What is your ideal work environment?

Ideal?

Proper office, no cubicles - with a door, which I will wallpaper with comics over time. The office doesn't need to be big. I do like a whiteboard for planning. Windows I can open for some fresh air, sunlight, and a view of something green that isn't just pavement or the side of a building. There will be a coffee pot and a drawer filled with liquor and tea and simple snacks like peanuts. There might be a small microwave depending on how much time I spend there. I also like a nice big wide-open desk, flat, preferably corner-oriented, nothing fancy on it, just some drawers. There will be three monitors on the desk - a massive widescreen main and two standard screen on either side.

I'll be needing a machine build/teardown/testing area too, usually that takes the form of another big straight desk along the opposite wall. The people in the office below me will get used to the sound of chairs rolling around above them. A small closet for parts is handy. Tile floors are better than carpets. Any chair will do as long as it's got wheels, reclines just a bit, and has a nice stiff back with good support. I'll be using headphones with massive noise-canceling cans, but there will be a subwoofer under the desk that will get use when I'm working late and no one else is there to complain about the racket.

Outside the office I like a nice big open space - company lounge/break room, no real preference beyond the openness and some comfy furniture. Stuffy halls in cramped skyscrapers always bothered me. I'll go out to eat 2-3 times a week, just walk down the street to a restaurant or possibly have something delivered. Once a week that lunch will start at 2pm and I won't be coming back to the office afterwards unless it's on fire. Over time I will acquire (or engineer) a posse of troublemakers who will also join me on that lunch. HR will tell new employees not to hang out with me. They'll do it anyway.

On the boat.

Living in Istanbul close to the Bosphorus, there are always boats going across and along it. There is one line that goes from my town to Besiktas, takes an hour, and I hop on it from time to time just to work on some things or read a book, going down to Besiktas and coming back to home.

Also, in a park.

I like going to parks in Emirgan and Besiktas and working on a picnic bench (the ones that look like a truncated -A-).

Otherwise, at home. I don't have much work experience (will have to start these days), but I've been to offices and I hate them. People interrupt you all the time, can even have problems because you go to the toilet too often. Plus, when you switch jobs, you have to get used to a totally new place. I don't like working in cafes, I get bored. Add to that that I'm a night owl. My dream is getting a freelance remote job, but I'll have to do at least some office work to build a CV for it. If I can ultimately land a research & teaching job in academia, which is my plan for now, IDK if I'll be able to adapt. I've been spoilt by freedom, (un)fortunately...

I love my home office, I custom built my desk using aluminium pipe, Kee-lite fittings. It's 3 2x10s deep and 5' 5" long. Now that I have a planer I need to refinish the top because despite doing my best with an orbital sander its not even close to flat. It fits 3 27" monitors and I have lots to spare.

I'm not super happy with my Ikea office chair but with a memory foam seat added on makes it acceptable until I save up for a successor.

Being home allows me to be there for my 3 month old baby and wife, but we've worked out a good system to avoid impacting my productivity, we'll see how that holds up once she can get up and down stairs by herself.

I have never had a proper "closed door" office, but have worked in a series of different workspaces in the spectrum of cubicles, open offices, and workrooms.

In my current role, I'm half engineer and half creative, and I realize that I have different working habits depending on whatever my task at hand is. I think—above any particular hard-set structure—flexibility is key, so long as you still have a place that you can call home and have a place you can get some privacy (but both don't have to be the same space, a call room with a frosted glass door could be plenty sufficient.)

Ideally, I'd like to work in one large workroom with my direct team, with 8-10 people. My peers and I have personal desks up against the walls of the room, with dividers. These desks are adjustable sit/stand desks, and have dividers between the desks to give a bit more isolation. Mandatory equipment: 2nd or 3rd external display, and any user's particular poison of headphone configuration (headphone choices are highly debated by many!)

In the center of my ideal workroom would be a bar height conference table, where the entire team can conveine as a group and meet, and would also be a good place to throw down treats like donuts/etc. I prefer bar height conference tables, because I feel that sitting promotes laziness and that there's nothing better than standing or leaning against a bar—I'm not an agile-head that says every meeting needs to be standing and there should certainly be barstools—but I think having a central flexible space in your workroom that's configured differently than just a sitting desk is cool.

Ideally, there would be a snack table or fridge stocked with drinks nearby that the company pays for. I have never had the privilege of having this, but think I'd enjoy it. (I presently work in a workplace that prohibits mini fridges, but my husband's team gets away by having theirs by throwing a (powered off) mini computer in the fridge with a LED light and having a post-it note on the glass door that says "testing in progress"—naturally, the rest of the fridge is filled with drinks.)

Now, two things I can't control in a work environment, but wish I could:

• I wish everyone would bring notebooks (or sufficient digital writing implements such as an iPad + Apple Pencils) to meetings instead of laptops, unless the laptops were critical for their presence at the meeting. I just think that bringing your laptop gives you an excuse to distract yourself or hide from the meeting. (This can also contribute to the "we didn't talk about that" or "you didn't involve me in this discussion" perspective—they were just checked out during a meeting when they could have spoken up.) I don't take comprehensive notes in meetings, but I'll write down a sort of stream of consciousness from the meeting—usually headlines of slides, key bullet points, and other random thoughts that occur, reserving a page in my notebook where something in this meeting gave me an idea for something that I'm working on. I may be biased, but I think notebooks keep me more focused and on the plot, and it's very easy for me to sketch out an idea. (For anyone curious, Field Notes are my small notebooks of choice, and the Studio Neat Panobook is my medium notebook of choice.) My husband (a pure engineering manager) makes fun of me for my obsession with notebooks, but has remarked that our design team in our company is obsessive about only using notebooks during meetings.

• Because my core office idea is so focused on team collaboration, a P1 to any productivity is having a team that knows how to collaborate well without taking feedback personally. I'm presently on a team of hotheads who feel like they're the entitled individual saviors of our business that can't collaborate to save their lives. I put in so much work trying to kill this mentality, and it only upsets them. (I love the irony that is my work life, I'm actually working in what is close to my ideal workspace—we have a large workroom with a connected conference room—but I'm on the worst and least collaborative team I've ever been on in my entire career.)

Bridge of the Star Trek enterprise.

A three-person office was my ideal when I was working in a team.

I had my direct overseer, and my more creative colleague within chair-sliding distance, but we all had our own desks, headphones, and a long list of things that needed to get done yesterday.

I was able to get a serious amount of work done in that environment, especially as we were all comfortable with switching between working shoulder-to-shoulder or by ourselves without any help or supervision.

However, when I was doing 3D modelling work for an architect, I would have adored a private office. So. Many. Interruptions. I was the only computer artist in the building, and everyone wanted their work, and expected me to pull a TV-ready rendering of their particular building out in ten minutes or so. Sorry, converting your CAD drawings to 3D takes a little bit more time, especially when you don't make the CAD drawing exact, and instead add an annotation.

In that kind of space, I needed a door I could close, announcing to the world, "Sorry, I need to actually work hard right now."

However, working remotely, or as an individual contractor, all I've needed is:

• A comfortable chair
• A decent desk
• A laptop
• A notebook
• A whiteboard
• A continuous supply of coffee

Gotta throw my support behind ergonomic desks. I have desks from the human solution both at the actual office and my home office. Been using them for 3.5 years now and don't know how I survived without them.