I am a very recent grad and landed a job as a developer at a local company. I have worked at this company for about a month.
The problem
I live in a suburb more than an hour away from work which equates to 10-15 hours of transit weekly. I have had a hard time focusing as we develop on an open floor concept office space which lends itself to many distractions. What's worse is that my boss sits right behind me... which means I am literally being watched for 7.5 hours directly by my boss...
As much as I love programming and applied mathematics, I'm having a really hard time putting in my 100% which is unfair both to myself and my employer. I knew something was wrong when I went from thinking about programming all day to watching the clock every few minutes to see how much longer I had left before I could go home...
Why I want to work remote?
I have had an extremely productive graduate school career. This was due to both the fact that I worked for an amazing PI and the fact that I worked remote 2 days a week (which were by far my most productive days). I found that remote work allowed me to treat programming more as a "hobby" than "work" which led to great results as I was not flooded/surrounded by HR/bureaucracy, workplace cliques, etc.
My question
How soon is it "safe" to ask to work remotely 1-2 days a week? I have worked at this company for under a month and am still on a probation period. I am concerned about what my employer will think of me if I ask this early (we do have some people working remotely). It's clear to me, however, that I cannot continue like this.