I notice you don’t mention “remote work”. And yet for me as a programmer, there’s no better way to improve my productivity.

Being able to work in a quiet environment; to have multi-hour sessions of productivity without having someone wander by wanting to socialize; conversely, being able to just go for a walk if I’m stuck on something without worrying what people think — nothing else makes me work better.

I’m tremendously responsive when remote. Indeed, I do a better job, because when someone pings me with a question, I can actually do my research before I respond, and present a full solution, not sit there with someone watching me while I desperately type.

Also, the idea of commuting to the office each day, wasting not only an hour or two but some quantity of the world’s resources, seems weird to me now.

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You know, I wouldn’t mind offices if we had some privacy.

But now, we never do. The reason I left Google after five years was that they just kept cramming more people in, and removing partitions. By the end, there were seven people within an arm’s length of me.

I found I’d work at home before coming in, stay the minimum time possible, and then work from home again. I’d always get excellent reviews, and yet they’d always say, “You need to spend more time in the office”, even though they knew I was working long hours at home.

No one loves cubicle farms, but those are better than nothing. But here in Amsterdam, I had some interest in a programming position, and then I saw the workspace — well over 100 programmers in one single room, with no partitions or any form of privacy whatsoever. The recruiter didn’t understand why this might be an issue for me, and kept pushing details like, “You get six monitors!” and “Beer nights!”