Open plan offices (in technology; there are plenty of work environments where they make sense and there's nothing negative to read into it) were originally desi

Open plan offices (in technology; there are plenty of work environments where they make sense and there's nothing negative to read into it) were originally designed with malicious intent. Now it's the default, and even touted as a perk, if you believe that. But the original purpose was pretty depraved. There's also quite a strong discrimination thread to that story. Those people who get pregnant are a lot more likely to leave if they have an open-plan office during that time. One of the things to keep in mind about white-collar sociology is that all of the things that seem like irritating inefficiencies-- the pointless busywork, the loyalty tests, the focus on sacrifice rather than contribution, and the illness-inducing open-back visibility-- are actually designed to make people sick. Why? Because there's literally no other way, in most companies, to figure out who deserves to advance. In the white-collar world, the manager types who run it will never know who's good at his job and who's not, so the only way to test people is to load them up with pointless unpleasantness and see who departs or breaks first. Not all individual managers actually people to break. In fact, the middle managers generally don't want it, because it makes messes they have to deal with. However, the only way to resolve the contest for limited advancement opportunities is for people to get so fed up or sick that they cannot continue. That's also why mainstream corporate work will never be able to accommodate depression or anxiety disorders. Those illnesses, especially when they occur in the previously healthy-- burnout and nervous breakdown-- are intrinsic features of the game. It'd be a different sport without them, and the people who've been winning one game for the past few decades aren't about to change the rules.