Yeah, this is beyond me as well. Back around the turn of the century, when I was a junior developer, I was making peanuts for salary but I had my own office an

Yeah, this is beyond me as well. Back around the turn of the century, when I was a junior developer, I was making peanuts for salary but I had my own office and was super productive. I discussed things with my coworkers when necessary but I altavistaed[1] trivial questions instead of blurting them straight out, the way everyone does where I work now. Despite the lousy salary, I loved it because I was able to spend hours in flow each day. OTOH where I work now, when I cost my company a lot more, they put me in a huge open office where I'm effectively prevented from being productive in any way. Sure I could use my NC headphones but then I would miss out on a lot of impromptu discussions/decisions and besides whenever I put them on someone starts waving in my direction... :( I think I've spent less time in flow in total (during 1½ yrs) at my current employer than I spent in a day back when I had my own office. Needless to say, I'm in the process of switching jobs.. [1] For those to young to remember, altavistaing was much harder than googling because it required some heuristics on your own part to find what you wanted: "Hmm, for this search term, do I expect the number of garbage pages to be 10, 15 or 20?" The golden nuggets were often hidden in between.