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Comment by Guest42 | Hacker News Reader

My experiences in offices have generally involved being surrounded by many people who talk rather consistently.

When coupled with surprise meetings that don’t pertain directly to my projects and the inability to multitask, I think that the home office is a net positive.

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A while back, I was sat next to a guy whose actual job was cold-calling potential customers for the company. It was... trying, although I realized the company's success depended on his job as well as mine.

That seems like a job that could easily be remote.

Yes well, open office plans and cubicles are awful, no argument there. But a real office with a door can be attractive relative to the situation many people have at home.

Speaking from short, few months experience, cubicles are actually quite nice compared to open office plans.

- You get plenty of personal space

- My cubicle got both a whiteboard and a bulletin board, a locker, two trash bins, and enough desk space to comfortably fit a co-worker for short sessions of working together

- high walls discourage conversations, so it is actually quiet

The biggest disadvantage is artificial lighting - my cubicle was quite removed from the windows.

I had a classic cubicle for over a decade. Dilbert stereotypes aside, it was pretty much OK. The company had offices--mostly for managers--but to be honest we also had an open door convention (keep the door open unless you really needed it closed for some reason--generally related to having a private conversation). So you really didn't have a situation where people with offices generally closed the doors.

Nice high spectrum lamps can alleviate a lot of the lighting issues with cubicles. Yeah the fluorescent lamps hanging from the ceiling are shit but it's nothing that can't be fixed with a nice high CRI uplight.

The odds that employers will offer employees below the executive or managerial level private or even semi-private offices is extremely low. Personally, I think the odds of such a thing happening are lower than WFH becoming mainstream.

I guess I got lucky then.

Speaking for myself, I haven't had an office with a door for a decade now. And if you go back to the top of my white collar career (that is, jobs done from an office (or notably, a warehouse)), I've had a door twice.

Ironically enough, I do have a door at home.

The last office with a door I had was in the old morgue of the hospital we supported. Was actually a pretty good location once you got used to the funky smells. Quiet, cool, dark and nobody came knocking on the door asking for us to fix there computers.

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