Yes, I've heard the 'collaboration' justification, too. In my experience, a lot of programmers hate the open-floorplan noise, to which they're told "just take a laptop into a spare conference room, or work from home". The upshot is that half the team is now taking up conference rooms or working from home.
It's the worst of both worlds: we're paying for both cubicles that nobody uses and big conference rooms being used as single offices, and people are even more isolated than if they'd just been given normal offices to begin with.
It reminds me of situations like Prohibition (and I'm sure you can think of others): we don't like X, therefore we'll legislate against X, and ignore the fact that people are going to do X anyway, and so our legislation actually makes things worse.
I'm surprised people that push the open-floorplan idea would allow devs to work from home. I would expect them to view that as "ultimate productivity-killing isolation."
I mean, "how can we know you're actually working. You're at home, we can't see you producing."
At some point, devs don't care. They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't, so they may as well actually get their job done the only way it's possible
Not every place that pushes open floorplan or some 'collaborative workspace' (ugh, get to go to that tomorrow) is a busybody manager.
They moved us from cubes to a 'collaborative workspace' at a company where working from home is fine, almost encouraged. It wasn't the managers that choose this, it was higher up who believe collaborative is nothing but a buzz word.
In both the work from home (which happened before and will probably increase) and the collaborative workspace, the measure of getting your work done is 'did you get your work doneon time' not 'do you look busy.'
Having a liberal work-from-home-if-you-want policy would definitely make it a lot more tolerable, but this:
"It wasn't the managers that choose this, it was higher up who believe collaborative is nothing but a buzz word."
always worries me, because it's that kind of higher level management that, 3 months later, stops by the awesome collaborative workspace he told you to use, finds it mostly empty because everybody is at home, and shuts down the work-from-home policy in spite of the fact that people are getting work done.
Sure, you can point out that people are getting their work done, but (again, I know I'm stereotyping here) that seems to be the kind of management that doesn't let facts get in their way.
It's the worst of both worlds: we're paying for both cubicles that nobody uses and big conference rooms being used as single offices, and people are even more isolated than if they'd just been given normal offices to begin with.
It reminds me of situations like Prohibition (and I'm sure you can think of others): we don't like X, therefore we'll legislate against X, and ignore the fact that people are going to do X anyway, and so our legislation actually makes things worse.