OK, so I work in Japan and the offices here have a certain set-up. There are no cubicles and the office floor is completely open plan in my company. So there is basically no privacy. Everyone can see everyone else all day.
My boss sits about a metre and a half to my right and I am perpendicular to him, all day. So, I can always see him, for the full eight hours, right there in my peripheral vision. I think it's having a subtle psychological effect of causing slight anxiety or a feeling of indignance in me. He's just sort of always there: the shape of his head, all day long, and he can always see me more directly than I can see him.
My Japanese coworkers don't act as if they are bothered by this arrangement, even the ones who are sitting very close to their division heads like I am. Maybe they are used to it because it's part of their own work culture but I can't imagine that they like it. It just feels very dehumanising to put people on little rectangular islands of desks, with no partitions between each person, and a boss overseeing each island from his own seat at a desk about a metre from the end of each island.
It's one of the factors that has led me to plan my exit from the company at the end of the year. It feels petty but it's small things like this that have driven me to decide to leave. I am planning to take a year off and then find a job as a delivery driver's assistant or something. It would be slightly lower pay but I would be outside, moving my body, enjoying changing scenery, and not sat there on display all day for the entire management to look at whenever they feel like it.
This has been mostly a venting/rant, but does anyone else know what I mean? I just want to have some sense of physical separation between me and the people overseeing and evaluating my work, and, preferably, to do a job where I can stand, walk, move around freely instead of being like some kind of festering gnome ornament in a brightly-lit office space.