Mohamed Aboelez

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Programmers need private offices with doors because they often engage in Do Not Disturb work, which requires uninterrupted focus and concentration. This type of work is different from harmlessly-interruptible work, where interruptions do not significantly impact productivity. Do Not Disturb work is crucial for building complex structures of thoughts and possibilities, and even a brief interruption can have a significant impact on productivity. Creating private workspaces for Do Not Disturb work can help programmers maintain a high level of productivity.

Why do programmers need private offices with doors? (Do Not Disturb)

That is why I prefer working home office. Privacy means productivity to me.

Back circa 1988, I had a copy of large ad from my university’s paper that said something like, “At Microsoft, we give you your very own office with your own door you can close.”
I hung the ad up prominently in every cube I had ever worked in with the key parts highlighted. When my last employer went from cubes to open office, I no longer had a cube wall to even hang it on.
I still have a pdf of it around somewhere.

Here’s the better and cheaper alternative: work from home.

I wish I had such a luxury… at any point ever since beginning to teach myself any of this tech nonsense that I knew nothing of just 6 years ago, but always some annoyance or another has kept me from forming such an expectation or desire, which is probably much better in the long run.
Working from home guarantees, for me at least, maximizing possible distractions and annoyances with the least ability to make them abate (at least until I got a decent income and can flee this nightmare safely and completely).
Yet living with that for years now, I can dive deeply into extreme abstractions while shaking towels like Spanish bullfighters goes on next to me without batting an eye. Or I can easily dive deeply into my dry, strange hobby reading Indian religious literature while every annoying emo song from when I was a teenager is being played 10 feet away at full volume and won’t be disturbed in the least. Thus I can adapt to almost anything a workplace could throw my way and more, in fact I have proven to myself (the only audience such demonstrations actually matter to really) that I can essentially adapt to anything and persist long past the point that everyone else I have ever known would throw in the towel. That’s a double edged sword to be sure but with the way finding a job works these days, a sword I better learn to wield effectively.

This article is golden! Saved it to send it to colleagues, family and friends as no one is able to understand this and is a struggle that I had to endure all my life! 10/10