[rodeoclown]

Scalability is a reason that many growing companies use open floors. When you are growing rapidly, you're often put in a situation where you need the most flexible possible floor plan, otherwise you have to move offices. Having way more offices than employees sitting empty waiting for the hiring to happen in the next few years feels too much like a waste of space. This makes the open office plan very seductive when making decisions about how to lay out the floors.

[mmagin]

The problem with this argument is that aside from work space and meeting space, there aren't many other uses to which most places are going to allocate the surplus space. And furthermore, I've seen non-load-bearing partition walls in existing buildings go up just about as fast as I've seen cube farm put in.