Facilities gets a different budget than operations. It's OK to spend $150k for an engineer that can't concentrate from the noise, but $1k to make him productive is out of the question, and out from another budget!

Either intentionally or as "unintended consequences", having to work in open offices is operant conditioning against working in private. This might explain why so many tech workers believe "privacy is dead/futile" and accept working on spyware.

1) Cheaper -- different budgets. Usually the people specing the office are judged on how cheaply they can deliver (partially), not on anything related to employee productivity.

2) Open offices look way better in photos/concepts -- so they'll get chosen over a boring all-offices layout

3) Much easier to reconfigure -- this is why a lot of startups or those in high-growth periods end up in them, even if they'd prefer offices. Even cubicles require some professional reconfiguring, but anything requiring permitted construction is a big deal.

Follow the money. It’s cheaper to build, easy to shuffle, and people will put up with it. I know I do.

Cheaper in the short term. If your engineers productivity is constantly tanking because of noise and interruptions it will mean lots of wasted money.

But you can't factor that in a spreadsheet, right?

I wonder how many of these problems happen because of outdated management practices since the days of serfdom that treat people as two hands and with hours in a day whom they have to whip enough to pick as much cotton as they can.

So many companies are full of upper management who think as engineering output the way one would run a chair manufacturing firm. Too many people think everything there is in a chair has been made, and the only scope left now is a little innovation here and there. All they have to do is get people to saw, hammer and glue as quickly as they can.

It allows the company to cut costs on rent since it requires the least floor space per employee. For a room of a certain size, you can fit 20 people in a room with offices, 50 with cubicles, or 90 with an open floor plan.

> Never understood the rationale behind open floor offices.

You can have an appealing environment to work in for 5-15 and within the same space scale that up all the way to an 80 person battery farm office without spending any more money.

I've seen swoopy spacey open office environments with lower person density than cubicles or offices. There will be no walls other than bathroom walls doesn't necessarily imply high density although it makes it somewhat easier.

Three guys in a 6x6 cubicle is much quieter and more productive than an open office, but it arguably takes up less space than all but the most extreme density open offices. Another analogy is if you insist on packing people in like crowded picnic tables or middle school lunchroom tables, merely spending an inch to put up walls isn't going to impact seating arrangements.