Training a junior or helping a collaborator is everything but loss of productivity.
I get it, if you are junior, there are benefits. If you are senior (and not ie team lead and control freak at the same time), you lose. Hell you lose a LOT, can confirm. Offices are way more stressful, so this is clear downgrade for senior people. Constant noise and interruptions way overweight the benefits.
Guess who brings more added value to companies, juniors or seniors? (not talking about long term perspective, most companies are led by people who focus on next bonus only, and who they manage is steered that way too).
But apparently I have superhuman abilities to concentrate, because honestly I've never found it difficult to ignore people around me to focus and get work done. And yet I don't feel special, most people I've worked with seem to able to do it.
I understand many people don't prefer it, and they should very much choose jobs accordingly. But I guess I'll stop pretending my preferences are based on objective criteria when everyone else does too.
For me, this is the bottom line. Working in an office -- even the best offices I've ever seen -- is a pretty terrible experience in a ton of ways.
In my younger years, I kinda gave up on actually getting anything done in the office. It's just too difficult. So I'd take my work home and make up for the time wasted in the office by doing my work in the evenings.
Eventually I wised up and stopped doing that, but that didn't make working in the office any more productive.
Combined with the negative metric of employee burnout, which inevitably follows from years of exposure to open plan offices, constant interruptions ... and the toxic positivity of company owners pretending how wonderful these things are for everyone.