[int_19h]

I've seen the transition from offices to open space in Microsoft first hand. The management basically made this same argument - "sure, you might not like it, but we did studies and most employees who participated in them think it's better! give it a chance!"

Somehow, those happy employees were never in my circles. Or in my colleagues' circles. Like, pretty much every time this subject come up in any context, the overwhelming sentiment was that there's no way the purported upsides are worth the obvious and unavoidable major downsides.

They moved ahead with it anyway, of course. And it sucked as much as everybody was expecting. Out of several dozen colleagues, I think there was a grand total of two who didn't mind it, and they were already doing the whole "roam around with a laptop" thing anyway.