Paul Graham on Office Space for Hackers

While re-reading Paul Graham's classic essay, Great Hackers, in preparation for a previous blog post, I took note of a few quotations that I wanted to include in a separate blog post.  I recently committed publicly to writing them up, so here they are.

Big companies think the function of office space is to express rank. But hackers use their offices for more than that: they use their office as a place to think in. And if you're a technology company, their thoughts are your product. So making hackers work in a noisy, distracting environment is like having a paint factory where the air is full of soot.

...

Maybe the people in charge of facilities, not having any concentration to shatter, have no idea that working in a cubicle feels to a hacker like having one's brain in a blender.