Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't interrupt you as much.
But I was probably producing about 10% of what I normally produced in a closed space. I was OK with that :-) My company probably wasn't, but hey, I was salary; that's their problem.
"Today’s modular cubicle is a masterpiece of compromise: It gives you no meaningful privacy and yet still manages to make you feel isolated. You are poorly protected from noise and disruption; indeed in some cases, sources of noise and disruption are actively piped into your space. You’re isolated because that small lonely space excludes everyone but you (it’s kind of a toilet stall without a toilet). The space makes it difficult to work alone and almost impossible to participate in the social unit that might form around your work."
At home these days I rarely have music or anything on, I can work for the most part in comfortable silence.
Means that music is saved for when I actually want to listen to it and can give it my attention, instead of while I'm trying to debug or avoid someone's armpit on the train.
I have worked at Google and a cubicle would have been better than the open source we had.