Shared office is even worse, everyone is loud, you're missing the attenuation you had in your cubicle. Impossible to do phone calls / video calls without noise canceling headphones and good noise filtering. Ans when you're at home trying to talk to someone on-site, you can hear three other colleagues chatting in the background. Hate this shit with a passion

that's wild to hear, cubicles sound great compared to the boiler rooms we have now

Are you sure? If you've tried it fine but it you've not tried it....woof

in the 2000s I started a contract with 200 other cubicle workers (software support), but they decided at some point to cut it down to 20... so after a few months it was a cube wasteland with a core of ubercubes - each with 4-10 devboxes and displays for ad-hoc test environments... and it was like that for 8 months then we all got the 'we're not eliminating your positions, but the jobs are going to New Mexico, you want to move to Albuquerque right?' axe.