"because the savings over cubicles are too small to be worth the risk of reduced productivity"

No, it's definitely about the money.

The cost savings 'per person' are quite a lot, and that's hard dollars on the spreadsheet.

'Productivity' is a very difficult thing to quantify.

In that business case, the 'hard measure' almost always wins.

Business runs on decisions like that, not on intuition, it takes somebody with a lot of power to override or make a bet on something that's going to 'cost the company money' according to the accountants.

Square footage is expensive, so are cubes, and especially offices ... when your VP Ops is running around, he's trying to get a sweet and cool location ... 'hey we can get this sweet studio for $x/sq foot' in SOMA two books from Caltrain station ... or we can work in the burbs of Oakland ...

Sadly, it's mostly a cost decision.

At my old job I worked in an open office coworking space and had to hotdesk, so I have no idea where I was going to sit for the day.

We didn't have permanent desks because they were more expensive, and my boss explicitly said so. He also refused to pay for peripherals or for stationary. I'm ideologically opposed to spending my hard earned money on things for work, so I just used loose copier paper and a Macbook with no external monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Not my problem that my productivity was negatively affected.

Some employers really fail to see the bigger picture on these things. Refusing to spend a few dollars on notebooks for me to write in resulted in my notes being scattered all over the place and lost (I'm a big fan of pen and paper). Refusing to pay for a monitor just resulted in me being stuck using a tiny 13" screen. Apparently when I was hired the CEO asked my manager if I would be able to work with an iPad instead of him having to pay for a Macbook Pro. It's really not an attitude conducive to employee moral, I never felt valued in the company, because I was made to feel like a cost, rather than an asset.

At least they were honest about it. Other companies talk like "we are all a big family" while treating people like shit.

Here's the question: is the savings over cubicles worth the reduced productivity?

Here's the answer: you can measure the savings over cubicles, and you can't measure the reduced productivity.

Cubicles are open office

I've never heard anybody else call them that. The article considers cubicles to be non-open workspaces: "At the time of the study, OpenCo2 was in the process of a multi-year headquarters redesign, which—as in Study 1—involved a transformation from assigned seats in cubicles to similarly assigned seats in an open office design, with large rooms of desks and monitors and no dividers between people's desks."

I sit in a cube farm and it's like open office. It's noisy and distracting. And I have to stare at a gray wall the whole day. that alone makes me thing about quitting. It's bad for my soul.

Take away that nice gray wall. Take the space you have now in your cube with your desk, and cut that by a factor of four -- or maybe a factor of ten.

You're now sitting at a table, with someone sitting right next to you and their arms are literally inches away from yours), and you have someone sitting right next to you on the other side, just as close. You have someone sitting across from you, and you are constantly fighting for foot space underneath the table.

The table is just wide enough for your computer and your monitor, and you have no place to hang any paper or reference material. You do not have space for a second monitor. You don't have space for a pad of paper next to your keyboard. You don't even have space for your coffee cup where there isn't a high risk that it will get knocked over and spill all over the electronic devices you're using.

You have literally three feet width of table space, and maybe two feet depth. You've got a chair, and you can roll it back far enough to get into it and slide your legs under the table, but if you try to roll it back any further than that then you will hit your neighbor behind you.

That is an open office. Welcome to my world.

We shouldn't limit ourselves to open office or cubes. Both suck and are demeaning and disrespectful in their own way. We should demand real offices (with windows). It doesn't have to be a single person office. I like sharing a room with two or three people. You are not alone but it's not as stressful.