First office: purely temporary. I had a desk and chair on the second floor landing of a 4-floor-plus basement stairwell. All the entry noise from below (where the sales folks entered the building) and the constant up/down from people going to the historical files (floors 3 and 4, and the basement) were more than a bit distracting - and there was absolutely no privacy, which doesn't bother me personally all that much. Then again, I was a young engineer just starting out.
Second office: same company, but now a "semi-open" environment. Defined one-to-a-cubes for engineers, with 4-foot metal walls topped by 1 foot privacy (i.e. rippled) glass on three sides, with the fourth side open to the aisle. Drafters were four-to-a-cubes, with open space in the middle and the drafters arrayed around the cube periphery, The drafters' wall facing the aisle was partial - basically just long enough to keep things from falling off their desks into the aisle. Both openings faced directly across from each other. Communication between all parties (engineer-to-engineer, engineer-to-drafter, and drafter-to-drafter was clean and happened easily.
Third office: new employer. Typical 90s version of office space - fabric covered partitions about 6 feet high on three sides, with a half-length wall on the aisle side and no actual door. All cubes were arranged as mirror images, meaning that if one had the door on the left, the next had the door on the right so that they had to pass by each other every time they entered/exited. Also, all openings were directly across the aisle from the opposing set of offices, so all four movements were readily visible.
Current office: 8-foot hard walls with glass door. This is necessary because I am no longer in an "office" environment. I am out in the approximate middle of the production facility. The door is to cut down on the manufacturing noise, not the "people" noise. Plus it gives me the benefit of being able to "wave away" an unwanted distraction if necessary - not that I do that all that often, as my job is to support the floor operations. (I tend to adhere to the "open door" policy in terms of availability, even if I actually close the door because of external noise.) The other benefit of the present setup is that I can lock up the equipment (several tens of thousands of dollars of test gear, and some moderately-irreplaceable component samples) whenever I have to travel - which is fairly frequently.
All above listed configurations have had their uses (and abuses) during my career. As responsibility/sensitivity of the work increases, so does the necessity for privacy.
Converting energy to motion for more than half a century
