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I've been permanently remote since 2014 (with some regular office visits interspersed at a few employers along the way). My take is that working in an office i

I've been permanently remote since 2014 (with some regular office visits interspersed at a few employers along the way). My take is that working in an office is superior to working at home, so long as employees have short commutes and the office provides an environment which is conducive to productivity (e.g. private offices or well-made full height cubicles). In any other situation than that (e.g. open floor plan being the worst), remote work is massively more productive than time spent in office. It does require a cultural shift in an organization, and I do find that companies that are half-remote/half-onsite or some mixture tend to do significantly worse than companies that go all-in on remote or all-in on staying in the office because the mix always leads to remote folks being left out of important political nuances handled in the hallway and break-rooms. I don't see myself ever working for Amazon for a myriad of reasons (or most of the other FAANG companies for that matter), but I do think this issue is more complex in a large organization than many WFH advocates give it credit for. That said, I never intend to go back to an office other than for occasional visits for the remainder of my life/career.

xwolfi 5y ago
I work on a trading floor in a large investment bank in Hong Kong and I dont get what you dislike abt open floor. It's so nice to just know what's happening around you, have people rushing to you or you rushing to people, being able to yell or be yelled at. Sure there are focus phases I d love to have less distractions in, but tbh sometimes your value lies in quick response to big problems rather than long concentration to solve small ones. I worked in full height cubicles and sometimes you can spend 2 weeks without sharing something with a coworker to a point you end up having spent all you time on a silly assumption you discover made you overengineer something a dude sitting 10 meters away knew you could solve in 5 lines. Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ?
- CoastalCoder 5y ago
  I wonder if your success is some combination of: - Unusually good aptitude for handling context switches. - Unusually good skill at concentrating on your work in noisy / busy environments. - Not much time writing code that's near the limits of your abilities.
- tristor 5y ago
  > Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ? That may be true. My dislike for open floor plan offices is actually less about noise and more about visual distractions. I stare off into the distance when thinking and having visual distractions within my field of view can easily interrupt those thoughts. Thanks to my upbringing, I'm pretty good at tuning noises out and I usually am wearing headphones anyway. But the visual distractions lead me to get off whatever train of thought that I'm on. I don't find cubicles to be significantly less noisy than open floor plans, but they do massively (to completely) eliminate visual distractions. One compromise I had at a previous employer that worked well was to "pod" cubicles, so you had your back to your team but could turn around and talk, but you weren't distracted by other teams during the day having nerf fights or whatever the heck they were doing elsewhere. Also, I do think there's an element of different personalities involved. I think more extroverted people probably enjoy offices and open offices generally, where-as I am introverted and a bit socially anxious, so having privacy and no interruptions for my work is best for my personality.
  - 411111111111111 5y ago
    it might also be a difference in the domain you're working on. finance/banking tends to be a very different kind of programming then most developers are used to, even though the domain expertise is still CRUD at the heart. i've been in that industry as well for 4 yrs now. I can kinda see his point, as its hard to not drift off in any other setting. You usually just get BusinessCases to implement, which are rigidly defined and just need to be implemented. (and tested to a degree some people wouldn't believe on this forum where even TDD is often questioned)
- Taylor_OD 5y ago
  Nothing that I do is urgent enough to warrant a yell across a room.
  - Bishop_ 5y ago
    Yeah, but your boss being able to do it to you makes him feel important and powerful!
- codenesium 5y ago
  This sounds like hell. People rushing around and yelling?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    Yes, that's what trading floors are like.
- dogman144 5y ago
  Trading floor is an entirely different environment from the majority of other open office concepts and related jobs out there. It’s more akin to an SOC or other Ops centers, where the open floor and resulting info flow is crucial to the perma on-call nature of those work patterns.
- _hyn3 5y ago
  > quick response to big problems Most developers (the kind that actually just sits and codes all day long) are not putting out fires all the time. But, many, many ops (operations) people are. This comment makes a lot of sense if you consider that the author might be in ops. As a former devops/infrastructure engineer (i.e., my coding was mostly around lighter projects or automation/scripting), I was in some open environments and sometimes they really were a ton of fun. One day I came in and there were server boxes all over my desk... it was funny. We were constantly pranking each other (nothing permanent or painful, of course!) That camaraderie and closeness produced one of the best work environments of my career and I miss it. However, my job now is serious, head-down coding... I would find that very difficult in the same open office environment, so I think both perspectives can be true depending on the type of job you have.
  - tristor 5y ago
    Somewhat ironically, most of my career has been in Ops myself. I still don't think open floor plan offices are a good thing. While working in Ops I was generally at an organization that was either large enough or geographically dispersed enough that calling me on the phone or messaging me through internal systems would have been faster and more reliable than walking to my desk or yelling, so I still don't really see any plus for open floor plans. Also, I had to stop bringing my vintage IBM keyboards to work when we switched to an open floor plan at my prior office job because /I/ was too noisy for others with my typing.
_joel 5y ago
Agree with you, I have no issues with short commutes. However one place I worked at pre-pandemic had a lot of hot desks but unfortunately not enough to sustain the amount of people who worked there (800 employees only 600 desks). This plus a clear desk policy made the place sterile and I regularly had to find some corner somewhere to try and work, usually on a little chair with no desk. I had a full office and decent chair at home, but despite this, it was always frowned on when someome wfh.
- jefftk 5y ago
  They had 1/3 more employees than desks, but frowned on WFH?
  - _joel 5y ago
    Yep, it was very much an old school company pretending to be agile by saying they were. It came about after a merger of the smaller offices (which had ample parking and seats), so I think the agile may have been code for cost-cutting. We had to battle to get moveable whiteboards.

xwolfi 5y ago

I work on a trading floor in a large investment bank in Hong Kong and I dont get what you dislike abt open floor. It's so nice to just know what's happening around you, have people rushing to you or you rushing to people, being able to yell or be yelled at. Sure there are focus phases I d love to have less distractions in, but tbh sometimes your value lies in quick response to big problems rather than long concentration to solve small ones. I worked in full height cubicles and sometimes you can spend 2 weeks without sharing something with a coworker to a point you end up having spent all you time on a silly assumption you discover made you overengineer something a dude sitting 10 meters away knew you could solve in 5 lines. Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ?

CoastalCoder 5y ago
I wonder if your success is some combination of: - Unusually good aptitude for handling context switches. - Unusually good skill at concentrating on your work in noisy / busy environments. - Not much time writing code that's near the limits of your abilities.
tristor 5y ago
> Maybe we both program different kind of software and maybe need different environments ? That may be true. My dislike for open floor plan offices is actually less about noise and more about visual distractions. I stare off into the distance when thinking and having visual distractions within my field of view can easily interrupt those thoughts. Thanks to my upbringing, I'm pretty good at tuning noises out and I usually am wearing headphones anyway. But the visual distractions lead me to get off whatever train of thought that I'm on. I don't find cubicles to be significantly less noisy than open floor plans, but they do massively (to completely) eliminate visual distractions. One compromise I had at a previous employer that worked well was to "pod" cubicles, so you had your back to your team but could turn around and talk, but you weren't distracted by other teams during the day having nerf fights or whatever the heck they were doing elsewhere. Also, I do think there's an element of different personalities involved. I think more extroverted people probably enjoy offices and open offices generally, where-as I am introverted and a bit socially anxious, so having privacy and no interruptions for my work is best for my personality.
- 411111111111111 5y ago
  it might also be a difference in the domain you're working on. finance/banking tends to be a very different kind of programming then most developers are used to, even though the domain expertise is still CRUD at the heart. i've been in that industry as well for 4 yrs now. I can kinda see his point, as its hard to not drift off in any other setting. You usually just get BusinessCases to implement, which are rigidly defined and just need to be implemented. (and tested to a degree some people wouldn't believe on this forum where even TDD is often questioned)
Taylor_OD 5y ago
Nothing that I do is urgent enough to warrant a yell across a room.
- Bishop_ 5y ago
  Yeah, but your boss being able to do it to you makes him feel important and powerful!
codenesium 5y ago
This sounds like hell. People rushing around and yelling?
- ghaff 5y ago
  Yes, that's what trading floors are like.
dogman144 5y ago
Trading floor is an entirely different environment from the majority of other open office concepts and related jobs out there. It’s more akin to an SOC or other Ops centers, where the open floor and resulting info flow is crucial to the perma on-call nature of those work patterns.
_hyn3 5y ago
> quick response to big problems Most developers (the kind that actually just sits and codes all day long) are not putting out fires all the time. But, many, many ops (operations) people are. This comment makes a lot of sense if you consider that the author might be in ops. As a former devops/infrastructure engineer (i.e., my coding was mostly around lighter projects or automation/scripting), I was in some open environments and sometimes they really were a ton of fun. One day I came in and there were server boxes all over my desk... it was funny. We were constantly pranking each other (nothing permanent or painful, of course!) That camaraderie and closeness produced one of the best work environments of my career and I miss it. However, my job now is serious, head-down coding... I would find that very difficult in the same open office environment, so I think both perspectives can be true depending on the type of job you have.
- tristor 5y ago
  Somewhat ironically, most of my career has been in Ops myself. I still don't think open floor plan offices are a good thing. While working in Ops I was generally at an organization that was either large enough or geographically dispersed enough that calling me on the phone or messaging me through internal systems would have been faster and more reliable than walking to my desk or yelling, so I still don't really see any plus for open floor plans. Also, I had to stop bringing my vintage IBM keyboards to work when we switched to an open floor plan at my prior office job because /I/ was too noisy for others with my typing.

_joel 5y ago

Agree with you, I have no issues with short commutes. However one place I worked at pre-pandemic had a lot of hot desks but unfortunately not enough to sustain the amount of people who worked there (800 employees only 600 desks). This plus a clear desk policy made the place sterile and I regularly had to find some corner somewhere to try and work, usually on a little chair with no desk. I had a full office and decent chair at home, but despite this, it was always frowned on when someome wfh.

jefftk 5y ago
They had 1/3 more employees than desks, but frowned on WFH?
- _joel 5y ago
  Yep, it was very much an old school company pretending to be agile by saying they were. It came about after a merger of the smaller offices (which had ample parking and seats), so I think the agile may have been code for cost-cutting. We had to battle to get moveable whiteboards.