Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

Nobody disagrees with that. What are you talking about?

A quick and simple question can also be "naturally" followed by documentation. For example, when someone asks about an ambiguity in the doc, they will naturally immediately amend the doc after the clarification. Another example, they will write the code and the own existence of the code will clarify the situation for other users.

Some small questions are also not worth documenting. For example: "yesterday you said you will work on X and Y this week, and we are the middle of the week. Today I realize I'm interested in X because it is related to Z, did you started working on it already?". At the end of the week, the information answering this question will not be relevant for anyone ever.

> sit together again

This is very very inefficient to book meetings all the time at the first simple question. I really cannot see how you are able to work in such conditions where communication is over-burden with so much process.

There is pros and cons in a lot of way of communicating. Your position that quick and simple questions are not fit for any purpose is not really realistic, and you now need to grasp at straws to find argument to defend this position. Even if "a hyper-planified communication plan where everything is written down" would be ideal (which is still arguable), I doubt the benefice of it are big enough to be perceptible.

> However, if you see the quick and easy questions coming at too high of a volume that it overwhelms the team

Which is a dysfunction. You had someone talking about a process that you seems to now agree makes some practical sense, but you call this person "toddler" because of the remote possibility of pushing this process in absurd direction.

> I am asking for being mindful of other peoples' times and not advocate for people being at their disposal because of a bad onboarding experience they had.

You are calling other people "toddler" based on something that only happened in your head. It's a bit ridiculous to then talk about "being mindful of other peoples' [stuff]". Nothing in OP indicates that they are not mindful of other peoples' times.

> The OP is, in a way, advocating for returning back to an old way of working that was deeply inefficient to me and my team, just because they like it, without providing a notion whether his team mates liked it

No, OP just said he like one way of working, nowhere I see they advocate for forcing other people to do as they like. On the other side, YOU are calling names to people who don't do as you please.

> I am simply sharing the viewpoint ...

You are calling other people "toddler". You are now backing up on that now that you have to admit that your initial position was self-centered childishness.

Honestly, I think forcing people to work at the office is a very bad idea, but, karmically, for people like you, while I don't wish that upon yourself, you just don't have the ground to complain: you are a self-centered individual that calls other people "toddler" at the first occasion, if you end up with a boss that has a similar behavior and ends up coming up with the bad idea of forcing you back to the office, how can you criticize your boss?

No! Because the accepted thing is to use your turn signal, as it's acceptable to do some research on yourself before asking somebody, or try to keep your voice down in shared rooms, or to not tap people on the shoulder when they have indicated deep work (headphones).

I am upset from people who DON't use their blinkers, who tap you on the shoulder while you have headphones, and who discuss Game of Thrones loudly next to you while you are trying to work, and I have every right to be. People like that make their lack or desire of understanding or following etiquette everybody else's problem. And that's not okay!

The etiquette of new workers is to try to follow the onboarding documents, and the guidance from their assigned "buddy", and if something is missing, distill the questions they have and go over them with the "buddy". If that's what OP's post saying, fine. But I got the impression they simply like to ask questions cause it's more convenient for them. Let the company, however, use that as a learning and drag itself kicking and screaming to update their onboarding.

> That's what self-centered people tends to believe.

The people who don't use blinkers ARE the self centered people, making their hurry everybody else's problem. A person who asks questions can be doing so for many reasons: not complete documentation, getting bad understanding of something, wanting to clarify some info or to be in the same page as the team, etc.

But if they do so incessantly, then there is a problem, and the problem shouldn't be simply solved by saying: "Yeah, just ask John, he's always available and ready to help". As senior devs and leads and VPs of Engineerings or CTOs, we should foster a place where most questions can be answered easily in a self service manner, and our meetings have clarity on at least the big picture stuff.

If all that is already there, asking many questions all the time can rightfully be labeled a "disruption". In that situation, the person asking questions always makes their problem (not wanting to do some work themselves) the problem of everyone else, and that's what self centered people do. In much the same manner, people not using blinkers (illegal, by the way) make their refusal to follow rules everybody else's problem.

Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing.

There's a reason that many programmers prefer to work from home. Working in a busy office (and that includes open plan offices with even light chatter) is extremely counter productive.

Surely there must be ways to balance these things?

When you want to ask someone a question it shouldn’t be too hard to infer whether it’s a good time to do that now or you should wait (if it is, well it’s exactly a very hard skill to learn if you put in some effort)