Yeah, this reinforces another perception I have. Which is that we have lost any concept of opportunity cost. We might save on commercial real estate but what is the cost in productivity, innovation, and ultimately profit?

Those metrics demand a much deeper and proper investigation of data to materialise into a quantifiable way for management, management is pretty blind to anything that isn't easy-to-crunch numbers. Probably due to education in most MBA curricula.

Everyone who has worked in an open plan office knows the pains, the constant interruptions, not only from chatter or shoulder taps but the incessant movement of people around, the alertness of being aware of people behind you, so on and so forth, but those are not easily quantifiable. Much like UX, to build a case for something that empirically most of us know is better takes a lot more effort than some bean counters/MBAs pointing to a number in a spreadsheet.

Those “metrics” require good instincts. The kind that justify the eye-watering compensation packages that upper management demand.

I’m a data engineer but even I think we worship data instead of understanding it as part of a larger decision making process.

Opportunity cost is a concept from microeconomics, a field completely alien to the vast majority of the managerial strata, in my experience; any lingering principles from microecon 101 having been long since replaced by MBA dogma.