Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

I'd never given a lot of thought to it but even the fairly large house I grew up in during the 60s/70s didn't have a dedicated office although there were large bedrooms with desks. I was fortunate enough to have a nice dedicated office before the current situation hit.

One does see a huge contrast on video calls between people in seemingly offices (or, if bedrooms/living rooms, sufficiently stage managed and lit to appear as such) and those obviously balancing laptops in a bedroom or kitchen table.

View on HN

What makes something a dedicated office though? The only two things I can think of would be a phone line (not so much these days) and maybe being somewhat separated/distanced from the rest of the bedrooms and maybe near the front door. That's how I deduced I was an aberration to the family planning from my "bedroom" anyway.

Good acoustics (low echo) is high on my list, and one of the first things I improve when setting up my home offices.

For my situation, it's not even so much about having a door. But having a separated work space/bookshelves (though there are plenty of others throughout the house), lights/audio gear, and generally a separated space that can be pretty messy. In times past, that would be about having lots of paper. Now it's more about having a bunch of computers/cables/etc. isolated from the rest of the house--even if, in practice, I often work elsewhere with a laptop.

What makes it an office? A separate room (or at least separated area, dedicated desk and chair, necessary peripherals and paraphernalia, sufficient electrical outlets and opportunity to not be interrupted.

A desk, and being set aside for only work related activities.

> What makes something a dedicated office though? The only two things I can think of would be a phone line (not so much these days) and maybe being somewhat separated/distanced from the rest of the bedrooms and maybe near the front door.

Some work requires an actual workstation with many cores, memory and beefy GPU.

Some people work on prototype devices with jigs, serial connections power supplies etc.

For some people WiFi does not cut it and you want a nice networking setup.

Other people may work with physical documents so there will be a printer, scanner, mail supplies involved.

I think "near the front door" only matters if you're seeing other people in the office. My office is near the front door but I don't actually need it to be. It's actually kind of inconvenient in our present work-from-home reality because my kid hears me on calls and doesn't understand that I can't play right now; in the long term I might set up an office in the basement, far from everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com