For some, probably. I'm happy to work in a cafeteria, coffee shop, etc.

Coffee shops aren't like open-plan offices.

In an open-plan office, you have to listen to all your coworkers, including those on completely different teams, have extremely loud and simultaneous conversations that you can hear from far across the room.

In a coffee shop, people generally don't talk, or keep their voices low when they do, so you generally only hear people talking to the staff to make orders and such.

Indeed. In a coffee shop, it's considered rude to talk on a phone at full volume. In an open office, it's absolutely "fine" for some reason.

There was a group of people in a meeting room working on separate parts of some larger project. I had to call one of them. You think that guy would get off his ass to walk away and talk to me in private? I spend the time helping you out and you don't even offer me that?

No, I had to hear 3 other people having a conversation louder than his call with me.

It's especially "fine" if you're a salesperson, and you're sitting right next to a group of engineers who are trying to concentrate.

Roles aren't always that well-defined. Many of us aren't recruiters or in sales but can still spend hours a day on planning, etc. calls with distributed teams. It's not practical to seek out a phone booth or alcove for every one of those calls.

> It's not practical to seek out a phone booth or alcove for every one of those calls.

Why not? It's not practical to make 8 of your coworkers suffer through your call either.

Maybe, if you need to be on the phone for hours a day, you need an office not to be in an open floorplan.

Maybe, but that's not within my control. Take it up with management.

Doesn't matter though for me because I'm in my home office.

It's completely within your control to not seek out a different (and designed for phones) place when you need to make a call.

Blame management who puts people whos job it is to talk on the phone all the time in the same open office as people who need to concentrate.

Last time I was at the coffee shop someone was watching Netflix at full volume. So yeah that was pretty bad. And I don’t have any power to stop them (at a workplace I could complain perhaps)

Complain to the staff. If they refuse to do anything, then leave and don't come back, and leave a 1-star review on Google Maps or Yelp.

> For some, probably. I'm happy to work in a cafeteria, coffee shop, etc.

Depends on the work you do and your age, I suppose. Also whether you touch type on a standard keyboard or not.

My work is made easier with large dual monitors and a nice standard keyboard. Squinting into a single small screen while mispressing all the laptop keys (because those characters commonly used for programming don't have a consistent spot in any laptop keyboard) is not my idea of fun.

Criticism of open office plans was almost a trope (there's a software book from the 90s that rips into them), but in the years before Covid, companies doubled-down, removing partitions and implementing full hot-desking.

I think those horrible, noisy environments would have led to a backlash sooner rather than later. Now any complaints about open plan offices will just be dismissed as people whining about not being able to WFH.