Open-plan is actually sold to employers for its discriminatory &quot;benefit&quot;. Mostly it&#x27;s about age, not disability. People like you and me aren&#x27;t even on their map. We may be a highly productive (in the long term, though short-term volatility is embarrassing) ~4% of the population but &quot;they&quot; don&#x27;t care either way about us. They do want to keep &quot;the olds&quot; out, though.<p>Once people have kids, they struggle with open-plan offices. That&#x27;s because the biologically rooted need to protect someone makes it impossible for you to keep the &quot;you can trust anyone&quot; attitude of college kids and programmers in halfway-house environments.<p>Open-plan forces you to trust randoms with visibility into how you are working, and that&#x27;s something that&#x27;s intolerable for anyone who&#x27;s ever had a disability, anyone with a less-than-privileged upbringing, and anyone who&#x27;s ever had a child (among other sets of people).