You make a valid point. And I believe open office spaces are wrong for the same reasons that I believe agile is wrong: both assume that all work is fundamentally similar.
When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.
For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.
So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.
When I call someone and in the background I can hear 20 other people talk, I immediately assume that the person I called is not considered important in his/her company. Because high-level work needs uninterrupted quiet time.
For agile, it's similar. When you stop having different roles, then you implicitly assume that your lead architect and your junior trainee can do the same work, albeit at different speeds. If your architect has useful experience, that's an insult. Or it means that your entire product is simplistic enough to be built purely by trainees.
So both open office and agile effectively reduce your programmers to expendable grunts.