So I worked in a legacy industry and they co-located a couple of teams near our biggest client. They decided to put in place an open office concept for the engi

So I worked in a legacy industry and they co-located a couple of teams near our biggest client. They decided to put in place an open office concept for the engineers and support staff, and gave the VPs and sales guys private offices. Especially when we first moved into the office the VPs loved to take the customers on a tour and stand at the top of the space and tell them how great this open office was. I was in a bad mood one time when this happened and the VP asked me if I agreed (with the customer) and I said, "it is perfect for what it was built for, it was built to show our customers how many resources we have and to imply that we have no walls separating our BUs from working together." He was not happy, but also had no lines of responsibility to me or my business segment. And like all open offices it was loud so everyone put on headphones and we had zero cross-BU interaction and very low inter-BU interaction. At one point corporate tried to push a no headphones rule because it looked bad when they brought in customers and it did not land well in the cube dwellers. A compromise was reached to not allow headphones when customers leadership visits where planned, about once a month. My biggest problem with the design was that they guy in the desk that faced me spent around 80% of his time on conference calls. Now he wasn't loud at all, almost never said anything on these calls, but he would sit silently with his headset on staring directly at me the whole time. Now he wasn't looking at me, just looking forward but it was really disconcerting. What I always find funny about the whole concept is that the open cube was really first imagined by Taylor as he tried to apply physical labor efficiencies into the office world. You would have everyone in an open office with the manager slighly raised up behind everyone so he could monitor them to ensure everyone was working at peak efficiency. Plus the modern leader of open offices, a company I forgot the name of in Colorado implemented and pushed open offices into the modern world, and then killed the practice internally in less than 2 years.