True! I think a lot of modern workplaces are good at compromising on this. In our case, we don't have private offices, but there are quiet working areas that you can go to to work. Although these are sparse in our Salford campus, unfortunately; there's a lot more in the London buildings.

I actually work in an open floor plan. I have a great boss, coworkers, interesting work, the only thing I hate are the distractions.

In our case we have “breakout rooms”, nominally for impromptu meetings but it’s acceptable to camp out in them for a while if you need privacy/focus. But I can’t drag my big screen monitor in them, or use them every day, so they are a very imperfect solution. If we added large screen monitors to them, and allowed engineers to camp in them most of the day every day, they’d be perfect. But then they’d be, private offices.

The last time I managed people, I had the company build small single person offices for them. If they needed to pairs or a bit, they had just enough room for that. If they needed a meeting with more than 2 people, there were rooms for that.

We never had problems with collaboration or communication, and this was before slack. Team members would email non urgent information to their team. Product managers would sit in your office to work out details of a new feature or bug to be solved. But if it wasn’t urgent, they’d respect your need for focus.

> but there are quiet working areas that you can go to to work

Doesn't help if you have a desktop and no laptop. Plus there weren't many in White City last year when I was there - everything was co-opted to be a meeting room or office as they slowly closed off various sections for refittings.