While the open-office debate has been a recurring meme on HN for some time, it seems that offering a variety of options as well as unfettered personal choice is key.
For example, my current employer has wide-open office space with pods of desks, but they also offer numerous privacy rooms for escape. As a mild to mid introvert myself, this allows for the best of both worlds the majority of the time: I can benefit from those casual, spontaneous conversations that pop up in the open space, but I can also grab my own room for an entire afternoon to crank out some heads-down work.
I think what's most important is for companies to acknowledge and respect the variety of working styles of their employees, along with the trust that--regardless of how chatting in a pod or hiding away from others might appear--more often than not they're getting shit done.
edit: words
I was in SV last year for a couple of months during the election, and everyone I met were all paid up members of the church of political correctness up front, but when you spoke to these people in private there were a lot of people who were secretly conservative, but "It's Silicon Valley and you can't be a Republican out here".
I'm reminded of Chomsky's words in his book, The Common Good:
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum"
Where things have gone drastically wrong here are that the spectrum is now so tiny that any debate within that spectrum is now impossible. It becomes almost impossible to depolarize the situation and widen that spectrum, and that's going to lead to everything you more eloquently put above, if not more.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-fired-google-195400805.ht... (Non-paywall version)