High wall cubes are fine too... Obviously a real office with a door would be ideal, but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
What I've noticed is that a handful of people together in a space will typically work out issues like music vs. no music, lights on vs. off, blinds open vs. closed, etc. without a lot of trouble.
But there's a tipping point where it gets much harder. Put 20 people in an open office and suddenly everyone is wearing headphones and nobody is talking (except the people who are ALWAYS talking/yelling to each other) and it sucks.
I think as far back as the late 70s, "Peopleware" cited a bunch of studies that found that small shared offices with flexible policies on letting people move around (so people can self-organize either around their teams or with people they share space well with) was optimal. Sadly few offices seem to have adopted this.
Worked in an office like that and agree, it worked pretty well. It's not always feasible to assign individual offices to people but 1-5 people works. I'd say 5 is even high, ideally it would be 2-3.
> but I think that door has closed at this point in time.
Well, I'd say working from home is like that? :-) Hopefully that's an option for more people. I am doing that now and it's pretty good, but the idea is that the whole team has to be remote, otherwise you don't want to be the odd one out.
If you organize bullpens around clumps of people who work together constantly, it makes more sense than doing it to an entire department or company. Though you should also have a quiet space per bullpen and meeting rooms for anything requiring cross-team collaboration or secretive stuff.
Even if all 12 folks are on the same team, I'm sure it's possible to split them up into subspecialties or working groups. An unstructured blob of 12 people on a team doesn't sound that ideal either way, regardless of seating arrangements.
Still, looking back over the past eight months at all of the distractions from kids, I'm still dealing with less distractions (external, at least...) than my previous gig in an large open office environment.
The key being team -- you are next to people you are actively collaborating with on a day to day basis.
Which is unfortunate because it's one of the many things I liked about working at Microsoft: they really seemed to take your productivity seriously when I worked there.
Individual quiet spaces are still needed for private meetings and client calls.
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