I worked at a company once that conflated mean-spirited policies with "just business". The result was a downfall that was entirely preventable.
Vacation and sick leave were combined ("PTO") which meant that you had to take a vacation day if you got sick. The result of this was that people came into work when ill and everyone was less productive. Very little ever got done in the winter, because it was just one constant office-wide cold. (I had so many colds, that season, that I saw a doctor to find out if something was wrong with my immune system.)
Open-plan offices are another penny-wise, pound-foolish institution. They're not used because they're "collaborative" or "hip" but because they're cheap, and they're cheap because they're shitty. The result, however, is high turnover, increased sick load, distraction and antagonism. There's also an overwhelming amount of evidence that open-plan offices hurt the best employees the most, which means you're losing off the top. That's not where you want to lose.
The killer was when it bought (cough rescued) another company and installed the acquired company's upper management. The new regime's first move was to kill the acquiring company's R&D team-- not because it wasn't doing useful work (it was) but because "their side" (the acquiring company) didn't have an R&D team. So a high-performing R&D team that had already built some powerful stuff (and was 6-9 months away from solving an existential-risk fraud problem) was shut down. Those guys over there have too much freedom! They're in danger of actually saving the company! Shut them down, now!
Of course, the health benefits were shit, which meant that days of work time were lost to haggling with insurance companies and hospitals about bills. Whatever pennies are saved by having a crappy health plan is lost when employees have to haggle on their own behalf to get health care.
Sometimes, cost cutting is the right way to go, but that's rare and usually in a well-understood existential crisis. As in, "this company won't be around in two years unless we're really tight, and here's how we plan to make it up".
I can't respect companies that play against their employees. If you have a crappy health plan, a bad PTO policy, closed allocation, stack ranking, and a bad office space, then you're not playing to win. Instead, you're in the business of competing against your employees, when you should be in the business of excelling at something, and of winning in the market. You only get to pick one, in the long term, in this world.
Unfortunately, for the individual executive, the "be a dick" strategy often works. Most "tech" startups are scams: companies not built to last, but just to be sold to some "greater fool" before it falls to pieces on account of its own sloppy constitution. The individuals who build these crap companies generally get to cash out (or, at least, move on to cushy venture capital jobs) before that happens and, when it does, they can plausibly (if falsely) blame their successors.
Our company uses PTO and open-plan offices, and while they're not ideal solutions, nothing is, and I think they get a bad rap around here.
As for PTO I appreciate my boss's explanation: "I just don't want any sniping over sick days. If you don't feel like you can come in and work, it should cost something. That way nobody will complain when someone calls in sick."
Similarly, I've heard a lot of complaints about open-plan offices, and frankly, I do think they're collaborative. Initially I didn't love the fact that I have to hear everyone's discussions around me, but it's certainly helped problems get solved quicker than they otherwise would. When two devs across the office are discussing a weird bug they're seeing it can have a lot of implications. Maybe you happened to see it two days ago it gives you the opportunity to chime in, or it allows the product manager to say "Guys, that feature isn't super important, if it's really hard we can just cut it", or it allows the QA guy to say "Let me know what area that affects so I can make sure to write some extra test cases". All of those situations seem innocuous when you're all working together, but if you're in separate offices or working remotely people will end up wasting time trying to figure these things out by themselves before reaching out for help.
These aren't ideal solutions, so you just have to be sure to take steps to mitigate the costs. With PTO you have to be generous with the time granted in order to account for the fact that it's employee's vacation + sick days, and with open offices you have to have a space employees can go to get serious work done without distractions. If you DO take those mitigating steps I think they're both good systems.
"As for PTO I appreciate my boss's explanation: "I just don't want any sniping over sick days. If you don't feel like you can come in and work, it should cost something. That way nobody will complain when someone calls in sick."
Time to quit. Your boss thinks your team is full of petty assholes who will complain when somebody takes a few days off for being sick.
It's not too bad if you get a minimum 6 weeks combined PTO. Still you will find people are more likely to come in when sick and drag the rest of the team down with them.
"All of those situations seem innocuous when you're all working together, but if you're in separate offices or working remotely people will end up wasting time trying to figure these things out by themselves before reaching out for help."
Firstly "wasting time trying to figure these things out by themselves" is a key part in overall learning and development. You want engineers to "waste time" like this.
Secondly, having worked in an open plan office for the last 5 years I've found I can help with maybe 2-3% of the conversations people in the office are having. I'm distracted by all of them and it results in chronic low productivity.
"and with open offices you have to have a space employees can go to get serious work done without distractions"
90% of your work should be "serious work". Open office employees are just used to chronic low productivity. When working from home I get 10x the amount of work done that I would at work. Quite honestly I could work at home Monday and then do pretty much no work at all Tuesday-Friday and my output would still be above average for the office.
Vacation and sick leave were combined ("PTO") which meant that you had to take a vacation day if you got sick. The result of this was that people came into work when ill and everyone was less productive. Very little ever got done in the winter, because it was just one constant office-wide cold. (I had so many colds, that season, that I saw a doctor to find out if something was wrong with my immune system.)
Open-plan offices are another penny-wise, pound-foolish institution. They're not used because they're "collaborative" or "hip" but because they're cheap, and they're cheap because they're shitty. The result, however, is high turnover, increased sick load, distraction and antagonism. There's also an overwhelming amount of evidence that open-plan offices hurt the best employees the most, which means you're losing off the top. That's not where you want to lose.
The killer was when it bought (cough rescued) another company and installed the acquired company's upper management. The new regime's first move was to kill the acquiring company's R&D team-- not because it wasn't doing useful work (it was) but because "their side" (the acquiring company) didn't have an R&D team. So a high-performing R&D team that had already built some powerful stuff (and was 6-9 months away from solving an existential-risk fraud problem) was shut down. Those guys over there have too much freedom! They're in danger of actually saving the company! Shut them down, now!
Of course, the health benefits were shit, which meant that days of work time were lost to haggling with insurance companies and hospitals about bills. Whatever pennies are saved by having a crappy health plan is lost when employees have to haggle on their own behalf to get health care.
Sometimes, cost cutting is the right way to go, but that's rare and usually in a well-understood existential crisis. As in, "this company won't be around in two years unless we're really tight, and here's how we plan to make it up".
I can't respect companies that play against their employees. If you have a crappy health plan, a bad PTO policy, closed allocation, stack ranking, and a bad office space, then you're not playing to win. Instead, you're in the business of competing against your employees, when you should be in the business of excelling at something, and of winning in the market. You only get to pick one, in the long term, in this world.
Unfortunately, for the individual executive, the "be a dick" strategy often works. Most "tech" startups are scams: companies not built to last, but just to be sold to some "greater fool" before it falls to pieces on account of its own sloppy constitution. The individuals who build these crap companies generally get to cash out (or, at least, move on to cushy venture capital jobs) before that happens and, when it does, they can plausibly (if falsely) blame their successors.