Whilst we all love to hate overcrowded offices, I really don't think that there's any problems with open plan offices. I worked in those for 4 years and never had an issue with them. Sure, there is a slight decrease in your personal productivity due to the likelihood of distractions and interruptions, but that is balanced by an increase in team productivity thanks to an increase in communication.
Work is not all about your own personal work. In fact, in the large organisations where I worked, I'd say at least 50% of the work that people ended up doing was a result of miscommunication, and so there are clearly huge benefits in finding ways to decrease that miscommunication.
Even programming work was largely dependent on communication. The projects where I worked didn't do any rocket science that required weeks of solitary work to chew through, but it did require a good understanding of arcane, bizarre business (finance) rules and interface requirements, and the bottleneck there was definitely communication rather than concentration.
Even with headphones you're more likely to have a chat with someone who's a couple of desks away in an open plan office than someone who's in a separate office.
not necessarily true. it's much harder to "bother" someone who is visually and audibly giving cues he doesn't want to be bothered, than with someone whom you simply skype in with once a day. maybe you can "communicate" more frequently with the former, but the interactions may in fact be less productive than an open atmosphere.
open plan offices may actually make people more defensive about distractions and hurt team interactions.
I appreciate your anecdotal experience, but the article claims to be the result of an empirical study, so I'm going to weight their findings more heavily, unless someone can offer a reason to believe their methodology was poor.
Work is not all about your own personal work. In fact, in the large organisations where I worked, I'd say at least 50% of the work that people ended up doing was a result of miscommunication, and so there are clearly huge benefits in finding ways to decrease that miscommunication.
Even programming work was largely dependent on communication. The projects where I worked didn't do any rocket science that required weeks of solitary work to chew through, but it did require a good understanding of arcane, bizarre business (finance) rules and interface requirements, and the bottleneck there was definitely communication rather than concentration.