[deathanatos]

I feel like the article ascribes way too much to the "control" aspect. In my experience, the truth seems closer to the "ignorance" than to "malice"; companies are lazy: they see other companies touting their open floor plans — big ones, like Facebook! — and think, if Facebook is doing it, it must be good! That, and/or it's just cheaper / easier to cram people into an open floor plan than trying to figure out walls.

Mix into that that so often recruiters seem to be outsourced to a third-party company composed of people who know next to nothing about engineering, and it shouldn't be surprising. They're parroting what they've seen other job posts tout. Until a significant number of job postings start listing "closed floor plan" or something along those lines, the cycle will continue.

And, it's not even just "control": it's also a loss of productivity through noise and disease. The last time I was in an open floor plan and a mild cold struck, it cost two engineer weeks. That's a couple thousand dollars; if a better layout could have quarantined that even slightly (it went through four people), the extra space required might actually pay for itself after some modest amount of time. But I don't know for sure, and someone would actually need to do the math, but nobody can: things like illnesses, and illness spreading are so untracked that it's a completely hidden cost that shows up on no ledger.

[M_Grey]

Agreed, but if you're on the receiving end, how much will you care about parsing the motives of the horrendous conditions you find yourself in? Mostly, if you're wise, you'll just want to avoid those conditions.