That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.

I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team.

When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.

I’m part of the minority of folks who think the value of in office outweighs the cost. Particularly amongst those who aren’t in management.

But only if you are working in close proximity to those working on the same projects and leadership going up at least two levels. (leadership, not management)

Why large companies with globally distributed teams see value in having employees in office sitting side by side in isolation is beyond me.

That you say “two levels” suggests formal hierarchy, which is management.

I mean, not just the people who ensure ICs show up to work and complete their task, but the people who are responsible for determining strategy, vision, and direction.

Because there is bidirectional benefit in those people having casual interactions with ICs. Both as individuals and as a group.

> the value of in office outweighs the cost

For who? Your employer keeps all the value and only employees pay the cost. Why would I want this as an employee?

Bingo if you are in your late 20s or early 30s. But then life and priorities change...

I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course.

And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension...

Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers.

I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.

Volunteer for something your interested in locally on the side. It's the only way I stay sane.