Am I the only person who doesn't mind working in a cube? The small space doesn't really bother me and I have walls for blocking out visual distractions. Beats open plan offices, for me at least.
But I don't really have a lot of trouble with distraction and will just put on headphones if I really need to focus.
I'm comfortable in all of them. I do find myself needing headphones more often in the short cube environment; but, that's not really a big issue to me.
I don't think I would like the open layout. Something about people walking by always being able to see what's on my monitor bothers me; and I'm currently in a situation where my boss could see my monitor if he chose to look up. Still not as bothering as a completely open layout.
So, I don't see anything wrong with cubes.
edit: I should have also mentioned that I wore headphones when I had my own office, too, because walls aren't soundproof, generally.
“Cubicles even make people behave badly. Researchers at Cornell studied 229 employees at eight firms and found that those in cubicles were more prone than those in open-plan offices to have long, loud conversations—sometimes unrelated to work—with colleagues or on the phone.”
The key to making open offices work in a software development environment is fundamentally about having sufficiently low density, and having management giving a shit about basic conflicts.