Open offices are great if you don't optimize for people per square meter. I did my onboarding in Boston. The company just moved to this office so there was a ton of space. Teams were far apart so it wasn't noisy. And this open space just felt great. I never worked in an open office so I was sold

A year later when I visited there were twice as many people. It was still okay to work there but noisier.

The last time when I visited was really bad. Desks everywhere, people 1 meter apart. I couldn't really work there in a productive way.

We should start to build offices for "free range" engineers.