I worked in an open-office for a year and my experience there was pretty bad. I was in a deep-work, heavy focus department sandwiched between two walking paths (we called our desks "Review Island") and literally anyone in the company including CEO could walk within 2 feet of you when they headed for coffee or water. So, you're on edge, your peripheral vision is a ton of people walking by. Then, the two departments next to us were very collaborative, they involved a lot of conversations...and yet, they also hated the open-office.

People want to have conversations when they want to; at other times, they want silence. I think there was an effect where no one wanted to interrupt others' silence, so they just emailed or chatted when a simple walk-over-and-chat would suffice...if we had had more space and more individuals with offices, I think a lot more productive collaboration would've occurred.

So, in summary, the noise/distraction was already so bad, we didn't want to make it worse.