Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller?
You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.
But yeah, they care about productivity.
Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.
I worked at a Microsoft derrived game studio in 2010... the offices were glorious... but the devs literally only talked to each other once a week or at lunch. But they were doing things like implementing entire siggraph, which are 'near real time' aka 1-5 seconds per frame, papers into actual real time (sub .1 millis per frame) implemetations. theyd spend a week wiring bindings between c and glsl, and 3 months getting it down to 20ms so we could see the effect. it was really odd since I needed to interact a LOT with otheres comparatively. I got bored as fuck coming from an agile pair programming company. It was good for that deep level of coding. it was not for the type of stuff I do at my current job.
Pair programming with all pairs trying to ignore or talk louder than all others is miserable. Open offices decrease face to face interactions empirically.
You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.
But yeah, they care about productivity.
Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.