Dispatches from the Job Market: Open Office, Open Tyranny

Let’s say you do have a job. Congratulations — you’re already beating the odds.

Then your boss shows up in this headline: Microsoft’s AI CEO Wants Employees in the Office Working at Open Desks (Business Insider)

Not only does the CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, require employees to work from the office more than other Microsoft employees, but he also prefers open floor plans, where employees sit at open desks grouped into “neighborhoods” of 20 to 30 people. The arrangement is “much better for collaboration,” in Suleyman’s words. “Everyone can see everyone else who’s in,” he told BI. “It just creates a lot more informal collaboration. It’s so much better.”

Sigh. I don’t mind in-office work. Many jobs benefit from it. But open floor plans? What fresh hell is this? This zombie idea refuses to die, no matter how much data stakes it through the heart.

I’ve worked in an open office. They are: productivity killers, stress amplifiers, collaboration myths, and surveillance-adjacent performance theater. According to Business Insider:

• In some surveys, face-to-face collaboration drops 70 percent after moving to open layouts;
• Another study showed negative mood spikes 25 percent;
• Stress response increases 34 percent;
• Sick days increase 62 percent;
• Neurodivergent and introverted workers suffer disproportionate harm.

Open offices flatten difference. They force everyone into the same overstimulated mold. And they kill the two things modern work depends on: focus and psychological safety.

But in a wounded job market? Employers can say: sit in the fishbowl or leave. And people comply because the alternative is unemployment.

This — not productivity — is the real driver.

A strong labor market improves working conditions. A weak one erodes them. Microsoft’s open-desk fantasy is Exhibit A.

When I was a full-time employee in Corporate Communications at Microsoft in 2011, we had a new, eager-beaver VP come in, determined to shake things up. He had recently toured the Bloomberg newsroom and thought he could re-create that. So, he moved all of us from a building where we had cozy private offices that allowed actual conversations and real collaboration, and moved us to a single big room.

It was a disaster. There was no “newsroom buzz” because it wasn’t a real newsroom. It was home to a bunch of corporate drones. Every conversation could be overheard, so no one talked. Most people wore headphones. The rest went to the coffee shop to work.

The VP behind this? Never to be seen.