[bunderbunder]

I worked at a company that did that. I think there might still have been a productivity loss. All the engineers and programmers got huge studio monitor headphones to shut out the sound of everyone else working. Because of that we all used instant messaging for most our communication even though we were sitting in the same room. We salvaged our productivity by essentially turning ourselves into telecommuters with a commute.

The sales and customer service roles were trying to schedule their calls to minimize the time when two people would be on the phone at the same time, in order to limit background noise.

I don't think the company could have afforded private offices, but I have a hard time believing all of that energy being put into working around the work environment was less expensive than the cost of some high partitions.

[gravity13]

I had a similar situation, but it made sense. Instant messaging grants the asynchronicity of emails without the overhead of long waits between replies.

When you want to talk to somebody without interrupting them, it's ideal. I might also suggest more 'got a sec?' type messages to get more of the swifter voice conversations.

That and sometimes we engineers prefer to build our sentences rather than blurt them.