Nah, the reason open-plan offices are popular in Silicon Valley is that SV has embraced a modern truism that the rest of the world recoils from: most of success is luck.<p>Open-plan offices optimize for luck (as in, chance encounters that spark new ideas) at the expense of pessimizing known, guaranteed, solid productivity.  Most people won&#x27;t be as effective in heads-down, concentration-required, focused, knowledge-based work in an open-plan office.  But this is irrelevant: in today&#x27;s economy, if you&#x27;re doing something that anyone else knows how to do or that anyone else thinks is a good idea, you&#x27;re a rounding error.  The only work that generates any financial return is when you do something that everybody else considers too crazy to try and it works.<p>Open-plan offices in startups are usually because the founders hope that enough smart people in close proximity, dedicated to working on a problem, will manage to fill in the holes in the business plan that the founder didn&#x27;t get to before they raised money.  Open-plan offices in big companies are usually because management hopes that employees will generate the next big idea that keeps them from becoming obsolete.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of cargo-culting going on too, and particularly in other parts of the country, people adopt the open-plan offices without the incentive structures, openness to new ideas, and ability to bring a product to market that allows companies to capitalize on it.  But that&#x27;s why Silicon Valley companies do it, at least.