It's kind of weird by now. They will happily offer you $200k in annual salary, but an office with a window where you could keep a potted plant is out of the question.
I've always loved the carrel desk. It seems perfectly designed to encourage the state of flow in its occupant.
is it a form of abuse like trying to keep everyone under control? is it a form of psychological conditioning to remind you that you just a resource whose top priority is to be interrupted at any time so knowing that you don't really have any personal space sovereignty or privacy to your own thoughts or creativity but that you must answer and create only for the collective?
I don't feel I have a clear picture on what it's about any insights?
Open offices facilitate that feeling of persistent accessibility and production. No closed doors to slow anyone down, and no notion that you are there to do anything but work every minute of every day. So why on Earth would anyone need privacy?
This is full-on agile ethos. And, for the same reason, agile is also responsible for the reversal of telecommute policies at some companies.
When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.
For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.
So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.
Also (and somewhat contradictory to the above), I expect that, if your colleagues are _too_ easily available, you'll be running to them with a half baked question in your head, only to blurt it out before realising you didn't think it through, and wasting both their time and your own. But before you go knocking on someone's office door to ask a question, you really want to be sure that you know what you want to ask, and that you understand the problem well enough for the answer to make sense to you. Which leads to a better conversation, less time wasted, and better learning.
The crazy extension of this is "free desks" where basically every place is a workstation, and you don't have any space to call your own.