The partitions are covered with fabric in considerable part to muffle noise, and the presence of the partitions themselves also helps with that. Too, cubicles have a larger footprint than open-plan desks do, so fewer people fit in a given space.

I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.

Private offices are of course better, and anywhere I've worked the norm has been to be open door unless there's some specific reason to close it. But, yeah, cubicles > open office though I've been pretty much remote for years now even if I theoretically had a desk in an office.

Another model that I personally found ideal was the small open office. One place I worked had 4-8 people in an open setup in rooms that were conference room type sizes.

It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function.

15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.

The thing I don’t get is why go to work for privacy when I can get that at home in my own office?

I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.

My impression is that a lot of companies are reconfiguring (and possibly shrinking) space with the aim to make offices more meeting and collaboration spaces rather than individual work spaces.

For a lot of companies at this point, having dedicated individual work spaces for most employees doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have specific equipment needs and are going to come in most days.

Because one wants to have private in person communication. In my experience cubical and closed door office environments maximize communication and collaboration while open concept reduce it.

Closed doors are like therapist room - you get to the meaning of topics fast. They allow conflict resolution and discussion.

Open concept are like libraries, everyone is silently trying to to disturb each other working. Full of visual and audible distractions.

WFH remote meeting have the lowest form of communication bandwidth. It's hard to arbitrage interactions with no visual cues, invites multi-tasking during meetings, and encourages disengagement.

>Because one wants to have private in person communication

So, like, if you Zoom'ed?

Zoom ≠ in person

Well, it has everything "in person" has except physical precense.

Which, unless the meeting is about hanky panky or massage or something, should be just as good for the purposes of technical discussion...

I think open concepts are more akin to cafeteria than libraries. Some people had done great gigs that always came from a table in their University cafeteria, and trying to industrialize that experience.

>The thing I don’t get is why go to work for privacy when I can get that at home in my own office?

Can your manager just disrupt you and micromanage you in person at all times at home?

Does it even justify their role in the company when noone can see his subordinates all together in the same space?

No it really is a lot better noise-wise.

by limited view you mean fewer visual distractions

The range of sound basically reaches as far as the space is open and it can travel through air (over-simplification). If you put anything between a sound emitter and the receiver, it'll block out (some) sound. If that anything is made out of sound-absorbing material (something soft basically, again over-simplification), it'll absorb even more sound.

The principle behind cubicles is to reduce the amount of open space immediately around you, with sound-absorbing material so both the sound you emit, and the sound others emit, travel more upwards than side-ways as the cubicle walls force the sound up, essentially making the environment more silent, if you are situated in a cubicle. If you were to be hanging from the roof above all cubicles, you'd get to hear basically all the sounds coming from the cubicles.

It's a pretty basic solution, something better would be actual private offices where everyone is enclosed fully, then you can make the environment really quiet. But that's also way more expensive and requires more space.

Cubicles are typically acoustic in nature to dampen sound. My cubicle had a window behind me and a door. People used to decorate their cubes, if you had kids their art was all over the place, your desk was typically much bigger and you had way more storage options. A proper cubicle was just a small private office with thinner walls.