Yes well, open office plans and cubicles are awful, no argument there. But a real office with a door can be attractive relative to the situation many people have at home.
Speaking from short, few months experience, cubicles are actually quite nice compared to open office plans.
- You get plenty of personal space
- My cubicle got both a whiteboard and a bulletin board, a locker, two trash bins, and enough desk space to comfortably fit a co-worker for short sessions of working together
- high walls discourage conversations, so it is actually quiet
The biggest disadvantage is artificial lighting - my cubicle was quite removed from the windows.
I had a classic cubicle for over a decade. Dilbert stereotypes aside, it was pretty much OK. The company had offices--mostly for managers--but to be honest we also had an open door convention (keep the door open unless you really needed it closed for some reason--generally related to having a private conversation). So you really didn't have a situation where people with offices generally closed the doors.
Nice high spectrum lamps can alleviate a lot of the lighting issues with cubicles. Yeah the fluorescent lamps hanging from the ceiling are shit but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a nice high CRI uplight.
The odds that employers will offer employees below the executive or managerial level private or even semi-private offices is extremely low. Personally, I think the odds of such a thing happening are lower than WFH becoming mainstream.
Speaking for myself, I haven't had an office with a door for a decade now. And if you go back to the top of my white collar career (that is, jobs done from an office (or notably, a warehouse)), I've had a door twice.
The last office with a door I had was in the old morgue of the hospital we supported. Was actually a pretty good location once you got used to the funky smells. Quiet, cool, dark and nobody came knocking on the door asking for us to fix there computers.
- You get plenty of personal space
- My cubicle got both a whiteboard and a bulletin board, a locker, two trash bins, and enough desk space to comfortably fit a co-worker for short sessions of working together
- high walls discourage conversations, so it is actually quiet
The biggest disadvantage is artificial lighting - my cubicle was quite removed from the windows.