Are high office partitions as effective as private offices?

Posted by CraigS on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by CraigS
Published on 2010-12-13T00:56:30Z Indexed on 2011/02/04 7:33 UTC
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I'm currently reading DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware, and I've been struck (as everyone is) by their comments about noise reduction via using private offices, and the effect this has on productivity.

Private offices are probably not going to happen at my workplace, but I'm wondering if high cubicle partitions (say, 6 feet) might be nearly as good? I imagine they wouldn't deflect quite as much noise, but they would have some effect.

One down-side is that the center cubicles would have less natural light. That seems quite a big downer to me.

I'd be interested to hear what peoples experiences are.

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