[alex-nt]

This week I went to the office (not Amazon, another company in Europe) for 3 days in a row because we had new-joiners and I wanted to make it easier for them in the beginning. I live near the office, just a 15m walk away, and I would still not like to continue 3D/W. I know, people call it entitlement, but my problem is that the office is a hostile environment. Here is my experience, in an office that was at most 30% capacity, in a 3Y old building:

  - The "kitchen" area is so tiny, if you want water you will queue, there are only 2 places on the whole floor where you can get it and they are tiny rooms where at max 5 ppl could enter, 3 comfortably.

  - Queues at the bathroom, there are 2 stalls, for the whole floor, I couldn't find another one (I really hope there is one more, I just failed to find it, I did ask, nobody knew about another one). This got worse and worse as the week progressed. I've noticed a similar issue at my previous employer (5Y old building, part of why I left, health issues that are greatly improved by the access to a toilet)

  - They implemented some eco-friendly lights, with movement sensors. This sounds great and I am for helping the environment, the problem is that in practice these lights turn on-off every few minutes, during the day, in summer, in a sunlight filled building. My eyes were so tired every EOD.

  - In the same eco-friendly manner they made the AC not run during the night and morning. So, if you respected the work schedule and came to the office in the morning it was hotter than outside. It's summer, we had 30C in the morning, 47C in the afternoon. I needed to wait for 1-2h for the AC to kick in and recover after arriving in the office.

I am conflicted, I did see that the new-joiners liked the in-person meetings and all, and I do get it. It is easier for non-experienced people to talk to new colleagues online if they have some interactions before. But, time after time, as my employers change buildings I see always reductions in common areas/bathrooms/etc. I find it hilarious now that I have to research the building of potential employers and ask them if they plan to move out in the next 1-3Y (more and more jobs no longer offer remote work in my area).

[late2part]

A long long time ago, I initiated a project to move 80% of the SaaS company's workload out of a big cloud provider that is fond of 3 day in office work weeks into privately run data center cages. To be clear, we bought and ran the computers, rented the network and the cages/rooms in the data center buildings/campuses.

One of our grading criteria was how many bathroom stalls and urinals they had in the men's and women's bathrooms.

Some of these places had 200k sqft (20k m^2) and just 1 stall. No bueno!!!

When we were evaluatin the sites/locations (in the early days) we had to queue our 8 folks up for 5-20 min for bathroom breaks before we could go to lunch!

[alex-nt]

A few years back, after I left my old employer I went on the local IT subreddit to find a question from somebody about another company from the same building. First comment was that he should accept the offer if he is open to go to the toilet in the Starbucks/McDonalds across the road. I felt vindicated :))

Every day in that building people would queue before and after lunch at the toilets. We are not speaking about a no-name company, it is one of the biggest financial software vendors in the world. Funnily enough, the old building, where they had fewer people, had x2 toilets. They moved us to a more dense floor with half the toilets.

[housemusicfan]

Your chief complaints (eco friendly everything in new construction, AC restrictions) are likely due to compliance with local laws. I would suggest to choose wisely when electing your political leaders. In fact California has a requirement for half the cubicle outlets in new offices to be on timers that shut off during "non-working" hours.

[Goronmon]

Your chief complaints (eco friendly everything in new construction, AC restrictions) are likely due to compliance with local laws.

More likely that these are cost-cutting measures being labeled as "eco-friendly" to avoid push back.

[alex-nt]

Where I live this was mostly a voluntary thing. I do not have a problem with it happening, I have a problem with the implementation. The lights thing is just nonsensical. Having them completely off during the day would have been better on both counts, but nobody thought about it.

[mrbonner]

Apparently you are not the pro in term of limited restrooms stall. You need to “floor jumping”: the art of using the stair either up or down a few levels until a free one is avail.

[alex-nt]

We did that! Sometimes I would sprint across the stairs 1-2 floors to go to the bathroom. The problem was that just to reach another stall you had to go through x4 security doors that were quite hard to open so it took quite a bit of time. Something that should have taken max 5m now was taking 15m, and my bladder was quite unhappy. Also, due to this, all breaks got elongated, as we were waiting for colleagues before going to lunch (for example) to go to the bathroom, and we were also waiting during meetings for them to arrive from the bathroom.

[oblio]

Then you might have the same problem there so you end up "toilet hunting" (if you're lucky and your company has multiple floors) which is mind bogglingly time inefficient.