The #1 Office Perk? Natural Light

Currently working alone in my own windowless office in an almost completely windowless building. Compared to the previous &#x27;open-plan&#x27; gig where I sat opposite opposite Jill-from-Comms and Sales-bro Bryan, it rules so hard.<p>So yeah,&quot;the #1 office perk&quot; for me is not getting interrupted with inane shit every ten minutes.

Oh yes please. I work as a games programmer at a massive studio and it looks like 90% of people here prefer complete darkness during the day, to the point where they have these umbrella-like covers above their desks to cover any light from the lamps that somehow miraculously are still on. Me and few other people occupy a little corner next to a window that we stubbornly refuse to close the blinds on, despite bi-weekly requests to do so from our artists. If I had to work in the darkness I&#x27;d genuinely consider leaving - it gives me a headache.

Natural light is good, but the office isn&#x27;t the place I crave it the most. And as other have alluded to, I&#x27;d <i>much</i> rather have a dingy personal cave than a bright but shared space.<p>So #1 perk for me: enough schedule flexibility that I can ensure I can have some outdoor time during daylight hours every day, even in winter.

My personal experience&#x2F;preference is merely that a &quot;change of scenery&quot; is a highly favorable perk. I have a private office with a window, and after struggling against code for long enough it is so nice to turn my gaze outside and watch the dog park next door.<p>But I say <i>scenery</i> change, because one of my favorite things about my job is that I work off site frequently at industrial plants, agricultural facilities and the like. Its like a moderate vacation to just be away from a desk, even though my laptop is attached to me the entire time. Working in a dingy concrete bunker can be as much of a perk as it is to look out my window.<p>Mostly just monotonous environments tend to be what bothers me most I think. My last job was at a business attached to a mall (you could walk out the doors into the mall food court on the second level). Coffee breaks were often just walking around the downtown core or through the attached public buildings over walkways. Changing your environment is such a massive thing for me to help the day&#x2F;week&#x2F;month&#x2F;years not feel like one long slog

I think some comments are missing the point. I used to work in an office that definitely had &quot;natural light&quot; because it did have windows, but the view from the windows was basically just other grey buildings about 10 metres away. I now work in an office where I can look out and see grass, trees, and the sky, and it&#x27;s much nicer.

Every place I worked, I optimized for a window seat. I would volunteer to sit next to the loudest and stinkiest people if that&#x27;s what it took, because those things didn&#x27;t bother me (noise cancelling headphones and my nose doesn&#x27;t really work anyway). I would sit far away from all the other amenities, or close to them, whichever was worse, just to get a window.<p>Somehow I got really lucky, and in 16 years of working in offices, I spent about 12 of them near a window (thanks in part to large suburban offices of Silicon Valley that offered lots of window seats). And for the most part I didn&#x27;t have to deal with loud or stinky people or being far&#x2F;close to other amenities.<p>Now I work from home, where I can see trees out my window. Sadly, Apple cut some of them down to make room for the offramp to their spaceship, so now I also see lights and power lines, but still tree too.

Am I the only one here who actually likes it dark? It might be healthier with natural light, but my personal preferences has always been darkness.<p>I wonder if it is related to coming from a northern country (Scandinavia) where ~1&#x2F;4 of the year is really dark.

Is this really considered a perk? It is a bit like getting paid is a perk.<p>I work in Germany where direct access to natural sunlight is part of our OH&amp;S policies.

The interesting thing is that too much light can take its toll on productivity as well. When I was working at another company, it was inside an essentially &quot;all glass, modern&quot; building on the top floor overseeing a creek which led to the Bay. Between about 10 am until 3 pm, everyone would always scramble to find whatever random objects they could to block the light because management never paid for any blinds. We&#x27;d grab task boards, company banners, and anything else we could get our hands on so we could block the sun and work. We&#x27;d have to constantly shift them, or ourselves, as the sun changed positions, which created some awkward situations when half the team began to huddle in one small, shady area in the building at peak times. Needless to say, as someone who prefers darker environments, my productivity wasn&#x27;t quite as high as I would have personally liked.

I really wish it was possible to somehow use my laptop outside when it&#x27;s sunny. It&#x27;s a shame to spend the prime hours of the day inside, and then spend all your spare time in the dark at night.<p>I get really jealous of the construction workers when it&#x27;s a nice sunny day outside. I&#x27;ve worked a few different outdoor jobs, and there&#x27;s nothing quite like working on a sunny day, it really lifts the spirit.

Very often on TV when I see office spaces in the US, I see rarely natural lights. They often seem to be underground or inside some refurbished industrial buildings.<p>Here in France we all have well lit offices with natural lights and windows. Well not all but the vast majority.<p>To me it seems punitive to work in a blind&#x2F;artificially lit office.

Not a perk. I fired an employer for failing to provide natural sunlight for a reasonable amount of time throughout the day. I’ve also rejected offers involving lack of sunlight. One place adjusted to this requirement quite well. Apparently I was the first candidate to even bring this up when I asked about the working environment.<p>The cost to my health is measurable.

That&#x27;s a great excuse to keep open space floor plan. &quot;This way all 100 of you can have windows.&quot;

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;products0.imgix.drizly.com&#x2F;ci-natural-light-4e47720c32369068.png?auto=format%2Ccompress&amp;fm=jpeg&amp;q=20" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;products0.imgix.drizly.com&#x2F;ci-natural-light-4e47720c...</a>

Every day I am the first to show up at my company, and I get maybe ~ 1 hour of nice, quiet work time with low lighting from the windows with overhead lights off.<p>Then the second person who comes in every day shows up and flips all the overhead lights on every god damn day.<p>When I’m working and the lights flip, I get a sense of rage and depression. I think it will be the reason why I quit this job.

Maybe natural light is a perk because it is nice to have (sometimes), but a door&#x2F;actual office with a lock and soundproofing would then be a minimum baseline requirement.<p>(I’d honestly prefer windowless to a window I couldn’t control, too. Windows with effective shades are nice, particularly if they can be opened for fresh air, but I’d be completely fine with a windowless office with a substantial door, great artificial full spectrum lighting, and HVAC under my control 24x7. Especially if my door and lock had a security rating.

I highly value a good view, and lucked into a lovely space on the 8th floor in a corner with large picture windows on 2 sides, and views of MIT and East Kendall Square nearby, and Central and Harvard square in the distance. The bottom half of my view is very green, mostly trees, with a few buildings nestled among them. The top half is blue sky, white clouds.<p>I watch the slow progress of several buildings under construction. A huge tower near Central has appeared, the stairway core apparently. Two big projects to the north also, near the cinema and Donnelly field.<p>Soon I&#x27;ll see the first yellows, reds and oranges of fall.<p>I enjoy the view so much that I brought in binoculars to see more detail. I have a sort of hobby of identifying landmarks visually and then finding them on google maps. This can be surprisingly difficult to do. The relative scale of things is surprising. Things that loom large in my view don&#x27;t look big on the map, and vice versa.<p>I can visually trace a good portion of my bike path to work, as I live near the top of a distant hill. I identify the landmarks on that route.<p>Despite these treasures I only remember to look up at the view a few times a week. I sometimes forget to open the blinds for days at a time. Very sad! I&#x27;m happy that this article reminded me of this great pleasure. It&#x27;s trite, but life is short; enjoy the view.

I work in a SCIF. The most natural light I get at my desk is the sun peeking out of the blinds in the morning. In addition, we keep most of the lights off, for that underground bunker aesthetic I&#x27;m assuming. One of the SCIFs here doesn&#x27;t even have windows.<p>I don&#x27;t mind it that much, and I usually leave work while the sun is still out. I can see some people having an issue with it, however.

I am curious whether it is the light or the view that makes the difference. If it is the light I wonder if a technical fix is possible: a short waveguide and&#x2F;or a few mirrors into a &quot;micro sun&quot; diffuser in the room instead of a light bulb? It should be relatively cheap if the benefits are as big as claimed.

Our old office looked like a cave and the new one has bright lighting and windows everywhere. I vastly prefer the old one, but most people prefer the new.

We just moved into a new office and one of the best things about it is that we now have small offices and I can keep the curtains closed and the lights off all day. Why would you want <i>more</i> light, especially natural light ?<p>I never open my curtains at home either.

Several people in my team (sysadmins) go to reasonably extreme lengths to eliminate natural light from their working environment...

Natural light or artificial light that recreates the natural light spectrum is good. Everything else is bad.<p>There is an overabundance of sharp blue light in most modern light sources. I highly recommend either using tinted computer glasses when working or something like f.lux<p>Even worse are flickering lights. Even at a high (nearly imperceptible) frequency, I have seen so many colleagues(myself included) suffer from headaches due to them.<p>What should be done? Either invest in better smoother lighting for your workers or let plenty of natural light inside.

Rarely discussed is the fact that professional phography lighting has high CRI and is not that expensive. There are plenty of LED panels on Amazon that can be rigged to work as desk lights.<p>Also, you can buy a professinal CRI meter so that you can get an idea of what you’re buying here.<p>Outside LED there are also high-CRI CFL lights which are easier to fit into overhead lights compared to LED. Still they need to be measured.

I sometimes wonder how light fixtures that mimic natural light are not a thing yet. They exist, but somehow they remained a niche product.

If a plant can&#x27;t grow there, I don&#x27;t wanna work there. (Grow lights &amp; hydroponics are just The Matrix for plants)

I very much prefer natural light to artificial light. I&#x27;ve wondered, regarding lighting windowless areas:<p>Why don&#x27;t buildings put natural light collectors (&quot;windows&quot;) on exterior surfaces, and use light redirectors (&quot;mirrors&quot; and maybe &quot;fiber&quot;) to shunt the light to places that otherwise lack it. The light could be output through the same fixtures that host artificial light sources. (Sensors and dimmers on artificial light sources could compensate for variations in natural light.)<p>It would be much more pleasant than artificial light and it would save energy. Perhaps the ROI isn&#x27;t high enough.

This is an unpopular opinion. You can train yourself to work in relatively noisy environments. The mind is plastic and adaptable. It is not going to happen right away. The first step is to not plug in your headphones when you go to a coffee shop. Enjoy the ambient chatter. Don&#x27;t try to do any work. After a while, you may try reading a book or a newspaper. It is my belief that headphones can breed dependency on them to focus. Kind of like you may be anchoring your flow state to the simple act of donning your headphones. It might not work for you. Especially if you pre-decide it won&#x27;t work. Remember the mind is a powerful tool. It may work for you if you start trying out life without headphones.

I&#x27;m a mechanical engineer. Engineering workplaces are notorious for poor sunlight exposure. Even the big tech companies develop their products in windowless rooms. And forget it if you have to go anywhere near a factory floor, it feels like you&#x27;re in a cave.

#1 Office perk: Not being required to be in the office.

Natural or not, the most important for me is not to get on my eyes or reflecting on the screen.

Totally agree. I have been at my current job for 5 years now and I feel that the lack of light is impacting my mental and physical health. This is the number one reason I am starting to look for another job.<p>Any job where I can just have a window looks really good to me now.

For the most part I agree with the sentiment of this article. However, I am currently in my office with sunglasses on because of the abundance of &#x27;natural light&#x27;.. It can definitely be a hindrance at certain times, but overall it is a perk.

or CO2 concentration under 1000 ... in our building they somehow trying to save money on air conditioning so we don&#x27;t consider air in the office to be &#x27;fresh&#x27; as there&#x27;s usually ~1500ppm - 2000ppm CO2 concentration.

+1. I sit next to a window and enjoy it very much. I used to sit in a middle of the hall and it was so freaking depressing - no daylight at all, always lamps that I needed to ask a guy who didn&#x27;t care to swap with me.

Ugh, no. My eyes ask for a place as dark as possible, so I can use a white-on-black theme and lower my monitor&#x27;s brightness all the way down.<p>The #1 office perk for me is silence. Game sudios are so noisy, holly cow!

I also read you can&#x27;t fake it with a picture of a sunny day or whatever. I have no windows so I make sure to at least walk past one on the way to the printer and back.

I you doubt the benefits of natural light, here is a story from a good friend of mine. Few years back when he was in college, he took an appointment with a doctor because started to feel depressed with no obvious reason (no family drama, health issues whatsoever...). Very quickly the doc asked him where he was spending most of his time, answer: in a classroom with tiny windows, curtain closed and artificial lights.

I think this is a testament to how bad flourescent and much LED and Halogen lighting actually is. This is not a limit of engineering, it&#x27;s a consequence of trying to save money on lighting and energy without any consideration for the ergonomics of the light output. Staring at flicker all day is highly unpleasant (but so is trying to see a screen when natural sunlight glare is shining on it).

At some point I the worst of both worlds — a desk directly underneath a corner frosted glass skylight&#x2F;window combination, meaning impossibly bright light in the early afternoon (making my display quite hard to read), and no effective nearby artificial lighting when it started getting darker. Took me maybe a month to find another job after my boss insisted I couldn&#x27;t move my desk elsewhere.

While my room in the office (with 7 cubes in it) does have 4 windows, they are blocked with strong black metal mesh for security reasons. Also, most of the desks in the room face away from the window, so none of us are actually looking towards windows. It&#x27;s not ideal, but I use breaks and lunch to just quickly walk around the block and get some perspective on obstacles I&#x27;m facing.

I luckily currently work in a place with a good view and natural light (though the ceiling light is on all the time too). I worked at many places where the engineers worked next to a clean room so everything was surrounded by closed off walls. I like to call it the dungeon. It really sucked during the winter since we do not notice how much snow accumulated until we left.

This is amusing to me, because when I was at Pixar, many of the shader writers and lighting TDs <i>wanted</i> an internal office, where they could control exactly the amount and type of light in their workspace. Many had nearly pitch black offices, so they could better see subtle differences in changes to their lighting and shading code.

Natural Light is a big thing, but the #1 Office Perk is not working in an open office. I would trade the open office I work in, which has a ton of windows and natural light, for a regular office, even just cubicles in a heartbeat.<p>I love the natural light, but I hate the noise and visual distraction 10 times more than I love natural light.

Haha, where I live we have no natural light even outside half of the year (near the arctic circle). And we are most productive during the dark season because there isn&#x27;t anything else to do, or any distractions nagging on your mind (like going to the beach etc) :)

I used to sit in a cubicle next to a window in a high rise. I would always get sun shining in my eyes and my face would get red sometimes. I usually ended up with strained eyes and later found out the uvb radiation can cause skin cancer. So I&#x27;m not convinced.

This wasn&#x27;t the &quot;natural light&quot; I was expecting. I thought this was going to be about a office with free cheap beer.<p>I know of a few workplaces in the US that do feature free alcohol at work, but many times out of 10 someone gets way too drunk and ruins the fun for everyone.

I have my first-ever desk by a window. Naturally, other coworkers jockeyed to also sit near the windows, so they could promptly complain it&#x27;s too bright and insist on lowering the shades.

I love natural light, and our office has huge windows and is at the top floor, but unfortunately many developers prefer working in the dark. It&#x27;s a bit depressing sometimes.

I was at a company once where they were out of cubical space. There was an available office that had windows so they put some people in there and boarded up the windows.

I work remote and I lease a private office. I looked at 3 different options and ended up choosing the smallest one because it had the most natural light.

Working in a beautiful glass building with very much natural light i still have to claim our bar&#x2F;free booze is what gets me to work every day.

Isn’t having a good boss the #1 office perk?

Natural light is overrated. We programmers are olms, sitting in the cellar with the mushrooms.

In some civilized countries natural light is actually a requirement, by law. Not in the server closet etc, but in your office it is. You can, of course, adjust the curtains or whatever to get the exact amount you prefer (which typically changes throughout the day, as the sun passes)

This is so sad.

#2 : a door.

no. The #1 office perk is a real freaking office. Not a worn spot on a table and an ikea chair.

For me, it&#x27;s aircon

lol, the anti-remote propaganda gets more ridiculous every day.

I always have all the blinds closed in my apartment and I work from home. I get very little natural light. Any reason I should force myself to get more?

I thought the article was talking about Natural Light <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.naturallight.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.naturallight.com&#x2F;</a>