In my office, I have a lot of hardware. With my door shut, it gets to be an oven even with air conditioning, with the door open it’s still hot, even though the

In my office, I have a lot of hardware. With my door shut, it gets to be an oven even with air conditioning, with the door open it’s still hot, even though the hallway temp is 68. I actually like it cold inside. You can always wear more clothes, but there is a limit to how much you can take off. It’s pretty unfair to impose hot temperatures on people since there isn’t much that can be done after you’ve stripped down to the bare essentials of clothing. But colder temperatures — it’s easy to wear a light sweater. 78 in the building along with hot computers means you are quickly going to have a rather uncomfortable situation. The fact this company has to adjust work hours to accommodate their “progressiveness” means they actually haven’t solved anything. It’s just virtue signaling. They could just as easily have their team work nights to get the same effect — but then they wouldn’t get media attention for just how innovative they are. Windows open in California means you also subject yourself to wildfire particulates, smog and other pollutants that HVAC systems mitigate. “Fresh air” is nice — when it’s actually fresh, and in most cities, it isn’t. Even Paris has had serious air quality situations. City air just isn’t all that clean. In Beijing, “fresh air” is downright toxic. I am not sure how eliminating air conditioning is considered an innovation. Air conditioning was one of the most important inventions, anyone that says otherwise never spent any time in an un-air-conditioned New Orleans house with box fans creating a cross breeze of 100% humidity. The nostalgia for the good old days is felt by those that never had to live through those days. This story reads to me like nonsense. Seattle, while it can get “hot” is positively frigid when compared to much of the rest of the country. Try that in Atlanta, Houston or Arizona. This story is the equivalent of a Miami building being built without heating — it isn’t any kind of groundbreaking innovation. When a building in Minnesota is built without heat, then I might be interested. What’s really innovative is how Apple Park handles fresh air and HVAC. Apple Park isn’t 78 degrees inside — it’s much cooler; they went far beyond the “innovation” in this Seattle building. This sort of innovation can be done, but being proud of a 78 degree internal temperature is like being proud when someone’s kid stops wetting the bed at age 12. It’s only a big deal to those who are experiencing it, but to the rest of us, it’s just self-congratulatory bullshit of the most mundane sort: big deal, you designed a building that isn’t quite at hot as the outdoors using groundbreaking technology that is equivalent to an open window.