I personally like them a lot, and I know plenty of people who range from also liking them to being indifferent about them. It’s just one of the topics HN shows

I personally like them a lot, and I know plenty of people who range from also liking them to being indifferent about them. It’s just one of the topics HN shows a very strong groupthink about. Wrong opinions on open plan offices are downvoted very aggressively, and complaints about them are comically exaggerated. I think most people who complain about them here haven’t experienced the alternatives. The most likely alternative is cubicle farms, which are soul crushingly terrible, or a number of different solutions which all require use of much more floor space. The economics of a more-floor-space approach would reasonably make everybody about $20,000-$50,000/year more expensive to employ, and well you can guess where that money would come from...