Personally, I have gotten a second job in an office for the 'office experience', yet i often do even this work at home, because i work faster there.

I think some "work from home" problems are problems of perception. It's not very well accepted to say that you work from home yet[1], making you feel like the job is somehow inferior. Also, the location of your home matters, if you live in a mixed commercial/residential place, it doesn't feel wrong to be at home and work all morning.

Discipline can be an issue until you establish a work routine. Much like driving to the office primes you to get into work mode, a morning walk to the local bakery can prime you to begin working at home.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IW3lhfVpLL4

I disagree with you, specifically one point.

>The office does offer some perks, but they are not related to work itself, they are all about socializing / banter / feeling of being part of a team.

That "banter" or "socializing" is work related. I've found that working from home (been doing it 2 years now) has one very big disadvantage - unless the whole team is remote.

You will be excluded from meetings, decisions and conversations. You will always have a feeling that you're missing something. You will miss important hallway conversations that can impact the work you do.

Any talk of new clients, potential new business, larger future projects are all communicated to me once they are mostly already hashed out. This keeps me from playing a bigger part in the company and thus the work they throw my way is more on the grunt/boring side.

I love working remotely though and I'm not working in the tiny open office they have. I would be interested in seeing what the dynamic is like with a full remote team.

I think there's a few things you have to realise about working at home: - you get to avoid almost all office politics - you will eventually lose at office politics

Essentially you need to have a manager who will step up and root for you, and you guys need to talk so he/she knows where your head is at

Yup. We are small enough that we all report directly to the CEO. Though anywhere I've worked remotely or not it is always me looking out for me. Never had a manager help with that.

I'm now leading a team which is about 50% remote, with the remaining people working from home a few days a week, and it makes a huge difference. Discussions naturally occur on Slack, often spinning out into a few people jumping into a Hangouts call. For people in the office we've got the meeting room set up for video conferencing which makes it practical to have mixed local/remote meetings without the half hour of trying to get things set up.

Overall I'm a big fan, and hopeful that we can make people working remote even smoother as time goes on.

https://www.ft.com/content/03775904-177c-11de-8c9d-0000779fd...

https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:AUQIVz...

Oh, the bliss.

So the home versus office axis is the wrong one to think about. The deciding factor is how well one can work in which place and that depends on a lot more than home versus office.

There's a reason that coworking or small office spaces are so popular these days: for $500/month in many places, you get your own little office with a door that shuts where you can concentrate on your work, or a quiet cubicle among other people with similar situations. If everyone was able to make working at home work for them, these places would not exist.

I've got a three year old who is used to me working from home and doesn't cause any problems at all.

I also know of far more people who complain of being constantly interrupted by managers and noise in an open plan office. Its not like modern offices are an oasis of calm.

And yes, open offices are horrible this way too. That's why we're having this discussion about people wanting to work from home: for many, it's a lot better than the chaos at the open-plan office at work, even if it isn't ideal. For others, it's at least as bad (kids/wife), so they either deal with the office, or they go to a coffee shop or rent a coworking space or similar.

My daughters love it when I work from home, so they're very supportive of my boundaries.

What's the point of living in an ultra-expensive region if you work from home?

2. silicon valley is a nice place to live in.

I WFH a couple days a week just so I can make up for the lack of productivity from the three days at the office.

I also think that there are different work cultures based on what you have to do. Someone who works in sales may be on the phone quite often. Same for a lot of managers, tech support, people who do demos and presentations.

The problem certainly isn't that they make noise, they need to! And because of the nature of their jobs, they tend to see hallway conversations and joking around to be beneficial, a way that information is shared around the office.

The problem is when they are located with people who are trying to do focused work.

It's frustrating. If my kid is having trouble focusing on his math homework, my first thought is to make sure he is free of distractions and can work in a quiet place. I don't tell him that he should wear headphones and listen to music while he struggles with learning algebra.

At the same time, I don't think that math classrooms or discussion groups need to be quiet places, and I don't understand why some people think this is somehow a counter point to what I described above. Yet within the office context, it often is interpreted that way.

And, broken record that I am, I'll skip back to the same old point: Tech companies have shouted themselves hoarse about the shortage of software developers. Yet they won't provide them with a quiet place to work or allow the working conditions that a majority of programmers say they would like. Why does governmen keep giving these employers a crutch? Sounds to me like a market solution would emerge, if we'd only allow it to.

Maybe we're doing it wrong: maybe we should be forcing kids to try to learn hard subjects in noisy environments full of distractions, and if they can't hack it, they fail. After all, if this is how the workplaces will be for them, so might as well prepare them for it now, right?

Similarly, I really think we need to change the way STEM is taught in colleges. Instead of allowing students to take their exams in quiet classrooms, they need to make they're crammed close together during exams, and that a local fraternity is required to hold a loud party in the room at the same time. All assignments should be done this way too, instead of allowing them to take them at home or in the library. If students can't handle doing hard subjects like differential equations in environments like this, then they're going to fail in the workplaces of the future, so we need to make sure to weed them out early.

I can't understand why thats so hard

Companies don't want to hear it. I've been quite lauded for my work. After which, I communicate what I need: I'm not asking for more money yadayadayada, just a quiet workplace.

At which point, I am reminded, in one way or another, that I am, however tasty, just veal.

P.S. Pick your home carefully. I ended up with a series of extremely noisy neighbors that left me really between a rock and a hard place.

Friends and family simply saying, 'You'll get used to it.' Until they finally really heard for themselves.

Noise has become an omni-present pollution in U.S. society. I suspect its contribution to overall stress is vastly under-estimated and under-appreciated.

I wonder - does anyone actually believe that anymore? I've always found that to be more the rationalization people use since it sounds good. I've generally found the actual reasons to be more of an attempt to remind employees of hierarchy (make sure the individual contributors know their place), control (much easier to monitor people than if there were actual offices) and cost (giving workers a little table space allows you to pack in 2 or 3 times as many).

Where I am, while the workers dislike the open space for obvious reasons, the managers who have actual offices now seem happier, so I guess that is something.

In an open office it is obviously much easier for someone to just lean over or look around their monitor and grab your attention, but having a private office with a door is still prone to someone knocking (or walking in if not closed)

Working from home, people can email, chat, or leave a phone message and in any case when I am focusing none of those will bother me until I make an effort to check for messages. Emergency calls can get through by calling me twice.

The only reason I'd like to be in an office is often my workmates become friends, and I want to "hang out" with my friends

Actually just playing the music loud over speakers works much better. But YMMV depending on your music taste, mine is perceived as too intrusive by most.

Paradoxically, at least in the US, we're seeing a trend towards fewer workplace friendships and greater detachment.[5] I/O (industrial and organizational) psychologists have a lot of interesting interpretations for those trends. Almost across the board, employment is far more transitory today than in past decades, so there's less pressure to invest time in meaningful relationships at work. And we're so connected nowadays that it's easier than ever to preserve relationships in some form (regardless of whether they're preserved, or we just believe they are), so we don't feel the need to generate replacements as much.

Having done a lot of freelance work myself for a couple of years, if I'm being entirely honest with myself, this is one of the disadvantages at times. I enjoy getting to work on different projects, but there's something to be said for getting to focus on something with the same team. Even if open offices and talkative coworkers can get in the way at times :).

0. https://hbr.org/2013/07/we-all-need-friends-at-work

1. http://www.gallup.com/services/178514/state-american-workpla... (behind a form)

2. https://www.fastcompany.com/3051290/why-having-friends-at-wo...

3. https://blog.linkedin.com/2014/07/08/work-bffs

4. http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/newsAndMedia/news/archi...

5. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/opinion/sunday/adam-grant...

Many of us are choosing between working at home and working in a loud and noisy environment. If programmers generally worked in the environment you described, our answers might be very different.

1) revenue 2) results

Those who got distracted by other crap tended not to be as successful by objective metrics. Just my experience though

Most want to build their political cartel, protect it and build it for their own good.

I've even seen bosses who purposefully punish high performers out of fear that they might become a threat to their job.

I am looking at new office space now and I am thinking about setting up glass cubicles and having an office sound system that will pump out white noise.

I am concerned about aesthetics though.

I myself am very easily distracted, and I'm far more productive at home, where I have a private office set to my preferences, including sound (this sounds ridiculous, but my ear cartilage is sensitive, so I can't wear earbuds and over-the-ear headphones are only comfortable for an hour or two), light (most offices I've been in have had times of day when the sun causes painful glare), and lack of people moving around distracting me. And that doesn't even cover whether I have to listen to the conversations of dozens of people around me.

I don't like being loud and distracting to other people, so WHEN I talk to co-workers in the office, it's either in a meeting room, or in clipped, hushed questions. I have one teammate that has a rather booming voice and no apparent concern for who hears him - I just decide not to ask him questions.

Meanwhile, my current office has people in 3 states (2 neighboring time zones), so we have a culture of lots of business being conducted over slack or google hangouts. One of my coworkers and I have conducted a lot of business over slack...while sitting next to each other.

In talking with others, I've discovered that some of us (including me) PREFER to conduct business over written media -it gives us something to consult later, and requires that people learn to not play the pronoun game. Others, perhaps because they either haven't figured out the pronoun game, or they really hate it, prefer face-to-face, which I've always found to have a poor signal-to-noise ratio. (They'd almost certainly disagree - you yourself said that "communication is faster and easier, less prone to misunderstandings, and I believe that's true for you despite each point being invalid in my experience).

Every time I or others complain about open floor plans, someone (and it's usually just one or two) will talk about how nice it is to have face-to-face collaboration...and frankly, I just don't see that happening! In my last office, which was open floor plan but had no culture of resolving things online and our other locations were 12 hours offset, there was definitely more face-to-face collaboration - but we also had a lot more meetings (ugh), and IMNSHO very little got done, so I remain unconvinced that it actually is more efficient, I think it may just be more comfortable.

From all of these anecdotes I have assembled my vision that for some office cultures, meetings are better, and for some people, meetings are better, but theses are hardly absolutes, and my personal bias is that it's a war between comfort level and actual efficiency.

TL;DR: pronouns in a text exchange are easily confusing.

In conversation, most people aren't actually understanding each sentence. Instead, we're mentally and subconsciously keeping a list of terms that we don't understand - usually pronouns - retroactively applying them as more clues come up to what they are. If you watch as an outsider to a short discussion between two people, you can usually see this in action.

In text, with greater pauses between parts of the exchange (email) and/or out-of-sync replies (IRC/Slack/Hipchat/Discord), it becomes easier for a pronoun to remain unclear. Oddly, instead of saying "I don't know what 'it' is in that sentence" (because we're tracking subconsciously) we tend to just consider what they are saying as unclear in general and mentally skip over it.

If you're communicating via text often, it pays to avoid most pronouns and bypass this sort of problem. Consider the first sentence of this post - had I said "my bad for assuming it was commonly known", you PROBABLY would have followed, because you had sent only one sentence. Had you sent three sentences, "it" would be less clear. Had you written at annoying length as I am, the word "it" would have been quite likely to be unclear.

I'm sure you've had the experience where you send something like "Would it be better to do A? Or does it make more sense to do B?" and the person replies "Yes". Similar cause, though no actual pronoun, just an implied one. Take any email thread with management involved (because everyone top posts and doesn't trim) and you can usually find where people are talking past each other or repeating themselves because pronouns/subjects of sentences weren't clear to the other party.

This post to the contrary, I've found that having SHORT posts but being explicit about subjects and direct objects greatly increases comprehension. I also tend to try and lead with what I need the person to do, or end with a single clear question or statement.

Because communicating by text is a skill, not an automatic perfect ability.

"Playing the pronoun game" is the act of concealing sexual orientation in conversation by not using a gender-specific pronoun for a partner or a lover, which would reveal the sexual orientation of the person speaking. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people (LGB) may employ the pronoun game when conversing with people to whom they have not "come out". In a situation in which revealing one's sexual orientation would have adverse consequences (such as the loss of a job), playing the pronoun game is seen to be a necessary act of concealment.

Like many words and phrases, I suspect there are multiple uses (I've found three definitions for "Broken Windows" so far - economics, law enforcement, and coding. While the last two are connected, the first one is not)

Yes. There's a lot of hate for open offices, and I'm among the haters. But someone I have great respect for technically recently asked why, since they loved open office plans and that's what they currently used and it seemed perfect. Who's right? Both.

Also, there's a wide range within any given solution. My current job has an open plan, but my teammates and I moved to the other side of the floor and the difference is like night and day. Everyone around us are heads down techies, and it's more than quiet enough. Before we moved we were near people who spent significant time on phones or in video conferences. And they were event driven, resulting in them having not very busy times where they'd all just sit and chat. So same company, same floor, same job, but a very different experience. Luckily we had the option to choose a location and move ourselves with very little hassle. Not everyone has that option.

Can't you get some full-size headphones which don't even touch your ears? That should eliminate that problem. I don't think it's too unusual to find it uncomfortable to have stuff pressing onto/into your ear cartilage for hours a day.

> I don't think it's too unusual to find it uncomfortable to have stuff pressing onto/into your ear cartilage for hours a day.

The ubiquity of earbuds says otherwise. I'm genuinely jealous of people - they can listen more places, with less inconvenience, and with less expense. Still though, this is my flaw, not theirs.

I never said that everyone was like this, but from what I see, it's usually young people wearing earbuds, and not necessarily for that long either. How many people do you see wearing earbuds for 8 hours straight?

I think if you were to take a poll of the general populace, you'd find that a significant fraction (probably even a majority) would be very unenthusiastic with the idea of wearing earbuds for 8 hours.

I have a recommendation on over-ear headphones. I have these Sennheiser HD598s, and I can wear them for 10 hours straight with no discomfort. Highly recommended: https://www.amazon.com/Sennheiser-HD-598-Over-Ear-Headphones...

That was not my experience at all. When I worked at home, I worked regular hours, and didn't do any non-work stuff during those hours. And after those hours were done, I didn't do any work stuff.

I basically kept to a strict 8:30-5 routine, and never had any issue.