My failed attempt at using a closet as an office
blog.pamelafox.org
blog.pamelafox.org
First, and obviously, it's quiet. No more kids playing in the house chaos. It's private, and can be locked separately, so I can work on my company's confidential stuff. Economical to heat and cool, since it is a very small space. You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode. Highly recommended if you can swing it!
> You also get that intangible "separation" of your work life from your home life that your commute used to give you--hard to explain. A brief walk outside to and from the office allows me to reset into work-mode or home-mode.
This reduced all temptations to mix work and home life. It also made it clear to the other people in the house that daddy is now serious, and that even just a simple "hi, how are you" would require me to get up, leave, and return to answer. And then leave and return to go back to work. The social friction was important.
The adherence to this technique needs to be total and absolute, but the situation has to call for an ever-escalating frequency of interruptions from family, work, the government, neighbors, etc.
We need some sketch comedians to get on this!
I guess I sort of understand a bit of downvoting but... didn't expect that much.
Whatever... happy holidays everyone all the same! :)
Suppose someone else went out the door, walked back in, and went to your work area. Were they then considered to be in the work area and so could talk with you without you having to leave and come back?
I would completely expect my family to get behind this. I've worked remotely for many years now so my kids were (in theory) well trained to not bother me while I'm working. However, that started to get more lax post-covid. I also used to specifically work late at night and in the morning while they were at school. As they get older and stay up later, it has gotten more difficult to keep that schedule.
I recently moved my office to our third floor space. I'm hoping the extra work required to go up a flight of stairs will limit spontaneous interruptions during the day. I'm hopeful, but don't expect it to work long term.
Maybe I need hats...
> You need two hats. A work hat and family hat.
The neighbors will just have to get used to seeing me step outside occasionally to swap hats.
It might sound unnecessarily pompous but really it’s just enforcing some basic courtesy.
Gotta trick those pesky neural Place Cells into operating the way we want them to.
I like the fact that because I work home, I have to mix work and home life actually. Breakfast, Laundry, cooking, lunch, doing groceries. I treat those as important "pauses" that forces me to move a bit my body, release the mind. The key is putting strong limit in the amount of those and planning them in advance so that you don't have unexpected and constant context switches. Like today I had set a reminder to clean up the nozzle of my printer at 12am. I definitely have to set alarms on my laptop because I tend to forget everything when focused. When you think of it, most people working at an office are also mixing work and personal if not home life, or even argue about things on hn.
As for kids, I send them to school so I tend to only have them home for 2 hours a day if I haven't finished work. The only issue is if they are fighting against each other because otherwise I tell them to do their homework. 2 hours of lower concentration out of 8 is not that big of a deal anyway. It is still better that 8 hours of lower concentration in an office.
It must take some cooperation from the others in the house, to avoid being often expected to make exceptions “just this once” and respond immediately.
Mentally it just put me in a different 'mode'
And preserved my home as the home
Was she filming a remake of Spinal Tap in such a small building? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=071cXxCNj5A
He leaves the house, gets in his vehicle, drives to get coffee and then to the office ... that happens to be home ... but goes into the office off the garage.
Same trip back every day.
He says that ritual is a big deal for him.
I am flabbergasted by this. You are wasting time and money waiting for something you could prepare yourself cheaper and faster.
For me, one great thing about working from home for about six years now is how little mileage we've put on our cars and how little money we've spent on fuel.
It was fantastic to have a mental break between work and not-work, and I didn't fall into the trap of working an extra hour because I have an hour fewer of commuting.
Here in Los Angeles, I know a handful of people that have apartments in radically different parts of the city, just for practicality and convenience. Just renting. Nothing anybody brags about given how awkward struggling people will make that, but if you got it like that there is no reason to experience LA, you can totally exempt yourself from the commutes and hellishness and have somewhere to decompress in whichever part of the city you are in. I've sublet for months this way too, while retaining a headquarters that I rent elsewhere.
It’s like when SF kept reminding that I needed to ask for a water refill because we need to conserve water while farms in the Central Valley are using the majority of it.
When it comes to housing, a singular human priced out of housing is someone who becomes homeless
More housing needs to be built in your scenario. It is not on the shoulders of the demand side. More housing needs to be built and it needs to be built now. We should be guilting the communities that have prevented development from happening. Not John Doe who rents two apartments.
The privacy implied by two locking doors between me and the tiny children is immensely valuable to me. The short walk to and from work helps me clear my head between contexts.
The space doubles as a guest space when we infrequently have them. It's great for guests to be able to just leave for the night without having to drive to a hotel and dealing with all that implies.
Setting the distance between the home and the office to be something walkable, but not too close is a great hack to force yourself to move more. Mine is about 2km, so going to the work and back gives me a nice push toward those recommended 7000 steps a day, plus does wonders to my mind - especially in the sunny mornings when it's a pure joy.
Also, a simple towable RV or a used RV can do this job quite well. It doesn't even need to be road-worthy, it just needs to have its battery/generator/AC/heat functional. Plop a starlink and a 30amp line on your switchbox and you're good to go.
It's not attractive though for neighbors or housing associations, unlike a decently made shed.
Now since school is back in action, it has become the quiet place to hangout if outside gets too warm in the summer, or a peaceful retreat during snowstorms in the winter. It's cozy as heck.
Slowly becoming the "radio shack" as it has a goes receiver setup in it now and a couple long pieces of wire strung through the trees for shortwave listening.
The physical individual separation, even if being across the yard, makes all the difference to our brains.
At one place I lived where there was no room I could dedicate to being an office, I ended up buying a standalone wooden 8x10' shed, insulated it, ran power and ethernet to it, and it served me very well for a couple of years.
1: https://www.icreatables.com/sheds/6x12-B-backyard-shed-plans
(Many professional writers have done this by tradition. They have a "work space" in a shed or an attic somewhere close to their home.)
I fully agree with this. I lived about six years and half, altogether, in a rural area and I loved every moment of it. Connection to nature is not a one-day trip during the week-end and it's certainly not a walk in a city park.
> I wouldn't want to go back to work-from-spare-bedroom or work-from-closet.
I don't mind the spare bedroom: I love it. Bathroom is nearby, coffee machine too. I mean, sure, I could duplicate this in a second home next to the first one but why bother?
I need a three bedrooms for that: parents, kiddo and office...
Do get some natural light from a window well too.
My wife’s office from the 2nd floor gets the kids/animal noise- but she also gets the view…
With that said, we've come full circle on this. One of the advantages of remote work is being able to live anywhere, yet you are essentially suggesting people live in very specific (albeit geographically large) areas. It is at least a bit funny.
Also people: actually, we do need offices for remote work. Moreover, we actually need office buildings.
Also also also people: damn do I hate my commute. Guess there's no other way since remote work doesn't work. Oh well!
- in some countries, dedicated home office rooms and supplies can be deducted from taxable income or lead to other forms of tax reduction.
- you do not have to pay for the commute. Not only in terms of money (gasoline and car value loss, public transport ticket...), but also generalized cost (time lost, loss of flexibility...)
- some employers actively provide financial support for home office (e.g. by subsidising supplies).
I am personally happy to pay for my home office _and_ accept a lower salary if this means I can spend tine with my kids and wife every day, rather than waiting for the train in the rain.
> "best lighting is actual daylight in front of you ... Replacing the existing office lights with very warm toned lights"
So Daylight is good, yes. That's 5500k to 6500k, depending on how you measure it. It's NOT very warm-toned; in fact, it's cool white. The lights linked are 2700k. You can use them, but your camera is just going to try and compensate for the yellow hue. If you're going to buy something specifically for lighting video calls/recording, you should find something daylight with a higher CRI ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-CRI_LED_lighting ). You don't need to go crazy, but the difference between those $1 LED's and the $20 LED's you see at the store, is probably the CRI.
If you want GOOD lighting setup, go for 3 or 4 point lighting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-point_lighting -- You don't need a huge number of expensive lights, just lights set off to the side. Personally, I hate ring lights because they are designed for you to put the camera in the middle of them. If you have glasses, all you can see in the camera is the ring reflection. Even if you don't have glasses, you're now staring into the center of a giant blinding light. No thanks.
It’s a 40W COB LED and a 20W as well, both around 4000K. Both have fairly substantial peaks in the 200-300nm and 600-700nm ranges (suitable for photosynthesis), and their CRI is 97.
These lights are absolute game changers. I ordered a 150W with a CRI of 95 and a very similar photometric report which I plan to put further away from my desk and use as a sort of diffuse light to get more of this very natural feeling light into the space.
The ability to grow plants so well is a huge plus too. But I’ve never had a higher quality picture in meetings, I feel way happier at my desk, I get less eye fatigue, and other perks. Good light is worth every penny.
Then on my breaks I just make sure to go outside and enjoy said sun.
My office is in a spare bedroom, where the East wall is my desk with 1500 lumens of bias lighting behind my monitor, the South wall is a TV with 2900 lumens of bias lighting and the North wall is a big window where I've put a 1600 lumen lightstrip on top of the holder of the shade, pointing upwards.
I run it all (Hue lights) at 6500K during the daytime while I'm working, find it to be plenty of light, and I can't see any of the actual bulbs as points of glare.
This is what I did. I had two young children (still young but not as young as when this anecdote happened) and we ended up moving to accommodate for working from home. Before we moved I was finding my home office space (a literal garage) was freezing during the winter and boiling during the summer. And like the author, it was affecting my ability to work. So my options were go back to the office, or buy something more suitable for working from home.
It also came with the bonus of a bigger garden for our kids to play in.
I moved to Los Angeles without a job simply because that’s where my partner and I wanted to live. We were both made remote, but that doesn’t change anything.
I was laughing all throughout because you have so much space but are still stuck with a difficult optimization problem.
My partner and I are semi-Digital Nomads and over the years of working from “home” I’d guess we created makeshift office space in about 30 different temporary homes. We are usually somewhere between a 1br and a 3 br, so it always takes a ton of creativity to wrangle the desks, chairs, noise isolation and manage to keep out of the way of your living space. We’ve worked in kitchens, bedrooms, living room couches, closets, woodshops, unheated out buildings, cabins, chalets, hotel rooms (with the furniture against the windows during a hurricane), poolside, and basements during heat waves. Probably my favorite was a 14 person camp bunkhouse in a national forest that I had all to myself with a little space heater to get me through the fall chill before hiking over to the main house after work.
My biggest trick is to make sure at the end of the workday you can close a door, shut a curtain, or throw a big sheet over the desk so that you have some physical separation between work and home.
It was both kinda quiet as it was on the 2nd floor and the kids played in the basement during lockdown. Part of me misses it as the "snug" feeling helped with focus as there weren't really any visual distractions. I did worry about the CO2 later in the stretch of using the closet and still worry about it now that I'm in a basement office that has no windows (but there is a window in the larger basement).
Funny story about working out of a closet:
During COVID, I worked at a place that was famously a bit of "meat grinder" with long hours, short tenure etc. I realized about half way through that I was very good at giving at honest sales pitch about the pros and cons of working there to the point that Recruiting would have candidates on the fence talk to me to try to "close" them.
I would usually start each call with "Yes, this is my closet" and end with "Now, if you come work with us, you TOO might end up working in a closet".
I had a 100% close rate so I guess it wasn't that bad of a joke or I'm a better salesman than I thought.
The office shown is extremely large and already big enough for two people, as was initially tried. The only real problem is the noise.
Instead of having a bunch of work done trying to change the nature of the closet, it seems like the best solution would be to have the contractor construct an entirely new wall dividing the office room in two. Rather than being in a small closet, they now have a large room, with a big window and door, etc. A real wall blocks the noise they're concerned about.
The bigger thing is, if it's a garage, it's likely not insulated, which means you'd have to do so for noise/efficiency. Probably still way better than having a desk in your toddler's room though.
This might help to remove your partner's remaining voice from recordings at least in your current situation.
I might try hanging up the acoustic sound panel at the start of the curtain track in the bedroom to see if that helps. I suspect the sound waves will just ...wave around it? But I am clearly not an audio engineer. :)
I have used those dividers just for visual backdrops in the past though, they're handy.
Ground vibration also needs mass to dampen, and it's harder to solve without expensive treatments since it ultimately depends on placement relative to loadbearing elements - jumping up and down on a structural beam will be overall less noisy than the flooring in between.
That said, you can lower the frequency by borrowing the techniques of weightlifting platforms: alternating layers of a dense rebond foam and wood.
This seems like it should change how houses are designed. A separate "writer's cottage" or "workshop" has a lot of value, but I've always just had N+1 bedrooms even when I lived alone so I could dedicate a bedroom as an office (and in my current place, the biggest bedroom is the office; the small bedroom is my actual bedroom).
It’s funny how most of us feel like we “need” a dedicated room, but really, a bedroom is in many ways an ideal space to give a second, daytime use to, unless you have a partner at home who takes naps or something.
Anyway, for now I bought a WeWork subscription!
From many years of experimentation and experience, I can say with a high degree of confidence that I really do need a dedicated room. It's not an issue of practicality, it's an issue of mindset. I need a room that is used only for working and nothing else, so that when I'm in there, my brain is triggered to be in "work mode".
Also, if I'm sharing a workspace with other uses, that means I can't leave things sprawled out in between work sessions.
> for now I bought a WeWork subscription!
Ahh, this indicates that we have very different needs indeed! Hotdesking/shared workspaces -- WeWork or otherwise -- don't actually work for me at all.
Don't get me wrong, coworking (without an expensive private office) has major downsides, I would love to not have to set up my workspace and tear it down (complete with portable monitor, and keyboard and mouse), and also to not have to lug all this heavy stuff with me daily, but my move was out of sheer necessity because of how loud and disruptive little kids are in the afternoon. The setup/teardown waste 5 minutes daily, but interruptions wasted hours.
What I've learned is just that we've each got to find a way to work within the options available to us. With an infinite budget I'd build a super nice 10x20 office in my backyard, but tbh the proximity to a well-meaning little kid who craves my attention would still limit the effectiveness of that plan.
Or, as is fairly common among tech workers, your partner's sleep schedule differs from yours (one of you needs to work late nights or early mornings due cross-timezone meetings, on-calls, deadlines, performing childcare during part of normal business hours, etc.)
Or, as is fairly common among parents with young children, the bedroom routinely sleeps 3+ people.
I've been WFH for 5 or so years, I have the uncanny ability to be able to work anywhere, anytime, a sort of mind switch that flicks itself - or doesn't, and then I'm screwed - irrespective of location, and then the surrounding world fades out when I am in my mental space.
I never had an issue with my partner or otherwise people being in the same space... until I had a kid. That changed everything, when our child is home I just stopped being able to not pay attention, even when they are in another room, and now I definitely see the - previously moot - benefit I would get from a dedicated room with a door + soundproofing.
As for the bedroom solution, that just would not work for me. My bedroom is a sanctuary: work - and any other cause of concern or otherwise stress - needs to stay out of it or my ability to sleep soundly - or at all - suffers greatly.
Regarding lighting, I set up the whole house with smart bulbs and set up Adaptive Lighting with Home Assistant, which also helped a lot with sleep issues.
To each his own I guess.
I don't want to work out of a closet. I hate working from my living room. I don't want to move to a bigger abode just so I can WFH more easily. A shitty open plan office is worse than my home office, but I miss having a nice office a short commute away.
In time, any dedicated home office will end up much nicer than anything a company would provide for you, unless you're on the executive floor.
> a short commute away.
Keyword "short". That severely limits your job options.
The only thing missing from WFH set ups is indeed work/life separation.
I’m back to working from home again we have a nearby office that I visit occasionally for meetings. It’s a separate room north facing window (West and south aren’t great at all). For me, there are tax benefits to help cover the cost, and the savings on a commute, restaurants for lunch, and dry cleaning easily cover the rest. Time savings are great, but I recommend keeping the commute at the end of the day, take different walks around the neighbourhood. Find new businesses, meet neighbours. It’s much better than the same walk each day to work.
My 2c.
I work remote. I rent an office about 3 miles from my home. If I continue to work remotely for 10 years, my total cost in rent (which includes heating/cooling/electric/etc) will still be less than my family expected to pay to put an office-sized addition onto our house. My office also has fiber internet now which I cannot get at my home.
But the biggest benefit is that when I'm at the office, it's a separate place from home, so I do office things at the office and home things at home. The separate physical places really help my brain to context switch. Plus, trying to do work at home when the kids are also home, before/after school or on school breaks, is very difficult for me.
That's my biggest gripe as well. I'm always in work mode while my desk is in sight.
And with all these office building real estate issues, I’m honestly shocked a replacement for WeWork hasn’t successfully made an impact in this space yet.
I just wanted to share a "home office arrangement" that I invented which I like quite a bit. It's probably more for a bachelor situation than couple, depends on your other, and not for the smallest of spaces, but it's a way to make a space like a living room do double duty. I've done it in several houses/apartments I've lived in and I won't go back.
The trick is this: if your couch has its back to a wall, move the couch out from the wall, and hide a desk and chair behind it, facing in the same direction as the couch. You can still use your living room as a living room, and if you're pounding a keyboard all day, a living room is a nice place to sit; I don not like staring at walls, I like depth. moderate clutter will remain mostly hidden, and you can also see the TV if you want to watch youtubes while you're on your keyboard.
The fact I work remotely means I have more flexibility and social energy at the end of the day to spend socializing with friends or at after-work sports leagues. When my best friend's mom died it let me spend TONS of time at their apartment so they would not be alone. It let me housesit for my partner's mother. Before we moved in together it let me work from their place and see more of them. I can, and often do, have lunch with friends who live nearby. Working remotely and isolation are just not on the same axis for me. It helps that my company has a very strong remote culture, but the job I had during early COVID did not and I still felt quite satisfied when we went remote.
100% agreed on the depth thing though. Nothing worse than staring at a wall while working-I like that from my desk I can see my entire living room, my front door, my bookshelves, etc.
Much happier in my new office, even though it's shared! Luckily our schedules don't overlap and dual occupancy hasn't been an issue but once.
[0]: https://cobertos.com/blog/post/tiny-home-big-door . Scroll down to "Lessons Learned"
[1] https://www.wayfair.com/commercial-office-furniture/sb0/priv...
A point in their favor, though, is that they are very soundproof, at least the ones that we have.
https://ikeahackers.net/2020/10/fold-out-desk-home-office-pa...
Works really well and given the cost of space for a second desk it was a very cost effective solution - only minimally affects the utility of the wardrobe as a wardrobe. (We didn't build the laptop holder this guy describes, the laptop just gets sat on top of the clothes in the drawer below that shelf with attention to make sure we're not blocking a fan intake. We had a powerpoint and a ethernet port put into the back of the wardrobe but actually we just end up using Wi-Fi mostly.)
I didn't put a huge amount of effort into the sound isolation, the acoustic panels mainly reduce echos but do nothing for low vibrations (people walking around the house, cars idling outside, airplanes). I have total control over the lighting (I don't want to see any daylight when I'm working). It can get a little stuffy if I don't turn on the AC/fan.
Personally I love working in a little space with my back to a wall. Because of the acoustic tile, many people think I'm just in a work office. I find the limited view (basically I'm looking at a monitor with a wall right behind it) keeps me from getting distracted.
Interesting! Can you say more? I can't stand being away from large windows during the day.
Ah. Maybe I should stop looking for life/work advice on HN, lol. (Don't take this as a personal slight at all please.)
If I spent most of my time streaming and recording, I would not want any sunlight. The sun changes position, there are clouds and rain, all of which create different lighting conditions, and makes it difficult to create a consistent palette of colors. Most noticeable if you are recording (as she does) and you do one session from morning til lunch, one session in the evening and the last session tomorrow morning. The colors would be changing.
(As a guy who spent years as a pro photographer these things scare me.) She may use the righlight to overpower the sun that would mostly work but it would look harsh.
I think she should look into microphones. I am not sure what she uses, but you can get microphones + limiter/compressor that would make it fairly easy to not pick up stray sounds. (up to a point).
I say"temporary" because I haven't changed it since the start. It's also very convenient: when I open up the door, the closet lights automatically turn on, and when I close the whole thing, it's like the office isn't even there...
I'm still working on convincing my wife to put a baby grand in the reclaimed space however, which seems to be a bigger task.
Ah well, first class world problems I guess... Move along people!
[1] https://twitter.com/ToJans/status/1569383616328736770?t=__BE...
Alas, that's not in the cards, so my office is the garage. I installed a mini split and it does a great job keeping it cool in the summer, and an ok job keeping it warm in the winter.
It's actually an excellent room for me - I use it as an office, my workout stuff is out there, and I play music out there too. The only disadvantages are the fact that it can't be solely dedicated to work, that I have to dedicate a good amount of the space to bikes, toys, mower, etc, and of course the minor quibble that there's no room for the cars in the garage.
(But honestly, when your house is just over 1000sqft, what kind of madman would give up an extra 400 in the garage just for cars?!)
[1] https://www.poly.com/us/en/products/headsets/blackwire/black...
I have since been relocated back into a bedroom after the student and Au Pair left. In some ways. The only downside really has been that the table next to me stayed in the room and my wife adopted it as her workspace…
This summer, Audio Feedback Loop is proud to release “Can You See My Screen”, the thrilling sci-fi event of the year that has critics dropping praise like “we can’t hear you” and “for the love of god, figure out how desktop audio works”.
Does that happen often where you are?
I have a theory based on inverse volume and volume combined with relative importance of the call I’m on. If I’m muted on a boring call it seems to defuse all known dogs.
Apart from that monitoring the air quality is also something that usually is not done in the corporate environment.
For the bottom of the door, there's strips of flexible plastic/rubber/etc usually used on garage doors as a "garage door seal" or "draft stopper". It comes in a roll or a pack of precut strips. I put a strip on both sides of the bottom of the door, flush with the floor.
To justify doing that I live in a dorm-type situation where I have shared bathroom and kitchen and only my large bedroom is private. ($800 / mon)
It's in Chinatown and because Chinese people generally keep to themselves, and I work 80 hour weeks (40 dayjob, 40 startup), it works out. When I was paying $1600 for a studio, I'd get annoyed when neighbors were regularly smoking weed. That's not a problem in Chinatown. No one smokes weed.
It's probably not for everyone - but doing both my dayjob and business from home wasn't working out. For a lot of people there's a mental switch if you have to travel and go to an office to do work. I'm one of those people. I just get more work done this way.
As it is, I have a 48" standing desk, in the corner of my living room, and that works fine, but I also don't have the same needs as the author. I do occasional Zoom calls, and Bose QC45 headphones, and the Zoom backgrounds, work fine. I do have a portable green screen, that I can set up, if I really need it.
I do spend the majority of every day at the desk (I'm at it, right now).
I have a cat that doesn't like my desk, so I only occasionally get demands for head-scratching, and he leaves me alone, otherwise.
I did try having a separate room for the office, but found I didn't like being separated from the household. My wife is very quiet, and is glad to leave me alone, and pursue her own interests (and I leave her alone).
But I'm also okay with my little space in the bedroom now :)
Bose headphones are great, one of the best investments I've made, but they don't reduce the noise in recordings, so I had to find other forms of sound reduction.
But it seems that the author's situation is one where an office workspace might be the right choice at least for one of them.
There is clearly too much interference with each other and video recording has a very high bar that is not easy to achieve at home - which are built for living not for professional recording.
I personally have few meetings and working from home is great. Background noise cancelation is fairly decent these days too and 99% of meetings are internal, so a crying child or a partner who is also in a meeting in the room next door isn't an issue.
I set up a second workstation in the living room. This was not super cheap - a "nice" chair/desk/monitor with decent ergonomics with passes partner acceptability testing is going to be tough to do for much less than $1-$2K.
Then my wife started working from home. The living room was no longer a viable place to work.
So this year I started turning the garage into a third office.... siiigh.
Still, if you earn a decent living from working from home, investing a few % of that salary back into your home office setup is generally one of the best investments you can make.
The real problem (aside from the space) is the air quality. There's just no going around needing to put a duct/return to the room.
CO2 levels num your mind. I have a bigger walk-in and sometimes I take calls there. After 15 min. I cant stand the air quality.
Basically, no amount of hardware or software can fix a bad sound environment.
The boom places the microphone close to your mouth so it's gain is very low. Having two mics on the boom setup to constructively add only the speaker's voice does extra cancelling.
This is how call centers work
EDIT: by boom mic I mean headsets with a boom attached. High end ones are specifically designed to eliminate ambient noise.
Your suggestion of noise canceling head-set only helps prevent her from hearing her partner, not the stream's audience.
Is it optimal? No. I prefer mechanical keyboards and have multiple servers in my house. But a consistent work solution is more important.
It’s very cosy and focus is entirely on the screen.
However I’m alone in the house when I work. So I can leave the door open for fresh air and no noise issue.
I don’t think OP’s have much to do with the size of the office
The garage, storage, office and bedroom are all a single "room" with no corridor, leaving you with no way to close of any of these spaces (for privacy) without blocking off other parts of the house to the rest of the occupants?
By that logic though, most things the average person considers personal or sensitive can be discovered yet it’s generally considered good practice to not actively expose intimate aspects of our lives to the world. E.g., it’s relatively easy to find most folks’ home addresses yet most folks wouldn’t feel comfortable posting their home address on the internet, and if someone else does it, it’s considered doxxing.
Anyway, I was just curious. Thank you for answering.
I feel like I must be missing out on something or be very adaptable relative to the HN crowd. I’ve worked in my cloffice - barely big enough to stand in, ventless, and windowless - for nearly four years now. It’s not my daily workspace, as I occasionally work on the porch, at the dining table, by our bay windows, etc etc.
I’d say 60% of working full time at home is spent in the cloffice that, based on these comments, might be depriving my body of oxygen in a harmful way I must not be noticing. Am I oblivious?
- big enough for standing desks - most noise isolation headphones will clean up your audio for meetings - add whatever solid color backdrop or virtual backgrounds to clean up your video - built-in air circulation to/from windows
Maybe it's selection bias.
There is background noise, from my partner, and occasionally neighbours and building work in their homes which can be as close as 2-3m from my window, but it works.
I attribute this working to several things:
1. buy a great microphone such as a Shure SM7B with a tight polar pattern focused on the person speaking as this will prevent the pickup of virtually all noise outside of that. this mic needs to be an inch or two from your mouth so you need a decent mic arm. any near-field studio monitor speakers are adequate, your mic will _not_ pick up the sound due to the polar pattern.
2. buy decent lighting, there's a lot online but you can default to Elgato Key Lights and these can do daylight temperatures as well as evening / night temperatures. you want two of these positioned around 45-40' angle offset in front of you on either side and just above the camera (you will not be staring into a blinding light), and one to light up the space behind you. alternatively a single key light with an umbrella / dome, and then 2 lights doing the environmental. this is a useful YouTube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpEeYwrkBPU
3. if you happen to wear glasses and you have a DSLR as a webcam then consider getting a circular polarizing filter, as then you can remove screen reflections from your glasses trivially.
I do not use sound dampening / conditioning in the room, I have some books on a shelf which helps to reduce / prevent echoes, but otherwise I've done nothing despite it being a box closet / room.
I do agree 100% with Pamela that air quality is the biggest issue... everything else can be changed easily. Any CO2 meter, i.e. the Aranet 4 or equivalent, will tell you when to open the window a little, if the CO2 level goes above 700 I open the window.
The office is tiny, there's a lot of equipment in here... and so I never need to heat this room even when it's below freezing outside. In the Summer I need to aircon it, I use a portable aircon... and despite it being noisy for me, the Shure SM7B is basically miraculous and the sound of the portable aircon is extremely low and all of the noise reduction software works perfectly against it (I use Nvidia Broadcast noise reduction only during the Summer when I run the aircon).
Closet offices can work, but the microphone is virtually everything. it looks like Pamela is using the Elgato Wave, it's an OK mic and has a lot of gimmicks... but truly, just changing to a Shure SM7B https://www.shure.com/en-GB/products/microphones/sm7b and combining it with an audio interface like the SSL2 https://solidstatelogic.com/products/ssl2 with a FetHead on the cable https://www.tritonaudio.com/fethead would've cured most of the problems.
Only the air quality is hard to solve.
A windows laptop, a mac laptop, and also a Linux one.
I've got everything connected to a CalDigit TS4 dock, and a single thunderbolt cable connects any of my laptops to it, that cable also charges the laptop at the same time as connecting the AV and monitor.
I'd probably say I'm mostly Mac and windows, but I've in a while it's Linux... So a 45/45/10 split.
I do prefer the windows laptop if I'm running Aircon in the same room and not using online video conferencing, as then I need Nvidia broadcast for noise cancelling on recordings. But this is entirely due to the portable Aircon and nothing to do with anything else.
Comments about "separate buildings" and "renting office space" kind of underscores the real value wfh provides; less human interaction. The only problem with that is human interaction actually ends up making much work easier, not harder.
Renting office space less so, but it still provides another key benefit to remote work: you can live anywhere. Office space doesn't have to be in a high rise, it can be unused commercial space in a suburb or even in a small town.
If you don't like remote work that's fine, but there's not much point in posting your caricatures of remote work on a thread filled with people who enjoy working remotely.
But for workplaces that presume WFH is cost-free and all benefits, someone there is suffering on behalf of the people who WFH.
The work in office crowd also forcibly shifts costs onto their coworkers by forcing them into the office under threat of firing, but the inverse never happens. I have a disability and had a legal entitlement to WFH for years which was routinely denied as a result of fraud where HR departments would claim undue hardship regardless of legitimacy. Since COVID this no longer flies as there is abundant proof that employers can in fact perform such accommodations trivially in many cases.
Work in office cost shifting was enforced through force and crime, so I have little sympathy for complaints of the costs of the work from home crowd voluntarily doing what they prefer to do.
Specialization predates dedicated work spaces by millennia—the ancient Egyptians didn't "do literally everything themselves", they had quite sophisticated division of labor, with craftsmen regularly operating out of their homes. Even after people started receiving wages, work continued to be routinely done at home. It was less efficient to maintain a second space large enough for all your laborers than it was to just send them home with the materials they needed to get the job done, then have them come back with the finished product.
The industrial revolution changed that because now there were very expensive machines that were doing mostly actual work, and the people needed to be where those machines were. Once people were primarily interacting with ideas centralization still continued to be preferable because communication technology was limited.
COVID proved that the centralization is no longer necessary—our communication tech is sufficient to run an effective team distributed across the world, and very few jobs have the kind of large, expensive shared machinery that started the centralization process. There may still be preferences towards shared spaces, but those are personal preferences, they're no longer just the reality of work.
There was a 200 year window where centralization was a necessary feature of industrialization and knowledge work, but that era has come to an end, and it certainly wasn't long enough to become some sort of evolutionary fact of life!
Further, this doesn't even disagree with my claim; what you've said here doesn't in any way support the claim that the "default" way of working was at home, and only "recently" did work centralize. Quite the opposite; work has always been "remote" in some sense. Even just practically, few people literally had the luxury to live exactly in the place where they worked, down to the room, as a great deal of work actually took place outside of any "room".
Additionally, COVID did not prove anything except that we can temporarily mitigate losses by working apart. Since, it's become very clear that such work styles create undue burdens on the folks who don't work remotely in order to support those who do, unless a company is entirely dedicated to remote work, which nearly none are.
This is a location where I have expended great effort in creating a productive and specialized workspace engineered to deal with personal medical issues largely using money out of my own pocket. I went to this expense, not just to benefit myself, but out of a sincere desire to be as productive as possible at my job.
My point is that in situations like yours, there's always a loser, and they often don't get a choice. You're benefitting, but the people you have an agreement with have passed the cost of keeping you in the loop and productive onto someone else, and that someone else can't decide to end remote work for you if the burden it too high.
You can sure bet I worked my ass off to reduce that companies need for an on-site presence. It was also because one of my backups was disabled and I didn’t want to push that cost onto them. Another went for into a car accident and went on disability and it was bad enough that their personality changed when they came back. Shit fucking enraged me, I just did math in my head about how many employees my employer killed or maimed on the highways yearly with its forced office attendance policy and it was a decent number.
Of course, I respect the sacrifices of anybody doing such work and staying in the office so people can stay home.
Yet what we saw with on-premise work wasn’t that. What we saw was managers misappropriating company resources to have employees keep them company and make them feel important and follow them around to flex on their contemporaries. Who threw tantrums and threatened peoples livelihoods and broke disability accommodation laws to get their way. There are people who need to “come in to work” but it’s a LOT less than who was actually coming into work.
And there's zero reason to believe that driving to work killed anyone. That's like saying being born killed people. The causes of people's car accidents are what killed them, not the reason they were driving.
There are also a significant number of companies that are remote only and successful and totally reject the need for this at all but of course - this won’t work for all workplaces or all workers. Just saying.
Maybe the tech will catch up to that, but it currently doesn't.
Let's say your employee works 9-5, but really they start their commute at 8:30 and get home at 5:30 so it takes 9 hours. Imagine how much better some employees would perform with an extra hour of rest a day instead of essentially forcing them to drive because face to face interaction is awesome.
Some employees are literally not going to go to one meeting the entire day. They will drive. Sit at a desk. Talk to nobody. Then go home. It's a strange thing.
Also, just as there are people on tech who really thrive off the face to face interaction, there's a whole lot of people who got into technology BECAUSE they aren't good at face to face interactions.
For roles that require little/no team coordination, it's acceptable to not work in the office most days. That isn't what a software developer job is, however, nor is it the vast majority of white-collar jobs generally.
Yes, you must commute. Yes, it takes time. But that's what the money is for. You wouldn't do this for free, so they compensate you for the inconvenience. The hour lost in a commute is infinitely made up for in the human interfacing that happens in person.
I'm sorry your job sucks, but I suggest again: get another job. Wasting time telling other people in a completely different work environment how much your job sucks isn't going to persuade them that they're in the wrong.
My observation is in general, not about any specific situation. Remote work has costs, and your leaders have decided those costs are better than the in-person costs. That's fine, and in a fully-remote environment it can work, but pretending like it's strictly "better" is unjustified.
We have NO IDEA how we’re going to maintain our current levels of energy usage even 100 years from now. We’ll run out of gas, run facefirst into global warming, and electrification with renewables will require a monumental amount of scarce resources and work.
We have a great solution to part of this problem. Move electrons, not people. Even if office culture really was all that and you’re right about everything, at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because it’s unsustainable. We can’t move to solutions like electric self-driving cars fast enough, the electric co-worker MUST be part of the solution.
So I argue it doesn’t matter if remote is better. The costs of offices are increasing more and more and more and something had to give. It’s not if in office be remote work is better, the question is what benefits most form our limited abilities to work out of an office? Right now office culture is STILL running on borrowed time by having the commuters not pay for the externalities of their emissions. Of course on-site is important but that 5 day in the office culture was ALWAYS going to die.
If your company landed somewhere on that spectrum that you're unhappy with, that sucks, but that suggests it's time to get a new job, not bitterly caricature your co-workers as only wanting to work remotely in order to avoid interacting with you.
As for the whole muh'productivity, I feel like we've beaten this horse to death many times over the past few years. The only reasonable answer is: YMMV.