Now it clicks why cube farms are popular: it is an easy way for managers / owners to feel the excitement of the agora but being up in the box seats they don’t have to live or think in it.
To be honest, I don't mind cube farms per se as much as densification.
As long as you have a certain number of square feet and things aren't bolted down, you can still exercise a certain amount of control over your environment. You can rotate your desk to face a different way, put up pictures or a coat rack, what have you.
It's when you start getting squeezed in the minimal legal square footage that all the options start to go away -- you literally can't move your desk without disrupting the entire floor, you can't add a bookshelf and any plants or pictures need to fit on your suspiciously narrow desk.
Sure, cube farms have many of the other problems of noise pollution, minimal privacy, and bad lighting, but as long as you have your own cube, or a cube with few enough people to haggle over rearranging, and a few extra square feet it's still possible to put your stamp on it.
My desk is bolted to the floor along with six other desks. If I get much fatter, I'll pretty much be sat on top of my neighbour. At this point, I would gladly get a cubicle, at least they pay lip service to concentration. The open plan office I'm currently in doesn't even manage that.
Yeah, $employer is currently trying to force that on everyone. I have so much stuff on my desk that I'm currently exempt from that nonsense. It's a great way to waste everyone's time, because apparently everyone's time is a lot cheaper than a bit of extra office space.
Our official "return to the office" date is very soon. Our second work site has been folded into the main site, and the cubicles in the main site have been reduced to half the size (in terms of square feet) they used to be, to more or less double the density.
Implementation of the changes had already started when COVID hit. People who have been to the office recently say things like, don't hit your knees where the PC is mounted.
I was fine with our (pretty standard sized) cubes before COVID. But I'm so glad we have the option to continue working from home now.
