A clean, cubicle-free environment, but with desks in a small-ish room, with no more than 3 other people that you can get along with. There should be spaces for professional and personal belongings. The building should be near amenities like convenience stores and restaurants, and as a bonus, located such that cars aren't necessary for commuting.
To me personally, it doesn't matter if I am sitting among a group of 30 people or 3 people, I don't want to hear my coworkers' typing, coughing, eating, drinking, phone calls, chair adjustments, conversations, etc.
Those are all distractions that I can do without and that I think I am personally more sensitive to than others may be. Not to mention that in a shared office you are sharing the lighting, temperature, decor, etc. In a private office those are all things that I control and are personalized to my preferences and comfort.
Agreed, the quieter, the better. For myself, I share a room with another programmer and 2 designers. Things are usually pretty quiet until our manager steps in. Our CEO came by when the manager was off, and noted how quiet it was.
5-6' cubicles, when combined with some white noise, carpets, and acoustic tile ceilings, make for great isolation in a building where making offices is not practical.
Personally, I prefer an office or room with 2-3 other people at max, but I'll take cubicles over open floor plans every day.
I have worked on a noon to midnight in office schedule for long periods of time and noticed most people sharing the office with you take it psychologically as noon to five even when you are actually in office 50% longer than them.
There was no manager above at that point. I loved to do it because it was super efficient for me. You get into the office when some problems had already came up and people already had tried a bit of effort to solve them themselves. Then you just do rounds after lunch and fix them. Then after people went home it was a good time to review code and catch up on the personal work.
This is office politics. If employee value to a company isn't immediately identifiable and measurable outside of "hours with butt in chair" then said company is incapable of properly valuing its employees (the exception being a company that just wants to bill hours for a "butt in a chair"). It means the entire process is based entirely on individual perception. This leads to its own set of problems where individuals game the system to be perceived as harder working but in reality may actually be doing less work or a larger amount of trivial "busy" work. This is a failure and will only lead to a culture of resentment and game playing within the company.
This isn't the "I get done in 3 hours that which would take Bob 8!" discussion that HN loves, this is someone just working odd hours.
I very often work 6a-2p and I will occasionally get odd looks or the random comment when I am packing up for the day an hour or less after people return from lunch. If you're there when someone arrives, they assume you got there 5 minutes ago, not 3 hours, at least subconsciously.
