Meanwhile in the defense industry you're all but assured a cube, often a tall one, maybe even an office if you happen to work in a building spec'd out that way. Can't have unauthorized eyes looking at what other people are working on.
Honestly I think this has more to do with the profit margins in the defense industry, not because of any IA/OPSEC concerns.
Though I have noticed a very unwelcome trend where some newer defense companies are building open-plan offices because they think it's "cool". Fine example of the worst sort of cargo-culting.
When I worked in military contracting for a decade, I found the same work environs: at three different DoD employers I shared an office (with window) with only one other person.
Now that I work at a big pharmaceutical (where profit margins are famously big), we recently transitioned to an open space. It's ugly, tight, offers no storage space, has a low ceiling, little daylight, and you can't sit in the same space from day to day. The space is even broken up across three floors so you're guaranteed not to be able to find your friends.
Management seems hell bent on driving out talent. Pretty much all our best and brightest have left. Their replacements have all been 22 year-olds, who've never worked anywhere else and don't know that it doesn't have to be like this.
Curious where a cubicle wall would be considered necessary and sufficient isolation, even assuming people cleared to the sufficient level and on the same project. Seems like you'd either say ntk exists or not, so either shared workspace ok, or more robust isolation.
The pattern I've noticed is that if the entire building/floor/cube farm is "you ain't getting in here without clearance" or "nothing in here requires clearance" then cube farms are acceptable. Most places with cube farms also provide something to string across the opening to prevent accidental NTK violations. You'll have oversized cube farms that are half empty even though the rest of the building is packed like sardines because they've determined that nobody else has a NTK for whatever the team occupying them is working on. At some point it comes down to common sense and cost, level of secrecy and expected lifetime of secrecy (the requirements for a sub propeller are different than something that's being production-ized so it can be issued to thousands of soldiers).
The only buildings/floors I've seen that are all offices either were management or super secret algorithms and electronic systems integration projects. Like the kind of stuff where the "old boring legacy tech" exceeds the kind of stuff Hollywood shows you.
Makes sense. I'm only familiar with the paranoid VTR SCIFs and the plywood-and-tent SCIFs (downrange), not so much with how contractors handle C/S/TS in CONUS.
