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The open-plan monster is now self-reinforcing and runs on its own sort of cargo-cult momentum, but historically there was an under-reported and rather offensive motivation: backdoor age (and, to a lesser extent, gender and disability) discrimination. I think that 90 percent of companies that are now using them are doing so for more respectable reasons (either they believe that "collaboration" shit, or they are aggressively cutting costs... which is unpleasant but not evil) but, for many in the past, one of the motivations in the move toward less workplace privacy over the past 20 years was... to push out older programmers. It doesn't make sense when there's a lot to do, because the older programmers are often the most efficient in terms of value per salary (i.e. they get 5 times as much done, but only cost 2x as much). You want old programmers when you have too much work to do. But when you have a slowdown and don't need high-end work, those older programmers will be seen as (expensive) excess capacity. If you're also looking to shave costs, moving to a crappier office space kills two birds with one stone. All of that said, I doubt that open-offices have the discriminatory effect now that the entire tech industry uses them. They used to push out older developers, but now, the people who absolutely can't stand them (or whose health can't handle them) have long-since left, and they're just making everyone's life hell. Of course, these offices also discriminate against people with a large array of health problems, and they aren't exactly pleasant for women... and I wouldn't be surprised if there were a massive class action suit in the next 10 years over it. It'd be hard to prove discrimination in most cases, but I'm sure that the bigger tech companies have discussions about office layouts and age that wouldn't look good in discovery. They're also not a great economic trade. Office space is really cheap in comparison to having your people be distracted. $40/SF per year would be high-end commercial real estate, and you only need 150-200 SF to give developers a decent layout. |
Loads and loads of stuff in business runs on cargo cultism.
It is very, very hard to say what precisely causes businesses to be successful or to fail. Correlation does not equal causation, etc. As a result, you have lots of "fewer pirates, higher global temperatures" type conclusions being drawn.
The discriminatory motives you cite factor into it -- correlations get promoted to causation when doing so will reinforce one's worldview or otherwise lead to a desired outcome. Sometimes this is subconscious.
Real heavy cargo cultism kicks in when someone with "juice" (a "thought leader" -- gag) draws such a conclusion and codifies it, or when a sufficiently large number of people independently do so and a herd mentality kicks in.