[AtlasBarfed]

Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller?

You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.

But yeah, they care about productivity.

Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.

[grogenaut]

I worked at a Microsoft derrived game studio in 2010... the offices were glorious... but the devs literally only talked to each other once a week or at lunch. But they were doing things like implementing entire siggraph, which are 'near real time' aka 1-5 seconds per frame, papers into actual real time (sub .1 millis per frame) implemetations. theyd spend a week wiring bindings between c and glsl, and 3 months getting it down to 20ms so we could see the effect. it was really odd since I needed to interact a LOT with otheres comparatively. I got bored as fuck coming from an agile pair programming company. It was good for that deep level of coding. it was not for the type of stuff I do at my current job.

[pseudalopex]

Pair programming with all pairs trying to ignore or talk louder than all others is miserable. Open offices decrease face to face interactions empirically.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices