I have a grimmer point to make: Working out of crappy half-assed "startup incubators" with lousy desks, lousy seating, and an atmosphere flavored with stress was a direct contributor to my own RSI problems. You might not want to wait until you have symptoms to conclude that having an actual desk and some quiet is a good idea.
Or, you have a private office with a door that closes.
Sure, not the ideal, distraction-free environment, but neither is a cubicle farm.
Maybe someone should do some kind of voice rec "groupware" then, where the relatively louder results of the other person are used to filter out false positives on my end...
I don't even get a cube where I work
A few years into my career the idea of cubicles caught on and quickly became the norm, and now of course we're stuck with these horrible open offices that are, in my experience, just absolutely dreadful for productivity; but since everyone is doing it nobody really notices anymore.
You can largely thank Jim McCarthy of Microsoft fame for that, who in the mid 90s coined the concept, "beware of a guy in a room":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6BCHqEbyc
https://blogs.msdn.com/b/david_gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/...
When I'm in a coordination role, open concept is better because I can hear everything in the office and route information accordingly.
When I'm in a crafting role, open concept is death to productivity.
A "successful" company probably already has a culture that's going to be hard to change, but where management is trainable, you can sometimes improve things by giving them something else like else to focus on, like commit logs, test suites, or ticket updates.
I wonder how long it will take for reliable subvocal speech reading a-la [1] to become available in consumer products. It could potentially solve not only this problem but a lot of problems related to the use of cell phones in public spaces.
[1] http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2004/mar/HQ_04093_subvocal_s...
I guess the presenter conducted the "faster than the keyboard" test under very controlled circumstances (e.g. only working on his own code, so one doesn't have to deal with non-english-word variables/functions).
I don't mean to be a hater, because that was an _amazing_ demo, but I don't believe it's the holy grail the title implies it is.