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I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offic

I think that companies might have more success getting people back to the office if they had not also spent the past decade or two systematically updating offices to be beautiful to look at in CAD renderings but awful to actually occupy and try to work in. This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Open plan offices are a bit of a productivity hit on a good day, but they're extra awful when every day it's a new set of voices to learn to tune out, and another half hour spent packing and unpacking all your shit, adjusting computer monitors to minimize glare from the overhead fluorescent lights, etc. And, if you want to actually take advantage of the co-location, 15-30 minutes spent figuring out where all your collaborators are sitting today, and scrambling for meeting rooms and huddle spaces, which are now in high demand since collaborators can no longer sit together in any sort of stable way and must instead fight for huddle space if they want to do any in-person collaboration. Alternatively you spend the entire day with headphones on (uncomfortable!) because you decide not to do that, and instead spend the whole day on team meetings because it's easier. And even headphones when you're not actively in meetings because everyone around you makes the same decision. A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. That died pretty quickly after return to office happened, because the reality is that we're not returning to anything. Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID in almost every way. And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.

xfz 2y ago
Very well said. Just to add I have problems with my eyesight and the company I work at makes zero effort to accommodate this. It took me a while to be sure as I don't want to exaggerate, but for some tasks I reckon I'm only half as productive in the office. This includes pair programming - share your screen on Zoom and I can use my big monitor and accessibility tools, which gives me half a chance. Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt. This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions. I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise. (* Please forgive the lewd British slang).
dunham 2y ago
I'm curious whether the open plan offices are just to look pretty or if that layout actually works for the people (interior designers) who design them.
_xiaz 2y ago
Noise is a real concern that is largely unaccounted for in those CAD renderings sold to management. I'm sure that office done well can beat out remote jobs, but so many fail short
rqtwteye 2y ago
That’s the thing. If the office was actually a place where people could feel comfortable and collaborate, I would consider going there. But going to an open space noisy office talking on Teams to people all over the world doesn’t make much sense.
- elric 2y ago
  I once had to take a 4 hour trip to France to go on site to debug a customer's problem. As soon as I got there, my contact walked me into a meeting room, and promptly started a Teams meeting with a team in Paris. At no point was I allowed anywhere near their infrastructure: I had to dictate commands to one of the guys in the Teams call, who would then execute them. I'm so glad I no longer have anything to do with those clowns.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago
'And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.' - can I have a Slack status message this long?
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  "Holding Court, Responses Delayed :upside down face emoji:"
phone8675309 2y ago
The company I work for took the pandemic to cancel the vending machines and coffee service that we had. They re-established the coffee service after about a month after their RTO mandate because people were refusing to come in. The vending machines are still gone. If I want to get a snack, I have to end up walking fifteen minutes to a cafeteria in another building, get it, and then walk back. That cafeteria is also the cafeteria that most people eat lunch in, so half of my lunch break is gone just walking there and back. No wonder why nobody wants to come back - I have better snacks, food, and coffee at home and it takes me less than five minutes to grab some.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  We had a coffee machine on our side of the building, now only the machine on the other side is left. To be replaced with two miniscule nespresso machines. I don’t understand why anyone would try to save money on such a critical piece of equipment…
ghaff 2y ago
So much relates to commute. I'd probably meander in for a halfway decent office arrangement if it were less than a 30 minute walk and there were actually people I worked with there. But that hasn't been the case so I don't.
- SebFender 2y ago
  Yes and no. I lived (no joke) 1 minute away from work and if I still had the choice would mostly stay home. For me, an office now is kinda of a bar. I want to go sometimes for a moment and then get back to my place.
- agentultra 2y ago
  Same. I’m glad I work in a fully remote org. We actually have an office. It’s over an hour commute away from me. And I have school-aged children that I have to prepare and drop off in the mornings. None of my co-workers work there. So I basically never go. At my last job I did have an office that was within walking distance. My children were much younger. I had a dedicated desk and office. And I managed to make it in every day. Commutes are a big factor in the decision. For a lot of reasons. Climate, expense, convenience, etc.
- vidarh 2y ago
  I used to work for a company where we were in at least one day a week. In practice that mean arriving around 10.30 and leaving around 4 on wednesday, spending half of the time on meetings or whiteboard sessions, and the rest was pretty socialising for several of us. I didn't mind that - it was 30 minutes on the train and a short walk for me, and it broke up the week. Any more than that, and it'll take significantly more money to get me in.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  traditional urban planning in the USA includes extensive field research that shows .. just what you are saying.. there is a demographic curve about time to commute and who is willing to do it, and how often.. behavior on a large scale across industries, show curves like that
  - 2y ago
jcims 2y ago
I'm full time remote and have been so for years. The two companies I've worked for since 2020 took the downtime to reconfigure most offices to high capacity open office floorplans. The background noise on zoom calls went from manageable before covid to blissfully low and has returned to cacaphonic new heights.
LiquidSky 2y ago
>A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. There's your first mistake. You're right that recent trends have been bad, but offices have always been like this. There's a reason "this meeting could have been an email" has been a cliche for decades now and even before that the office was generally depicted as a place where you either pretend to work or desperately struggle to get work done in the face of endless pointless bullshit.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  as always it varies. First job was very 00's style cubicle arrangement. You may have to move depending on what project/team you were on but you could count on a dedicated desk at any given time. 2nd was a WeWork building. open office room, but the arrangement had plenty of private booths (sharing the floor with like, one other startup) or lounges depending on your needs. then 3 was mid pandemic and the return was a lot more of that "reserve your desk" style. It was a "true hybrid" workplace, though (0-5 days a week in office. Your choice, zero pressure), so it was only during certain big deadlines where it'd cause difficulties.
- rimunroe 2y ago
  > You're right that recent trends have been bad, but offices have always been like this. There's a reason "this meeting could have been an email" has been a cliche for decades now and even before that the office was generally depicted as a place where you either pretend to work or desperately struggle to get work done in the face of endless pointless bullshit. What? My workplace pre-covid assigned us 1-2 person offices and had a handful of dedicated meeting rooms. If someone was having a loud conversation in the hallway you'd either close your door or ask them to move to a meeting room. It was almost as easy to focus there and then as it is in my home office now. The company I'm at now has an open floorplan with no assigned seats. The few employees who are actually in the office are often on calls with people at one of our other locations. There are enough people who do this that there aren't enough meeting rooms for everyone to take a call in private.
BenFranklin100 2y ago
It is incredibly short sighted not to provide a dedicated desk.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I suppose it depends on the utilization. Even before COVID I maybe used my desk once every two weeks or so and eventually just gave it up.
  - BenFranklin100 2y ago
    Sure, if someone doesn’t care or is infrequently there, then don’t bother. If someone is in the office a few days a week, give ‘em a desk.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Hoteling is probably a pain for a regular. Yeah, something like 3 days per week is is probably about the threshold.
- skywhopper 2y ago
  I’ve been amazed that none of the companies who have long-term leases they hate to waste have tried building actual personal offices for their staff in the space. Let the folks who moved further away stay home, but make the actual office experience something better.
- elric 2y ago
  If I don't have a dedicated desk where I can leave stuff, I won't be coming to the office. Simple as that. Wasting time commuting is bad enough, but if I'm not even worth 2 square metres, why would I want to work for those people?
  - Aeolun 2y ago
    Because you are worth $250k per year? I won’t claim it makes any sense.
throwaway387232 2y ago
I clicked in to this topic to make these exact same points, but you did a better job of it than I would have. My employer mandated a minimum number of days in-office per week and then implemented the flex desk system with all of the drawbacks that you outlined. In my company's case it's a little worse: There are, in fact, often no available open desks in my workgroup. Furthermore there's no enforcement or discipline with respect to day-of desk reservations. So this means that about half a dozen employees have permanently camped out at a "flex" desk, essentially claiming them for their own. Everyone I guess "knows" that those aren't real flex desks in practice, or at least nobody wants to stand out as the asshole who kicks Richard off his de-facto personal desk. For the desks that aren't permanently camped nobody bothers to use the online tool to actually reserve them. They just show up at some point during the day, and if there's no jacket on the chair or backpack under the desk or something, they just sit down at it and start using it. If you reserve the desk in the tool before coming into the office often you'll arrive to find someone sitting there who hasn't bothered to use the tool to reserve it. So then you don't have a desk at all and need to camp out in a common area on your laptop, surrounded by 3 or 4 other people blabbing away on Zoom calls. If you confront them to kick them off the desk they'll usually move, but that's a really uncomfortable thing to do and makes you look a little like a bully to everyone around. "Dude, you snooze you lose. Dick got there first. Why don't you just go to the common area where all the other late-coming slackers have to go?" It's a productivity hellscape that I do everything in my power to avoid. I've resorted to dropping by the office a few times a week just to badge in and grab a bite to eat from the microkitchen so that I show up in the query that management runs once a quarter to make sure everyone's badging in often enough. I also make it a point to walk prominently by several other desks and saying "hi" to people to give the illusion that I'm "in the office" on a semi-regular basis. The first time management tries to turn the screws to deal with my behavior I'm triggering my plan to move on to a role in another company that's fully remote.
- fencepost 2y ago
  With no specific location you should be sought at and more butts than desks nobody should expect to be able to find you anyway.
- Justsignedup 2y ago
fencepost 2y ago
This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse If you're required to hot desk you might as well do it someplace more pleasant.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  Few things indicate a company's extreme antipathy towards its workers as much as hot-desking does.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> packing and unpacking all your shit This is often overlooked. Humans are weird about making spaces our "own." The emotional response to a blank desk versus the same desk, in the same place, surrounded by the same people but with some nonsense bauble--or houseplant you're torturing--that makes it your own is massive.
SoftTalker 2y ago
> Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID Yep. Now, on any given day, half the office is at home. So, even if you're there, you probably still need to use Zoom for meetings or collaboration. At that point, why? I don't like Zoom but if I have no choice I might as well be at home and not commuting in to a half-empty office. I still find some value in working at work. I find it easier to focus, I'm not distracted by household tasks and activities. But I could achieve that by just getting out of the house, going to Starbucks, or a co-working space, or the park. I don't need a permanent office to go to.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > I still find some value in working at work. I find it easier to focus I'm jealous! For me, the office is where it's hard to focus. Once or twice a week, I even give up on getting anything done at all during the workday and just warm my seat, making up for the lost time at home that evening.
jayd16 2y ago
> This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Yeah, this is a real noodle scratcher. WTH is the logic here?
Aeolun 2y ago
I kind of like going to the office, but it was pretty depressing to work from a share office for a few days only to realize the work environment there is so much nicer because they actually need to compete on that…
JohnFen 2y ago
Well said. During the span of my career, the office went from being a perfectly fine place to get work done; then degraded to a cube farm environment which was worse, but you you could work around it and get stuff done anyway; then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quit my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but when I worked in the place that adopted an open office layout, I lived a literal 10 minute walk away. Having such a trivial (and pleasant) commute in no way made up for having to work in those conditions.
- danudey 2y ago
  > then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quite my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.
  - atherton33 2y ago
    > Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation. But act fast, the next available slot is in two weeks, assuming an exec doesn't claim the room for that full day that morning.
  - JohnFen 2y ago
    > to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. I wish you the best, but if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity Which history? Rome and Sparta had profligate (for the time) public benefits and didn’t do much worse for the wear.
whyenot 2y ago
One of the very nice things about working in academia is that I now have a private office. It has been a huge productivity and quality of (work)life boost. I don't understand why tech companies continue with open plan offices when they know their workers dislike them and have known this for years (decades?). Having a low stress reverse commute on 280, one of the bay area's most scenic highways, probably also helps.

xfz 2y ago

Very well said. Just to add I have problems with my eyesight and the company I work at makes zero effort to accommodate this. It took me a while to be sure as I don't want to exaggerate, but for some tasks I reckon I'm only half as productive in the office. This includes pair programming - share your screen on Zoom and I can use my big monitor and accessibility tools, which gives me half a chance. Oh, and the chairs make my arse* hurt. This isn't a stupid little startup either, it's a listed and profitable company worth billions. I stay because they know how bad it is so I just go in a few times per month to socialise. (* Please forgive the lewd British slang).

dunham 2y ago

I'm curious whether the open plan offices are just to look pretty or if that layout actually works for the people (interior designers) who design them.

_xiaz 2y ago

Noise is a real concern that is largely unaccounted for in those CAD renderings sold to management. I'm sure that office done well can beat out remote jobs, but so many fail short

rqtwteye 2y ago

That’s the thing. If the office was actually a place where people could feel comfortable and collaborate, I would consider going there. But going to an open space noisy office talking on Teams to people all over the world doesn’t make much sense.

elric 2y ago
I once had to take a 4 hour trip to France to go on site to debug a customer's problem. As soon as I got there, my contact walked me into a meeting room, and promptly started a Teams meeting with a team in Paris. At no point was I allowed anywhere near their infrastructure: I had to dictate commands to one of the guys in the Teams call, who would then execute them. I'm so glad I no longer have anything to do with those clowns.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 2y ago

'And so the mandatory in-office days are, in practice, just the days that fully remote team members need to cut the hybrid members some slack for not being able to get anything done.' - can I have a Slack status message this long?

toomuchtodo 2y ago
"Holding Court, Responses Delayed :upside down face emoji:"

phone8675309 2y ago

The company I work for took the pandemic to cancel the vending machines and coffee service that we had. They re-established the coffee service after about a month after their RTO mandate because people were refusing to come in. The vending machines are still gone. If I want to get a snack, I have to end up walking fifteen minutes to a cafeteria in another building, get it, and then walk back. That cafeteria is also the cafeteria that most people eat lunch in, so half of my lunch break is gone just walking there and back. No wonder why nobody wants to come back - I have better snacks, food, and coffee at home and it takes me less than five minutes to grab some.

Aeolun 2y ago
We had a coffee machine on our side of the building, now only the machine on the other side is left. To be replaced with two miniscule nespresso machines. I don’t understand why anyone would try to save money on such a critical piece of equipment…

ghaff 2y ago

So much relates to commute. I'd probably meander in for a halfway decent office arrangement if it were less than a 30 minute walk and there were actually people I worked with there. But that hasn't been the case so I don't.

SebFender 2y ago
Yes and no. I lived (no joke) 1 minute away from work and if I still had the choice would mostly stay home. For me, an office now is kinda of a bar. I want to go sometimes for a moment and then get back to my place.
agentultra 2y ago
Same. I’m glad I work in a fully remote org. We actually have an office. It’s over an hour commute away from me. And I have school-aged children that I have to prepare and drop off in the mornings. None of my co-workers work there. So I basically never go. At my last job I did have an office that was within walking distance. My children were much younger. I had a dedicated desk and office. And I managed to make it in every day. Commutes are a big factor in the decision. For a lot of reasons. Climate, expense, convenience, etc.
vidarh 2y ago
I used to work for a company where we were in at least one day a week. In practice that mean arriving around 10.30 and leaving around 4 on wednesday, spending half of the time on meetings or whiteboard sessions, and the rest was pretty socialising for several of us. I didn't mind that - it was 30 minutes on the train and a short walk for me, and it broke up the week. Any more than that, and it'll take significantly more money to get me in.
mistrial9 2y ago
traditional urban planning in the USA includes extensive field research that shows .. just what you are saying.. there is a demographic curve about time to commute and who is willing to do it, and how often.. behavior on a large scale across industries, show curves like that
- 2y ago

jcims 2y ago

I'm full time remote and have been so for years. The two companies I've worked for since 2020 took the downtime to reconfigure most offices to high capacity open office floorplans. The background noise on zoom calls went from manageable before covid to blissfully low and has returned to cacaphonic new heights.

LiquidSky 2y ago

>A couple years ago, I was eager for a return to office. There's your first mistake. You're right that recent trends have been bad, but offices have always been like this. There's a reason "this meeting could have been an email" has been a cliche for decades now and even before that the office was generally depicted as a place where you either pretend to work or desperately struggle to get work done in the face of endless pointless bullshit.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
as always it varies. First job was very 00's style cubicle arrangement. You may have to move depending on what project/team you were on but you could count on a dedicated desk at any given time. 2nd was a WeWork building. open office room, but the arrangement had plenty of private booths (sharing the floor with like, one other startup) or lounges depending on your needs. then 3 was mid pandemic and the return was a lot more of that "reserve your desk" style. It was a "true hybrid" workplace, though (0-5 days a week in office. Your choice, zero pressure), so it was only during certain big deadlines where it'd cause difficulties.
rimunroe 2y ago
> You're right that recent trends have been bad, but offices have always been like this. There's a reason "this meeting could have been an email" has been a cliche for decades now and even before that the office was generally depicted as a place where you either pretend to work or desperately struggle to get work done in the face of endless pointless bullshit. What? My workplace pre-covid assigned us 1-2 person offices and had a handful of dedicated meeting rooms. If someone was having a loud conversation in the hallway you'd either close your door or ask them to move to a meeting room. It was almost as easy to focus there and then as it is in my home office now. The company I'm at now has an open floorplan with no assigned seats. The few employees who are actually in the office are often on calls with people at one of our other locations. There are enough people who do this that there aren't enough meeting rooms for everyone to take a call in private.

BenFranklin100 2y ago

It is incredibly short sighted not to provide a dedicated desk.

ghaff 2y ago
I suppose it depends on the utilization. Even before COVID I maybe used my desk once every two weeks or so and eventually just gave it up.
- BenFranklin100 2y ago
  Sure, if someone doesn’t care or is infrequently there, then don’t bother. If someone is in the office a few days a week, give ‘em a desk.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Hoteling is probably a pain for a regular. Yeah, something like 3 days per week is is probably about the threshold.
skywhopper 2y ago
I’ve been amazed that none of the companies who have long-term leases they hate to waste have tried building actual personal offices for their staff in the space. Let the folks who moved further away stay home, but make the actual office experience something better.
elric 2y ago
If I don't have a dedicated desk where I can leave stuff, I won't be coming to the office. Simple as that. Wasting time commuting is bad enough, but if I'm not even worth 2 square metres, why would I want to work for those people?
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Because you are worth $250k per year? I won’t claim it makes any sense.

throwaway387232 2y ago

I clicked in to this topic to make these exact same points, but you did a better job of it than I would have. My employer mandated a minimum number of days in-office per week and then implemented the flex desk system with all of the drawbacks that you outlined. In my company's case it's a little worse: There are, in fact, often no available open desks in my workgroup. Furthermore there's no enforcement or discipline with respect to day-of desk reservations. So this means that about half a dozen employees have permanently camped out at a "flex" desk, essentially claiming them for their own. Everyone I guess "knows" that those aren't real flex desks in practice, or at least nobody wants to stand out as the asshole who kicks Richard off his de-facto personal desk. For the desks that aren't permanently camped nobody bothers to use the online tool to actually reserve them. They just show up at some point during the day, and if there's no jacket on the chair or backpack under the desk or something, they just sit down at it and start using it. If you reserve the desk in the tool before coming into the office often you'll arrive to find someone sitting there who hasn't bothered to use the tool to reserve it. So then you don't have a desk at all and need to camp out in a common area on your laptop, surrounded by 3 or 4 other people blabbing away on Zoom calls. If you confront them to kick them off the desk they'll usually move, but that's a really uncomfortable thing to do and makes you look a little like a bully to everyone around. "Dude, you snooze you lose. Dick got there first. Why don't you just go to the common area where all the other late-coming slackers have to go?" It's a productivity hellscape that I do everything in my power to avoid. I've resorted to dropping by the office a few times a week just to badge in and grab a bite to eat from the microkitchen so that I show up in the query that management runs once a quarter to make sure everyone's badging in often enough. I also make it a point to walk prominently by several other desks and saying "hi" to people to give the illusion that I'm "in the office" on a semi-regular basis. The first time management tries to turn the screws to deal with my behavior I'm triggering my plan to move on to a role in another company that's fully remote.

fencepost 2y ago
With no specific location you should be sought at and more butts than desks nobody should expect to be able to find you anyway.
Justsignedup 2y ago

fencepost 2y ago

This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse If you're required to hot desk you might as well do it someplace more pleasant.

JohnFen 2y ago
Few things indicate a company's extreme antipathy towards its workers as much as hot-desking does.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> packing and unpacking all your shit This is often overlooked. Humans are weird about making spaces our "own." The emotional response to a blank desk versus the same desk, in the same place, surrounded by the same people but with some nonsense bauble--or houseplant you're torturing--that makes it your own is massive.

SoftTalker 2y ago

> Office life post-COVID is an entirely new thing that's worse than what office life was like pre-COVID Yep. Now, on any given day, half the office is at home. So, even if you're there, you probably still need to use Zoom for meetings or collaboration. At that point, why? I don't like Zoom but if I have no choice I might as well be at home and not commuting in to a half-empty office. I still find some value in working at work. I find it easier to focus, I'm not distracted by household tasks and activities. But I could achieve that by just getting out of the house, going to Starbucks, or a co-working space, or the park. I don't need a permanent office to go to.

JohnFen 2y ago
> I still find some value in working at work. I find it easier to focus I'm jealous! For me, the office is where it's hard to focus. Once or twice a week, I even give up on getting anything done at all during the workday and just warm my seat, making up for the lost time at home that evening.

jayd16 2y ago

> This move toward not giving permanent desk assignments to people who are required to be in the office also makes it worse. Yeah, this is a real noodle scratcher. WTH is the logic here?

Aeolun 2y ago

I kind of like going to the office, but it was pretty depressing to work from a share office for a few days only to realize the work environment there is so much nicer because they actually need to compete on that…

JohnFen 2y ago

Well said. During the span of my career, the office went from being a perfectly fine place to get work done; then degraded to a cube farm environment which was worse, but you you could work around it and get stuff done anyway; then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quit my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. Commute is certainly an important aspect, too, but when I worked in the place that adopted an open office layout, I lived a literal 10 minute walk away. Having such a trivial (and pleasant) commute in no way made up for having to work in those conditions.

danudey 2y ago
> then to an open office environment which was hellish enough that it got me to quite my job and vow to never work in such an environment again. We're moving to an open plan office design, to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. Also, please don't talk to people at their desks, it's very distracting. Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation.
- atherton33 2y ago
  > Book a meeting room if you want to have a real conversation. But act fast, the next available slot is in two weeks, assuming an exec doesn't claim the room for that full day that morning.
- JohnFen 2y ago
  > to help people collaborate and interact in new emergent ways and improve productivity. I wish you the best, but if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > if history is any guide then the result will be less collaboration and a decrease in productivity Which history? Rome and Sparta had profligate (for the time) public benefits and didn’t do much worse for the wear.

whyenot 2y ago

One of the very nice things about working in academia is that I now have a private office. It has been a huge productivity and quality of (work)life boost. I don't understand why tech companies continue with open plan offices when they know their workers dislike them and have known this for years (decades?). Having a low stress reverse commute on 280, one of the bay area's most scenic highways, probably also helps.