Christ, I'm sitting in an open plan office right now with two telephone conversations going on in my right ear.
Thank the hardware overlords for headphones ...
3-5 people in the office at any given day? Just build offices, christ.
One of the founders must have had a particular itch to scratch is all, and it has cost the company money so that they could have the worst of all worlds
The 'Library Rules' are dumb because one of the prime reasons you need to make noise in an open office is to share a screen with someone, as you collaborate or problem solve or whatever. This is hard to do if you have to move to a quiet room because you can't move your monitor setup with you, or have the comfort and access of the things at your desk.
Even non-code discussions are easier at your own desk, with kbd and mouse for notes vs laptop and trackpad.
Not being able to talk above a whisper, or at all, at your own desk is a disaster.
What causes people to whisper in libraries but talk loudly and disturb others in an open office plan?
Perhaps some segmentation of open office plans would also be interesting -- a "loud" zone, a semi-quiet zone and a silent zone. I don't know how workable this would be for teams unless you had hot-desking, which is something else people seem to hate, but still. Engineers who need to work on a difficult problem for a while can use the silent zone, while groups who need lots of communication and the perennial extroverts are free to use the louder spaces.