I think that a lot of this depends on the company or where you work as well. I work in an open plan office ... > By the time people are in their 40s and 50s [

I think that a lot of this depends on the company or where you work as well. I work in an open plan office ... > By the time people are in their 40s and 50s [...] That isn't necessarily true, we've had a couple people we have looked at hiring that were interested in working with us because they were tired of being cooped up in small cubicles. Our execs are all over the age of 50, and part of our programming team is over the age of 40. We all share the same space. > Also, it's not only the noise that makes open-plan offices hell. There are days when the noise in an open-plan office bothers me, but a pair of good headphones helps sort that out ... generally. > It's the social overload of being visible to other people. [...] brain-space to the appearance of productivity, in addition to actual productivity, [...] And this is where I have to disagree with you. This comes down to culture. At my office you can spend the entire day coding and push 800 new lines of code to out git repositories, but at the same time we also all understand that every so often you need to switch off. If you spend an entire day reading Reddit, Hacker News and Wikipedia it may not even be an entire day wasted (especially if stuff on those sites relates to work), but it can help you get out of the singular mindset of work, and have you thinking of other things, and thus help relax. When it is expected that you can't work 8 hours a day on the same programming project that fear of being "caught" not being productive goes away. There is a mutual understanding that doing those things for a week on end isn't right, but at the same time we also understand, the execs understand, our boss's understand that everyone needs some down time.