The open office is a bad idea for a lot of people, but that’s not why it’s cost efficient. It’s cost efficient because it keeps rent, heating/cooling down, lets you have desks for only 60-80% of your workforce and it plays really well with the middle managers handbook of “watching people be busy”. Or in other words it basically checks all the boxes that you care about when you move into the E&Y level of executive power. The entire system is flawed or course. Even the 37-40 hour work week is sort of a left over from when we worked assembly lines. That doesn’t really matter when it’s what gets taught at every management education and is what gets adviced at any management consulting agency, and, because it works. It doesn’t work for every employee (or even manager), but it works for every company.

That’s the “cog in the machine” part of the story, the other side is what you can do as that cog. If you posses a skill set that is in demand, you can actually get away with a lot of things in this world. Why people don’t do this is beyond me, especially for IT staff. Of course it’s not easy to find the remote job you want, but in my anecdotal experience I have met so many people who were so much smarter than me who got much fewer benefits. I’ve even heard people defend their low pay, using their bosses talking points. Like, what?

I’m not an asshole, I’m not hard to work with but I do have ADHD which is crippling for me when it comes to working on things I dislike for long periods. Maybe that’s part of why I’ve always asked to get things my way, but it’s not beyond me how lucky I am to be in a profession where we always have a couple or job openings available.