co-located teams in team-room like settings are much more productive
Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave. I am a firm believer that you can train yourself to hop in and out of a reasonable facsimile to the "zone" in much less than 20-30 minutes (I do it all the time)[1]; but the level of distraction of the warroom type environment massively favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the engineers I really want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard problems, are much less likely to be in that group.
In short, you may double your productivity for building that CRUD application, but when you have to solve that really hard problem, you may find you don't even have an engineer who is capable.
1. There is a level of concentration, the "real zone" below it that most development doesn't require. However, when it does, the interruptions become catastrophic.
Whenever I've seen this done, the very best employees leave. I am a firm believer that you can train yourself to hop in and out of a reasonable facsimile to the "zone" in much less than 20-30 minutes (I do it all the time)[1]; but the level of distraction of the warroom type environment massively favors your more extroverted engineers. My experience has been the engineers I really want to keep, the ones who solve the really hard problems, are much less likely to be in that group.
In short, you may double your productivity for building that CRUD application, but when you have to solve that really hard problem, you may find you don't even have an engineer who is capable.
1. There is a level of concentration, the "real zone" below it that most development doesn't require. However, when it does, the interruptions become catastrophic.