In a way, but not the way that counts. If you spend all day helping people with their work will you be lauded when you make 0 progress on yours?

You certainly should because you're building the company that way.

Company which those juniors will switch to as soon as possible.

If your superiors don't consider you training people part of your job then you should either get them (ahead of time) to agree it's part of your job or you should stop doing it.

The thing is it's not always obvious. You don't always spell out how many hours each day you spend training others and so management just thinks you're doing nothing.

Is there a company that will push your deadlines back because you're training people?

And then seniors have to pull overtimes just because they need to semi-constantly babysit juniors, or clueless managers of other teams or projects who only know how to escalate and chase etc.

I get it, if you are junior, there are benefits. If you are senior (and not ie team lead and control freak at the same time), you lose. Hell you lose a LOT, can confirm. Offices are way more stressful, so this is clear downgrade for senior people. Constant noise and interruptions way overweight the benefits.

Guess who brings more added value to companies, juniors or seniors? (not talking about long term perspective, most companies are led by people who focus on next bonus only, and who they manage is steered that way too).

A former boss called me the most distractable person he had ever met. I've worked in open plan offices since 1997.

But apparently I have superhuman abilities to concentrate, because honestly I've never found it difficult to ignore people around me to focus and get work done. And yet I don't feel special, most people I've worked with seem to able to do it.

I understand many people don't prefer it, and they should very much choose jobs accordingly. But I guess I'll stop pretending my preferences are based on objective criteria when everyone else does too.

> Offices are way more stressful

For me, this is the bottom line. Working in an office -- even the best offices I've ever seen -- is a pretty terrible experience in a ton of ways.

In my younger years, I kinda gave up on actually getting anything done in the office. It's just too difficult. So I'd take my work home and make up for the time wasted in the office by doing my work in the evenings.

Eventually I wised up and stopped doing that, but that didn't make working in the office any more productive.

I think it's generally better to take the short-term productivity hit to train the new hire than it is to leave them to the wolves for your own work. Two heads are better than one and all that

When it is -scheduled-. When they just walk over to your desk and grab you -- it completely torpedoes productivity.

How are you measuring productivity?

By the only metric that matters -- collective output.

Combined with the negative metric of employee burnout, which inevitably follows from years of exposure to open plan offices, constant interruptions ... and the toxic positivity of company owners pretending how wonderful these things are for everyone.