The open-office trend is destroying the workplace (2014)

The modern equivalent to that open door is internet access. There's a whole world on the internet, but only a tiny fraction of humanity outside my door. You'll learn more in 5 clicks on the internet than by listening to hours of Monday morning quarterbacking about the superbowl. That link is from 1986, at that time the best (only) source of innovative new ideas was speech overheard from other physically co-located humans, even long distance phone was like $1/minute, now we have free port 80 across the entire world so virtually all inspiration and innovation is reading visual and from the entire planet.

In 1986 it mattered if Einstein had a conversation outside your door, it mattered in a big way, but decades later in 2017 it matters if you read Einstein's blog and follow him on twitter.

Also note the rise of groupthink because in '86 only you had Einstein standing in your doorway and only your doorway or at most a couple people, but in 2017 "everyone in the field" and lots of people outside the official field read, perhaps, Aaronson's physics (although lately mostly politics) blog.

The push comes from expansion. If your company is poorly run maybe with enough whipping everyone in the open office you'll survive maybe even thrive. But if you want to succeed at the multi-office class of size, you'll need competent management, and those along with the line workers are repelled by open offices and can get jobs at non-open office employers. An open office selects for a company that will struggle to survive past 100 people.

The biggest recent change I can think of is at the last open office I worked at, it was a fireable offense to wear headphones; the company paid a lot of money for the remodel and refusal to collaborate is being directly and intentionally insubordinate. The beatings will continue until morale improves. I admit I'm completely mystified, from what I read here everyone is visually in sight "to collaborate" but everyone puts on headphones to drown out the noise so they can work in order to eliminate all collaboration in practice, which strikes me as complete nonsense.

Intense display of social signalling via architecture, the non-living parts of the office are all open and free and the living parts of the office all have headphones on and shush anyone who speaks, library style.

There might be an aspect of reverse psychology going on, with the whole "shush people into silence" and headphones movement, open offices are knowingly anti-collaborative and perhaps management wants it that way to eliminate palace coups or something. I mean, they can't be so stupid as to think it increases collaboration or productivity, so they must intentionally be sabotaging those characteristics in favor of ...

I wonder whether commentators are conflating "open" offices with "loud" offices.

I've never working in anything other than an open office, but the level of noise has varied a lot. Some offices have a culture where it's common for people to make a scene, ie when something happens people gather round a TV and start talking.

One place I worked at had a guy who would stand up and start a discussion about politics every day, and it wouldn't end until he was right. It's somewhat fun to have the old oxford union style banter, but it's a time sink and generally doesn't move anyone's opinion.

By contrast where I am now is as quiet as sitting alone at home, even though it's still in the financial industry and there's actually more people than the place I mentioned earlier.

One place was a macho atmosphere (all traders), and the other is intellectual (all coders), they both perform the same function in the market (market making). They both looked the same though; at least three screens per person, a wall of screens some places. You're close enough to touch your neighbour on either side if you stretch out your leg.

I guess in the future workers will wear VR headgear all the time, so the surroundings will matter less?

Try something like noisli. It still has that masking background-noise effect without being music (i.e. without drawing your attention).

It basically allows you to play a configurable mix of background noises; e.g. Wind blowing, rain faling, white noise, train tracks.

Heck, writing this makes me want to try it tomorrow again.

Then it's unfair to the others :)