There is the old saying “nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft/IBM”. Most people, including executives, are just following the accepted wisdom with some slight variations.

What makes you think they actually care about productivity? It's pure narcissistic traits, they want to be able to easily waltz in and watch their wage slaves.

> development methodologies that disempower the developers, devops without people who understand ops, databases without dbas, Business Intelligence in basically every flavor.

Again, it's control. Us, with our MBAs will make far more than you, even though we contribute less than an LLM

You, with your decades of learning that we've demanded, are expendable and honestly we don't need anyone with skill doing your job.

> It’s as if they would rather fail doing the conventional thing than risk failure by doing something different.

The business just wasn't ready for their radical idea. See Adam Neumann. The difference between you and them, is that you are looking at this as work. A way to make money.

For most of these folks, they already have money. This is a game, a gamble, a way to pass the time, and to gain influence. If the company fails it's not good, but it's not the end of the world. They don't have to work and when they are bored then they can always start a new business.

There are also executives who hate open offices. You will find them in their office with the door closed, and they don't want you to knock on the door if it isn't urgent.

It is about personality. However few people are willing to admit that others are different and that it is okay.

Doing conventional thing is often expensive, requires skill, or requires organisational power to change the way things work.

Many of these counter-productive trends are the ways executives "deliver visible results" and maintain good optics after committing to something they have no means, in terms of resources, power or skill, to deliver by the book.

For example RTO is used as a short-term downsizing strategy as organisations often lack ways to monitor actual long-term impact from squeezing workers like that. BI bandaids are often applied to create visibility around certain issues (the easy part), and by extension build perception these issues are manageable, without actually solving any of them (which is the hard part).

The issue is that executives and managers don't see it as counterproductive because there's no compelling business evidence out there to change their mind.

Instead, here's what people actually see...

Microsoft of 1990s brags about their programmers having real offices with a door. But the later Google startup with "counterproductive" open offices beats them on a search engine and mobile phone. Microsoft's newer campuses are now open office.

Fog Creek Trello had blogs with photographs of their offices for the developers explaining all the great benefits... but they also stumble and eventually get acquired by the open-office Atlassian.

Where are all the business cases of the closed-office-with-doors beating out the unproductive-distraction-chaos-open-offices?!? Can't think of one? There lies your problem.

The person who wrote this thread's article, Maria Konnikova -- is a journalist and book author -- and not a tech CEO who bet her company's productivity on a running a dev shop with private offices. That is why executives don't listen to her and are not swayed by articles like this.

If we want to get rid of open offices, it has to be done with real businesses and not magazine articles.

The quest for measurability is also driving fake agile. The real measurement of agile is right in the manifesto, but if you can't read the code, you can't measure.

Agreed, often enough these stupid "imperatives" are bad for profits, and even bad for the career of the top person who's kind of driving them.

Catch-22 is a good book to read, if you want to understand how large organizations work. You'd think it might be dated, but I'm not so sure. It's also funny.

If I kept my door open, I would still get distracted by people walking by. Even if they didn't say anything, they'd look in which would catch my eye.

I still miss the old days: We had offices, we actually did design before we started implementing, we didn't do stand-ups but everyone still knew what was going on. I think I'll go yell at a cloud now.

I had what seemed to me a standard office, door but no window, in 2008 at my first job out of school at IBM in Austin. Some folks in that same hallway were doubled up but I was lucky to have one to myself while there.

A few jobs later in 2011 I also had one with a door, wall was a half-frosted window onto the hallway, was doubled up with another new hire eventually, this in SoCal, Ventura County.

Then in grad school from 2012 in NYC, also had a closet-scale office I shared with one of a rotating cast of officemates, that had an exterior window, nice view of 1 WTC as it was going up.

Since then (2016 on) it's been open offices, but at least with individual (if joined) desks, then WFH.

10'x10' office with a door and window out to the hall, and a light switch.

There's probably about 30 other offices like mine, a cube area with another 8-10 cubes, and a few conference rooms, but most of the building is a shop floor.

But I don't work near a major city, and I'm not a software engineer, just a regular one.