In your first post above, you claim open office doesn't work for you, since you need confidential meetings and then would need to be away from open plan anyway. This is asinine reasoning, as your phoning and meetings would disrupt everybody around you doing knowledge work. If it's not you, then it's all the other people. With open plan, there's in fact less collaboration, as there's less space. Even pairing makes too much noise. This, while gossiping and all the other distractions are much worse than in an office. So it's a failure on all accounts, which research do confirm.

This second post is a bit unfairly judged. We all know LoC don't matter. In fact, your point of someone doing irrelevant work is spot on. You know what would help? Actual technical leadership, being included, having a say and a tight feedback loop.

That would require actually seeing people, collaboration and building an organization. Exactly the opposite of the past 20 years tear-down of workplace culture.