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Comment by loveoffice | Hacker News Reader

For the first time in my life, I work in a real office, and I love it. As in, I have my own office, with a door that closes and everything (still missing a name plate on the door). I've decorated it with plants and I chose the furniture myself.

That office is a spare bedroom in my house. I'm never going back to working on an open space. The north-American middle management ideology that birthed that nonsense can die in a fire as far I'm concerned.

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Seriously. Sometimes I walk by an office building and see the cubicles inside. I literally tense up inside in involuntary spasm. Life in a cubicle farm is like a slow-burn version of hell.

I will do anything, anything, to avoid ever going to an office again. I will also say that if anyone is so dense as to require office work in 2022, I will never work for them, even if they later change their minds back to WFH.

Cubicles are still far better than the open-plan offices that replaced them.

Sixth vs seventh circle of hell

We must have very different office experiences. I only go in for 6 hours or so with an hour for lunch. My co-workers are nice and the commute is short. I could understand if you like working from coffee shops and such, but working from literal home basically puts you under house arrest.

House arrest is good. Now I can actually get to things around the house in my downtime instead of wasting it on watercooler talk

Goodness me, if I could stay in my house for an entire week I sure would! I've spent a lot of money and effort making this place perfect for me, why should I want to leave?

House arrest? What a bizarre way of looking at it. Today I went and got my car fixed at the mechanic during the same period of time I would have had to vacantly stare at my monitor and pretend to be productive at a typical cubicle job. I have more freedom of movement now than I ever did with the strict 9-5 schedule at an office.

That's the thing. Offices don't have to have a 9-5 schedule. For example - just today I started working at 10am at home. I had a 30 minute remote meeting and then followed up on a couple of things before driving in at 11. I had a 1:1 over lunch with my manager. I did some code review and talked with my co-workers. Then I left at 3:30.

I got free lunch. I got to see my manager face-to-face to have a pretty serious conversation. I got free snacks.

…but you have to live driving distance from work, ruling out almost the entire planet for living in. I will add that it also rules out almost every workplace for you, and almost every employee for your business. Face to face is sometimes better, just not worth the massive tradeoffs.

Depending on where you want to live remote work will make more sense. I'm just saying the loathing that offices get can be quickly fixed by using them less and mostly for what they're good at.

I think my highest-upvoted comment on HN is actually me ranting about how much I hate open offices (specifically me complaining about my coworkers around the World Cup).

I really haven't changed my opinion on this; do I sometimes miss hanging around coworkers in person? Sure, I have some good memories with them, but I very much do not miss open offices. If I had a guarantee of a private office, I'd realistically consider going back to in-person work, but it's basically off the table until then.

My team sometimes just hangs out in zoom, not talking. It's better than an open office since it's opt in.

I've had multiple record scratch, conversation dies moments discussing my utter dislike of open plan offices to managers.

Some simply do not understand that it doesn't work for a large number of people.

Detest it, I get no work done, my stress goes through the roof and I'm constantly bothered by people chatting/noise, distractions in my sightlines etc.

Basically have to put on noise cancelling headphones and find a seat in the corner, what's even the point then?

Thank christ for WFH.

Not gonna lie. They had us in the first half.

Mine has a 'Staff Only' badge on the door that I got at the hardware store. It gets a few laughs from visitors to our home.

not to mention saving at least 1 - 2 hours each day in a commute, i commuted to east bay from palo alto and dear god i wanted to die everyday.

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