[arjie]

Hmm, interesting. For many people, it looks like their open office has people taking phone calls at their desk. We take phone calls in rooms (which you book on Google Calendar). If there are no rooms available when you book you reschedule or take the call in the Team Room (which has no expectation of noise-level).

If people are loud, you talk to them about it. It almost never happens since your coworkers are respectful and since you've obviously kept the more noisy jobs in a different part of the office from the engineers.

It seems to me that single person offices will suffer heavily from Conway's law.

But we'll see. It looks to me like where I've just moved to has no call rooms and no separation between engineering and the rest, so I'll see if those factors alone will change me from pro-open-office to anti-open-office.