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Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupt

Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.

cm2012 5y ago
Same, I do marketing and have been working from home for almost six years. Nothing could make me work in an office again.
User23 5y ago
Open concept offices are awful. As someone who is more vulnerable to interruptions than most, being able to control my work environment is a godsend. Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.
- catsarebetter 5y ago
  Totally agree, used to wear enormous noise cancelling headphones but I would have to pay music to completely block out noise from the office, but then there would be loud music playing in my ears. Real challenge there
  - erik_seaberg 5y ago
    Noise cancelling responds to droning, repetitive sounds, while a big chunk of plastic responds to everything. Not to sound like a shill, but there’s an old headphone model (HD-280 pro) I’ve always sworn by, and I was pleased to see that same model was in Google’s “stuff” catalog for any employee to request. Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable. You can definitely get ones that are about as comfortable as a pair of comfortable over-ear headphones. Ideally, everybody struggling to work in an office would wear big, absurd earmuffs. Maybe if management looked around and saw that 80% of their employees were geared up like they were working on the tarmac of a busy fucking airport just to get some work done, they would rethink the hell of open offices. Nah. They wouldn't.
- techsupporter 5y ago
  > Open concept offices are awful. The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with. I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again. All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home. I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
  - lamontcg 5y ago
    Don't underestimate the utility of being able to just take a goddamn nap when you've had shit sleep the night before rather than powering through the day trying to appear productive when you're a zombie. Most normal people have bad days when they really shouldn't be at work, its so much easier when you just aren't at work and can deal with the problem (take a nap, take a cold shower afterwards, get in a few hours of actual non-zombie productivity and call it a day). Then you're much less stressed the next day. And there's no worry about insomnia-spirals where you get so worried about being tired at work that you can't sleep.
    - jasonkester 5y ago
      One of the big upsides of contracting is the days when I’ll down tools at 10am and declare that “I am not smart enough today to accept money in exchange for programming computers”. I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them. It’s a net win for everybody.
    - JohnBooty 5y ago
      Yeah. God. The ability to take an afternoon nap if you need it... there's no way to even put a monetary value on it. Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.
rektide 5y ago
> rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things. Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback. Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative. I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  I don’t believe I can write useful software while following someone else’s conversation. Certainly my best work has been after everyone else left and I suddenly realize I’m hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable and haven’t really moved for hours.
  - dmoy 5y ago
    > Certainly my best work has been after everyone else left and I suddenly realize I’m hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable and haven’t really moved for hours. Exactly this. The "hmm I should get lunch WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK? CRAP" days are the most productive.
nanomonkey 5y ago
I agree for the most part, except that I once had a software job where I had my own office, and it was the best. I could spend half of the day with the door left open, and fix my coworker's problems, and then spend the rest of the day with my door closed doing deep work. It gave me a great sense of what pain points were effecting others, but also allowed me to shut off the distractions when needed. I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.
sen 5y ago
Yeah I’ve been working from home for near on 12 years. I’d rather take a drastic pay cut and change careers than ever go back. I fully understand why some people like (or even “need”) it, but I absolutely despise it. I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points. I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions. Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”. It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school. Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice. Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.
- dleslie 5y ago
  > Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door. > Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”. That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care. > I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.
teirce 5y ago
> Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home. I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.
- Hamuko 5y ago
  I live alone and I'm still pretty pleased almost two years into not seeing people face-to-face.

cm2012 5y ago

Same, I do marketing and have been working from home for almost six years. Nothing could make me work in an office again.

User23 5y ago

Open concept offices are awful. As someone who is more vulnerable to interruptions than most, being able to control my work environment is a godsend. Everyone is different, but my ideal work environment is library quiet. No music and certainly no overheard conversations or people constantly walking past. I’ve never worked in an office that was willing to provide such an environment, but I have it at home.

catsarebetter 5y ago
Totally agree, used to wear enormous noise cancelling headphones but I would have to pay music to completely block out noise from the office, but then there would be loud music playing in my ears. Real challenge there
- erik_seaberg 5y ago
  Noise cancelling responds to droning, repetitive sounds, while a big chunk of plastic responds to everything. Not to sound like a shill, but there’s an old headphone model (HD-280 pro) I’ve always sworn by, and I was pleased to see that same model was in Google’s “stuff” catalog for any employee to request. Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Another colleague reused his earmuffs and earplugs from the gun range, but I think most of those are pretty uncomfortable. You can definitely get ones that are about as comfortable as a pair of comfortable over-ear headphones. Ideally, everybody struggling to work in an office would wear big, absurd earmuffs. Maybe if management looked around and saw that 80% of their employees were geared up like they were working on the tarmac of a busy fucking airport just to get some work done, they would rethink the hell of open offices. Nah. They wouldn't.
techsupporter 5y ago
> Open concept offices are awful. The only people I've met who seem to like them are people who do sales for a living or the exact kind of coworkers who I would really not like to be in an open office with. I have a really nice office in Seattle. Since I am the second most tenured person on the team, I even have a water view and am right next to the snacks. I haven't seen the inside of this office since May 2020, and probably never will again. All of my colleagues and I have agreed that we don't see the need to go back and our employer is likely going to sell our admin building (we have several other buildings for actual patient services) and distribute some of the money to those of us who worked in that building as a bonus or as an allowance to buy equipment for home. I've visited the open offices at friends who work for Microsoft and Google and they're just awful hives of noise. I would rather have my own door and own bathroom.
- lamontcg 5y ago
  Don't underestimate the utility of being able to just take a goddamn nap when you've had shit sleep the night before rather than powering through the day trying to appear productive when you're a zombie. Most normal people have bad days when they really shouldn't be at work, its so much easier when you just aren't at work and can deal with the problem (take a nap, take a cold shower afterwards, get in a few hours of actual non-zombie productivity and call it a day). Then you're much less stressed the next day. And there's no worry about insomnia-spirals where you get so worried about being tired at work that you can't sleep.
  - jasonkester 5y ago
    One of the big upsides of contracting is the days when I’ll down tools at 10am and declare that “I am not smart enough today to accept money in exchange for programming computers”. I get the occasional day off to go do things that don’t require brain. They only pay for bites of the donut with the jam in them. It’s a net win for everybody.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    Yeah. God. The ability to take an afternoon nap if you need it... there's no way to even put a monetary value on it. Can walk, get some exercise/sunshine, nap, even have a quickie with your partner or look at porn, etc. No matter how awesome one's office is, those things are generally not options.

rektide 5y ago

> rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I think of the benefit of the office being the opportunity for continuous partial attention. It affords the ability to be aware of what's going on about you, to learn & see a lot more. But one has to be attentive-ish, have some receptivity, to benefit from this. I feel like I can work without interruption in an office. But it's a risk or a sacrifice to do so: giving up my option of awareness, giving up the chance to share, the chance to learn or teach, the chance to discuss, to focus on my own things. Rather than argue against open office as a bad construct, my main grievance is that most engagement points are synchronous & exclusive. Those not in the room at the time are not included, in most organization. Most learning, most deciding happens in the moment, in confidence. The open-office works because people are unable to find good forums for important conversations, and so ad-hocracy is an acceptable all-connected fallback. Remote tends to be way more deliberate. Ad-hoc interaction is replaced by smaller networks of who-wants-to-talk-to-who. Most actions are private & hidden. It's even less communicative. I'd far prefer an organization that can find more enduring, participatory, accessible ways of communicating. True for organizations which are remote, and those that are in person.

erik_seaberg 5y ago
I don’t believe I can write useful software while following someone else’s conversation. Certainly my best work has been after everyone else left and I suddenly realize I’m hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable and haven’t really moved for hours.
- dmoy 5y ago
  > Certainly my best work has been after everyone else left and I suddenly realize I’m hungry or thirsty or uncomfortable and haven’t really moved for hours. Exactly this. The "hmm I should get lunch WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S THREE O'CLOCK? CRAP" days are the most productive.

nanomonkey 5y ago

I agree for the most part, except that I once had a software job where I had my own office, and it was the best. I could spend half of the day with the door left open, and fix my coworker's problems, and then spend the rest of the day with my door closed doing deep work. It gave me a great sense of what pain points were effecting others, but also allowed me to shut off the distractions when needed. I absolutely cannot get anything done with open office floor plans. And commuting is life wasted.

sen 5y ago

Yeah I’ve been working from home for near on 12 years. I’d rather take a drastic pay cut and change careers than ever go back. I fully understand why some people like (or even “need”) it, but I absolutely despise it. I get way more work done in a lot less time, save time and stress due to the commute, see my family more, and have significantly better mental health due to all those previous points. I did miss the office a bit earlier in my WFH career when video conferencing wasn’t as common, but these days it’s not an issue at all and you still get face time with your colleagues etc.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions. Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”. It’s not just me: As a remote manger I can almost always tell when summer break starts for everyone’s area because there’s a stepwise decline in productive when people’s kids aren’t in school. Likewise, the office environment makes all the difference. I’ve worked in open-office spaces where everybody respected each other and concentration was the default. I’ve also worked in private-office spaces where I could expect knocks on my door every 15 minutes or less because the culture was so bad that interrupting the engineers was the default practice. Lately, I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. Comes down to culture, but Slack makes it easy for people to quietly interrupt people directly whereas it was much easier to police the interruptions (as a manager) when I could literally see the offenders bothering the engineers.

dleslie 5y ago
> Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. I lived in an 800 square foot home with one bathroom for five of the last six years, with my wife and two children. My desk was beside the front entryway, with no door. > Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”. That's a problem of setting boundaries. It never gets easier, but at least the spouse works and the kids go to school and day care. > I’ve felt that fully remote has been the worst of all worlds. Once Slack becomes the default I’m pinged from every angle all day long. It’s hard to push back against people who want answers now now now and know they can get your attention by typing the right few characters into Slack. More setting of boundaries. Be firm and say no. Better, don't respond outside of your core hours unless you're explicitly on pager duty.

teirce 5y ago

> Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. I wouldn't be surprised if there is a strong correlation between the number of people (partner,family,kids) and how much people enjoy working from home. I live alone in my apartment and going the first year or two of the pandemic seeing people I know once every few weeks drove me mad.

Hamuko 5y ago
I live alone and I'm still pretty pleased almost two years into not seeing people face-to-face.