I currently work at home 3-4 days a week with the others being in the office, usually for meetings and collaborating on things.
The office is an open floor plan with very poor noise reduction. When not in meetings in that environment, it is hard to get work done even with headphones. Visual and audio distractions persist. That said, there are times where getting together is helpful.
When contacted by companies, I ask about telecommuting. Many play the "it is up to you and your manager once you are established" game. Result - thanks but no thanks.
Time spent in the car/traffic is productivity lost.
RJ stepped up. He volunteered to write the Amiga OS from scratch, entirely by himself. Of course, he had one major stipulation: no one was to bother him for the next 18 months. No meetings, no phone calls, no "Hey RJ, wanna go get lunch?" For the first 12 of those 18 months, RJ wrote the code in the office. But then, it was decided that the 30 minutes he was driving from home to the office and back again each day was too detrimental to his progress. RJ moved into a hotel near the office with just his clothes and a computer.
I have a daily commute time of 1h each direction but I travel by train. I've been doing this for 2 years now and intent to keep it this way because I find it a lot easier to focus on reading than when I am at home. When I don't feel like reading I listen to podcasts or reflect my work.
Fair enough. My point is being more mindful and deliberate about things, and not taking the default of "I have to come into work." You don't have to. I'm certainly not suggesting that you have to work remotely, either.
Time spent in the car/traffic is productivity lost.
Not necessarily. Thinking is still the number one thing we as software people need to do. A 20 minute commute is a great forced time to not do anything else but drive and think. Even when I worked from home for 2+ years, I still drove somewhere else nearly everyday to work in addition to going to the gym.
I'm happy to be working in an office again. My current floor plan is much different than your though. I share an office with my teammate, and it's almost too quite through the day.
The office is an open floor plan with very poor noise reduction. When not in meetings in that environment, it is hard to get work done even with headphones. Visual and audio distractions persist. That said, there are times where getting together is helpful.
When contacted by companies, I ask about telecommuting. Many play the "it is up to you and your manager once you are established" game. Result - thanks but no thanks.
Time spent in the car/traffic is productivity lost.