Ask HN: Anyone rather just be alone during work day?

From personal experience: in engineering, people are roughly split into two groups, ones who figure out by themselves, and others who ask. So when I worked in the office (in that particular geo), I put a thick cross on my developer career and added a second chair beside my desk. (I once did timing, and the average was 26 min between interruptions.)

Now I work remotely, in a different geo, and people still want to "talk to me", insist that I open the messenger app etc, call me on whatsapp (which our company prohibits BTW). No way around it. It is all the same people who asked questions when they were engineers, only now they moved higher up.

I am adding this useless personal anecdata only in hope we accumulate a big enough list so that HR and others realize that enough people consider important to be alone to get stuff done.

Some lore in our company tells about overachievers who would get up at 5am to be productive until the bulk of teams arrives at work. It was some 20-30 years ago, these days, one gets up at 5am to catch the train for this 2+-hour commute. Being alone is all we can have.

I don't want to go far, I just want to get my stuff done.

I enjoy the time I spend with most of my coworkers on most of my jobs - when I'm not working. Watercooler conversations, kitchen talk etc.

As soon as I'm working, I find people talking around me, getting up, or even simply being in my field of view, very distracting.

Not an enjoyable situation when you're working with quite a bit of legacy code with both complex logic and a few somewhat complex algorithms.

I try to get in the office earlier than everyone on my team, and I try to at least have a look at tasks that require concentration at that time of the day.

I find the notion that employers are worried that you might slack off working from home absurd, as I believe I'm not some special unique snowflake but part of a large subset of people that function like that.

Locking the door is always an option I guess!

I like working alone sometimes, when I feel like it would be beneficial to do so I just work from home. I couldn't do it all the time though and I enjoy coming into the office, mainly for the banter and hanging out with my colleagues / friends

It usually works better for me to work alone in a conference room, and I can see the people around me walking around so I don't feel like nuts, and yet I can focus on what I was working on.