I think the emphasis on requiring everyone to be physically present in a noisy, distraction-oriented open plan office is a direct confirmation that it’s about o

I think the emphasis on requiring everyone to be physically present in a noisy, distraction-oriented open plan office is a direct confirmation that it’s about optics and cosmetics. The decision isn’t driven by what would be productive in terms of work output, nor what would be healthy, nor even what would be cost effective. They are willing to pay premiums in terms of the costs of lost productivity, costs of opulent office features that don’t increase productivity or attract talent, costs of artificially reducing the candidate pool by excluding remote workers from consideration, etc. The only way to see it as a rational choice on the part of management is if they are compensated more for the optics and cosmetic appearance of the company workplace than they are compensated for actual work output. I’d argue this seems at least plausible for a lot of start-ups seeking hype-driven investment. By the formula, it then leads to a cookie cutter pattern of levering up the hyped private valuation followed by a race to an IPO and marketing campaign to distract everyone from loss growth and poor profitability prospects, to use the IPO to essentially externalize the losses that will come from a huge price correction out onto unwitting people who come to own the stock through some unmonitored 401(k) plan manager and onto employees who get trapped by IPO blackout windows preventing them from selling at the early, hyped IPO prices. Spotify fit this pattern very well, and it is shaping up to be Uber’s strategy over the next year too, while possibly even letting privileged insiders participate in a private equity sale to a few hedge funds, to capitalize even sooner on the hyped private valuation prior to the inevitable price correction. Really, it’s not hyperbolic to point out that even early choices to mandate an on-site only policy in a cost-ineffective open plan office are indicators of this optics-first-productivity-second way of thinking.