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Comment by catone | Hacker News Reader

Yes! ... I actually work from home, but I went into the office for two weeks this past August to get to know the guys I work for. Their office is an open plan (one big room with a long E[ish]-shaped desk and people sitting at various points along the E).

Two main things I noticed:

1. Office distractions were MUCH harder for me to deal with than home distractions. Distractions at home are generally things I self impose and can control with will power (i.e., not playing with the cat, not turning on the TV, not getting a snack, etc.)... but in the office there was stuff going on all around me and no way to shut it out.

2. The guy sitting next to me was sick -- when I got back to my home office two weeks later, so was I. (Granted, travel could have been a factor here -- I live in the US and their offices are a 20 hour plane ride away in Australia.)

Oh, I hear the bug went around the entire office after I left, too.

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The transmission of illnesses would be greatly reduced if companies gave decent sick time benefits. At my company, my sick time is rolled into my vacation time. If I am take off work for an illness, it counts against my vacation time.

I once was sick with mono for 4 weeks and went to work miserable everyday. I did almost nothing but sit and stare at my monitor all day.

That's atrocious. I think it's probably illegal in the UK - and we have 20-30 days of paid vacation!

I'm surprised you managed to stay awake with mono... I remember I stayed in bed for about 20 hours out of every 24, for about 6 weeks.

This is something that's becoming more common in the US - "personal time" replaces sick and vacation time. Ostensibly, it's to encourage people scheduling time off than feeling like they need to "burn through" their sick time every year. However, I think it may have to do with paying out accrued vacation time for employees. I'm not well enough versed in HR stuff to speak to that though.

I work for a university in the US now. We get 2 weeks of vacation time, 5 days of personal time (sick + ???), and the university shuts down for almost 2 weeks at the end of each year. On the whole, it's far better than most employers I've had. However, being a parent with a child in daycare causes the problem that I have to burn through my personal days when she's sick so that I have nothing left over when I'm sick - so, it's off to work I go.

    The transmission of illnesses would be greatly
    reduced if companies gave decent sick time benefits.

Is transmission of illness a bad thing? By getting constantly a little bit sick it builds you up. And there's that whole thing about allergies from enthusiastic immune systems, etc.

Also, often diseases are contageous before you are aware of them. I think chicken pox is like this, maybe common virii also.

General immunity only build up until about 20 years old (end of adolescence, basically), sorry, but can't remember the source. Afterwards, exposure to disease does not contribute anything to general immunity. Specific immunity to colds is impossible, as the virus mutates several times per year (you never get the same cold twice). Also, frequent colds tend to lower general immunity, opening the door for secondary infections.

>sorry, but can't remember the source

You'll have to do better than that; it definitely isn't like the immune system stops adapting after the age of 20; otherwise vaccines wouldn't work.

Crazy. In Australia we get min 4 weeks annual leave, 8-12 sick days, plus long service leave as early as 10 years (depending on state).

My company actually has a problem with presenteeism, that is, staff coming into work half dead instead of taking a couple of days off. Usually we send them home, but occasionally someone will take out a whole department with some bug or another.

Or put in the infrastructure to allow someone to work from home.

I'm rarely sick enough to not get out of bed, but since I get to work on my bike every day, in the middle of a winter, a little cold makes it pretty difficult to make it to the office. On those days, I simply head into the home office and put in my time. And others have pointed out, I tend to be more productive at home.

That's actually pretty ordinary (sick days run over into vacation; it's all PTO). Like most Americans here, I get six sick days and twelve days vacation annually.

I can finally understand why more and more Americans come to Europe.

(this is not meant as a troll or a flame, I really didn't know how good European work laws are until reading things like that).

Many jobs here, there are.

By the way, I work in the US and get three weeks of combined sick time/vacation. My company calls it "flexible time off."

I really like the flexibility of the PTO system. As long as you leave yourself a buffer of days in case you get sick it works great.

We give people the option 4 weeks "Paid Time Off" or 3 weeks vacation and "unlimited" sick (although you move to short term disability if you need 5 or more days in a row). About 80 percent of people choose the latter.

We also give 7 fixed holidays and 5 floating holidays.

When I was still working as a game programmer in London, there were ~70 people working in what was effectively one big open-plan office. (it was somewhere between L and T-shaped, so not everyone could see everyone else) I used to come in well before everyone else, around 8:00-8:15 (most others came in ~9:45) because I was so much more productive in the 1½ hours with nobody around - it probably accounted for 50% of what I got done in a day.

Of course, come crunch time, I had to stay in just as late as everyone else, so my 8am starts quickly disappeared, and productivity along with it.

The communication argument for open-plan never made sense to me: if you want to talk to someone who isn't an immediate neighbour, you need to get up and walk over anyway. And you can still talk to your neighbours if you have shared 2-4 person offices, which are a vast improvement. (I prefer being on my own altogether, but maybe that's just me being a misanthrope)

I like sharing an office with another developer working on the same project. Working by my self with the door closed is more productive, but less social. What I hate is sharing an office with someone that is working on some other project.

I guess I need to clarify that I'd be fine with sharing an office with a friend or so. Just sharing with some random person you work with - meh.

As a rule of thumb, I am three times more productive at home than in any shared workspace. The actual workspace, getting there, dealing with the politics, background noise, for office work is incredibly unproductive. For collaboration use skype and email, and meet up once a week with colleagues. The technology for monitoring homeworking will be a very big sector over the next five years, to root out the slackers. Bring it on.

The technology for monitoring homeworking will be a very big sector over the next five years, to root out the slackers.

You may be right, but the mindset of needing monitoring technology to root out the slackers in your workforce seems symptomatic of a larger problem of lacking meaningful metrics for whether actual productivity has occurred.

> lacking meaningful metrics for whether actual productivity has occurred.

I believe in the Pareto 80/20 rule and wonder some days whether I am falling into the other category (I don't believe it's static)

I was joking the other day with my co-worker about a new chat status message.

"Mike, Active, 15% brain activity"

Amen. I'll submit to a webcam if that's what it takes to keep people convinced I'm working, but I'd much rather have them say "he got his work done promptly and well, he's a-okay."

Just wait until you have a spouse and kids running around the house. Sometimes I need to go to the office early to get some sleep.

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