My current office is the best one I've ever had. It's in my home. I have plenty of space for all of my working computers and screens, and I have ample desk spac

My current office is the best one I've ever had. It's in my home. I have plenty of space for all of my working computers and screens, and I have ample desk space. Everything I need is a few steps away at most. I have windows that look out on the big trees in my yard. My standard poodle commonly sleeps behind me whle I work. I can close the door when I need to focus, or leave it open when I want to hear the goings-on in my house. The second best office I ever had was when I worked for Apple's Newton team at the Bubb Road office in Cupertino. Each person had a proper office with a door that closed and a window to the outside. The offices were arranged around common spaces that we called "living rooms" and populated with couches, coffee tables, whiteboards on wheels, foosball tables and musical instruments. People who needed privacy to focus closed their doors. Those who were open to conversation left their doors open. Those actively seeking interaction sat on the couches or puttered in the small kitchens next to the living rooms. Apple later moved us to a couple of the buildings at the Infinite Loop site when it was new. Those offices were pretty good--private offices with doors that closed and easy access to comfortable common areas--but they weren't as good as the ones at Bubb Road. (To be fair, though, Newton needed more space. There weren't enough of the good ones at Bubb Road for the team as it grew.) Third best was at NeXT, which was about the same quality as Apple's Infinite Loop, or maybe a little better. My office at NeXT was larger than the one at Infinite Loop. I've worked in cube farms, and sitting at a cheap card table, crammed into a room full of other people seated around the same things. I've worked stuffed into a small room with half a dozen other programmers, perching machines on whatever surface we could find. I can work in awkward situations. I'll choose a good office every time, though, over something less good. I'll do more and better work in a comfortable office in which I can close out distractions. Headphones don't work for me, because anything I hear in them is just another distraction. Well, to be fair, I haven't tried something like weather or forest sounds. Those might work. I've worked mainly from my home office for about fifteen years now. I've occasionally agreed to work from someone's idea of what a office should be like, but I'm always looking forward to getting back to my "real" office when I do that, and if you want me to work from somewhere else, there has to be a pretty good reason for it.