I wasn't kidding about Google and Facebook. Facebook has been "open plan" since forever, with rows of monitors on long tables, and Google has talked publicly a

I wasn't kidding about Google and Facebook. Facebook has been "open plan" since forever, with rows of monitors on long tables, and Google has talked publicly about their research on optimal collaboration environments, which concludes that you need to pack engineers densely so they'll share ideas (and then have some common public space as well). Unfortunately I just spent 5 minutes trying to dig up the original articles, without luck.