Honestly I think the noise and chaos of open offices are positives to executives because it creates the appearance of work.
I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.
Your bit about executive perception is a great point. I think that's a huge reason why our offices and workdays look the way they look, why we spend so much time in meetings, why WFH has so much resistance.
The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.
One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.
It made me think of another: perhaps executives wrongly assume that what's a productive environment for them and their tasks is appropriate for everyone in the organization.
> One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
Might as well put you all behind a big glass wall, with a placard underneath that says “Developers” and toss a few bananas in every once in a while.
At my office, our team IS behind a glass wall. We have four external facing 70" monitors displaying various dashboards, and we call this work area "the Fishbowl..."
Right, I think some people honestly think that software just magically leaps from developers’ fingertips onto store shelves. Product management, project management, operations, marketing, legal, sales, BD? They just sit in meetings and play Candy Crush all day...
I never claimed that everybody but software engineers are useless, I wrote that managers are mostly useless, as in you could reduce their number by perhaps 2/3 and you would get the same results (probably better).
Where do you work? I've rarely experienced this. Current and last company, both fast moving adtech firms, we are always desperate for good managers. BUT the key is only to have managers with, well, management skills. That does not mean promoting the best engineers to management, a common problem. In fact it is often specifically not that. They get promoted in the tech track.
The book "Managing Humans" is worth a read if you're so cynical about managers. Though the actual problem is corporate culture in my experience.
Funny anecdote about that: I briefly worked in one of those "startup inside a megacorp" companies, which had the typical trendy NYC startup look, open floor plan, free snacks and lunch, etc. Fairly often, you would see upper management types from the headquarters walking investors around. One of my coworkers, who worked for the company for many years, believed that we were basically just a zoo to look exciting for the investors compared to the stuffy corporate office. Good developer, here's a banana!
Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.
I think this is pretty close to being 100% true. Expensive tech workers function more like office furniture in most companies, where the executives don’t actually care about productivity anyway, beyond a few senior engineers who decide everything anyway.
In a previous job I once had a VP make a quick run-through of the office to make sure everybody was at their desks doing something, anything. The reason being that they were about to walk clients through the space and wanted the appearance of hard work being done. The VP was very open about this reasoning with us as he was herding people into place. I believe a few people sat at different desks because their regular desks were away from the path.
Oh yeah I've been there as well. I've also seen upper management insist on adding more infrastructure monitors on the walls for the same reason: clients think they look cool!
Wow, I remember being a junior guy long ago and getting assigned this task. They brought in two huge (at the time) monitors and had me set them up to show “real time” graphs and plots. Didn’t matter what the data was, just find a computer, plug it into those monitors and show some techinal-looking ambiance for the 15 minutes that some investor or other big shot will be in the room.
At my first startup job upper management would explicitly tell everybody to come in early and look busy whenever there was a board meeting or investors around.
Lest someone think that description is hyperbolic, this is a real, recent event at IBM [1]. The audience was a marketing department, so the "spiff up the cubicles" talk isn't solely aimed at technical staff, it is everyone (except perhaps sales?).
/r/IBM is an IBM-controlled sub, and the original was deleted by the IBM-employed mod, hence the screencap.
I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.