Microsoft's CEO is tired of working from home and he's not alone
zdnet.com
zdnet.com
Until this current health crisis forced remote work on a large scale, those of us who thrive in solitude were forced to work harder to do our jobs well despite the extra social demands. Now many of us can breathe and are more productive, more balanced, and happier.
Let the extroverts have smaller offices, and let us introverts work remotely. I can be quite social, I can perform music on stage, and I can genuinely interact with other humans face to face and leave everyone feeling enriched. But after all those things, I'm exhausted and need low stimulus recovery. I may be in the minority, but I believe it is a larger minority than people might expect.
Frankly, I'm tired of hearing one-sided stories of how "everyone wants to come back to work!" No, we do not all want to come back to the office.
In fact, I will going forward only accept remote positions. There will thankfully be more of them as companies are recognizing that remote can work and that reduced office costs are good for the bottom line.
But I also recognize that social interaction is necessary to get work done, and I don’t expect to be truly happy and relaxed at work in the first place. I can’t wait to get back to the office.
I started working remotely a few years ago, and actually started seeking out social activities, something I rarely did when I worked in the office. In normal times, working from home allows you to choose where to spend your "social" energy rather than burning it all on work.
But yes, going forward, I'll be expecting a much more liberal work from home policy from my current and any future employers.
In fact, we should all push for this, for all employees whose jobs can be done remotely - most people on this board can walk and get a better paying job fairly easily, but that's not the case for every job in an organization, and we should support our coworkers who don't have our privileges.
Which articles are those?
I have the impression that every article I have been reading for the past six months was explaining how insanely awesome working from home was supposed to be and how the office was supposedly dead while I find the situation nothing short of hellish.
But there are still articles and essays that pop up lately, generalizing that "most people" or "everyone" wants to get back to the office. Perhaps the desire here is that we recognize the differences in people and try to make some compromises to accommodate an even greater percentage of workers. You can't make everyone happy, but certainly the pre-covid environment favored the office lovers far more than the home-workers.
However, I do appreciate how lucky I am. My entire family are out of the house during my working hours. I have the luxury of a dedicated study in which I can work. I have multiple laptops and screens. I have a good webcam, microphone and speakers. I have an enormous desk for it all to sit on, and probably most importantly a fast and reliable broadband connection. I also have a dog to keep my company.
If working from home meant balancing a laptop on my knees while I sat on the edge of my bed, and tethered through my phone, I doubt I'd find it so pleasurable.
My team loves meetings. Every question asked was an excuse to gather a bunch of people around a desk and talk for almost an hour. Precious hours wasted in useless meetings. The best thing that happened with remote work was that my team realized that a single message or email was more than enough 99% of the time and now we don’t waste so many hours in those useless meetings anymore.
What I don't miss is the company events or meeting random people on the hallway...
My employer keeps throwing out tentative dates for "return to work." There are going to be a lot of unhappy people when we're forced back into our open office environment.
That door used to be the default. As a student working a summer job I had a door.
I'm all for accommodating people who prefer remote work as long as they do good work, but honestly the kind of people who aren't tired of sitting in their homes is not exactly zero but it's very small.
An overwhelming amount of people doesn't just want to go work, but accepts extreme risks to even get out during the pandemic. Stats on depression and so on are through the roof. For virtually everyone, including me personally, this is pure torture.
I imagine if we lived in a house, with a garden, enough bedrooms that my work desk isn't 2m from my bed, it would be a completely different story. If you don't need to go to the office very often then living further out the city would not be that big a deal. In my area a 3br home with a garden is around the same price as a 1br apartment in the city.
I guess I'm also at the other end of the spectrum though. I generally enjoy open plan offices, just sitting down having lunch with folks at work, going for drinks afterwards.
Being holed up at home or stuck with family over long periods of time I always feel like I'm going to turn into Jack Nicholson in the Shining or something
I've hit a few points where I'm completely unable to focus, and last month did about 4 weeks in a row where I put in over 70 hours.
I need some level of interaction, or I just never break out of work mode. And I don't have all the distractions at home I once would have.
It will depend somewhat on what type of work you do, but it can be quite reasonable to have periods of significant creativity and productivity, and then periods of cooling where not much gets done (but perhaps the brain is busy sorting and clearing connections, leading to the next breakthrough and productive phase).
Perhaps at a big company with a long lived product where you're just doing enhancement and maintenance (especially where tasks are doled out in tickets), it could be possible to be "productive" most of the time. But that's hopefully not a scenario most people find themselves in unless they only write software for money and otherwise have no interest.
If your department uses some team chat system, check to see what channels are available. There might be channels for topics of interest to you where you could join and gradually become interactive, thereby making yourself known. This can be especially valuable if you start writing a tech blog or occasionally making some tech demo projects on github - you can share those with your department (perhaps in the guise of requesting feedback), and it will help raise your visibility.
I think that introverts sort of self-select out of management and decision-making roles - in person. This is probably why open-seating decisions come about, which is hell on an introvert.
Maybe with remote work introverts will have a better chance to take on roles for these kinds of things or at least construct a better environment for themselves.
By the way, I read somewhere that like 85% of top athletes are introverts.
Personally, I've found meeting days to be pretty much unbearable for working from home, while I love my maker days from home. Anything that requires collaboration of more than 2 or 3 people just sucks to do over Zoom, IMO, but being able to lock myself in a quiet room and turn off notifications is a godsend for writing code.
In my experience, I've found that this seems to match up with the opinions of the people I know. The people who work in jobs that require a lot of meetings are completely burned out on WFH, while the people I know who are mainly individual contributiors absolutely love it. I'm curious if that is the experience others are having, but personally, it seems to me a good explanation why opinions on WFH seem to be all over the place.
Recently tried pair programming, it was a joke. Or I wish it was, rather a frustrating experience for both parties. Maybe one day virtual reality will take it closer to real experience, but we were far away from that.
I hate my work now more than ever. Meetings certainly don't help. Kind of death by thousand cuts.
One person writes a test, the other implements the test. Commit between non-passing test and passing implementation. Switch places, repeat.
In this way you don't have to rely on controlling the ux of a remote machine and you can just rely on the screen sharing video and voice communication.
It's often impossible to schedule a meeting with 5 people where there is a no-conflict time for anyone.
The person scheduling (ideally) looks at people's calendars, guesses which meetings a person will be able to move (20-person OKR review no, 1-1 with peer yes), and tries to schedule at a time like that.
So yes, anywhere I've worked, blocking your calendar doesn't magically get you out of meetings.
The reward mechanisms of Extrovert brains is tied to social contact. Introverts not so much. Whats required in creating good teams is understanding there is a spectrum and different people need different things to thrive.
I've noticed a marked increase in meeting pre-amble:
- General checkins about how people are doing / holding up (mostly a positive thing)
- Chitchat about the latest thing: new COVID restrictions, or a favorite restaurant closing, or "I finally braved a haircut"
- Fires
- The usual small chitchat about the weather, etc.
I've interpreted this as folks feeling desperate for connection. Connection they'd usually get by being in the office.
When I started typing this comment, I was trying to categorize the type of meeting where I've seen this happen, but it's actually pretty universal, ranging from:
- Daily standups and other standing meetings with immediate team
- Broader planning discussions
- I've even seen this "personal interest" chatter from execs who are usually a bit more private.
At times, it's nice to indulge in this. Over time, it's had a negative impact on productivity. It's hard to know how to react to it - on the one hand, it feels like people are in need, and this is their way of staying sane. On the flip side, there aren't very many hours in a day.
Could be a company culture thing.
But these updates are limited to the weekly all hands meeting. Other meetings just get right into it.
It seems to be a good balance of getting to know your coworkers and not wasting too much time. In the grand scheme of things, it probably takes up less time than all the random water cooler chitchat that takes place in an office.
So much better in fact that I wish I could continue to work from home at least a couple of days a week even after covid is over!
I suspect a part of this is due to the fact that developers/individual contributors are more used to using tools like git, ssh etc. that makes the transition almost seamless; my workflow is completely independent of even my machine, I could pick up any brand new laptop on amazon and I'd be productive within minutes. Maybe less familiarity with the technology stack is a significant source of additional attrition.
This is a terrible way to measure loss of productivity if you weren't doing this before the pandemic. Numerous times I've missed my day's targets because something came up or one of the task was more difficult than I expected is too high to count, remote and in office.
I know I'm being pessimistic, but this sounds like a way to micromanage your employees and build plausible deniability to fire whoever you want whenever you feel like it.
There are so many days where I've uttered the phrase "So this is what I'm doing today" destroying what ever you originally had planned. Whether that's from some emergency/important email, a newly found bug that is critical, or just one of those comment/requests from a senior manager that sounds like it's made on the whim but comes with the un-said "by end of day".
The biggest downsides are a lack of human interaction with my coworkers. I've gotten used to Zoom meetings but they just aren't the same. I also miss the organic hallway conversations. Instead of running into someone while grabbing coffee or water I now have to go out of my way to book time with people. Its totally changed how I interact with people beyond my immediate group.
I suspect I'll WFH for as long as possible while going in a few times a month to socialize.
Same. And for most people, I'm just not gonna book that time. It's time consuming (and sometimes awkward) to have one on one zoom chats with people in a way that a short conversation in the hallways isn't.
I have booked social meetings with other folks at work, and sometimes you have energy for it and sometimes you don't. The fact that the meeting is for a fixed time in your calendar and that you're on camera, makes it feel so formal too.
It might have to do with where I was raised, or maybe I'm just more extroverted than I think, but these days the two things I really miss most are 1) regularly seeing friends who aren't my absolute closest circle and 2) small, casual interactions with total strangers (but that are slightly more than "that'll be $7.62"). The second has recently started to weigh on me more; maybe that's why I write a lot on HN/reddit :D
Exactly. This, for me, is a perfect summary.
I am perfectly fine with working from home but the mental toll of having virtually nowhere to go outside of my four walls is starting to wear on me. It makes me upset and frustrated and I start projecting those emotions onto the actions of others and it becomes a downward cycle.
I'm not particularly social. In fact, I'm almost anti-social (I do not like the interactions like "how are you doing?" in the shops / "hello there!" while walking in a park / "how's your day going?" entering a takeaway place, and I will absolutely never strike up a conversation at the bus stop or on a train), but this is starting to feel suffocating.
Yet I'm still going to avoid unnecessary trips and minimize contact because until we have some effective shots to go around, that's how I avoid the consequences of this stupid virus.
Now, even though I wake up without an alarm, eat clean, and exercise every day my productivity has tanked. There's some deep, human alarm buried somewhere in the reptile part of my brain that is saying 'things are not right...you are not ok...things are not right,' and it's been doing it since March. I can't seem to find a breaker to switch it off.
There's only so many times you can walk around the block.
I definitely consider myself an introvert, but I also realized I would normally do a ton of stuff during the day where I was just generally "around" people - I liked walking around our downtown, or eating out (even if I was alone), or working from a coffee shop in preference to working from home.
I really feel like I'm having a weird feeling of disassociation from the world, and I don't like it.
FYI, just because you've already had it doesn't mean you can't be an asymptomatic carrier. In fact, you're more likely to be one, since you're less likely to have symptoms again.
Also, some people have had it twice.
That statement defies all science and logic. Either I have immunity, which means the virus can’t survive in my body which means I can’t be a carrier OR I don’t have immunity at which point it’s just as likely to get symptoms as it was the first time.
> Also, some people have had it twice.
There is no actual data to suggest that, only a few self reported cases which scientists have said were far from clear. It’s still regarded as very unlikely and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet whilst the rest of such countries are currently in the middle of a steep second spike again.
> and in fact all regions in the world which had a very severe outbreak in March and April haven’t had a second wave at all yet
That's just straight up wrong. Most everywhere is now seeing a second wave, except the USA, because we never ended our first wave.
But if you have data showing that regions with a high level of infection in March don't have a high level now, I'd love to see it.
Here is some data about Spain, showing Madrid with a huge second wave: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/world/europe/spain-...
You should probably investigate Madrid before making such strong statements.
If you very generically categorize introversion/extroversion as (I realize this is an oversimplification and doesn't take all factors into account):
- Interacting with people consumes energy
- Interacting with people is fuel
Missing that interaction as an introvert doesn't seem to make sense at first.
But for myself, I've realized that it's a bit more nuanced than that. It's not so much that all interaction saps energy. Certain types of interaction does.
Put me in a conference room all day with a group of colleagues to plan the next release, and I'll be utterly exhausted by the end.
Put me in a crowded street festival, and I'll feel energized and alive.
Make me talk with people at the crowded street festival, and I'll be exhausted by the end.
All of this to say, not all interactions are created equal, and I think it's fair to say that even introverts like/need to be around people, but the kinds of interactions an introvert is asked to participate in will mean the difference between energy/exhaustion.
If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before. You should be using a variety of communication mechanisms, and figuring out which work for different situations. Managers should not be striving for "more contact", they should be striving for "more trust". You should also be relaxing the formality of calls so they are not exhausting. And your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different, which is why the advice on WFH is so scattered. Individuals need to experiment to find out what works for them.
If you miss the office because your simply miss the people and enjoy the office environment, that is one thing. But if you miss it because you have not yet put in those efforts to make remote work effective for yourself, your team, or your entire organizations... then you have some work to do.
Furthermore when those meetings/calls involve multiple persons it becomes increasingly time consuming and complex to scale efficient interaction. In my experience impossible.
I admit, it took me months to break down exactly which conversations truly need to happen each week, and the smallest groups that still made them effective. But it is quite possible.
As a Product Manager at a larger SaaS Platform company, if I did not carefully say "no" to most invites that come my way, I'd be on calls for 10 hours/day. Even with that, I'm still on more meetings than I should be (currently not sustainable), and I'm actively seeking strategizes to improve this.
> If you are getting exhausted by video calls, something is wrong. You should not be spending all your days on calls, doing even more meetings than before.
Is not congruent with
> your teams should be figuring out their own personal WFH environments - we are all different
There are many reasons to be exhausted by video calls that have nothing to do with something being "wrong".
Some general thoughts on the topic.
1. For some, video interaction is highly personal. You're inviting work into your home, and even with virtual backgrounds and quick access to the mute button, video can be exhausting for these reasons and/or just because it's video. Not everyone has adjusted as well as others to this form of communication.
2. You're describing a desired end state, which is not necessarily the current reality. Small and agile teams/companies may have more success in fundamentally altering their communication structures and habits. Larger (and especially growing) orgs haven't necessarily mastered this. Entire teams who have never worked remotely have been asked to adjust overnight. And even though we've all been in this for awhile now, the organizational change required to truly alter the meaning of a meeting, or perhaps remove the need for that meeting altogether is not something that will be achieved any time soon for some companies.
3. I can fully dedicate myself to making "remote work effective for myself" (and in fact, I have - I've been remote for ~7 years), but making those changes for myself does not automatically translate to changes for the team/org. Anecdotally, pre-COVID, I spent ~6-7 days/month IN the office to handle those things that are better accomplished in person. That's what made it work for me. That's no longer an option, AND everyone who I worked with - folks who were not remote workers - are all going through their own personal transition and set of struggles unique to their home life, personality, prior WFH experience, etc.
I don't disagree with some aspects of your conclusion - but I'd argue that they are unreasonable to achieve without a company-wide commitment to changing how we work, and those changes will not happen quickly for most.
This is why people are clamoring to get back.
Yep, I agree with that 100%. We all got surprised by going remote last spring. And we didn't know how long it would last. But it is time for companies to make that commitment and act on it.
Meetings have become excruciating to me. I'm not alone so it does seem like people are having fewer meetings (positive!) but the idea that we're all going to be remote knowledge workers after this seems to be a fantasy. I think the remote workforce will grow 2-4x, and certain nonessential knowledge work will become remote (and therefore cheaper) but the best and brightest knowledge workers will continue to all congregate in high COL cities for career development and things by and large will not be that different.
These are things that can never be replaced with WFH and shouldn't need to be. It's not a problem right now since we're all WFH as we're in the middle of this pandemic. Once we return to safer times, some of us will really want to stay WFH, but they'll begin to miss out on a lot of these small interactions. People won't realize they missed out, and it'll never be intentional, but it'll happen. At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
I am definitely pro-WFH a couple days a week, like Tue/Thur or Wed/Fri. Make those meeting-less days and I can use those to go into deep focus mode. If the whole company does it then we won't miss out on any in-office banter.
This isn't to say there aren't roles that work well fully remote if the entire team is fully remote too. Keep in mind those are going to be less-creative projects and much more task based, and if that appeals to you, those will always exist. They existed before the pandemic, and what's different now is that these types of teams can now flourish in bigger companies as well.
That's what I miss. It's those conversations in the hallway, or seeing someone in the break room that reminds you about something you meant to ask them about.
It's really hard to replicate that in WFH. I can't want to say "can't be replicated" or "shouldn't need to be". I think they absolutely should be replicated. But I don't know how. Things like slack help, but it's just too disconnected. You can have "fun meetings" (a contradiction in terms!), but those feel like a waste of time. Zoom happy hours exhaust me.
I don't see how that's true. These kinds of chats can easily take place via chat apps, informal real time chats, etc. In fact, I'd argue they're significantly better in those forums. Off the cuff few people have very well thought out ideas. Written conversation tends to yield more well-formed and careful communication. This may reduce the quantity, but likely increases the quality.
> At some point it'll become a forcing function to bring everyone back into the office.
Only at companies where this kind of thing is required for whatever reason (usually companies with old school or technologically impaired brass). If you don't get offered a promotion or get to contribute to a project b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head and could only be shared in person, then I'd argue it's no place I'd want to be. Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
But that defeats the purpose. The whole of the interactions mentioned (at least for me) is that they are spontaneous, informal, unstructured and not tracked.
> b/c you didn't have lunch with your boss to chat about some random idea that flung into your head
Companies are first and foremost collection of people. At some point, building a career means building ties with the rest of the company and there is only so much you can do out of strictly professional interactions. So yes, at some point, not having the ability to have lunch with your boss will hinder your career.
> Certainly others may prefer this type of environment, but I would view this as a company with misplaced priorities and inefficient structures.
Most employees are not robots. It's not only about being efficient. At some point things need to feel a bit human.
The real answer here is there is no universal answer. Your guiding function is not the same as mine as we have different tolerances and wishes for interaction. Yours is not more right nor more creative in every case, just as mine is not more efficient nor more productive in all instances.
You're right companies are collections of people, and there is no singular method to organizing them that makes sense in all cases as personalities are different. Usually though, autonomy is important to satisfaction. Letting your people choose their environment rather than forcing your own personality on them is more likely to help them, and in turn the organization, succeed.
It doesn't mean that online chat is equivalent to in-person informal conversation. They are different mediums and different tools.
No gyms, clubs, bars, libraries, etc., and now I find that whenever I get even short social interactions I'm extremely delighted. I think that these social interactions is one of the main drivers of the desire to work in the office, not productivity or any other metric.
- My home/life balance is shot to shit. I can't just leave work at work anymore. And now I have a toddler and a dozen other distractions as part of my workday.
- Also, I am not reading anything anymore. It turns out my commute was the only time I got any reading done, and that 40 mins of cooldown between work and home was actually important in some way to my personal life.
- Any meeting virtually takes about half-again as long.
- Sure, no one is dropping in to bug you. But we are now missing deadlines like crazy because people will just work on whatever and never bother to check in on each other. It turns out that 16 hours on a project someone could have told you was about to be canned is less productive than 5 minutes of someone dropping in on you and telling you that it's about to be canned.
- Burnout is crazy high because now nobody cares about your life and how you are doing. Some people effectively lost all of their friends overnight.
- The quiet, conscientious people who make up the bread and butter of an organization will never have the assertiveness to be heard in a virtual setting. The only people who are consistently getting things done are the bullies.
- Promotions and advancements will be a shitshow. No one knows what an effective employee looks like right now, even less a manager.
- In the case this does workout then corporate has is considering hiring people from wherever they are cheapest since there are no geographic constraints.
I can't speak to everyone's experience, but as someone who has shifted back and forth in my career between technical and business roles, I can confirm that I was much more productive at home when working on technical problems, and much MUCH less effective when working on business problems.
This is an indication of organizational dysfunction -- beyond WFH.
people who are self-motivated or like to GSD, don't want the distractions that come along with an office or waste their time commuting.
point being is that if you can navigate your clients through the correct questions, cut down on the small talk and have focused, guided meetings, there is no reason to have to meet someone face to face.
having worked from home for the past few years, I’ve grown to love the minimal social interactions of remote work. i get my work done faster, and i’m more excited to see friends because i’m less exhausted. obviously, things are a little different now stuck at home most of the time...
Satya's "when people say you're working from home, it feels sometimes like you're sleeping at work" is about a lack of work/life seperation, not productivity. The office has invaded your home, so it's like you are now sleeping at office.
Other concerns- such as not having downtime between meetings, or a commute to transition between work and home- are real problems. He actually states that the solution is to build time in to your day to regain downtime.
I didn't get the feeling he is down on remote work at all, but pretty balanced. I wish he'd been even more positive about remote work, but I never got the feeling he was negative at all.
First and foremost, Mr Nadella has an office with a door. This is a privilege he and his management staff have denied to quite a few of his employees, even after those employees repeatedly turned in surveys indicating their preference for not-that.
Distractions and being able to get away from the din of the open plan are much easier to do when you are simply not in the din of open plan.
I'm in tech but not a software developer and my team does a lot of different things at the same time, so this probably colors my view. Perhaps software devs are either more outgoing, can manage distractions easier, or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
This is why I've greatly enjoyed working from home. The only distractions I have are on my computer, and thus can be easily managed, or my partner and pet who live with me and neither of them come barging in with an Urgent Question Which Must Be Answered Immediately or carry on long and loud conversations about disparate topics multiple times per day.
Most of the central campus is a large hole in the ground because it is being rebuilt and the buildings constructed there will not have solo or pair offices.
No, I think we've got a larger proportion of introverts in SW development than compared to many other fields.
> can manage distractions easier,
Definitely no. When you're developing code you're essentially loading up that code into your brain. Every interruption causes it to fall out of your head and you need to start that process over. It can take a good half hour or more to get into the programming "zone", so each interruption costs a significant amount of time.
Interruptions are really bad for software development productivity.
> or have some other secret method to flourish in open plan.
Nope. A very good pair of noise cancelling earphones maybe help some, but mostly we just have to put up with it because that's what management decided to do to save a little money without realizing that it's detrimental to productivity.
I am sure there are another dozen in-office perks that CEO has that the average employee does not.
I can poop outdoors on backpacking trips using natural materials to wipe, I can poop in busy airports and I can poop in stinking 100 degree portapotties.
But I have a really hard time pooping in gleaming offices where all my coworkers can see me walking into the bathroom and emerging 10 minutes later. I hate it!
The answer to the latter, if you are not a horrible person, is of course not. You don't really care, it's not your problem, you're not keeping track of it, it's just an event you forget moments later. Probably, then, that's what your coworkers think of you, when you go; so stop caring, because they definitely don't.
(If anyone ever were to metaphorically give me shit for using the bathroom, I'd turn it around on them in a heartbeat, too. It's so easy - just ask, what kind of creep cares about their coworker's bodily functions to this extent? Gross, weird!)
before WFH, I worked at a desk in an open floorplan. for whatever reason, it gives me a constant low level of anxiety to be in an environment where lots of people can see me, especially if I can't easily tell when people are actually looking. so I used to go to the bathroom a bit more often than I really needed, just so I could spend a few minutes in a more private space. I personally don't care, but I certainly do notice which of my coworkers also seem to be frequent users of the bathroom. if I were a pointy-haired boss, that might be one of the data points used to assemble my list of slackers.
In All Quiet on the Western Front, there's a passage about this, where the men discover a tremendous camaraderie about their shared shitting time - since there's no way to have privacy or any nicer facilities than what they can scrape together, it's basically just a purely functional experience. They sit in a field and provide each other dignity, instead of privacy; something we could well learn from.
Interestingly, the Romans also had this - https://www.history.com/.image/t_share/MTcxODU0MDM4OTM2MDY5N... - and it seems they did fine by it. It may be only really in relatively recent Western culture that we added a layer of shame over a natural act, and in turn required immense privacy for it. Wasn't the Tuilieries garden in Paris a place where fancy ladies might pop a squat?
I once worked at a startup with 300 people on a floor with one bathroom with 3 stalls. 90% men. You'd always be waiting, you'd always be voiding yourself next two two other people. Maybe people you'd be going back to sit next to in a few minutes. You begin to know things about people you don't want to know.
I myself of course do prefer the privacy, like most anyone, and further prefer a single occupancy bathroom because the hygiene opportunities are much better when you have direct and private access to a sink. I think the 300 people to 3 stalls situation was probably close to violating some kind of building code and at the very least it's just not a good example of treating your workers as though you value them.
On the far polar opposite, I worked at a startup that had 5 single-occupancy bathrooms for 50 people. Two of them had showers. It was so much nicer in every way.... just that feeling that you were as comfortable at work as you are at home. Not just cattle, but treated with modern dignity; there's a cost to the employer to do this, but it might actually have ROI in the sense that your employees are more comfortable and healthier.
Oddly enough, I think the shift to open offices deserves at least some credit here. I think most office spaces were designed with a median estimate of occupancy in mind. Before open offices, it was a mix of offices and cubicles, with much less density. When I worked in a cube farm, we had 4 stalls and 2 urinals for about 60-70 men on two floors. My most recent office had 2 single occupancy bathrooms for about 40 people. If we count the urinal as 0.5 toilet, we get almost double the per-bathroom density in the open office.
And the other confounding factor is when you combine open offices with cell phones, the bathroom turns into the 'Candy Crush break'. I imagine median occupancy times were lower back in the day, as lugging a newspaper or magazine to the bathroom was a little too obvious.
Here you need at least a stall and an urinal per twenty male occupants and two stalls per twenty female and the entrance can't be directly connected to the working space so you need to have an intermediate space (a corridor or a changing room for example).
I'm not American, friend. Poor conditions exist even in very nice places, simply because people don't get together and do anything about it. After all, who wants to be the Bathroom Advocacy Dude?
Our company considered getting rid of cubicles a few years ago and there was almost an open revolt. People ended up accepting drastically smaller cubicles as a compromise and everyone ended up pretty happy.
I can confirm, having spent time at Microsoft, that Microsoft provides a very proportion of offices to their workers.
Microsoft once ran recruiting ads for programmers advertising that the job came with an office with a door.
It's strange because based on the number of downvotes I tend to get on HN, it would seem that I have a weird worldview.
But when I chat with random people in my network (even casual acquaintances and colleagues), I'm surprised to find that they usually agree with my worldview and sometimes have ideas that are even crazier than my own. Filter bubbles are real.
(1) the loss of fidelity of moving business information. Informal and unscheduled discussions contributed a lot to movement of information within a business, triggered innovation in unexpected places, and losing these conversations had a big impact. In addition I think it's fair to say talking to someone in person is almost always more effective than talking over the internet (body language, no delay, etc etc)
(2) the loss of the the social connection that all humans crave in some amount (even extreme introverts like myself). Scheduled online meetings might be effective for keeping in touch with people you knew before the pandemic, but it's not as effective as office chitchat for building a connection with people you haven't already met. I can't even imagine how lonely it must feel starting a new job when the entirety of your relationships are built over zoom and slack.
I don't know the answer for (1), but (2) is something that I'm confident we could find an answer to in a more remote world. For all of history, humanity has been able to build communities and fulfill the social itch, long before the industrial revolution (i.e. before most workers commuted to a shared workplace), so I'm confident we could do it again if the world continues moving work remote post-pandemic. Actually, I'm hopeful we could do it better than in a commuting world: in a non-commuting world, individuals should be much more invested in their community, their neighborhood and their neighbors, something that from my understanding has been on the decline for the past century or so (coinciding with the rise of the automobile, the rise of the 2 working parent household, and the fall of the multi-generation household).
My employer is also realizing you don't have to rely exclusively on local talent. For practical purposes if you're meeting every week or two then you still have to live in the same region. For example, one of the guys on my team just bought a house that's 2-2.5 hours away from the office. If he has to make that trip once every other week then it's not bad. Given that traffic congestion has dramatically decreased that 2-2.5 hours provides you with considerable range and options with where to live. Yet you still get to interact with your team face-to-face every other week. It's the best of both worlds - I think.
Is this a scenario you guys have been thinking about?
Yes there are certainly some cases where in-person meetings are for more preferential for discussing complicated topics, but i think 90% of it can be done virtually. Also I think there are some (white collar) positions where their job duties rely more heavily on in-person interactions too, and those might be more on the upper-management and executive levels, but those shouldn't dictate every position in the company.
Now I'm back at the office 50% of the time. The company is split in two, and you work in the office one week and from home the next. I feel a lot better, and I have to admit that I can now appreciate the weeks I'm working from home more, since I'm not stuck doing it all the time.
Usual chitchat between coworkers is not what a CxO would complain about.
As they say in the asteroid belt: du walowda pensating fosh, du bera wang showxating efa. (think twice mail once)
fit lik sabaka - a dog's breakfast of a feed, communication made of scattered impressions and desires (pejorative)
fit lik kapawu - a shipshape feed, communication with everything in its place (laudative)
fit lik sabaka - an amazing feed that was the highlight of one's voyage, so good one would even pay for a repeat (an encomium. highly informal, beware of context!)
As an earthling, I tend to put way too many extraneous thoughts in my HN posts, but we're all on a planet under constant gravity, where we can just overlook anything uninteresting. A belter would edit far more, because there excess of any kind risks floating around dangerously when stationkeeping if not fatally during a flip and burn.
There isn't a lot of room to optimize for a WFH world with those kinds of spatial restrictions.
Probably knows no way to evaluate his underlings except based on how busy they look?