Silicon Valley defined modern office culture. Now it needs to learn to live without it

Tech companies such as Google and Facebook have long been revered as vanguards for office culture — attracting top talent with free gourmet meals, onsite massages, and even laundry services. Tall Poppy Though many are working from home under lockdown, the prospect of more flexible work policies has Silicon Valley workers wondering what life could look like beyond the Bay Area’s exorbitant home prices, rents and high taxes. Asked when they would prefer to return to the office, “What’s the hurry?” was the response from as many as 76% of employees, said Jonathan Johnson, Overstock’s CEO. “Almost every single one of the conversations I have every day with companies is, ‘We know we don’t need as much office space as we have now, we know that for the next 18 months we’re going to do a lot of telecommuting, and we think it’s going to be permanent,’” said Bryan Murphy, CEO of Breather, a company that rents out workspaces to teams for as little as hours at a time. In recent years, tech headlines have been dominated by increasingly flashy real estate deals: Apple’s new spaceship headquarters in Cupertino, which cost an estimated $5 billion; Google’s $2.4 billion leap into New York’s Chelsea Market; Amazon’s contest to bestow its “HQ2” on the highest metropolitan bidder; a Frank Gehry-designed Facebook campus with 525,000 square feet; the Salesforce Tower hovering over San Francisco.