I agree with you (generally) on principal. However, employers don't like individuality. Individuality costs money and makes more work. Just conform to the cookie-cutter employment contract/workspace/toolsets, and don't rock the boat.
Treating the software craft like factory work is cheap and profitable in the short run and disastrous in the long run. Without top talent you have a less capable, lower quality product. Without innovation you are more likely to get disrupted and have your entire business and revenue fall out from under you.
Hey, if filtering on something like open floorplan workspaces also filters out employers with that attitude, that's awesome in my book. The sooner I can know they want cookie-cutter work, the farther away from them I can get.
I see your point in "Individuality costs money.... ", but I doubt it does.
Open source projects find an fix bugs quickly, if there's enough developers, because people are different, work different and think different. I would argue that individuality saves time, money and work.
That being said, businesses could just cookie-cut smaller offices and more people would get more work done.
I don't think there's much doubt, from a management/accounting perspective, that supporting diverse requirements for a workforce of individuals costs more than supporting uniform requirements for a workforce of enforced clones.
The thing is, the cost isn't what really matters, the cost/benefit ratio is. You want to put your people in an environment that optimises the productivity of your organisation as whole, by getting the balance right between supporting both individual performance and effective collaboration. If detailed customisation of the environment for every single member of your staff to hit that balance will increase your costs by 100%, but doing so increases productivity of your overall organisation by 200%, then it's a very beneficial action.
