You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.
The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.
So you have definite control over spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...? Must be magical where you live.
I observe this with coworkers every week: - their special needs offspring needs special attention - their neighbor is noisy and an Grade A jackass - cats meowing for minutes - the wife of someone interfering to assign him chores for lunch time - i personally am plagued by sirens of medical emergency transports during months when it gets hot under the roof here, multiple times a day / night
> You're on the hook for all the costs of an office
Honestly, I'd consider that a small price to pay to be able to avoid going to the office.
To be honest, working in public spaces like that is just as bad, if not worse, for me than working in an office.
Anything else is just unprofessional, nothing to do with working from home in general.
> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces
was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.
The open work spaces thing too allowed for rapid over-hiring without having to have the real estate to back it up.
Never underestimate the desire to keep up with the Joneses.
Those huge open plan offices of the 1970s looked amazing in magazine photo-shoots. If you're C-suite suit you can really preside over a room like that.
Like a newsroom bullpen seen from a balcony above, lots of noise, lots of activity.
It's a just bummer if your job is to think carefully about stuff without distraction.
> I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch.
I don't disagree with this though.
Letting programmers have all those things would cause a great deal of class distress among managers ("why, these middles and proles [Fussell's terms] are getting the same perks as me, their superior! Now how are we going to distinguish between those and the upper-middle, at work?") so they try to avoid the ones they can. High pay, can't do much about that (though they do their best); schedule autonomy, not universally available, but in general we do OK there, at least; they've had a fair amount of success keeping us under frequent monitoring that would be seen as an intolerable insult if applied to higher tiers of management ("Agile" has been a huge boon for them); and private offices, ooooh boy, offices, they've managed to all but eliminate them for us, and we helped with the same free-spirit fuck-traditional-office-norms hacker attitude that (on the flip side) also got us some of that schedule autonomy.
IOW we threaten their class security, if you will, and giving us private offices would be a big step in the wrong direction on that front, from their POV, especially since that's the one aspect of upper-middle work perks they've been the most successful at keeping us from accessing.
The "professional class" set of the Fussellian upper-middle has been under steady attack, with only lawyers mostly still hanging on (non-lawyers can't own law practices, is probably the only reason, or they'd be under the thumbs of MBAs and private equity just like doctors are these days) such that higher tiers of management are increasingly the only remaining large group (sans lawyers) who still enjoy an 80s-style upper-middle life at both work and home, and I think they'd like to keep it that way. The last thing they want is a whole bunch of software dorks "leveling up" a class, and becoming their social peers. It was bad enough when the '80s-and-earlier "analysts" were kinda-sorta upper-middle—luckily they nipped that in the bud by combining "analyst" and "programmer" and ensuring the new role tended to get only the latter's social status.
After that, it was years and years of cubes. That was less than ideal, but people made it work. Then open offices came into vogue. That was hated by the majority, and the quality (and speed) of work sorely suffered.
Perhaps the compromise position for RTO could be: you have to come to the office, but you get your own actual office.
It depends on who you work for and where you live. At my last job I refused to go back into the office, because when I was in there the boss would come in regularly to discuss the latest political blog he'd been reading. He's the one in charge of managing the quiet time, and he was a major extrovert who was terrible at it.
Meanwhile at home, I have an 8x8 room that was once a closet and is now my office. It has a child lock on the outside to keep my kids out. I have a set of 37dB ear muffs that fit over my ear buds and block out basically all sound from outside. And I have control over my slack notifications and can ignore them until I'm ready.
I need more quiet time than non-tech management thinks I do, and this way I get to manage it myself instead of making do with whatever management allows me.