Were offices "unsuccessful"? Because I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch.

The open work spaces thing too allowed for rapid over-hiring without having to have the real estate to back it up.

I'm saying the concept of creating private working spaces was unsuccessful. IME workers tended towards tolerating distractions or wearing headphones.

> I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch.

I don't disagree with this though.

Agreed, it was always about reducing cost.

Not always. You have to include the fad component. Our company isn't cost constrained, nor were we hiring a ton of new talent. Yet we updated our office layout and furnishings 2x in the last 8 years to look "better."

Never underestimate the desire to keep up with the Joneses.

I definitely agree with this.

Those huge open plan offices of the 1970s looked amazing in magazine photo-shoots. If you're C-suite suit you can really preside over a room like that.

Like a newsroom bullpen seen from a balcony above, lots of noise, lots of activity.

It's a just bummer if your job is to think carefully about stuff without distraction.

I once worked at a small company in Florida where there were "offices" but the office manager would talk on speaker phone from his office at the top of his lungs all day. I had the headphones on and the only way I could drown him out was to blast music at high volume, or to take my laptop out into the hallway and hunker down, or to invent reasons why I needed to work at home so I could work without those all-day interruptions. The office manager got shirty about that, since they rented me a parking space in an old bank branch about four blocks away from the office; told me I took "a lot of liberties". I got a strong "because I said so!" vibe from that, and I bounced not too long after. Your contributions to this thread read like ChatGPT being used by Business Insider to try and prop up the corporate real estate market.