Open plan offices attract highest levels of worker dissatisfaction
I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right.  What you need is:<p>- A a decent cultural protocol around it.  One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.  Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal.
- A reasonable number of walled-off rooms for anyone to use.  Need to take a phone call?  Have a quick 1-on-1?  Debate something loudly with 3-5 people?  You need to have rooms, of varying sizes, to handle these use cases near at hand.
- Minimal noise that's not related to collaboration.  Eg, no loud ringing phones.  No phone-based customer support department in the same room as the devs.  No kitchen (full of dishwashers, coffee grinders, etc) area facing the open workspace.<p>Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work.  Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction.  I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.