But you'll never win that argument with a manager in a company that has decided to double down on open-plan layouts. If someone higher up is dogmatic about open-plan, then managers can't talk bad about open-plan or else they face career roadblocks. This gets funneled to HR, so then they create bullshit codewords like "team player" or "good cultural fit" that really just mean "someone who agrees to sublimate their natural need for privacy for no other reason than that we told them to."
The only thing you can do is rejection-sample employers until you find one of the rare ones where the upper management just happen to already share your views about offices and productivity.
If the company's office plan looks like Google's, then surely they're going to generate earnings like Google one day. I don't think the analysis necessarily goes that much deeper than that.
We've gone from managerial pseudoscience of the early 20th century that attempted to measure and optimize productivity into full on mysticism that rests on vague notions of 'increasing opportunities for collaboration.' At least scientific management attempted to use quantitative analysis and empiricism to make employees more productive. In the new age, we just need vague slogans, beanbags, and chi consultants.
What bigger slap in the face can they give to a developer? They are basically saying, up-front in one of the earliest conversations they have with you, that your value to them is more determined by your ability to look like a good piece of office furniture than by the product of your software development labor.
The typical retort to that around here is that group productivity matters more than individual productivity. I agree that the productivity of the group can be greater than the sum of the individual productivities of its members. No one has yet explained to me how lowering the sum of individual productivities leads to an increase in group productivity, though.