Makes sense. Some thoughts: * Agreed that (too many) discussions unrelated to work can be frustrating. My experience is that the vast majority of conversations

Makes sense. Some thoughts: * Agreed that (too many) discussions unrelated to work can be frustrating. My experience is that the vast majority of conversations I overhear are work-related and at least a bit relevant to me, but I imagine different office cultures are different, and it also probably depends significantly on how you arrange seating. * The tradeoff between asking questions and figuring things out by yourself is an interesting one, and I think people start their careers in different places. My personality is more on the shy side, and for a long time I was worried about wasting people's time, so I would spend a very long time on any given problem before asking for help, which hurt my overall productivity. Having an office environment where it feels normal and welcome to ask questions would help people like me quite a bit. But I understand that some people are on the other end of the spectrum and give up too soon and end up asking more questions than they should. * Another thing that I think differs from person to person and from office to office is how much you expect work to be a source of social connections. At one point I moved from a "social" office to one where people quietly focused on individual work all day (and where it felt very difficult to start a conversation, even a work-related one), and it was much more lonely than I would have liked.