The reason is because management is almost never driven by science or productivity maximization but maximization of either narrow subdivided metrics (like costs for a particular function) or absolute cargo cult conventional wisdom. Even when there is an empirical, data driven culture somewhere in an organization, it rarely extends to the board, often doesn't extend to the executive suite, and almost never extends into, say, facilitues management.
I'm not sure I agree with this because if it were thus, I think 'most organizations' would be out of business quickly.
I think the answer is more plain: shared offices cut cost, and and the resulting immediate an ongoing increase in profit is 'the most important of all benchmarks' for most companies, in fact it's not even a 'benchmark' ... it's 'the point'.
So - essentially, 'private offices' are an 'investment' and an investment has to be clearly and obviously justified, otherwise the default is to go to open office plans.
The vast majority of work simply is not deep work - and yes, even things like 'Marketing' - although most operational marketing people have a 'creative bone' - and brilliant marketers are as useful and brilliant as equivalent Engineer, the actual creative/deep thinking Marketing stuff is usually done in agencies, which are like architecture firms. Similarly I don't doubt creative financial structuring or deal making,
'deep time' is just not as consistent for them as it is for most Engineers.
There is actually rather scarce 'deep work' to be done, and so, as so few companies willingly require people to be 'learning very important new skills' ... offices become less common due to the simple economics of it all.
"software engineers and knowledge workers " make up a tiny portion of workers in the economy. Tiny. Is my point.
Also, having written software for quite some time, in my experience would be that yes, at the end of the day, 50% of an Eng time is meetings, standups, blackboard discussions, chatting with others, having breaks/wasting time, eating, going to the bathroom. etc.. I think it approaches 50/50. The other issue being that one simply cannot be 'in the flow' for much longer than 4 hours anyhow, pro musicians don't practice 10 hours a day, more like 3. Though for myself, I can see much greater than 4.
Why would the relative fraction of jobs taken up by software matter? Most jobs aren’t police officer jobs, but we still give police officers handcuffs and police cars, because (for that subset of jobs) those tools are needed, just like private workspace is needed for the subset of jobs in software.
> in my experience would be that yes, at the end of the day, 50% of an Eng time is meetings, standups, blackboard discussions, chatting with others, having breaks/wasting time, eating, going to the bathroom. etc..
Other than when a company mandates a poor meeting-oriented policy, like mandating Agile meetings even when it’s counterproductive for everyone, I’ve never heard of anything remotely like what you describe.
Mandating an inappropriate Agile-style meeting schedule is common, but that’s exactly the sort of thing I am saying the open plan office engenders. The fact that unproductive meetings make up 50% of work time in these companies is in no way any kind of endorsement that software engineering (or even other) workers actually benefit (in terms of productivity).
In other words, the engineering tasks demand 80-90% deep work focus, but engineers are forced, like a square peg in a round hole, to contort unproductively to wedge that somehow into a meeting-centric company policy that hurts both the engineers and the people who mistakenly organize & believe in the udefulness of the meetings.
