I'm not alone in picking up on this:

  > private offices for each programmer,

I refer readers to the comments made by Richard Hamming, quoted here by PG : http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html : about shutting oneself away:

  > I notice that if you have the door to your office
  > closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow,
  > and you are more productive than most. But 10 years
  > later somehow you don't know quite know what problems
  > are worth working on; all the hard work you do is
  > sort of tangential in importance.
  >
  > He who works with the door open gets all kinds of
  > interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues
  > as to what the world is and what might be important.
  > ... there is a pretty good correlation between those
  > who work with the doors open and those who ultimately
  > do important things, although people who work with
  > doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to
  > work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but
  > enough that they miss fame.

Adapting this to programming, intra-team communication is already hard enough to establish and get flowing. Don't put stuff in the way. Yes, programmers do need quiet environments, but the gains from good and easy communication will out-weigh the losses. If you really need silence for a bit of hard-thinking work, take your laptop and go somewhere else for a bit.