If they have value to the company then how about sharing the costs of commuting? A 50-50 split seems reasonable to me. The company gets the value of those conversations, and the plebs get some help with all that fuel they now have to buy, at ridiculous prices due to high oil prices.
Lower performance though. At each iteration through the string you need to compare the length with a counter, which if you want strings longer than 255 characters will have to be multibyte. With NTS you don’t need the counter or the multibyte comparison, strings can be indefinitely long, and you only need to check if the byte you just looked at is zero, which most CPUs do for free so you just use a branch-if-[not-]zero instruction.
The terminating null also gives you a fairly obvious visual clue where the end of the string is when you’re debugging with a memory dump. Can you tell where the end of this string is: “ABCDEFGH”? What about now: “ABCD\0EFGH”?