Personally, I think that most office designers take the concept of open offices too far. From what I've seen of several offices, as a Software Engineer, is that

Personally, I think that most office designers take the concept of open offices too far. From what I've seen of several offices, as a Software Engineer, is that Open Office is meant to be entirely open. This means that the only dividers/partitions are for things like meeting rooms. The rest of the office is open, such as halls, cafeterias/break rooms, etc. This is what causes my hatred of open offices. I am on the fence about cubicles/private offices, because I do like the fact that my team is close by and I can have a conversation by turning around and talking to them. The annoying noise for me is all the idle chatter from people in meeting rooms near by coming out of their meeting and deciding to carry on a conversation right outside the meeting room, or while walking back to their desk. Ideally, I'd like an open office to mean that it's open for my team, where we are partition/sectioned together, but that there is a door or some way of keeping out all the ambient office noise/sights. I believe if I had this, I would be able to get a lot more work done as I'm not having to wear headphones to cut out the general clutter of distractions from my environment.