I work for a company that not only has an open plan office, but no assigned seating either. It's honestly the worst, mostly because I like to have my own environment at work. I can't bring in my keyboard or any of my other stuff, and as corny as it is i can't even bring in photos to keep at my desk since there's no assigned seating!
As much as i like open spaces, i miss at /least/ having my own desk.
Then they introduced a mandatory uniform and a complete ban on personal items -- all the Wallace and Gromit coffee mugs, the photos of family disappeared overnight.
It's the most sterile, depersonalising, demotivating work environment I've ever encountered.
Incidentally, BPS covered this in another article... "Why it’s important that employers let staff personalise their workspaces" -- https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/03/27/why-its-important-that-... . It's well worth a read.
I've mentioned some of the other stuff they did in my other comments so I won't dig it up here. I left at the end of last year and at that point I was doing the job of four engineers (who'd all left).
These days, I sleep through the night (first time in about five years), I've massively cut down my coffee intake (from four cups of espresso-strength to a couple of lattes), and I'm working on my own projects in the evenings again. I still have about a stone in weight (put on through comfort-eating) to burn off, but I'm working on that.
Give me my desk!! my keyboard!! my monitors!!
Open offices are the first half of that, and open desks are the other half.
Who does it benefit? The company in cost per person of space. Any other metric applied shows gross inadequacies of open offices.
Maybe i'm just being a baby, but a work desk doesn't feel complete without at least a picture of my dog at it, haha.
Having worked in an open office like environment before, it was the only way I was able to get a lot of stuff done.
These types of open offices are a deathknell for productivity and great for people who use work as their only social outlet.