I've worked my entire career in open plan offices and if I were ever asked to work in a US style cubicle farm I'd resign inmediately.
Cube farms FTW. You can get over-the-wall collaboration on occasion without the visual distraction and the cubicle walls help dampen noise/conversation from further away.
It's not as good as a closed office for heads down work, but it's a 100x improvement over open offices where you see every movement, hear every sound, and perpetually feel like you're on display.
Open offices are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than cubicles. Cubicles are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than offices.
If you like open offices, you'll love when they switch you to hoteling so you have no permanent desk, but still need to come into the office!
One does not imply the other. I also prefer open office over cubicle. But not having a permanent desk could be done in a cubicle farm as well. It's an orthogonal dimension of corporate hell.
I need my mise en place.
It's the same axis when you look at it as "how do I fit X developers a space that costs Y dollars, and I'm trying to minimize Y."
Ah thank you for the concise distillation of my feeling.
No idea why nobody does this. Japan has been offering these kind of sealed workspaces in manga cafes and "private video watching booths" for decades.
I get that some people prefer to be alone, but these days why not work remotely?
Leave your walls, collaborate in the collaboration areas, care less about how loud you're being when you get animated about something you're enjoying working on or your new ideas; because you're not killing the focus of the people in their focus areas.
Good work requires variation, collaboration and focus. So, for me how it sounds when you say this is: "people who are given the capability to focus really bum me out"
As for the requirements of "good work", those vary with the nature of the job. One of the reasons I've always worked in an open plan office, aside from them being much more common in the UK, is that I work in finance, often on or close to trading floors. That's not an environment that benefits from cubicles and I believe they're rare in this industry in the US too.
But mainly, it's what I'm used to and what I like. I never said you had to feel the same.
It's the first letter that's capitalised, BTW. "Emacs", not "eMacs".