I've mostly worked in offices. Most of them involved unreasonable time pressure-- someone will be mad if you're even 2 minutes 'late', and your time spent avai

I've mostly worked in offices. Most of them involved unreasonable time pressure-- someone will be mad if you're even 2 minutes 'late', and your time spent available for incoming work can be tracked to the second (and commented on in employee reviews). Involved managers who build healthy teams are too often punished rather than rewarded for it. You are also surrounded by people who, despite these conditions, apparently have sufficient free time to try to pull you into whatever local politics, gossip or sidechannel recruiting they feel like. Between all that garbage and a commute which was a little too long & dangerous for my mental health, I quit. To make ends meet, I ended up cleaning offices much like the ones I previously worked in. No one cares if I'm a few minutes late, as long as the work gets done. My goals are literally visible and easily measurable. When I'm done, I'm done, and as you say, I don't take my work home. People universally appreciate what I'm doing and tend to smile at me. I can confirm I have spare brain cycles for new ideas, as well. I definitely think people benefit from having some kind of tangible, repetitive work like this in their lives. Yeah, the pay sucks, and I'm still trying to find that holy grail of a 'good developer job', but I am doing it on my terms now. In the mean time, my day to day life is significantly happier and more manageable. Sometimes, if the office is empty, I even sing.