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I have been a C-Level at a (medium sized) company before, I had a go at using an open-plan desk (which I strongly prefer), but it’s not practical. The reason it

I have been a C-Level at a (medium sized) company before, I had a go at using an open-plan desk (which I strongly prefer), but it’s not practical. The reason it can’t really work, is C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information. An open-plan desk is a bit of a waste if you can only spend 1-2 hours a day sitting at it, and you need to spend the rest in a meeting room. I’ve also worked at a company that considered offering private offices to anybody who wanted them, but the numbers on it suck. For our office sites it was going to cost an extra $20-30,000 annually per employee in floor space. Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer. If it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere. Most people wouldn’t choose to take a pay cut of that size in return for a private office. The extra money could come from increased productivity, but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive. In this case most people spent 1 or 2 days a week WFH, so to cover the cost the change would more realistically have to increase productivity by upwards of 50%. I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea.

scottLobster 5y ago
Sounds like that company was considering some luxurious offices. I'd be satisfied with my cubicle walls going to the ceiling and a simple door. The goal is privacy/focus. Hell if I was allowed I would get some plywood and hinges from home depot and install them myself over the weekend.
- mirkules 5y ago
  Unfortunately, you can't just erect 4 walls and a door, and call it a day. The problem you quickly run into are building codes. You need to think about electrical codes, HVAC, accessibility, fire codes (sprinklers, flammability of materials, etc), evacuation planning, etc. In California, there's even a rule that at least half the outlets in an office area must be motion controlled. Not saying I don't agree with you, just more things to consider about the complexity and, ofc, the cost of doing things like that.
zepto 5y ago
> but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive. 15-30% is probably low for quite a few individuals. It could be as much as 2-3x. I have experimented with it and it certainly is for me. The problem is that on average you may be right, since there are also a lot of people who barely benefit from it.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Do you think it’s 2-3x averaged for the entire year? I’m way more effective at writing complex code in an office. I’m not any more effective at random administrative tasks (due to procrastination tendencies, I might even be less effective at them). I’m modestly more effective at reading emails or design docs, but not integer factors more productive. I’m a huge supporter of offices and was extremely salty when we got kicked out of them (for cost reasons). It’s why I love remote working now.
  - cyphertruck 5y ago
    The 2-3X factor includes the lower return from administrative tasks. For code writing it is probably 10X - 15X.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    It's not that people are more productive with private offices, it's that some (many) people are extremely unproductive with open floor plans. So that 2-3x figure is realistic, no matter how you average it.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  The problem with extraordinary claims like this, is that you’re much more likely to be estimating your own productivity incorrectly than you are to be correctly. There’s no doubt that most people would write more LoCs sitting a in quiet room undisturbed, but that’s likely a rather poor measurement of your ability to productively provide value to your employer. I worked with a guy recently who was a notoriously poor communicator. He’d spend 4 days/week WFH, would barely give any updates on what he was doing, and was in general incredibly hard to get a hold of. He did write a lot of code, and most of it was very high quality. But almost none of it was ever used. His excellent code would almost never end up solving the problems we needed it to solve, or provide the functionality we needed it to provide, and nobody ever learned anything from working with him and his very senior-level skill set. In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing. This person was a rather extreme case, but I’ve worked with plenty of people like him.
dudul 5y ago
So you confirm that all these talks about "innovation" and "stimulating collaboration" and all is just BS. It all comes down to cost to cram as many workers as possible in the available space.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Did very many people ever believe it was about those things?
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  They undoubtedly lead to more efficient collaboration, just as they also undoubtedly lead to less efficient focused work. The reason you don’t really get a choice these days in how you want to tune the floor layout is undoubtedly down to economics. Office space costs more than it used to, and as the service sector grows, so does the demand for skilled labor performed in front of a desk (along with demand for places to put those desks).
  - Veen 5y ago
    Is that true post-COVID? There's an awful lot of empty office space now.
    - AmericanChopper 5y ago
      I don’t know about every market, but in the places I’m familiar with, generally yes. Commercial rent didn’t change much at first, now it’s dipped a little bit. If it keeps this downward pace long term, then the economics of office floor space could change significantly. But that’s highly speculative territory.
  - cyphertruck 5y ago
    You undoubtedly have a habit of claiming your uninformed opinion is fact and ignoring decades of research to the contrary. Cutting performance by %70 to save %15 in costs is never going to be economical.
  - 5y ago
hobs 5y ago
30 grand a year for 1 office means you are paying upwards of 10 dollars per square foot of space, your office space is waaay too expensive.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  > your office space is waaay too expensive I think a lot of people who rent office space (especially in expensive cities) would agree with you here.
- dataqat 5y ago
  "Average office rent in San Francisco rested at $87.18 per square foot in 2020." https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/san-francisco/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/sa...
- vel0city 5y ago
  The offices I work out of in a suburb of DFW are >$20/sqft and its not really that fancy of an office building. My wife works commercial property management in the suburbs of DFW, most of the properties she manages have rents >$30/sqft. And real estate is considered cheap in Texas!
  - JohnFen 5y ago
    Where I live and work, the average cost of high-quality office space is around $5/sqft (the average cost overall is $2). And no, I don't live in the boonies. I live in a city with a considerable tech presence.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Even cities like Cincinnati or Huntsville are nearly $20/sqft average for rent, $5/sqft for an office space in a city is seems absurdly cheap in the US. Its extremely outside the norm for most offices in the US. https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/huntsville/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/hu... https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/cincinnati/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/ci...
mandelbrotwurst 5y ago
> Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer. Salary is arguably more important to an employee than the total cost of employing them is to the employer because for the typical employee their salary is close to 100% of their income, while labor expense is less than that for nearly all corporations.
emacsen 5y ago
It's understandable to take this perspective; it's the perspective a CFO might need to take, but it leaves out a bunch of things. At one company I was at we had a lack of computer storage for our developers to work. They were constantly deleting work they'd produced in order to make more room. - I won't say the work product to safe the company some face). The employees begged me (the sys-admin) to buy more storage for them, so I planned out a nice storage array that would handle their needs, be reliable, network available, easy for me to manage, backup, etc. I took it to the CEO and he and the CFO wanted to know how many more work units the developers would produce if we got them this. The CEO went further, saying he didn't care how long it took for developers to develop- they were paid a salary. I was so flabbergasted that they didn't care about productivity or about employee comfort. Back to this conversation... 20-30k is a lot of money certainly, but let's look at the full comparison. I don't know how much you pay your knowledge workers, but let's assume a round number of $100k, so then yes, we need them to be 15-30% more productive. I actually do think you can get them to be at least 20% more productive, and then you have some secondary benefits of employees feeling better, etc. But that's also talking in extremes.. Private offices vs Open-Plan. What about cubicles? Cubicles where you have at least 3 walls are not private offices, but give you more of the benefits of one than open space. You might find that cubicles cost, say 5-7% in lost floorspace, but that's paltry compared to private offices. > if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. Yes, and many companies are moving to remote work for knowledge workers, and many don't have set work hours, for just this reason. Some people are morning people, but others aren't. The modern office is designed around a type of person: A morning person, an extrovert, and someone with no kinds of sensory or attention issues.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  Not having the tools to perform your job is something that very directly effects your productivity though, the case for applying that same rationale to sitting in a floor plan you don’t like is much less convincing. I’m sure it would increase productivity for some people, but I’m also sure it would decrease it for others. People who are widely relied upon by other people would surely show an increase in productivity by some measurements if interrupted less. But people who who widely rely upon others to get their tasks done would surely take a hit. I’m not convinced that the aggregate productivity change would be significant, and I’m quite certain that it wouldn’t be significant enough to justify the costs. The other area we considered it to be beneficial (which I forgot to mention), was that we hypothesised it would decrease turnover (and all the costs associated with that). We never got to measure that, so I can’t tell you how much you might reasonably expect it to change things. But our estimates put the number as being rather trivial overall.
mirkules 5y ago
Open plan offices are unpopular partly because the C-level suite tries to sell the idea that they are somehow superior to offices. Everyone knows it's a way for the company to save money. Being lied to, on top of feeling miserable in an open plan office, is what really gets people's skin boiling. Personally, I worked in a cubicle for most of my career, but when I switched to an office, it took a good year for me to get used to not turning around to look who's behind me when I heard an ambient sound. Not because I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing, but simply because I hate the idea of somebody being behind me (I even sit in restaurants with my back to wall when I can). > I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea. People also hate sitting cramped in an airplane, yet they still fly. But given the choice to drive, they would. Meaning that morale will be low and people will take the first opportunity to find something more comfortable. I understand that it's a balance between cost and morale, but there's a point at which you cannot recover morale by other means. The proliferation of work-from-home policies is the best thing to come out of the pandemic, in workplaces where it is possible. If you took this survey now, and divided it among wfh and wfo employees, I suspect you would find a big discrepancy.
- AmericanChopper 5y ago
  The cost of providing open plan office facilities is already priced in to most office-working people’s salaries, whether they’re aware of it or not. If it turns out that office facilities are cut back over the long term, you would expect that to apply some upwards pressure on wages. WFH is complicated by a number of other factors though, there’s lots of things that will also be providing downwards pressure. Like all of a sudden having to compete on expected compensation with somebody who lives in rural Ohio, or Manila, or any other place with a lower cost of living than the place you currently live. Long term effects are yet to be seen, and anybody who thinks they know what they’ll be is just guessing.
cyphertruck 5y ago
You’re right, you’re not going to be %30 more productive in a private office. You will be %100 more productive. In some cases, %300. That you are willing to sacrifice %70-%80 of an employee’s productivity to save %15 of their salary shows the problem. That you don’t realize it is because “management” is no longer drawn from those that do. Instead “management” has become clueless MBAs who can't do either job.
dragonwriter 5y ago
> The reason it can’t really work, is C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information So do managers down to the first-line, everyone in HR, and in many organizations lots of other people. Most of those people use shared meeting rooms for the purpose.
1123581321 5y ago
The productivity estimate from focus is off, especially for employees who do more than solve immediate, light problems (you were already taken to task for essentially claiming there is no such thing as a highly productive employee.) The additional cost also isn’t typical everywhere. Going by your math, you should be recommending full offices in much of the country. Finally would note you don’t have a monopoly on executive perspective in this thread. It’s to the credit of others that they can understand why they perhaps should eschew a traditional visual indicator of power disparity that would favor them.
wwweston 5y ago
> C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information “Confidential information” is presumably a concern because (a) at a certain point broad enough knowledge you’d rather keep internal leaks outside the organization and (b) some of it is about managing internal tensions and focus, so you keep information quiet that could disrupt the directed focus of employees on their roles and business goals When it comes to (a), it’s easy to see how open office plans can become at least a marginal liability: anything discussed privately in C-levels that has external strategic value is absolutely going to get discussed “on the floor” as execution even appears on the horizon. And if (b) is a concern, why not other impacts on focus and productivity? I’d guess, personally, that office setup costs are highly legible and therefore easy targets for someone looking for a marginal win. Productivity has more inputs and is less legible which makes it easy to imagine the org can make it up elsewhere (or make up stories about how it was made up elsewhere). Assuming orgs value margins of individual productivity in the first place, of course, and it’s not always clear that’s the case.
JohnFen 5y ago
> if it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere. Maybe by using office space somewhere that isn't insanely expensive?
loco5niner 5y ago
Honestly though, I went from loving my company to hating my company when they moved us to the new open office plan. I'll tell you, that has about an 80% efficiency drop. I love my coworkers though, that's why I stayed. And they are revisiting remote work, so I'm hopeful.

scottLobster 5y ago

Sounds like that company was considering some luxurious offices. I'd be satisfied with my cubicle walls going to the ceiling and a simple door. The goal is privacy/focus. Hell if I was allowed I would get some plywood and hinges from home depot and install them myself over the weekend.

mirkules 5y ago
Unfortunately, you can't just erect 4 walls and a door, and call it a day. The problem you quickly run into are building codes. You need to think about electrical codes, HVAC, accessibility, fire codes (sprinklers, flammability of materials, etc), evacuation planning, etc. In California, there's even a rule that at least half the outlets in an office area must be motion controlled. Not saying I don't agree with you, just more things to consider about the complexity and, ofc, the cost of doing things like that.

zepto 5y ago

> but even if you believe you’d be more productive in a private office, you’re not going to be 15-30% more productive. 15-30% is probably low for quite a few individuals. It could be as much as 2-3x. I have experimented with it and it certainly is for me. The problem is that on average you may be right, since there are also a lot of people who barely benefit from it.

sokoloff 5y ago
Do you think it’s 2-3x averaged for the entire year? I’m way more effective at writing complex code in an office. I’m not any more effective at random administrative tasks (due to procrastination tendencies, I might even be less effective at them). I’m modestly more effective at reading emails or design docs, but not integer factors more productive. I’m a huge supporter of offices and was extremely salty when we got kicked out of them (for cost reasons). It’s why I love remote working now.
- cyphertruck 5y ago
  The 2-3X factor includes the lower return from administrative tasks. For code writing it is probably 10X - 15X.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  It's not that people are more productive with private offices, it's that some (many) people are extremely unproductive with open floor plans. So that 2-3x figure is realistic, no matter how you average it.
AmericanChopper 5y ago
The problem with extraordinary claims like this, is that you’re much more likely to be estimating your own productivity incorrectly than you are to be correctly. There’s no doubt that most people would write more LoCs sitting a in quiet room undisturbed, but that’s likely a rather poor measurement of your ability to productively provide value to your employer. I worked with a guy recently who was a notoriously poor communicator. He’d spend 4 days/week WFH, would barely give any updates on what he was doing, and was in general incredibly hard to get a hold of. He did write a lot of code, and most of it was very high quality. But almost none of it was ever used. His excellent code would almost never end up solving the problems we needed it to solve, or provide the functionality we needed it to provide, and nobody ever learned anything from working with him and his very senior-level skill set. In my experience, people who make extraordinary estimates about how much more productive they’d be if left to work on problems alone are much more likely to be similar to that guy rather than the person you’re describing. This person was a rather extreme case, but I’ve worked with plenty of people like him.

dudul 5y ago

So you confirm that all these talks about "innovation" and "stimulating collaboration" and all is just BS. It all comes down to cost to cram as many workers as possible in the available space.

sokoloff 5y ago
Did very many people ever believe it was about those things?
AmericanChopper 5y ago
They undoubtedly lead to more efficient collaboration, just as they also undoubtedly lead to less efficient focused work. The reason you don’t really get a choice these days in how you want to tune the floor layout is undoubtedly down to economics. Office space costs more than it used to, and as the service sector grows, so does the demand for skilled labor performed in front of a desk (along with demand for places to put those desks).
- Veen 5y ago
  Is that true post-COVID? There's an awful lot of empty office space now.
  - AmericanChopper 5y ago
    I don’t know about every market, but in the places I’m familiar with, generally yes. Commercial rent didn’t change much at first, now it’s dipped a little bit. If it keeps this downward pace long term, then the economics of office floor space could change significantly. But that’s highly speculative territory.
- cyphertruck 5y ago
  You undoubtedly have a habit of claiming your uninformed opinion is fact and ignoring decades of research to the contrary. Cutting performance by %70 to save %15 in costs is never going to be economical.
- 5y ago

hobs 5y ago

30 grand a year for 1 office means you are paying upwards of 10 dollars per square foot of space, your office space is waaay too expensive.

AmericanChopper 5y ago
> your office space is waaay too expensive I think a lot of people who rent office space (especially in expensive cities) would agree with you here.
dataqat 5y ago
"Average office rent in San Francisco rested at $87.18 per square foot in 2020." https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/san-francisco/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/ca/sa...
vel0city 5y ago
The offices I work out of in a suburb of DFW are >$20/sqft and its not really that fancy of an office building. My wife works commercial property management in the suburbs of DFW, most of the properties she manages have rents >$30/sqft. And real estate is considered cheap in Texas!
- JohnFen 5y ago
  Where I live and work, the average cost of high-quality office space is around $5/sqft (the average cost overall is $2). And no, I don't live in the boonies. I live in a city with a considerable tech presence.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Even cities like Cincinnati or Huntsville are nearly $20/sqft average for rent, $5/sqft for an office space in a city is seems absurdly cheap in the US. Its extremely outside the norm for most offices in the US. https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/huntsville/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/al/hu... https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/cincinnati/ https://www.commercialcafe.com/office-market-trends/us/oh/ci...

mandelbrotwurst 5y ago

> Salary is very important to employees, but the total cost of employing somebody is more important to an employer. Salary is arguably more important to an employee than the total cost of employing them is to the employer because for the typical employee their salary is close to 100% of their income, while labor expense is less than that for nearly all corporations.

emacsen 5y ago

It's understandable to take this perspective; it's the perspective a CFO might need to take, but it leaves out a bunch of things. At one company I was at we had a lack of computer storage for our developers to work. They were constantly deleting work they'd produced in order to make more room. - I won't say the work product to safe the company some face). The employees begged me (the sys-admin) to buy more storage for them, so I planned out a nice storage array that would handle their needs, be reliable, network available, easy for me to manage, backup, etc. I took it to the CEO and he and the CFO wanted to know how many more work units the developers would produce if we got them this. The CEO went further, saying he didn't care how long it took for developers to develop- they were paid a salary. I was so flabbergasted that they didn't care about productivity or about employee comfort. Back to this conversation... 20-30k is a lot of money certainly, but let's look at the full comparison. I don't know how much you pay your knowledge workers, but let's assume a round number of $100k, so then yes, we need them to be 15-30% more productive. I actually do think you can get them to be at least 20% more productive, and then you have some secondary benefits of employees feeling better, etc. But that's also talking in extremes.. Private offices vs Open-Plan. What about cubicles? Cubicles where you have at least 3 walls are not private offices, but give you more of the benefits of one than open space. You might find that cubicles cost, say 5-7% in lost floorspace, but that's paltry compared to private offices. > if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. Yes, and many companies are moving to remote work for knowledge workers, and many don't have set work hours, for just this reason. Some people are morning people, but others aren't. The modern office is designed around a type of person: A morning person, an extrovert, and someone with no kinds of sensory or attention issues.

AmericanChopper 5y ago
Not having the tools to perform your job is something that very directly effects your productivity though, the case for applying that same rationale to sitting in a floor plan you don’t like is much less convincing. I’m sure it would increase productivity for some people, but I’m also sure it would decrease it for others. People who are widely relied upon by other people would surely show an increase in productivity by some measurements if interrupted less. But people who who widely rely upon others to get their tasks done would surely take a hit. I’m not convinced that the aggregate productivity change would be significant, and I’m quite certain that it wouldn’t be significant enough to justify the costs. The other area we considered it to be beneficial (which I forgot to mention), was that we hypothesised it would decrease turnover (and all the costs associated with that). We never got to measure that, so I can’t tell you how much you might reasonably expect it to change things. But our estimates put the number as being rather trivial overall.

mirkules 5y ago

Open plan offices are unpopular partly because the C-level suite tries to sell the idea that they are somehow superior to offices. Everyone knows it's a way for the company to save money. Being lied to, on top of feeling miserable in an open plan office, is what really gets people's skin boiling. Personally, I worked in a cubicle for most of my career, but when I switched to an office, it took a good year for me to get used to not turning around to look who's behind me when I heard an ambient sound. Not because I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing, but simply because I hate the idea of somebody being behind me (I even sit in restaurants with my back to wall when I can). > I know they’re “notoriously unpopular” but if you did a survey I’m sure you find waking up to go to work in the morning is pretty unpopular too. The alternative is to increase the cost of employing you in a way that doesn’t result in any form of compensation, which if you think it through is likely not a very good idea. People also hate sitting cramped in an airplane, yet they still fly. But given the choice to drive, they would. Meaning that morale will be low and people will take the first opportunity to find something more comfortable. I understand that it's a balance between cost and morale, but there's a point at which you cannot recover morale by other means. The proliferation of work-from-home policies is the best thing to come out of the pandemic, in workplaces where it is possible. If you took this survey now, and divided it among wfh and wfo employees, I suspect you would find a big discrepancy.

AmericanChopper 5y ago
The cost of providing open plan office facilities is already priced in to most office-working people’s salaries, whether they’re aware of it or not. If it turns out that office facilities are cut back over the long term, you would expect that to apply some upwards pressure on wages. WFH is complicated by a number of other factors though, there’s lots of things that will also be providing downwards pressure. Like all of a sudden having to compete on expected compensation with somebody who lives in rural Ohio, or Manila, or any other place with a lower cost of living than the place you currently live. Long term effects are yet to be seen, and anybody who thinks they know what they’ll be is just guessing.

cyphertruck 5y ago

You’re right, you’re not going to be %30 more productive in a private office. You will be %100 more productive. In some cases, %300. That you are willing to sacrifice %70-%80 of an employee’s productivity to save %15 of their salary shows the problem. That you don’t realize it is because “management” is no longer drawn from those that do. Instead “management” has become clueless MBAs who can't do either job.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> The reason it can’t really work, is C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information So do managers down to the first-line, everyone in HR, and in many organizations lots of other people. Most of those people use shared meeting rooms for the purpose.

1123581321 5y ago

The productivity estimate from focus is off, especially for employees who do more than solve immediate, light problems (you were already taken to task for essentially claiming there is no such thing as a highly productive employee.) The additional cost also isn’t typical everywhere. Going by your math, you should be recommending full offices in much of the country. Finally would note you don’t have a monopoly on executive perspective in this thread. It’s to the credit of others that they can understand why they perhaps should eschew a traditional visual indicator of power disparity that would favor them.

wwweston 5y ago

> C-Levels spend a lot of their time in meetings discussing confidential information “Confidential information” is presumably a concern because (a) at a certain point broad enough knowledge you’d rather keep internal leaks outside the organization and (b) some of it is about managing internal tensions and focus, so you keep information quiet that could disrupt the directed focus of employees on their roles and business goals When it comes to (a), it’s easy to see how open office plans can become at least a marginal liability: anything discussed privately in C-levels that has external strategic value is absolutely going to get discussed “on the floor” as execution even appears on the horizon. And if (b) is a concern, why not other impacts on focus and productivity? I’d guess, personally, that office setup costs are highly legible and therefore easy targets for someone looking for a marginal win. Productivity has more inputs and is less legible which makes it easy to imagine the org can make it up elsewhere (or make up stories about how it was made up elsewhere). Assuming orgs value margins of individual productivity in the first place, of course, and it’s not always clear that’s the case.

JohnFen 5y ago

> if it costs an extra $20-30,000 to employ somebody, that money has to come from somewhere. Maybe by using office space somewhere that isn't insanely expensive?

loco5niner 5y ago

Honestly though, I went from loving my company to hating my company when they moved us to the new open office plan. I'll tell you, that has about an 80% efficiency drop. I love my coworkers though, that's why I stayed. And they are revisiting remote work, so I'm hopeful.