I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "r

I thought it has been solved years ago. Open offices have the same benefits as huge halls in a 20th century industrial factories as long as workers are doing "routine, mechanical tasks". Filing forms, coding html, translating a small specifications into Java code, any kind of a "drone work" - repetitive tasks with a little or no variation - could be done in an open space with the best benefits/costs ratio for an employer. The only kind of work which cannot be done efficiently in a constant noise and distractions are these "engineering tasks" which require intense mental concentration (or what they usually call "meditating on a problem"). But such kind of high-skilled jobs are about 5% (and the best guys have their rooms, because they are worth it) so there is no wonder that 90% is an open space. An example of such a task, which requires a quiet place would be "analyzing and decomposing an unfamiliar problem domain into a reasonable, valid metrics/heuristics to be used within machine-learning algorithms, given that you have no PhD in ML or problem domain's field". Very common scenario, isn't it?