[WorldMaker]

Among many reasons, open floor plans are cheap. Offices require drywall and doors and (re-)construction permits. Cubicle walls are surprisingly expensive for how cheap they look. If you are looking to cut every cost you possible can, open floor plans certainly cut costs.

[Someone1234]

If anyone was curious, $150 for a single straight cubicle wall, up to $1,500 for an "Office Space" style fully surrounded cubicle (inc. desk), and $5,100 for four cubicles (inc. desks and shared walls).

These are all generic grey looking ones, nothing fancy like tempered glass.

[colanderman]

Isn't that peanuts compared to other employee overhead costs?

[CyberFonic]

It is, but the management sees staff as a fungible resource. So why treat them well when you have a glut of people wanting to work for you? - so they like to believe.

[merlyn]

That is new pricing, you can get great discounts on used, although when companies rip out their cubicles, they figure they'll get good money for them, but they typically sell for pennies, much like most office equipment.

Anyway, I've only heard of companies typically ripping out their cubicles to switch to open flooxplan, or starting out on the cheap, line-em-up, see who fits your culture, ostracize the others.

[wcummings]

Open floor plans also photograph well

[saasinator]

Is it worth sacrificing productivity to save a few bucks? How many dollars are you wasting? Even if an engineer is 1-5% less productive, compounded over a couple years you can more than pay for every cubicle.

[nimmer]

More like 25%, have you tried focusing in a noisy environment all day long?

[pasbesoin]

In my estimate, you are still way low.

In one environment I spent a number of years in, once work-at-home became more acceptable, almost universally, the most productive people -- by my prior and continuing observation -- pushed to add as much of it to their schedule as they could manage.

Even the real collaboration -- email and instant messaging, first. Phone calls where needed.

Some face-to-face meetings could be plenty productive, when properly defined and run. The far majority were not, however.

The best people hated open space. Those who loved it, you typically had to remind 5 times of everything. Or nag. Increasing your own burden, in the process.

[CyberFonic]

Perhaps those who like open plan offices are multi-tasking extroverts? Studies show that humans, like overloaded CPUs, loss efficiency when swapping tasks in and out and in ... responding to interrupts, inter....