[makwarth]

Fully agree regarding "collaboration". The "money" argument is what I'm arguing against in the post. You can pack more engineers in an open office, but if the software output is low, you're not saving money - you're carelessly wasting resources.

[Grishnakh]

Unfortunately, humans are generally short-sighted. Penny-wise, pound-foolish.

Also, I imagine a lot of these managers would disagree with you about the output; they'll claim that collaboration boosts output, improves quality, etc. Of course, it's all just hand-waving with no evidence. To get any real evidence, you'd have to do some kind of study doing identical or similar projects in both environments. And even then, different people are different: some people might actually be more productive in an open environment. It probably really depends a lot on the personality type of the programmer, and on how they prefer to work. A lot of today's hipster programmers really do like open offices.