I'd imagine the effect of open-plan offices on productivity greatly depends on the nature of the company and how the company operates. If a company mainly produ

I'd imagine the effect of open-plan offices on productivity greatly depends on the nature of the company and how the company operates. If a company mainly produces software in a non-mission critical domain where, say, a 5x gain in productivity is more valuable than a 1.5x gain in reliability, they're likely to have very short release cycles à la agile development. That kind of operation relies heavily on communication and collaboration within and across teams, so an open-plan office is likely going to be much more productive. If you don't have a collaboration-based development strategy, I'd buy that open-plan offices might often make employees less productive, but even then there will be multiple factors at play.