<i>> “People are coming in to do occasional big meetings, but really the rest of the time, they want a quiet private spot to get on a Zoom call,” said Witting, a partner at the company. “It’s weird.”</i><p>It's not weird. Before we had open concept hellscapes, and the cubicle farm, people had actual offices. Four walls and a door you could close.<p>WSJ seems to have the memory of a goldfish if they can't hark back to a time before offices became a free-for-all for noise pollution.<p>Surprise, surprise, people want a quiet private space to do most of their work, and will gravitate toward those [limited] spaces in a modern office.<p>In my experience, 90% of the modern office was never fun. It was finding a floating desk, putting on noise cancelling headphones, and trying to ignore the constant interruptions to do your work. The only fun part was socialising during lunch/coffee with colleagues, but the rest of the experience was a huge net negative.
I don't think the average office has ever been fun. If the average work someone did was fun then there wouldn't be a strong "slacker" culture. I think a lot of people romanticize "the good old days", like over technology, most things are worse than you remember them being, and you just remember the nicer aspects, unless it was genuinely awful and traumatic.<p>It's like early transistor amplifiers and radios, the first ones were shit. They sounded harsh and thrashy. They got better quickly, but they were expensive to buy and paled in comparison to their valve counterparts for a long while. Even my old man romanticized them until he encountered one in the present day and remembered how bad they really were. I think he just remembered enjoying good songs, thus the quality was secondary to the music itself.
Back in the day I used to have an office- a _room_- where I could get work done in a quiet, focused setting.<p>A pod seems like a huge downgrade.<p>Thankfully, I have a home office now.
<a href="https://archive.is/I0h0k" rel="nofollow">https://archive.is/I0h0k</a><p>imo sounds like WSJ pushing their typical narrative to try and encourage employees back to the office.
At a lot of places teams were built in a way that they are not co-located. We have people in India, Europe, and every US time zone. When CEOs make these pronouncements they just ignore this and then the office is just a different place to take a Teams/Zoom call these days.
Anyone that has had to work in a global corporation and had actually collaborate knows this is always how its been.<p>Even before the pandemic more than half my meetings were on zoom. Now at least I can do it from home.
A lot of it simply comes down to management being butt hurt because they signed up for a 20 year lease on office space in Expensive City.<p>That said, I think more focus should be on making remote nicer and productive as possible rather than fighting it. More actually listening to employees and making it work. Making having get togethers in person every so often.