On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that.
Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that the number one most important thing that you do at your job is your directly measurable productivity. Not relationship-building, just pure "shut up and let me sit down and get my work done." Personally, I'd prefer it if engineering work didn't go the way of Amazon warehouse workers, because if "productivity" is the sole metric of an employee's performance, just wait until your employer decides to try and optimize it.
Best of luck to the OP at the dice roll that is the next company he works for.