Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace

Yup. Its impossible to really focus in an open-office work area. I have to meet with another team occasionally that's management bought into the open-office hypetrain. Its awful. The noise is overwhelming, there's constant distractions (even small noises like people shifting in their chairs can become overwhelming when its coming from you from every direction)

i never thought anyone would come up with something worse than cubicles, but it turns out that's easy; just remove them.

Yup. When it becomes clear that it's not helping anyone actually get work done, companies just stick to their guns and refuse to change.

Which helps illustrate that point that its never been about increased productivity and collaboration-its always been about cutting the cost of office space and increasing the supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing every second of the day.

Many moons ago, interviewing for my first full-time job out of school, I visited a certain large aerospace company in the Seattle area :-) One of the things that turned me off and helped lead to my turning down their offer was their bullpen-style office arrangement. (Arguably even worse than today's incarnations, it was just a bunch of desks in a large open area though we seem to be heading back in that direction.)

Mind you, it wasn't the only thing. Everything about the hiring process and people I spoke with screamed replaceable cog--they actually hired me solely based on my resume and only gave me a plant visit when I asked for one--but the bullpen office arrangement sure didn't help.

This keeps coming up every so often, so here's a different discussion I'd like to get into. How do we measure something as ambiguous as productivity?

And I contest some of the points raised: For companies where people are mostly left to themselves save for meetings and sync ups, is it really about a supervisor's ability to monitor what you're doing? Collaboration is probably the driving force, which again raises the question as to how does one measure and evaluate such things?