I had a shared office with one other programmer working on the same stuff as me for my first job. After that I took a job where I was in a cube. After having an office cubes are almost unbearable. Cubes also tend to come with a lot of bad practices like not actually having a door, facilities setting up your desk so that you have to sit with your back to the "doorway", getting shuffled from one cube to the next with regularity, and ever-decreasing work-space.

One place I worked for started me in an 8x10 cube, moved me to a different floor and into an 8x8 cube, then across to another floor into an 8x8 cube which had a supporting pillar through it, making it more like a 6x4 cube, and finally into a conference room with 6 other people, all within the space of a year. I miss my office.

Don't get me wrong, I'll make do wherever. But compared to having an office cubes and open plan are worthless.