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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Oh yes please. I work as a games programmer at a massive studio and it looks like 90% of people here prefer complete darkness during the day, to the point where they have these umbrella-like covers above their desks to cover any light from the lamps that somehow miraculously are still on. Me and few other people occupy a little corner next to a window that we stubbornly refuse to close the blinds on, despite bi-weekly requests to do so from our artists. If I had to work in the darkness I'd genuinely consider leaving - it gives me a headache.

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I think it's interesting that the comments here seem almost universally in favour of bright natural lighting, when clearly there are plenty of people (at least in gamedev) who feel otherwise. I tend to prefer a dimly lit room and am perfectly happy with the only light being from my monitors. Then again as an ex-gamedev troglodyte I'm also happiest working from 3pm-1am...

One fairly universal current I've observed though is a dislike for strong artificial lighting, particularly overhead lighting. I can work very productively in an abundance of natural light or in a basically dark room lit only by the glow of monitors and RGB accessories, but put me in a room without windows and with supermarket-style lighting and I'll be miserable.

In my home office, I'm fortunate to have both a large window and a simple IKEA floor lamp (something like this: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/10394129/). I alternate between the two, but never turn on the overhead lighting on the ceiling fan.

Part of that might be the harsh nature of fluorescent lighting used in a lot of offices. Natural light is broad spectrum, but typical fluorescent lighting is a few sharp peaks. Combined with the 120 Hz flicker common in many I find them pretty unpleasant, especially for long periods of time.

I find I don't mind higher CRI and higher frequency lighting nearly as much. You can get that in fluorescent lights and they're not as bad as they used to be, but the really good ones are expensive.

I'm the same way, I currently sit near a huge window and I find that it is way too bright. I've had to put up shades to block the sun. My last job I sat in a dim room with only a small amount of ambient light and I loved it.

I like natural light at a medium level (eg, blinds 1/2 closed). I despise bright artificial light.

When I went to work at Google, in a large windowless room, I was one of those people with a cover over their cube. Without the cover, one of the rows of artificial light would shine right in my eyes.

Same when I worked at Rackspace. I was in a football-field-size windows-less room (there were actual windows at the periphery but I was so far away it didn't matter) right under a fluorescent light fixture shining right in my eyes. Most of us had these gigantic plastic leaf shades we found in the kids section of Ikea blocking the light. Some folks went as far to drape their cube in surplus camo netting.

Now I'm in an office sitting right next to a 10x10-foot east facing window with lots of light and views outside. But I nearly always have the shade down since the sun shines right in and blinds me every morning.

All this could be solved with private offices. I just hope I live to see the day when our line of work reverts back to private offices from this open space insanity.

It won't. Open offices are a lot cheaper and managers are almost universally too stupid to realize that the adverse effect they have on productivity costs them anything.

I'm not a game dev, but a dev in a different industry and I am like your coworkers. I yearn for an office with no light but I am stuck in this awful open office with tons of light everywhere. My coworkers refuse to close the blinds and my desk looks right at the window. I hate it.

Why don't you exchange cubes with one of your colleagues who values natural light more?

I did some contract work with some mushroom people. I was in the minority of staff that wanted sunlight. We got a large office for the four of us, the other 30 were in almost complete darkness in a sea of cubicles. They actually blacked out their spaces with material.

We had plenty of plants, fishtank and my customary giant Pac-Man. Good times.

I also encountered this at a company I worked for long ago. Found it so bizarre—they’d turn off as many lights as they could and hang black curtains around their PCs to maintain as dark a space as they could. I chalked it up as “weird dudes at weird company” but have encountered this behavior a few times since, and am now reading about it here in the comments! Different strokes for different folks I guess.

Designers are probably dealing with white balance issues. Daylight changes colour throughout the day.

It's enough to throw off their work.

As a compromise you might try daylight balanced photography bulbs.

Consistent color but it feels like daylight.

So, shouldn't the business put them in an office where they can control the light?

They might be working on games that are very dark (mostly black screens) so that is the only way to see any contrast. P.S. I hate those games, my room is not going to be midnight dark to play a game.

I get near daily migraines from an open office layout with excessive glare from natural light. Polarized sunglasses help a bit, but not enough.

It’s not a preference for me, it’s a disability. I love light, but glare is physically painful and results in migraines.

The strongly contrasting glare, from just a single blind being open, sounds horrible for others else in your area with sensitivities.

I'm right there with you. Natural light and computer screens don't mix for me at all.

Then there is the uneven heating that natural light brings with it since it is blazingly hot where I live.

At the last game studio I worked at the artists formed a “no windows or florescent lights” room full of dimmed lamps and Wacom monitors on the lowest brightness. Deep down I wish I could have had that and strolled into the coffee room for sunlight every hour.

Interesting to see that this seems like it might be a theme at game dev places. I remember reading in Masters of Doom about developers constructing similar makeshift structures to shield their workspaces from light at John Romero's company, Ion Storm.

Id and Ion Storm are/were both in Texas. There’s a lot of sun there. Enough that you can afford to hide from it.

Anecdotally, I was a lot more nocturnal when I lived in New Orleans than when I lived in Boston and Seattle. It’s impossible to get too much sun up here, but down in the tropics, that’s a definite problem.

Also, weren't they on the top floor with a glass ceiling? Direct sunlight glaring down on me is very annoying, but sunlight that has reflected off of the grass or filtered through the trees outside my window is fine. It not all coming from the same direction, and all the infrared has been absorbed.

What kind of lights are they blocking? If it's a super bright fluorescent light, those have a very blue and electric color, compared to natural light or a warmer, softer light, I hate those fluorescent tubes.

Are you sure the lights aren't reflecting on their monitors? My monitors face the windows in our high rise and around 3pm I can barely see my screens and have to adjust everything to reflect less, and these are matte monitors.

I think given you are getting light, natural > artificial. However I can see why some people would prefer no light at all!

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