> A few years into my career the idea of cubicles caught on and quickly became the norm, and now of course we're stuck with these horrible open offices that are, in my experience, just absolutely dreadful for productivity; but since everyone is doing it nobody really notices anymore.

You can largely thank Jim McCarthy of Microsoft fame for that, who in the mid 90s coined the concept, "beware of a guy in a room":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6BCHqEbyc

https://blogs.msdn.com/b/david_gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/...

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/06/dont-go-dark.html