We had a presentation on the new "Studio" buildings at Microsoft. A snappy team from the folks responsible for designing them told us about color schemes and that each building had a theme, in stone and wood and so forth. They waxed eloquent about carpet and the cafeteria and I was thinking, what are they hiding?

Then they got to the places where we were going to work. "We call these six-packs." Pods of six people crammed into a small area with low partitions, very little space for personal items, and little regard to our actual work (e.g., whiteboard space, or room for equipment, or even sufficient power).

They tried to retract the word six-pack. "Oops, we weren't supposed to say that. We're supposed to call them 'Villas'".

Villas.

I called them "moo towns".

If you were lucky you were in a six-pack with people working on the same thing as you, and then the conversations around you probably had something to do with work. If you were randomly assigned a six-pack the chances were that you were being continually interrupted by stuff that you didn't care about.

And of course we ran out of space, and even the walls in the six-packs were removed, and all the book-cases, and now there were eight people in a space designed as a tight fit for six, and places in the building started to smell bad (I wish this was hyperbole). Let's not even talk about security, as in having to lock stuff up at night . . . um, where, exactly?

Open plans are horrible.

This is the kind of shit that makes me angry. Microsoft should know better. Slick presentations about bullpens being the future of work, like it's self-evident. A generation of software engineers are going to come up with the belief that these sorts of working environments are standard, and then wondering why they're so stressed out and tense all the time.

This seems like less of a general open-plan problem, and 100% idiot management problem. Why would they separate people working on a single project, instead of corralling them into the same six-pack?