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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

I like moving into a shared space for a group conversation, yes.

But mainly, I want an office with a door that closes. I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own mouse, again, selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own chair, which I have selected and adjusted for its ergonomic properties. I want to put pictures of my kids on the walls. I want to leave physical notes to myself. And have reference books nearby. I want a plant.

I do not want a soul-less hotel-style "business workstation." And I especially don't want one in an open floor plan with everyone talking over everyone else.

Get it through your thick, stupid skulls.

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Infinite Loop[1] >> Apple Park[2]

"It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." -Greg "Joz" Jozwiak

[1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history...

[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...

Anecdotally I heard that Infinite Loop also made every point on the one central hallway into an accidental parabolic microphone -- you could hear basically every conversation in the hallway from any point in the building.

My impression is that Microsoft has done offices very well, but at the cost of locality with team members (since shuffling offices is a great deal more burdensome than shuffling an open floor plan).

> I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties.

^This. I enjoy using a nice electromechanical keyboard, but the noise from typing (even on a model with quieter/damped key switches) is incompatible with a shared/open plan office space.

But the greatest reasons are privacy, a sense of spatial ownership, and freedom from distraction and interruptions.

I can zone other people and their keyboards out just fine but yes.

Though my colleagues have noted previously that they find the level of volume coming from my keyboard to be less a distraction and more a useful indicator of how interruptable I am that I don't need to deliberately update.

This may be off-topic but over the years of working in a shared office with 3 others, I learned to distinguish whether they were coding, writing on their thesis, or just browsing.

I'm sad I can only upvote this once.

Putting it all together - you want to work from your home office.

Where did they say “home office”?

I want all the above, along with face time with co-workers and a half hour commute separating it from home.

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