That you have to spend a lot of time with other programmers asking questions raises another question: why is this? If the other programmers were better able to concentrate and churn out specs/documentation for their work that you could consult at your leisure, would there be as much need for constantly interrupting each other with questions? If you had all the information you needed at your fingertips, why couldn't you stay in your office and focus 100% on developing your part of the software?

As an analogy, it's like saying "Who has time to implement safety measures when we're so busy administering first aid because of all the accidents?"

Hmm... sufficiently define everything so that human contact is unnecessary? Genius idea. Now if only the customer knew exactly what they wanted a year out and the BA's perfectly captured that in absolutely unambiguous prose, and of course if nothing ever failed to go according to plan.

You're both right. It's a spectrum. Perfect documentation is impossible, but good documentation is valuable.

In biot's analogy, human contact is analogous to first aid.

For one thing, the context is self-reported employee satisfaction, not team productivity. Even if you could somehow find a measure of productivity that many people would agree to, I'm skeptical that the results would support the idea you have presented.

You would be NOT annoying the guy next to you with your loud chewing/constant throat clearing/conversations/talking through problems/music heard through your earphones.

I've worked in open plan, cubes, and my own office. Open plan is by far the worst. For me, it comes down to perceived privacy more so than noise.

You would spend the time orienting on your personal tasks, as opposed to filtering out the chatter of your coworkers, the movements that distract you, the sound of a hundred fingers tapping away at the keyboards... you would have time to mentally turn a problem over and over for as long as your mind could stand it.