They are hiring you to effectively be an office decoration, not a productive worker. So open-plan eye candy is rational so long as the workers themselves refuse

They are hiring you to effectively be an office decoration, not a productive worker. So open-plan eye candy is rational so long as the workers themselves refuse to stand up for being treated in a minimally healthy way and refuse such companies. In theory, sure, but does it hold up in practice? In theory, programmers have leverage right now because there is more need for their expertise than there are programmers to fill that need. In practice, I see businesses who are perfectly willing to leave those positions open for years rather than change their hiring and/or office policies. Boycotting them won't change this because "best practices" in tech are viral and completely irrational. They work more like fashions than they do peer reviewed research. Even if everybody boycotted those startup companies and they had absolutely no engineers, they'd still get funding and they'd still influence tech "fashion". They've gotten really good at it over the years, too, employing propaganda techniques right out of Mao's little red book[0]. Anyway, all of that is to say we the employees don't have the leverage people think we do, even when our work is in demand. We're being manipulated en masse and most of us would rather work and keep ourselves fed and comfortable than take on any kind of risk. After all, if we were able to tolerate risk we would have opted out of this nonsense years ago and started our own company. [0]: Zed Shaw - The Scams that Derail Programming, Motherfucker: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Xh2Go-jkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5Xh2Go-jkM