A lot of my conversations go like this:
Person A: Hey, have you decided what you want to do with [x] thing?
Person B: No, I was thinking [y], but I got stuck with [z].
Person A: That makes sense, what happens if we do [w]?
Person B: That's a good idea, but [v] might be a problem. I'll think about it and get back to you.
Person B sits down and works for a few more hours
If you have individual offices, that conversation might take ten minutes, and it only occupies 20 man-minutes. If you have an open-office with your entire marketing department, the conversation will probably take a full-man hour between all the people who get distracted and the other people who need to chime in.
Honestly, I think easy collaboration works better for programming/IT than it does for sales/marketing/communication, because the problems in IT are more concrete. So I think you are more likely to be able to chime in with a useful comment when the problem is "I'm getting this weird error" than when the problem is "does this have the tone we are looking for?"
In both cases, I think open offices are terrible. 2-3 people per office seems about right to me.
The only place where that worked well was the old-timey trading floor, as seen in Gary Cooper-era movies.
I'm sure trading is way more productive now that it's done from a desk in an office, in the same way that auctions done online are probably more productive than auctions conducted in-person.
Systemically keeping their tastes and station "lower" than that is probably part of what's going on, especially with the bigger companies. Developer pay may (sometimes) approach or match upper-middle, professional-class level, but (self-)respect for developers can't be permitted to reach those heights. Better their conditions are kept closer to, say, mid-20th-century secretary pools.
I'm not crying, just observing. There's a risk of a new honest-to-god high-status profession emerging, and desire to avoid that is probably behind some of the "culture" filtering down from the big tech companies. It's barely-upper-middle-class-culturally-if-you-squint-a-little management not wanting to have subordinates who match or outrank them, socially. The smaller companies aren't in on it—they're just cargo-culting, of course. Investors and potential larger, acquiring companies sure do seem to expect those conditions when they get their tours, though, so there's that.
As I see it, with great risk comes great reward. Managers are held responsible for the the great successes or great failures of their team(s). I wouldn't work for a manager that I don't respect and feel deserves a position of management above me. If you do, thats your bad.
If you are concerned (or care) that your perceived status isn't living up to your expectations for the work you do and the value you provide, you could always try doing something else that people perceive as more respectable and worthy of awe and special treatment.
Business will offer the least that people will accept, it's up to you to decide if you will accept it. Working with someone is a voluntary negotiation - that's a two way street. Business decisions about floor space are not sacrosanct, and enough discontent from employees would change norms as it would for anything not vital to company survival.
While I give startups some leeway, for large established companies like Apple or Facebook, already rich shareholders are loling all the way to the bank at workers' expense. I'll cry a river if additional accommodations result in falling a place or two on the most profitable companies in the world chart. According to YCharts, FB's quarterly profit margin was an astounding 38% (down slightly from the previous quarter): https://ycharts.com/companies/FB/profit_margin
To reap riches that insane, I consider it an obligation for the leadership of that company to accommodate their workers quite generously. You might argue it's already generous, but compare that to their executive class. The level of inequality is astounding, and this is amongst rich people.
RNs and Nurse Practioners make at least as much as the typical software engineers in SV. The $175-$250K+ that some of the senior guys at Google and FB make is not typical. Most of us in the rest of the country are probably making about $100K, and that's when we start becoming over-priced.
And teachers? I have respect for them, but I don't consider what they do necessarily difficult, especially in lower grades.
What people are complaining about is software engineering - which is supposedly in such high demand we need hundreds of thousands of foreigners to take up the lack of supply - being treated like blue collar labor, essentially another guy on the assembly line to be exchanged for another body if needed.
In contrast, lawyers, doctors, business execs, and most non-software engineers are treated as professionals. They have offices, expense accounts, professional dress codes, ability to attend conferences. Most professionals, after putting in their years, begin to partake in the company's profits, with access to the financials, hiring, and product strategy, and overall direction of the business.
Meanwhile, the typical developer, even at a company where software is the product, are never privy to the business. Instead, their access is limited strictly to a list of monkey-tasks or user stories on Jira. The MBAs, product managers, and execs keep all the interesting info to themselves. They're more likely to ask you for help resetting their password than they are in developing a sales pitch or project proposal.
Do you think a lawyer going to a job interview at some big firm gets to go through 2 days of quizzing over vague topics from 2nd year of law school? Instead, it is a professional discussion with peers about previous work.
Doctors, lawyers, and business people have a smooth, linear salary progression into their late 50s. A software engineer starts out well, but rapidly hits the glass ceiling at about 40. After that, you're an over-paid liability.
There's a difference between a "teacher" and a great teacher. Even in the lower levels I think it's hard to know how much of an effect incentivizing great teachers to stick around could have on the world and economy. Grade school years are highly influential years of people's lives and for some, school is the only chance they have to see something different and break the mold of which they've been brought into.
Given the impact teachers have, and knowing what a little shit I was as a kid, I cannot agree with that statement.
Basically as bad as our power dynamic is, the esteem doctors hold for themselves and the disregard they have for RNs as people who couldn't finish their medical training is well known if not widely broadcast.
When you walk around acting like your organization could function without any of the people who do all of the work, there are gonna be problems. But at least for us those problems mostly don't include people dying.
(This has nothing to do with FB -- I've hated it everywhere I've worked.)
This is mostly false, and to the extent that it is true, it turns out that people much prefer to have the ability to retreat into ambiguity around management's thought process and incentives when it suits them, rather than for the executives to be explicit about it.
The most infamous example of an executive revealing something everyone already knew to be true is Gerald Ratner [0]. After jokingly stating that his company was able to sell things for such low prices because it was "total crap", they plummeted to the brink of collapse. The company was saved only after firing Ratner and changing its name.
Companies where ill-advised executive candor has turned fortunes downward are now said to be experiencing the "Ratner Effect".
Executives are, first and foremost, performers. Dropping the illusion is offensive to the audience. We like pretending.
Leadership got called out at a recent company meeting by someone who commented that noise-cancelling headphone were critical. One of the C-suite evangelists was like "haha, yeah you're right next to my office aren't you." In other words, "I'm so oblivious, I think it's amusing that my loud conversations are negatively impacting my subordinates' ability to concentrate in this 'collaborative' environment'".
My team does not need a collaborative atmosphere. We're not marketers. We're quiet, introverted, methodical folks who need a quiet atmosphere where they can concentrate on writing ops code that won't bring down a production server in the middle of the day. We don't want to have to listen to overheard gossip, ostensibly private phone calls, etc. while we're trying to figure triage a complex issue. But more than anything, it's offensive that they won't just come out and admit that this is being done for financial reasons. We're all adults in a capitalist economy; we know the score.