People hated cubes in contrast to having an office, not in contrast to sharing one huge office without any privacy at all.
Not if the major disadvantage to open plan is that you're constantly being disturbed by your coworkers because there is no noise isolation.
The cubicles at the feynman computing center in fermilab were practically reconfigurable offices with dividers nearly reaching to the ceiling.
There are certainly bad cubicles which serve almost no purpose at all. I think what you'll find is it's mostly just a regression over time from private offices to open floor plans. Throughout the middle ground it starts out with office-like cubicles, and towards the open plan end of the time window they have low, thin walls before completely vanishing.
In my opinion it's mostly cost-driven. Companies are trying to increase the worker density, especially in areas like silicon valley where ft^2 is at a premium.
They're just using "improved collaboration" as a consolation prize without admitting "we simply can't afford to give you all reasonable isolation anymore, and there's so many of you engineers on the market you no longer all have leverage to demand it"
Frankly, the talented folks easily get sufficient leverage to work from home or wherever they want anyways. So it's not really all that big of a deal, unless you're stuck in the office because you lack the leverage to escape.
You realize that these two statements contradict each other, right?
My experience has been that cubicles offer little or no noise isolation as compared to no cubicles; both alternatives are basically the same (i.e., much worse) in comparison with offices.
You're applying a worst case experience with a cubicle to all cubicles. I've had offices that sucked too, it doesn't mean offices are universally bad.
YMMV was your second statement. Your first statement was a flat assertion that is false for many people, including me.
> You're applying a worst case experience with a cubicle to all cubicles
No, I'm saying that the worst case experience exists and is basically the same as no cubicles. Your statement that I objected to was "There's a whole lot more noise isolation than no cubicles at all", which is simply false for the worst case (which I think is fairly common actually).
But I get your point - you can arrange to have your back to a cubicle wall, but then you get more peripheral movement, or you end up with people walking behind you (which I find much worse)
Cubicles are somewhere in the middle between the two extremes.
So more watercoolers and coffee machines, then!
(Seriously, I think this would help. And location is important, too - you don't want the "dev team water cooler" at the back of the dev team office and the "project managers' water cooler" at the back of the project managers' office. You put one in between dev and project management and you put one in between project management and engineering, etc. so there's organic inter-silo mingling.)
I think what happened is, very basically, we saw that water cooler / hallway conversations were so much easier than going and bothering someone in their cube or office. You knew in that context that you were not bothering someone so much, just mentioning something at lunch. At lot more cross pollination. So people took that and ran with it, thinking that tearing down the walls would increase collaboration.
But what the missed was the context. Hallway context = you're not bothering too much. Open plan context = now you're bothering not only that person but everyone around them as well. It wasn't the walls, it was expectations for focus in a given space.
The Big Thing to remember here is that we still need regular workday contexts where we do lower the threshold to team collaboration. Many of us engineers here on HN love to get on these thread and say stuff like, total isolation and concentration all day long? Sounds great! Maximize my productivity! That brings us back to cubes. But it's actually important to strike a balance with team productivity and cross pollination as well. Open plan is not it though. Maybe we need to bring back the water cooler with the tiny cups.[1]
[1] Just kidding, that would be terribly wasteful.