There are lots of reasons why offices tend towards bad rather than good. If I sat and thought about it I could probably list a dozen systematic biases towards crappy office spaces. Here are just a few off the top of my head:

- Open-plan offices, hot-desking, and other negative patterns are more cost-effective for a given amount of space.

- Cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all spaces are "easier" to manage from a personnel/HR point of view. Less griping about who gets the "good office," as there is no good office. No need to think about differences between people, we can just treat them as fungible "human resources."

- Similar race to the bottom regarding amenities (coffee, break rooms, etc.). Just look in the other comments of this thread. It's easier to target the least common denominator than provide personalized/individualized benefits in a manner that's fair to everyone.

- Insecure, distrusting managers promote bad office spaces like open plans, hot desking, etc. in order to better micro-manage their teams. Good managers can push back, but in practice the bad managers tend to be the squeaky wheels and get the grease.

I've worked for 10 different companies so far in my career. All but one I would consider a good company. But of those nine "good" companies, I have had one good office space. That's why I've been remote for the last 6 years. For me personally it was either go remote or leave the industry. I'm never making a open-plan or even cube-farm layout my primary working space again.

This isn't restricted to "offices." It's also why it's difficult to live with other people and housemates often end up in conflict. The more people you need to share a space with, the more contention each shared resource gets, and fewer individuals get what they actually want when they want it most of the time. There's tradeoffs to make, of course. We have societies and communities precisely because groups tend to accomplish more than individuals thanks to specialization and division of labor, but there's a reason humans tend to live in roughly family-sized units when given the choice, not open dorms with hundreds of other people.

>> you are incredibly lucky

> Says who?

Says anyone who has spent more than a decade in the workforce.

> There's no more reason for an office space to be bad rather than good. And there's no reason to think that having a good one is based on luck.

By “no reason”, you mean no logical reason. That might be true. Unfortunately a crafted reality controlled by sociopaths isn’t required to be logically consistent at every layer. Hence our current reality, where this is very much a case of luck.

> If office space dynamics and setup are important to you, then put it in your job search mental list and find a job that matches that.

Thanks for the advice. That’s /exactly/ what all the folks working remotely have done. That’s also why we are agitated by shitty management trying to take it away.