Why pay someone six figures and bombard them with distractions and noise and render them useless? To save a couple hundreds of dollars in office space per person a month? It's moronic.
I assume by 'everyone' GP isn't referring just to software people.
It was absolutely the norm in the '70 and '80 and before. How comes that technology improves and worker's rights regress?
So now we have to squeeze into and share the space already built.
I also wonder how many people really had private offices 30-40 years ago.
IBM (and presumably any other company of that ilk) certainly had one person per office up through 1990.
One thing that people forget is that you had a land line phone. And you spent a lot of time on it. And haranguing people was considered a negotiation tactic. So, being able to close your door to not bother others was important.
I think this is an important point I haven't heard discussed before: The cell phone kind of enabled the open office explosion. That really explains a lot. Before if you needed to be reachable in a company, you needed a physical location from which to engage in phone calls.
In 1990 corporations? Goodness, no. Most companies didn't even have a corporate email system. IBM was probably one of the few exceptions. And external network access required signatures from 3 VP's (one senior), your firstborn, and probably your left ovary/testicle--it basically just didn't happen.
Programming teams were colocated or they didn't communicate. CVS was an advanced idea. C and UNIX were those toys from academia--real programmers used mainframes and COBOL or FORTRAN. If you had a forward thinking team, they might circulate useful technical articles and ideas via inter-/intra-office memos. Otherwise, you bought a book or went down to the corporate library and borrowed a book. At IBM you could pull up old issues of the IBM Journal of Research and Development (which were gold--and still are).
A 128Kbps (yeah, that's 12 kilobytes) dedicated leased line was considered pretty fast and was pretty expensive. A 250MB SCSI drive was considered pretty big and local networking at 16Mbps (Token Ring) was godly and ferociously expensive.
I can go on and on ... but we're already well into "Back in my day, we walked uphill to school--both ways. And we counted our bits by hand." territory.
Even in universities, 1988-89-ish was just at the point where using ftp to pull a .tgz from somewhere might actually be faster than sending a physical letter through the mail and having them mail you a magtape in return. And you sent a physical letter because very few people in a university at the time had an email address that was generally accessible. For God's sake, in 1988 /etc/hosts could still enumerate in an actual file every single host on the ARPAnet.
The amount of technical change from 1990 to 1999 was ENORMOUS.
https://www.morganlovell.co.uk/the-evolution-of-office-desig...
I don't think there are a lot of good normative answers -- I dislike open offices and cubes aren't much better (and at present, I'd especially have trouble regarding a management team that's still on board with them with either respect or trust).
But I'd guess the descriptive answer is that the open office is essentially the new factory floor. Many information age jobs look "white collar" but at a certain level, they function and are viewed through a widget-factory management lens.
also, up until 5-10ish years ago this was the standard at Microsoft for example where you would get your own office, or if you were a newb you had to share an office with someone else. let that sink in. the current state of affairs is something we have concocted in the last 10ish years - because savings.
It was a huge success and we got a complex product built in a few months. Unfortunately that was 2001 and the client went bankrupt without ever paying the invoice and we were all made redundant over the next few months.