I just always assumed an "open office", really meaning a non-office, an empty building, was what was available for startups after the dot com bust in SF.

Then after the fact we made up a bunch of bullshit as to why this is some brilliant idea. Then this idea spread as if it was some kind of technological advancement because it worked for small tech companies trying to not spend money on furniture and walls.

We just aren't very good at any of this at scale. The open "office" and battle against remote work are different flavors of the same type of stupidity.

Nah it's because walls cost money and take up space. Open plan is cheaper with the trade-off that nobody likes it

I actually like that environment, unless I'm having problems debugging something. If something is not working after an hour or so I am on edge and need peace and quiet, but otherwise I can program fine for most tasks with noise around me.

in hindsight its amazing anything actually ever got done

Realistically the actual work got done in the evening after going home.

Hell this is still the case for high meeting days

My team is very small remote-primary, but we will travel to each others cities / offices quarterly or so.

We have long since given up on getting any work done on our in-office days, but see them as collaborative / bonding / light planning only.

It's gotten to the point that even if we fly to each others city for a week, we might only go to the office 2~3 days, or by Wednesday/Thursday we might by physically collocated but go to different rooms in silence with headphones to actually get work done.

As a dev these days are actually pretty stressful as they have the feeling of creating work faster than doing any of it. It makes me remember how unproductive my dev teams used to be with the constant in-office interruptions. At prior jobs, I used to do most of my actual dev work after hours, and on unilaterally declared WFH days