> plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders.

Unless all of those people just happen to sit next to each other or they're shouting across the room then an open plan office does nothing to help that anyway, you'll have to organize meetings to collaborate or do it in other formats. For customers and stakeholders you'd be lucky if they worked in the same building at all.

Face to face communication is not the only form of collaborations and IMHO it's the worst and least scaleable one for technical fields. And when you're collaborating through a mailing list or something similar (that doesn't involve interrupting each other) that's just another wall of text.

Sounds like we’re talking about vastly different sizes of company, or vastly different levels of bureaucracy. If a company wouldn’t seat together people who need to collaborate, I don’t think the choice of office plan is the most important problem to solve.

So, you have 15 people who try to work. And 5 people sitting close together, who are loudly collaborating around a white board.

You do realise that these people will disrupt the work of the 15 people around them?

That's what daily life is in an open office.