[tfehring]

I'm 27. I'd love open office spaces if my job never required writing complex code. But I find it all but literally impossible to do so in an open office, which means that I can't both (1) do my work exclusively at my desk during work hours and (2) actually get all of my work done.

In practice, I've adjusted my schedule to something like the "double schedule" that PG describes in [0]. When I'm at the office, I spend my time on meetings, planning, managerial stuff, spreadsheet/dashboard work, and simple coding. Then I go home and do all of my complex coding remotely til 1am or so. Obviously this isn't great for work-life balance, and it's terrible for my sleep schedule when I need to be at 8am meetings. But I think a compressed version of this setup (e.g., if I could reasonably only be physically present in the office 4 hours a day) would be pretty much optimal for me, including the open office space.

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

[not_kurt_godel]

Your schedule sounds like that of an indentured servant. Seriously, you regularly start work at 8am and end at 1am? What kind of life is that? As someone who's fallen into a rabbit hole where that sort of madness gets normalized, let me remind you: it's not normal. Find somewhere else unless you're making millions?

[tfehring]

If I'm making millions, I'm doing it very gradually. And I am looking for other opportunities. But I should clarify that I don't work from 8am to 1am every day - I probably have one 8am meeting a week on average, and the late nights ebb and flow with the projects I'm working on. The rest of the time, I work roughly 9:30 to 5. I still work more hours than I'd like, and the occasional time-sensitive, coding-heavy projects are brutal, but it's not as bleak as my last comment suggests.

I sincerely appreciate the reminder though - thank you.