[speeder]

I am not saying that people should not be fired, some of the fired people did deserved it, since their productivity dropped a lot.

The thing is, their productivity dropped because the open plan office allowed other people to easily distract them. And before that, they were perfectly productive.

Also the quitters, were mostly high-level people (that started as junior coders and ended being managers) that were unhappy with how the most senior managers handled all the stuff.

If the office was not a wide open plan, people would not waste time alt-tabbing a lot (they would read whatever news they want, and then return to work) or distracting other people (ie: tired people that feared opening a news site would open a news site instead of drawing productive people into conversations), or by getting distracted by the junior programmer that decided to watch youtube and screw the alt-tab behavior.

Yes, it is a quite extreme example, a sort of outlier, not all open offices will have a massive loss of employees (either due to firings or quittings) but it is a good example of how the paranoia of being watched, and then the complete lack of it, can totally wreck the workplace.