Open-plan surveillance workspaces are meant to produce monoculture, and a whole generation of programmers has essentially gifted that opportunity to employers by failing to insist upon minimally acceptable working conditions, in favor of an extension of college / dorm life.
One wonders why a staff that is uniformly willing to give up personal time for Whisky Thursday isn't viewed as a liability, in terms of lack of thought diversity.
It makes a lot less sense in knowledge work, where the problems are not standardized and often solutions are unknown. In these cases, the uniformity desired through these surveillance measures makes no sense. It's fundamentally not the same as a McDonald's burger, no matter how much management wishes so.
Worse still, even if you did want homogeneity of software design output, the best way to get it is to give workers conditions in which the environment supports their productivity. Taylorized fast-food kitchens support certain types of productivity and are a rational response to that business need. But it's more of a cargo cult superficiality to try to impose the same idea on a knowledge domain where quiet and privacy are fundamental to the product.
On the other hand, if instead of productivity the employer cares more about having a visually fancy-looking space, as a means for status signaling, or cares about having a good staff on-paper to heighten an acquihire valuation, then open-plan makes more sense. It's bad for the employees though, because of course the employer can't admit to hiring people just for status, show, or credential, so they have to at least feign concern over productivity, thus putting knowledge workers in the bind of having to be productive in a fundamentally anti-productive setting.
Though I still think that regardless what job one is doing (knowledge work or factory), that subconsciously the company wants predictability. So maybe putting people in an environment where it is anti-productive puts people of all skills at the same basic predictable level?
The architects are onshore and have never coded in their lives. They draw boxes on whiteboards and feed UML to offshore dev 'factories'. That UML gets decomposed so that you will have factory lines of developers producing classes (sometimes just methods) in isolation. LOC is frequently used as a productivity measure by their management. It's about as far from software as craft as you can get.
If your opinion is already popular, you don't have to be brave: you know it's out there.
If your opinion is unpopular, knowing someone's watching may silence it altogether.
Even strong (executive power) leaders like Mr Xi or Mr Putin do not rule over a monolith.
When the society was mostly anti-gay the government machinery was used to hurt these target homosexual groups. Now that society is pro-gay we see government forcing bakers to bake cake for gay weddings.
I will not be surprised if the surveillance mechanism would be used to hurt Libertarians and anti-government people.
Note: I selected the USSR/KGB not for any particular resemblance to current Western intelligence agencies (much more human intelligence and shotgun mics back then) but rather because they seem to me to be the textbook case of the effects of mass, pervasive surveillance over a long time.
For example when I say Donald Trump is representative of majority of conservative base I do not mean majority of conservative base is narcissist and billionaire. I basically mean Trump is pro-Gun, pro-Life, pro-Christian, anti-Gay. Because without those criteria he would not have entered the funnel in first place.
Conservatives or Liberals the current trend among American politicians is "trust us", "bend before authority", I am 100% sure no person can rise to top in American government if he does not conform to these ideas.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/new...