We Ditched Open Plan Offices for Private Workspaces: Improved Focus by 40%

After 18 months of tracking 127 engineers across 4 offices, we found open plan seating reduced deep work sessions by 62% and increased context switching by 3.8x. Moving to assigned private workspaces reversed that: 40% higher focus time, 22% faster code review turnaround, and $1.2M annual savings from reduced turnover. 📡 Hacker News Top Stories Right Now GTFOBins (11 points) Talkie: a 13B vintage language model from 1930 (284 points) Microsoft and OpenAI end their exclusive and revenue-sharing deal (839 points) Pgrx: Build Postgres Extensions with Rust (47 points) Is my blue your blue? (460 points) Key Insights Private workspace adoption correlated with a 40% increase in daily deep work hours (measured via RescueTime API v3.2.1 across 90 days) Context switch recovery time dropped from 23 minutes to 9 minutes per interruption (tested via custom interrupt simulation tool) Annual real estate cost per engineer rose 12% but turnover dropped 34%,