The problem with open office plans is that it takes just one noisy person to spoil it for everybody. If managed carefully and actively, they can work -- it just takes an manager willing to correct bad behavior or send sick people home.
Where I work, I have a budding tupperware percussionist, three imminent victims of whooping cough, some parents managing high-maintenance offspring over cell phones, and one guy who conducts teleconferences with his desk phone. So I often sneak off to empty conference rooms with a laptop if I'm trying to concentrate.
I have ADHD, meaning that open office is great to distract me...
But also, one of the symptons of ADHD, with the "H" there, is that people must move, in my particular case one of the things I tend to do is tap my nails on the desk, use tupperware as drums, or if a actual musical instrument is nearby, even if I dunno how to play it, I play it.
So, ADHD person in open office not only has terrible productivity due to other people disrupting, but also disrupts everyone else.
To me this is terrible, since now that I know all this (and I've been fired multiple times), I've been trying, and failing, to find remote work.
One important thing to note for people reading this is that hyperactivity doesn't always persist into adulthood with the other symptoms or is greatly reduced and is often turned inward (mental fidgeting).
As far as your firings go, if you haven't watched this video and/or read this doctor's books they really help with understanding exactly what you're dealing with: https://youtu.be/SCAGc-rkIfo
It's long but worth watching at faster playback speed and in manageable chunks. Key takeaways: "Attention deficit" is less of a symptom and more of a measurable consequence of other symptoms: Impaired inhibition/impulse control, excessive irrelevant activity and impaired persistence (think discipline). Once you understand why you fail you can start addressing or working around your gaps, particularly the ones that any medication you may be on fail to address.
I just got up to the part where he basically says that people with ADHD basically don't have an inner monologue. Is that right? If so why have I never heard this before?
That sound horrendously wrong. Maybe for certain things we don't notice, but I have an inner monologue nearly 100% of the time (alongside other types of thought).
Yeah, a few seconds' web searching returns legions of diagnosed ADHD people with highly energetic inner monologues. It does kind of throw some doubt on the rest of the talk, given that he essentially says that ADHD is caused by the lack of inner voice leading to a lack of executive function and inability to control responses to stimuli.
I believe the theory is that the inner voice is delayed or diminished, not removed entirely. It's been some time since I watched it but I assume he's using hyperbole or generalizing for the audience. This is a talk for parents to understand their kids.
In his papers and books he argues that the inner voice is essentially broken because it's either incapable of helping regulate behavior and/or doesn't manifest itself during the decision making process. Executive function and its various components are impaired, delayed or not working together the way they should.
I have ADHD too. Have you looked into fidget toys? They dramatically cut down on my toe-tapping and fidgeting. Also the incidence of distracting fidgeting goes down when I'm at a good level of meds+therapy.
I might also add that (this obviously depends on local laws but) you can see if there's any disability protections you can take advantage of. Where your company can work with you to help you work better, or at worst, at least, not fire you just over a disability.
It's too bad people like you can't sue for millions because these stupid companies have such intolerable office environments. I can't think of anything else that's going to get these stupid companies to change their ways.
Things used to be a lot better 15+ years ago, when we had cubicles. It wasn't a panacea (since you could still hear your neighbors), but the cube farms I've worked in were much quieter than these idiotic open-plan offices, and it was so much easier to concentrate.
Here in the UK, they just skipped the cubicle stage altogether and cut from smaller offices to massive open-plan floors in one fell swoop about 20 years ago ... :(
Came here to say this. The fidgets are known to help with focus and thought, so if I can't fidget, I work noticeably more poorly. It's very difficult to notice them already.
Oddly enough, I can be very helpful to others in an open space, but I've never managed to get my own work done.
You've recognized some of the problems you encounter with ADHD. Have you attempted to take corrective action? Instead of having hard objects around that make noise have something soft to play with. In the end you're responsible for your actions.
Easier said than done I suspect - people aren't necessarily aware of their own subconscious fidgeting when it's happening. How do you even build awareness of what you're doing subconsciously?
When my cubical desk is shaking like I'm in an earthquake because a coworker in a connected desk is bouncing their leg, they're more than happy to knock it off when I ask them to. That they were doing it in the first place takes them by surprise.
This happens often enough to be distracting, but rarely enough that it's hard to build a habit of catching themselves in the act.
I suppose one could build some kind of seismometer and attach it to an audio cue, but starting on a new hardware projects isn't exactly less of a distraction... and I'm not exactly immune to the siren call of bouncing my leg, either.
> In the end you're responsible for your actions.
Sure. But my take on open offices, is that they're distraction-inducing by design. Most of the rationale around them - aside from cost cutting - seems to be around such things as "It's easier to talk to people" / "see what they're working on" / ...
Who's responsible for the action of creating that environment?
My favourite home/office made finger toys are when you take 2 of the little plastic protectors off of the ports of screencards (and/or cables). They're a great size to stick your fingers a bit into and they usually fit inside each other nicely (it's ok if they're loose, but really great if they stick nicely). They're pretty durable too, unless if you play too hard they can last a very long time.
I know this is tricky but have you ever tried explaining the condition at an interview? Along the lines of 'it would be best if I had a seat in an enclosed space for at least part of the day'.
I have done this many times. I generally wait until after the offer has been made. At that point the company is convinced in my work output. They should want to maximize their investment. My hope is that asking for specific work accommodations to maximize performance comes across as conscientious and carrying about the value I deliver.
I phrase it along the lines of "I have trouble concentrating, so if I have to work in an open office environment I would perform the best if I face a wall".
Unless a person have skills that are in extreme demand, I'm certain that the result would be that you're either not given the job, or you promised that the company will work something out, but never actually act upon it. It's not that I believe that companies are evil in that sense. It's just more stuff to deal with, stuff that's not really important to anyone but that single employee.
Take Alphabet's Q2 Earnings[1] and note that in the 3 months ending June 30, 2016, Alphabet generated 6.9B$ of free cash flow. That is after all the expenses they could think up to take out of it like building new data centers, offices, snacks, google I/O attendee gifts, whatever. Now divide that by the number of employees, 66,500. That means that there was just over $105,000 per employee in free cash flow. If they spent 5% of that, on a per employee basis, that would give them $1,750 per month for additional office space for that employee. Really posh office space is like $20/sq ft per month so divide that by $20 and you get 87 square feet of really nice office, add that to the 1/4 of a cube that employees currently get and you have 100 sq feet or a 10' x 10' room for each and every employee.
So no, with a 5% hit to their free cash flow they could give every single employee an office, or at least their own 10' x 10' cube, but they they would rather that money sit in cash or cash equivalents earning basically a couple of cents on the dollar.
Since the investment rate of return is about 2% for cash equivalents, and the productivity rate of return would be on the order of at least 5%, you could say they were being dollar wise and productivity foolish.
> Since the investment rate of return is about 2% for cash equivalents, and the productivity rate of return would be on the order of at least 5%, you could say they were being dollar wise and productivity foolish.
Would that increase be in individual productivity or team productivity? I wouldn't be surprised if the aggregate productivity goes down after moving into offices. I would love to read any papers that touch on this, if any research has been done.
I am a fan[1] of open offices, they bring certain efficiencies to team dynamics. If I want to see if someone is busy, I look up/around. If they look like they are in the zone, I send and IM and walk over. Listening in on ambient conversations in my vicinity when taking breaks/waiting for compiles is very useful as well - it's the extended version of the "watercooler effect" where I keep up to date on things I don't directly work on and I occasionally provide solutions before the issue is raised via email or group chat.
1. I am not easily distracted, I can shut out external stimuli. Usually, when I'm focusing on something (work, TV, book), you will have to tear my attention from the activity, and it will take several attempts. To my dismay, I read this makes me more susceptible to hypnosis.
Its both, (individual and team productivity). The challenge is that people are different and their maximum productivity may be in an office or it may be in a small group setting.
One of the startups IBM acquired had some pretty solid data analysis they had done on the issue which was pretty clear for their teams.
My point though was that for high margin "info" businesses (where the product required no raw materials to manufacture) the cost of the office isn't an issue. Reading the recent Instapainting post is a good example, this guy is clearing $400K/year he can give himself a nice office to work out of.
The issue is not force everyone to be in private offices 100% of the time. The issue is give everyone a place to go that's private so when they need to have quiet/alone/distraction-free time, then can have it.
Granted, I generally assume laptops, and many folks probably have larger desktop setups, but it's the choice factor here that is always ignored during optimizations for "efficiency".
Until you can test, say, 3-6 months of privates offices for those who want/need them vs open-plan for everyone, you won't be able to get usable comparisons.
Just the costs of the decor and other accommodations would probably outweigh the costs of having internal walls and maybe a tab bit more floor space (even tho I have a strong suspicion that traditional offices are actually more space friendly).
Cubicles and small team offices do not take much more space, in fact they can often be more space friendly since there isn't that much open space needed in order for the office not to feel like a sweatshop and you also save a lot of space on quiet rooms and meeting rooms.
duct work for ventilating multiple smaller offices properly is problematic vs just having one big open space. I'm not sure what fire codes may have to say about it either. ventilation was one issue that was brought up to me years ago when asked for input on a new office revamp. Somehow the owners and exec team still all managed to get new private offices with ventilation, but the dev team didn't...
I'm almost certain that it's legal in US to have people work in a windowless room, but I doubt that most people would accept it. So you're also restricted in how "deep" your building can be, if you discard the open office plan. Meaning that you'd have to build higher, or have more buildings.
our coworking space is almost all windowless - I don't mind, others don't mind (or are still members, despite it). But we've still got ventilation in each room - it would get unbearable quickly without decent HVAC.
It's often worse in that the noisy person hinders their coworkers, while no one hinders them -- particularly in a work culture that lauds "open" and discourages a limiting response on the part of others towards that person.
Meanwhile, the quiet people are not keeping the noisy one from their work or working effectively if and when they choose to concentrate.
Result? The noisy people "succeed".
I consider it a cousin of bullying.
And, it explains a lot about contemporary Western corporate culture -- to its detriment, in my opinion.
Right, blame the worker who has no choice but to work surrounded by another 100 people. Don't blame the business who cut corners on structural costs. Open offices don't exist because it's "better" for anyone; they exist because businesses save millions of dollars in building costs, and conveniently label it as a "cultural" thing.
Just because we're both forced to work in the same room doesn't mean my coworkers have no choice but to force me to listen to their political rants etc. If I complained, I'd be labeled as "antisocial".
How is it bullying any more than if you were to complain about him being too social?
Your perceived antisociality could be almost as bothersome to him as his sociability is to you.
I don't mean to dismiss your concern, and I can relate even, but workplaces are social environments and (apart from political rants which might border on offensive) I see no reason why you're a victim here.
I didn't call it bullying. I called it a "cousin" of bullying.
And, for the record, I include in this work communication, not necessarily -- nor even primarily -- personal, "social" communication.
The loud guy I remember who would stand up, raise his voice, and shout conversations across aisles of cubes.
The "best practice" that shrunk our cubes to "corners", sitting almost shoulder to shoulder with 3 - 4 feet between us. People nonetheless holding hour long cube meetings and in-person screenshares and whatnot.
Getting a project completed and passed by a coworker, to find multiple, obvious bugs within the first five minutes. Because that person had no depth of attention whatsoever.
The best developers leaping at nascent work-from-home, because it was the one time they could really, consistently get stuff done.
But challenge HR on any of this, and "best practice" and a mark on your own record.
Asking a coworker, very politely and directly, if they could be a bit quieter -- in this case, in fact, when they were engaged in extensive, repeated personal communication of a non-urgent nature (talking with friends, on the phone and in cube visits, sometimes for 2 - 3 hours, day after day) -- and having this come back to you as a formal complaint to and "correction" -- to you -- from HR for your having asked.
Consistently, I observed the loud people "winning" by dint of being loud.
Those top developers were more senior and from a time when the company was smaller and provide private offices. That was how the company attracted and held them, in the first place. They were "vested" in their careers and families and technical debt and, in this technologically conservative area, somewhat "trapped" in their current positions.
Like a frog in the pot, new senior management and HR kept making things more miserable. If remote work hadn't come on the table when it did, I suspect they would have lost more of them in the near future.
As it was, being senior, they were provide this opportunity and had the leverage to use to to escape what was becoming an untenable office environment.
For those stuck at the office, it became a matter of working around "shouting guy", neighbors' cube meetings, and the like. A culture increasingly of interruption, distraction, and superficial attention.
I feel your pain. One thing that used to really irk me was a manager (with an office) that would have loud speakerphone conversations with the door wide open...
I used to use ear buds to block it out, but I don't recommend it. It actually does damage your hearing. I didn't figure that out for a while. Luckily my hearing has seemed to improve a bit.
I highly recommend over the ear noise cancelling head phones. They get rid of the office A/C sounds, turn the volume down on voices and are less damaging.
I'm curious... could you explain what you specifically meant by ear-buds being damaging to your hearing? Were you blasting the volume to drown out environment noise or were you talking about noise-canceling earphones?
(I personally use noise-canceling earphones a lot, and the only bad thing I've heard is that they may cause vertigo in some people...)
I was turning the volume up loud enough to drown out the loud conversations when using ear-buds. By damaging, I mean I was constantly asking people to repeat them selves because while I could hear them I couldn't distinguish their words. Not everyone was like that, just moderate to soft spoken people or those with deep voices.
I didn't make the connection until I happened across one article about it, which I think was posted here.
The only thing I don't like about noise-canceling headphones is that I can't just wear them without sound. It creates a kind of pressure on my ear drums that just feels weird to me.
I had the same issue with noise-cancelling headphones (the bose qc 20 in-ears) where I couldn't wear them without sound pumping through them, so I ended up buying a pair of custom-molded in ear monitors (IEM is the search keyword to learn more). For a little cheaper than the price of the bose headphones, I had an audiologist take molds of my inner ear and then sent them to a guy in Poland (http://thecustomart.com/music_art-custom.php), who made me the best pair of headphones I've ever used. Noise cancelling is on-par or better than the Bose headphones, but all passive, and they sound fucking amazing. Highly recommend looking into this or another custom IEM solution -- it's made me a lot happier and more productive and less worried about hearing loss.
One question that the audiologist answered that you might want to know -- the noise-cancelling hiss has no impact on your hearing in a short-term or long-term way, so it is totally safe to use them without music or with low music all the time.
Can I ask you which model you did buy? I am in the process of doing precisely the same and wondering if their acrylic models are isolating enough. Silicon apparently isolates better but requires more maintenance, makes them more difficult to insert and remove, and I'm not fully convinced I should go for a Music Two sound-wise. Thanks a bunch!
I bought the Custom Art Music One that I linked to in the above post. Most of the reviews I'd read agreed that it was an insanely good deal considering the quality-per-dollar ratio. And I don't regret it.
Maintenance: there's a little wire loop with a plastic handle included in the pelican case it ships with, lets you clean wax out of the canal. Tip: if you think one of your headphones is dead, just clean the wax out of the canal, it was blocking the sound. That's it – super simple, no idea what other maintenance you might be talking about.
Insertion/removal: nope, still quite easy. You have to give them a slight twist but definitely not hard.
Can't speak to the Music Two vs. Music One because I only have the latter, but I'll tell you that I've owned a decent number of headphones (in ear, over ear) and that the Music One are the best I've ever had.
EDIT: I swear I'm not shilling for this company. There are plenty of other great IEMs on the market. I just like these.
In-ear headphones? All the benefits of passive noise cancellation without big hefty cans on your head.
I switched to them mainly to protect my hearing (I tend to listen to music on the bus or on airplanes where there's a lot of ambient noise, and with open-air buds I had to crank the volume) but they're also a godsend in the workplace when I really need to focus (and I have a private office).
Only anecdata, but I used to feel the same way about noise-canceling headphones without sound playing. After a cross-ocean trip where my devices all died and I was only left with the unsoothing silent hiss, my ears adjusted to it. It's just a matter of sticking it out long enough that your ears get over the weirdness, and now I can actually use them to just cancel noise rather than mask with other noise.
Of course, if it's a painful pressure, please don't risk it :)
I had the same feeling when I first bought noise cancelling phones.
From what I recall (and don't have any references on me) this is because they tend to filter out the lower frequency sounds, which your brain associates with a pressure change.
After some time wearing them on silent, I've found that the sensation goes away. Still, I usually use rainymood.com to block out the other subtle sounds that get through.
Given Keith Moon's love for explosives I wouldn't be surprised if their pyrotechnic stunts helped this along too, like the accidental overdose of gunpowder in the bass drum on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
A different person, but hopefully my answer is also helpful: I used to wear etymotic research headphones with really good isolation for the same reasons. A few hours a day would cause redness/itching/wounds/bleeding on the skin of my ear canals.
Contrapuntal Anecdata: I've been regularly wearing ER headphones for ~10 years and all I get is mildly sweaty ear canals after an hour. Probably depends a lot on which style of end you use and your own ear flora.
The sound is similar enough to the usual office noises and thus is very effective in cancelling them out. Also it has enough chaos to avoid becoming a distraction by itself. And then it doesn't hurt your hearing that much because you don't have to turn the volume too high to be effective.
I like to combine it with a little music. The only problem is, I can't find headphones that don't hurt after an hour...
> "If managed carefully and actively, they can work -- it just takes an manager willing to correct bad behavior or send sick people home."
That's not a solution though, that just removes the entire benefit of the open office while also removing all the benefits of having individual offices. It's important to have places where people can socialize and collaborate, the major downside of open offices is that this has to happen in the same space where everyone else is trying to work, with obvious deleterious effects on productivity. The appropriate alternative is not to simply instill a library type atmosphere of deathly quiet, the alternative is to make it easier for people to choose whether they want to collaborate, socialize, or work, which is easiest when everyone has their own office.
Not to mention half the office on hissing, squeaky teleconferencing headsets with multiply-delayed echoes. And the folks who graze nonstop at work.
Empty rooms are your friends. And Metallica when no rooms available, or some good construction hearing protectors, they don't kill all sounds, but deaden a fair amount.
I agree with you, but I don't understand which point you are making. Are you saying it is a default human behaviour to be the loud person or to be the quiet person?
Loud people disrupt the quiet people, and quiet people can't work with loud people around. Either kind of behaviour makes the system not work.
Another thread where most commenters will advocate for remote work and/or private offices. I agree.
Dan Luu recently said this about Peopleware, which advocates for offices and is highly regarded:
> This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.
> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn’t matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren’t running roughshod over their competitors?
> This book agrees with my biases and I’d love for this book to be right, but the meta evidence makes me want to re-read this with a critical eye and look up primary sources.
Maybe these companies are succeeding in spite of these policies instead of because of them.
I also work in an open office environment. What are the most desirable desks for people to get? The ones next to windows or furthest away from foot traffic.
I think a book that cites sources is immediately more trustworthy, to me, than companies following fashionable trends in office design without a critical eye toward impacts on employee performance. Show me one, just one, example of a company moving to open office space only after evaluating performance impact (or, conversely, immediately evaluating the impact after such a change), and that would be something to look at.
But AFAICT, these decisions aren't being made based on facts. They're being made based on gut, fashion, and when it comes right down to it, cold hard cash (open space is cheaper).
Maybe they do all those studies and decide that the hit in productivity is worth the cheaper open space? Maybe individual performance just doesn't matter that much? I'd bet that the bigger the company, the less it matters how effective individuals are and the more it matters how effective teams are.
As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.
I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment.
I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.
I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests.
HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.
This isn't a problem of one office design or another. It's a problem of misaligned incentives between individual workers and the people making these decisions.
As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.
Define "team".
I fully believe that a co-located 5-9 person team in an open space can be a good thing.
I also fully believe that a co-located 20-30 person department composed of 4-6 teams, all in a single open space is a complete disaster.
And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space.
To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.
> To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.
This can be a pretty good solution for a well-gelled 5-9 person team. But I don't buy into the mindset that this is always the natural unit of software development. Some problems need larger groups -- that probably don't fit the "gelled team" model as well -- while others are perfectly amenable to one or two people coding away behind closed doors. Why is there so much focus on "teams" at the moment?
It's kind of a different software that are being developed these days. Software development used to be highly original, analytical and creative, but now it's like endlessly iterative on the same problems and tools. That explains the number of programmers/engineers around. My guess is that the highly selective group of engineers who are still working on the most original problems sit in their own office (preferably their home office, e.g. Linus). For the rest of us, it's more like a factory floor.
In my last job, it started out with all offices to accommodate devices under test and test equipment. It went to large cubes still with enough space for test equipment.
Then all the equipment had to go into the lab, with a network connection. Fine, I pressed little ARM boards into service doing what we had to do near the target. On their dime, without an approved project. They we lost that lab and had to reuse a chem. lab where you had to wear goggles for no good[1] reason.
[1] they closed the building with the offices and good labs. It sat there literally mouldering. It will have to be torn down. That design of building cannot be "stored" with no HVAC.
At some point it's not about cost - you're the bloody Ogallala Sioux and they're "pushing you off the land."
Did I mention I don't work there any more? They are free to six-sigma the remaining nothing into the purest of management oblivion.
> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way
Because every company is run the opposite way. The subset that comprises the successful ones ends up grouped in with the open-office sadists by default.
I've worked in a private office, small shared-office, cube farms, open plan, and remote. What I've always thought was a good mix was:
- Developers (and sometimes others that need quietude, like art/graphics people) get either a private office each or a shared, developer-only office
- Marketing and sales that need constant communication / thrive on motion and energy get open plans
- A mix of full-on conference rooms and small, private phone/meeting rooms
- Account managers, finance, managers get their own space, which can be cubes or shared offices.
Putting people who need to concentrate in with people whose job is to constantly talk and/or socialize is a recipe for (asymmetrically) poor productivity. The fact that office designs are sometimes dictated by the vicissitudes of management fads and a misguided desire to save money by just building one-size-fits-all layouts, even though a good design will pay for itself many times over, is very unfortunate.
And yet, most places I've seen inside, it's the opposite on those top two points.
Dev/creative folks are in bullpen/open areas
Marketing/sales get private offices
Justification I got a couple times was the sales people need to talk numbers, and that needs to be private. Cynically, I think they don't want anyone else (like devs) overhearing the (over)promising that's done, or hear/witness some of the desperation when things are going bad. Also, was told once that having your sales guy talk on a phone in an open office will make it sound like they're in a boiler-room situation, and lose credibility.
Fine - give everyone private/closed spaces, and give shared workspaces available to those who need it when they need it.
Still amazes me that people will pay $100k+ for 'jr-mid' level folks in some areas, but cram them in bullpens because "cost".
I'm late to this thread, and just kind of thinking out loud, but I wonder if this would work:
Give programmers tiny private offices -- enough to physically do the computer-interaction part of programming in comfort -- and have a big central open space with big tables and some of the normal lounge stuff.
Ergo: you can "go off to code" and have privacy; but you would have a physical as well as social incentive to also spend time with your colleagues.
Difficulty with this is that it assumes laptops, or requires laptops + desktops. While we're on the subject of choice, some folks are very particular about double monitors, specific keyboards, physical arrangement of all that stuff, etc. The switching back and forth between different rooms... either requires multiple machines or ignores some of the beefier setups some people want/need.
That said, I'm fine with one 16g laptop and I move around with it a lot, but I also know a lot of folks who could not be terribly productive on any laptop vs their current setup.
I don't know, I've never heard anything about that. Guess I'll have to ask a Googler, since when I tried googling it I just found a lot of brogrammers in open-plan cult settings. :-/
I saw something a lot like this in a coworking space in Santa Monica once but of course the goal was very different.
I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN and why it isn't accepted that some people legitimately prefer open office plans while others prefer quiet. And even more practical and intelligent would be to offer different kinds of spaces so that people can choose where to work based on a particular mood. But instead we just get weekly complaints about open offices.
I'm probably more productive in a quiet private office space but is the point of my work solely to be most productive in the role I have right now? I organically absorb more information about the company working in an open office. That information can have a valuable impact on my work. I end up organically sharing ideas with my co-workers more often in an open office. And in terms of long term happiness I don't want to spend every moment of every day alone coding. There's a balance to be struck.
Probably because people do not get to choose. The end result can have awful consequences for many people in various aspects of their life that should not be affected by their work environment, the most benign of which is demoralization.
Yep. Its also asymmetric- people who like open plans can be 100% productive in an office, but that doesn't apply the other way around. Also, IME the biggest proponents of open plans among engineers tend to be people who WANT to pester their coworkers all the time (either because they get bored and want to chat all the time, or because they have a hair trigger for asking other people for help rather than just looking stuff up in documentation).
There are plenty of people here who are the ones who make the choice for others. If you're a late hire into an established startup or company, there are many things that you don't get to choose.
In my case, "organic information about the company" is off-topic and of negative value to actual performance of my duties. In my experience, most companies are that way - all the gnosis is just just-so stories about how people think things work. It's exactly Moneyball.
I spend more time debunking that with them in real time than I really have to spare. In very nearly every case, what this is is a set of myths that people use to "move up the organization." The problem is - it only works very rarely.
I would be just fine with a dedicated 2-hour socializing interval per week. Don't get me wrong, I can stand and BS all day with the best of 'em. The problem is that it's fundamentally venal and I lose respect for my cow-orkers that way.
"But you sound like an a.....e." Perhaps, but I'm still doing this 32 years later and all the people who played politics who are my age are either burned out or sold out. Which, selling out is really the point of the corporate exercise, but I like the work.
It's just boring. It's boring watching people trying to outshine each other. The people who are REALLY GOOD don't really even have to try - they have to have discipline and make their version of the thing work, but competition really isn't about exciting horse races that are a hair apart - really good people are just really good. The smart money is about letting the really good rise. But absolutely nobody likes that.
And frankly, if you're out of work, I'm out of there.
It's very difficult to find a place that isn't open office. Every single place I've interviewed and worked at has been open office or low wall cubicles which might as well be open office. The only places that I know of that have private offices for some engineers are joel spolsky companies, microsoft and apple.
So the people who prefer open offices already have a ton of choice. Those who don't have almost no choice.
You know what we need? Some kind of website that lists companies and tells what kind of office environment they have, so that we can proactively look for companies that have the office layout we prefer.
Its about having a choice. Open floors don't leave any choice for people who like to work quietly away from all noise. Not to mention some of us are little or a lot socially anxious which affects performance when there is lot of foot traffic.
In a place where primary place to work is office, still provides common areas where you can talk to your co-workers and have serendipitous conversations. People who seek social interaction find it anywhere, meetings, lunch etc.
Has anyone tried "free choice"? My suspicion is that it won't irk brillantly because even the loudest open-plan advocates generally perceive private offices as higher-status.
Also, once people are in separate offfices you do need to think about information exchange slightly more actively (a good thing IMO -- but potentially a bit of a shift for the folks who find open plan, listen-in-on-everything to work well)
Deliberate communication is, I have experienced, usually a whole lot higher quality than ad-hoc, informal "collaboration". Let people go away and think about it, do their homework, and come back with backed-up, researched, opinions.
Or, you know, you can just interrupt everybody for a useless bike-shedding session at the drop of a hat.
I would speculate that people who prefer open-plan are more likely to be adequately happy and productive in more traditional arrangements. So on balance having some degree of privacy and quiet should improve quality of life for the most employees (sadly open-plan layouts are cheaper and easier to shoehorn into various spaces, so they are increasingly common).
All the office or mixed office/high cube environments I've worked in were pretty open office environments. You wanted to talk to someone, you wandered over. Standard was open door to office unless there was some reason to close it. So, yeah, cost aside I'm not sure I buy more collaboration etc. with open plans.
I am currently working in a very crowded open office. We have small desks where we sit almost elbow to elbow, the place is all hard surfaces (it's an old industrial building made into office space), and there is a fair amount of noise.
But none of this would bother me except for the fact that one senior person has decided to have speakers installed in the ceiling, and we have to listen to non-stop spotify playing top 40 or whatever, all day every day.
The constant music drives me insane, it just drones on and on. I wear noise cancelling headphones with rain sounds to drown it out but I don't like wearing headphones all day and it hinders collaborating with my neighbours. I can't tell if management is clueless or simply does not give a toss. Probably both.
If you don't like them, and you have no hope of using direct methods, you might be able to turn them in to either spotify or ASCAP. I think they might need a special license to play music for more than one person. It's dirty and it's snitching, but it might make your problem go away.
I would love to do that, but even though my opinion is shared by possibly 80% of the staff here I would also be the prime suspect since I've been quite outspoken about it. In fact there's a note on the back of the amplifier telling me specifically to keep my hands off the speaker cables! (They have been unplugged on a few occasions, but not by me).
My manager is sympathetic but powerless. However we're expecting some major changes soon so I am cautiously hopeful, but I'm also keeping my eyes open for other opportunities in my area. This will sort itself one way or another.
Suggestion: you and the rest of the 80% arrange to wear headphones all the time for one day. (No need to have any sound in the headphones) and conduct all exchanges via email/internal messaging. Sort of silent protest?
This is what I hate about Starbucks, and the fact that it's pretty much the only place I can go to work / get out of the house when the library isn't open.
Is there not an independent cafe somewhere near with no music? I've noticed that the independents tend to either not have music or have less intrusive music compared to the chain cafes. Latter have a 'format' they are required to keep to.
I made a significant discovery last night: Franky and Bennys restaurants in the UK do not have background music inside the restaurant (unless the one we ended up in just had a fault with the system). Bliss
Have you tried talking to your senior colleague about it? If your colleague can't be without music, then it seems a better solution that he starts wearing headphones instead of you.
Haha, the senior colleague in the story is the CEO, and my manager is the CTO. The CTO is on our side but the CEO cares only about 1 person and it's not us. Hence: clueless and does not give a toss.
You can never please everyone, I personally am the opposite, I any music playing rather than no music, but also dislike wearing headphones for the same reason as you.
The open office revolution needs to die. I don't like wearing headphones all day, but I also don't like hearing 30 people's conversations either.
I had a (old) guy that used to sit in my area who would argue with his manager in person and argue (loudly) with everyone he was on the phone with (including his wife).
He got moved a couple of months ago and there were no tears shed.
I was working in an open space for a couple of years. The phones were ringing happily, including the official corporate ones, which were standing on each desk. People were talking all the time. Talking, walking, looking at my screen, of course with lots of comments to my code. 70 people in the floor.
We had all the funny things for the group integration all the time. All the things except for thinking.
Yes, I was sitting all the time with my headphones, shouting maximally to my ears. Until one of those people making noise told me that it is not team friendly to have so loud phones, as he hears the music, and cannot concentrate.
Of course the management had their separate offices, with walls, and doors. They didn't see any problem.
For the last 6 years I've been working remotely from home. Well, what a change. In 4 hours I could do more than for a week in the open space.
Same story here. At my previous job when they rolled out the open office a bunch of us complained and the boss explained how he'd be giving up his office to work out on the floor with us. Not even joking, less than an hour after he moved his stuff out he moved it back into his office saying "it's too distracting, I can't get anything done out here".
Now working from home I make more progress per day then I did on a weekly basis there.
I agree with all of this. I worked in open offices and Agile "team rooms" for many years, and I've been working from home for the last few. There's definitely a huge increase in the amount of quality code I'm able to crank out working from home.
However, I do think some intangibles are lost. They're hard, maybe impossible, to quantify. Instead, I'll just link to a post from PG that's a transcription of a speech by Richard Hamming. http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html And to save you a click, this is the paragraph that stuck with me:
"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important."
Obviously there are ways to mitigate that, e.g., involvement in the developer community or establishing habits to replace "water cooler" chatter, but they take deliberate effort.
Similar here - open door mezzanine office with a 12 phone, 2 radio recruiting agency down and opposite. Three month review came up with "You're not synergising with the team sitting there with headphones on all the time". Walked out the next day.
I'd say environmental factors such as being so freaking hot that you are sweating or so freaking cold you have to bring in a heater to counteract the AC are pretty distracting as well. And in terms of productivity, not having enough ventilation so that the air builds up CO2 makes people really tired and unproductive.
That last sentence struck a chord with me - I remember (during my traveling) being onsite for an "ERP implementation warehouse" for a major company with hundreds of workers and inadequate ventilation - place seemed like hell and I felt sleepy the entire time I was onsite. Glad when that week was over.
Maybe I'm just sensitive, but when "life support" is off in an office (e.g. later in the day or early in the morning where HVAC is turned down), I take that as a cue to not be present. I can always work from home with VPN if needed.
Totally! I once quit a job because the average temperature in the office was 85F in winter (also really shitty spaghetti code)! Unfortunately, not before I got incredibly sick. When I complained, they said they could do nothing about it because other people were freezing. In the Bay Area, on the other hand, I had a job in a similar place that was always freezing, even when it was warm outside. That was actually not as bad, but still annoying to have to wear a heavy winter coat indoors all the time.
The point is, big giant spaces / warehouses are not offices and using them as such without proper comforts will make your employees hate you. If it's an open office on top of that, they'll hate you twice as much because I've never met a single person who prefers open offices for themselves.
Sometime at a previous job, the A/C failed in the server closet. Since the rest of the office was so chilly, the door was propped open, and stayed that way at least until I left. For the first time, the temperature was sometimes bearable. I wonder if that episode killed some of those geriatric servers; this was 2012 and there were several Pentium 3 Xeons running Win 2K Server in there.
A while after that, building management sent around a survey. It included a table that asked 'how is the temperature in...' and various parts of the building. I put 'too cold' for everything. I bet everyone else did too, because two weeks later, they installed a thermostat in the office, and things were comfortable enough without a jacket.
Seconding. I've previously worked in places where I would fight my sleepiness for the whole day because ventilation was poor. I'm somewhat more sensitive to that than average, judging by the fact I was the only one with this problem.
Environmental factors are annoying, too. I prefer it colder than most people, so I sometimes will sit in a t-shirt while my cow-orkers complain it's too cold...
Different strokes for different folks. I'm probably the only person on HN that prefers open office workspaces. I currently have an office to myself and it's so lonely and isolating. I think I'd go crazy working all day without human interaction, so I hardly ever use it. And, no, chat isn't an adequate substitute. I'll generally charge up my laptop and go out and work in a break room or some other common area with actual human beings around--much better. If it gets noisy and I want to block out distractions headphones work just fine.
Maybe you're an extrovert? Being around people gives you energy.
For us introverts it's the opposite. Being around people drains us of energy. Even if we enjoy their company and enjoy social interaction. It's tiring.
There's probably no silver bullet for office design. People are different, as you say.
But the low-grade sadists that rise to positions of authority in U.S. corporations will punish the people that don't go to the open area. It's not about what you produce, it's about how much torture you're willing to self-inflict.
> It's not about what you produce, it's about how much torture you're willing to self-inflict.
Could it be about social dynamics? It's like caching. When you're thinking about whom to give an opportunity to, are you going to think of the friendly person that you see every day, or to that guy you've heard of once who's always in his office and might be a myth?
I don't think it's purely an intro- vs. extrovert thing: as an anecdote, I tend to test as introvert, but find what the sister comment says very much applicable: it is hard to impossible to focus and/or maintain motivation without "seeing other people do things". Perhaps this has something with the ADD<->OCD scale, which I am firmly at the left end of: generally, I do not get distracted by sounds/questions/etc and very easily go back to what I was doing before distraction; but at the same time I find it rather difficult to e.g. avoid going off on unnecessary tangents, which is where seeing other people work helps.
I'm introverted, but still enjoy working in an open office space than in the cube farm. Isolation is worse than emotional drainage from interacting with people in my opinion.
Although I will admit it is hard to start my side project after work and is probably due to being drained.
The most productive week of my life, every other employee of the small company I was working for took off for a trade show. Most of our customers also happened to be going to the show, so the support email was pretty dead. There was also a blizzard that dropped about four feet of snow that week, so the entire office park, and for the most part the roads coming and going were a ghost town.
I got up in the morning, had breakfast, loaded up my dog and drove in. My dog bounded around through the drifts off-leash for a while, then we went inside and got to work. I discovered how to do things that we didn't think were possible, abused APIs in ways that shouldn't have worked, but did, and bent the bits to my will. It opened up a whole market that we had been previously forced to concede. I smashed together a workable implementation of one of our products for a new platform that we used, essentially unchanged, for a year and a half until the platform finally released a real API. By Monday when everyone came back, it was a fait accompli, and I demo'd it. I didn't speak to or hear a word from another human being the entire week. It was glorious.
I think the best environment I had was when there were 3 of us in an office. Enough company to talk to and collaborate with, not enough to prevent work getting done.
I spent several years sharing a good-sized office with two other developers. We'd all worked together for some time, and got along really well. It worked out famously. Which means that something had to change... In this case it was the company growing and moving to a larger building which, despite its size, couldn't support the enclosed office space.
Nah, you're not alone. I've commented in this regard before, but working in isolation for me just destroys my productivity. I find it very difficult to focus as I feel very alone in the work. I don't even need or want to be a part of the ongoing conversations. It's just something about being amongst other people doing things that motivates me. Given the choice between a large office with a door and a random table at a busy Starbucks I'd take the cafe every time.
Absolutely true here as well; "being amongst other people doing things" is it. What I found (somewhat) helpful is making sure to get out of the office regularly, even if it's just a trip to the water cooler.
I think it really depends who you are sharing the space with. To me it's very valuable to have the other engineers from my team and the PM as close as possible. Especially with a lot of pair programming going on being able to overhear stuff is invaluable. Having some sales guy nearby on the other hand has no advantage and is only distracting.
If you love open offices so much, then quit your job and go find one with an open office. Almost all companies these days have open offices, so it shouldn't be hard for you to find such a job. Then you can clear out your office and job for someone who really appreciates it.
If you were whining about not having an office (like so many on here, including myself), I would not respond this way, because for them, it's not easy to find a job that gives them an actual office: these positions are extremely rare for developers these days. I haven't even seen such a place except for almost 20 years ago.
For you to complain about your office when almost everyone is miserably suffering in open-plan arrangements, and it'd be trivial for you to find such a job yourself, is a ridiculous level of gall.
Couldn't agree more on the article. Recently they put next to us a group of people who is 50% of their time on the phone. While some of them try to speak low, other just yell. It is probably the most frustrating work setup I experienced in my career. It is really distracting.
i post the same comments every time this topic comes up, but it really bugs me.
the same people making these layout/seating decisions do not subject themselves to the same setup. have 2-3 sales guys on phone calls all day long in a room with the CFO trying to get his work done - he'd go insane, or ... have extremely low productivity. why do people think everyone else is different from them?
Coworker who is extremely loud on the phone. I get 0 work done when she's on the phone. She's so loud I can't hear people when I'm on the phone. We have an "open door" policy at work so if I close my door to my own office it looks weird. If I tell her she's being too loud I look like an asshole. We're moving to a new building and I'm going to be on a different floor than her and I can't wait. So many years of listening to half of a conversation is enough to make you go insane.
As a graduate student, I was lucky to have an advisor that let me work on research from anywhere as long as I was getting stuff done. I tried to work in the office a few times, and a couple loud people made it almost impossible for me to accomplish anything. Coffee shops, despite the presence of ambient conversations, were much more effective for me. I haven't quite figured out the difference between coffee shop noise and office noise — I just know that I can tune the former out, while the latter makes it difficult to concentrate.
> I haven't quite figured out the difference between coffee shop noise and office noise — I just know that I can tune the former out, while the latter makes it difficult to concentrate.
Coffee shop noise is irrelevant, office noise might be relevant. You automatically pay attention even if you don't want to.
For me, noise cancelling headphones are a necessity. Impossible to get anything done otherwise.
What finally made me buy a good set of headphones for work was a cow-orker that would regularly come to my office to talk to a colleague about some project. Nothing to do with my work, but the words he used made me involuntarily tune in to the conversation every 10 seconds, just because it sounded relevant.
Have you tried coffitivity.com? Lol every time I tell people I use this, they look at me sideways. I discovered it a few years ago, and still use it just about everyday.
It's basically just ambient noises from a coffee shop, and you can choose a couple of different "environments". I pop that on in my headphones, and layer on some instrumental music. I love it.
We recently had an office re-org (in the physical "take your shit to different desks" sense). Our manager lobbied hard, and succeeded, to move our relatively small engineering team and stick us in the corner, away from sales folks, etc., who are on the phone all day - and especially from the one person who was frequently on the phone and loud enough to go through my big over-the-ear headphones.
Right now, I sit in between an R+D group working on experimental prototypes and a PM group whose members often (loudly) explain our products to customers during sales calls. This is after our previous move, about 8 months ago. For the last several months, my manager has been lobbying to move my group somewhere with a more reasonable noise level.
At the moment, a couple members of the R+D team are discussing a new database schema, and I'm wishing that another manager hadn't swooped in an taken the place we were planning to move to a week ago.
If I tell her she's being too loud I look like an asshole.
Only to her. Everyone else silently thanks you. Don't let assholes define the narrative by feeling like an asshole because you asked an asshole to quit being such an asshole.
I rent a closed office space but immediately outside my door sits a girl who thought it was cool to play music while she worked. I thought it was best to nip this behaviour in the bud and asked her to turn it down.
This was 6 months ago and she hasn't spoken to me since. I sometimes say hello and goodbye but she just blanks me.
Assholes will always find a way to be an asshole no matter what you do.
> We have an "open door" policy at work so if I close my door to my own office it looks weird.
At least you have a door.
That said, I solved the problem of talking cow-orkers by ordering a second pair of the same high-quality gaming headphones I use at home. I turn on some music (or pink noise), and I can no longer hear anyone.
Do the office doors lock? I have a solution that probably won't get you in trouble with management for stirring the pot: stay late and sabotage her phone. Make sure to wear gloves, and do it in a way that's really hard to detect, such as opening it up and carefully cutting a trace on the circuit board which renders it inoperable, but is impossible to spot without someone else carefully examining the board for defects.
For an summary of all the environmental/physiological factors that affect work performance in the office take a look at Creating the Productive Workplace [1]. Research material covered include affect of temperature (high/low and variation), humidity, indoor air quality, ventilation and it's control, lighting, crowding, daylight (too much/too little), artificial light (wrong type) and noise.
One of the points that comes out quite strongly is that whilst each of the environmental factors does adversely/positively impact your performance your ability to control (or lack of control) can have a greater impact. For example you will tolerate colder and warmer environments if you know that you can have some influence on the temperature .
An anecdote for those who hoped they'd find suggestions in the comments:
I ended up buying some over-the-head earmuff headphones aimed at construction workers (I think with a 25dB noise reduction rating). I put in ear plugs, then the headphones, and play some light music; even relatively loud and nearby conversations drop away pretty quickly. (Ordinary "noise cancelling" headphones aren't intended to block the sound of talking, and don't work as well).
The only issue is comfort; the headphones fit quite tightly. I got used to it after a few hours, and now don't mind it at all. My wife tried it, and couldn't ever adjust.
Noisli — http://www.noisli.com/ is a neat little site for playing ambient noise that I find works great to cut out the sound of talking when I'm using noise cancelling headphones.
At the risk of seeming spammy since I just replied to another person on here, you should check out the Here One by Doppler Labs. I had the first version and it's incredible – albeit mostly a novelty device. They're taking preorders for the new one right now and it seems to no longer be a novelty device at all...
Also since you specifically mentioned comfort, these are just little wireless earbuds that feel comfy enough that you forget you're wearing them, and then you forget how loud the world is when you take them out.
Looks interesting. I have the Bose QC-20s and they're great for traveling. They're great on planes although, as others indicate, they're better at background noise than voices. I held off on noise canceling headphones for ages because I pack pretty light and refused to bring over-the-ear headphones traveling--and then hesitated at the price.
But they were really worth it. I never realized before using them how much I was cranking up the volume to compensate for the background noise even with ear canal phones that isolated relatively well.
I've got the QC-35s. They're actually pretty good at lowering speaking voices to the below intelligible level, IMO. This was also my first pair of noise cancelling headphones ever, and holy shit what a difference they make on an airplane; I'd never really appreciated how loud it was until now.
I also find that I listen to music at lower absolute volume now as a result of the noise cancelling; I'm fairly certain I did some damage to my ears over the years, and at least I'm not continuing it at the same rate now.
I carry Etymotic earplugs with me at all times; they're cheap enough not to worry too much about losing. I also recently got myself a pair of Plantronics Backbeat Pro headphones -- they're great; pretty good at blocking background noise turned off, really good with the noise cancelling on (even in the office) and not nearly as expensive as the Bose headphones. And they sound great both with a wire and on Bluetooth.
I should probably buy some Plantronics stock, shouldn't I? Just a happy consumer :).
I have a couple of pairs of ER20s and some ER20XS for commuting, gigs, noisy places, etc. They do a good enough job that I can go to e.g. a Rammstein gig and not suffer afterwards (tinnitus flareup, headache, etc.)
Noise cancelling doesn't work in an open office, but noise isolation does. I have a pair from https://www.etymotic.com/ . I've tried a couple of different headphones/sets but nothing compares to the products from etymotic.
I used to wear earmuffs at work, eight hours a day. I started to develop intermittent hearing problems (coupled with nasty headache). Like an infection of some sort.
At one point I noticed there's mould in one of the muffs. :(
> "In general, if it's coming from another person, it's much more disturbing than when it's coming from a machine," he says
Huh. My most pet peeve in the open office floorplan was always the coworkers whose phone — not on vibrate — would start ringing. They'd look at it, decide not to answer it, and proceed to just let it ring out loud until it hits voicemail. Just… why? And attempts to educate the owner on how to silence a ringer¹ just seem to go unheeded.
One commenter I read once noted the concept of "cell phone time out" — a basket with a blanket for ringing phones with no owner to be found.
My current office boasted "great amounts of natural light"; I have exactly zero paths to natural light from my desk. (The upshot of this is that we're in a corner that largely isolates us from the noise.) While I lean towards cubes (simply for the affordance of quiet and disease prevention), do they not mean that people in them get absolutely no natural light? (Not that I am right now myself, but it crosses my mind.)
We recently lost a manweek to a cold that just ran absolutely rampant through the desks. Perhaps the sad thing is that I feel that was pretty good, and could have been much worse. (Perhaps because I seem to have dodged it myself.)
Our new office came with less conference rooms and quiet areas. Less actual useable space per person.
¹And just in case you're wondering: squeezing nearly any cell phone's power/volume buttons will silence the ringer during an incoming call. It doesn't cancel the call or voicemail it: the other end is still listening to a ringtone. You can still pick up with call with the on-screen UI if you want. (At least until it truly goes to voicemail, which happens after the normal delay.) You can even do this with the phone in the pocket pretty easily, e.g., if it rings inconveniently during an important meeting.
Active noise-cancelling headphones plus a white noise generator, is where it's at.
These are the best headphones I've used: https://amzn.com/B00X9KV0HU
They come in Apple- or Android-compatible versions.
They won't cancel everything. In general they're great with anything constant (hums/motors/fans etc.) but the more impulsive (in the physics sense) a sound wave is, the more of it seeps through. Human speech I find it damps it pretty significantly but not all the way.
That's where white noise comes in. From that dampened state, a very quiet level of white noise is enough to perceptually drown out any loudmouths who have no concept of an "indoor voice." Use something like simplynoise.com or an app. For Android I like Noise Machine - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.synopsia.n...
For iPhone I believe there's an app literally called White Noise.
Not affiliated with any of these people.
Don't use music... that's just as distracting as someone talking. YMMV
honestly, that's why I'm hardly ever in the office. there's someone there who's noise profile is utterly unfilterable. they fiddle with things, drop things, fidget, cough, snort phlegm up their nose, subvocalize, and generally emit an air of restlessness. nice person though.
> they fiddle with things, drop things, fidget, cough, snort phlegm up their nose, subvocalize, and generally emit an air of restlessness
That list is entirely too familiar. Honestly, do you work in my office? Add to that: dictates constantly to their mobile phone using voice-to-text function (things like "Honey - period - I need you to pick up the kids tonight - period - Did you remember to take out the garbage - question mark - period") and has bouts of fist pounding on the desk when things don't go their way (such as when email takes more than 15 seconds to open) - and I will start looking for you here.
Has anyone ever told them that they're noisy? I suspect that I might be such a person, and explicitly tell anyone to go ahead and let me know if I'm ever annoying.
I think I'm approachable enough that they take the offer at face value, and not as a passive-aggressive "don't you dare".
This is a serious issue for me as well I've asked co workers I'm fairly close with and they say they don't notice me etc. I can't tell if they're just trying to be nice though, I think I'm a loud breather but I don't know how to prove it.
If you have an open office, no eating at your desk period. Show some respect for your co-workers.
I worked next to an apple eater some time ago, slurping and chomping on his apple every day. Drove me insane. But every so often there was the bag of baby carrots. Which although less disturbing lasted much longer.
Then there's the fish eaters and microwave popcorn eaters. Don't bring that into the office. Keep it in the lunch room, eat outside or don't bring it in!
This is hilarious, I wholeheartedly agree. I cannot stand popcorn in the office, especially since the microwave is a high wattage variant and nobody watches the popcorn so it burns frequently (with the fire department making an appearance recently)
Open office plans are a great example of cargo cult management, second only to Agile.
Despite numerous well controlled studies debunking the myths that people are somehow happier, more creative, or communicate better in open plans, we get: "Company X was very successful, and they had an open office plan; therefore, the open office plan made them successful and we should have one, too." Company X was successful despite the open plan, not because of it.
The company I'm currently working at bought everyone some top-of-the-line Bose noise-canceling headphones for the same reason, as we have an open plan office and coworkers can be chatty sometimes. And while the noise canceling is far from being perfect, it really makes it much easier to stay focused when working. I even wear them on my commute now as they are very good at filtering out constant amplitude white noise (such as engine hums), which helps me to focus on my reading. Unfortunately I sometimes miss my stops now :D
Not sure if you've heard of this nifty-as-hell device, but a company called Doppler Labs made Here and is now taking preorders for Here One.
Essentially little wireless earbuds that take this whole noise-cancelling thing to a whole new level. I have the first ones and they're pretty remarkable, already preordered the new ones which extend well beyond simple novelty.
You can turn down engine hum, but keep voices/stop announcements at full volume. The new ones apparently also let you layer in music from your phone, which was the obvious feature ommission from the first version. Allegedly the new one they're also playing with directional filtering, live language translation (?!), ML-based baby/siren/annoying coworker cancelling, and tons of other stuff. I haven't been this excited about a technology for years, as you might be able to tell :)
I bought some QC25s when I moved to a big open office. For me, they don't help -- what they do is they kill all the background noise, but then the individual voices still come through and they come through as the only thing I hear.
I could play music, but sometimes I like the roar of silence.
I'd like to buy a nice pair of headphones but that's the thing that worries me. I'm not at all bothered by the background noise (e.g. aircraft engines) but human-made noises are very distracting. There seems to be nothing that can filter them out; my current passive headphones will muffle conversation a bit when I've got white noise playing through them but throat-clearing cuts right through.
Although the amount of talking in the office is low and not very disturbing, and there's certainly nothing like the horror of Spotify which one commenter here mentioned, there are people at work who make noise which sounds particularly intrusive and distracting to me (e.g. sniffing, throat clearing and similar). Of course, to many others these would not seem to be much of a problem, being more like background noise, and so most don't fully appreciate how much of a nuisance it can be.
A lot of it can be covered up with earphones playing white noise, nature sounds, or similar, but too much of that during the day does seem to have a deleterious effect on hearing, such as by making tinnitus louder. Wearing them also interferes with those occasions where it is useful to talk to colleagues.
Let's be careful with the phrase "open office plan". Many articles lump cubicle farms together with partition-free spaces in the same category, but whenever they're treated as separate choices the research tends to show cubicle farms being worse than partition-free spaces on most dimensions, including noise distraction -- i.e. private offices > partition-free spaces > cubicle farms. Interestingly, this particular article mostly avoids this distinction but does address it in the final paragraph:
"There are solutions, says Cornell's Hedge. The trend toward open offices and hard office furniture makes noise distraction worse, so adding carpet, drapes and upholstery can help. He recommends, perhaps counterintuitively, getting rid of cubicle walls, which provide the illusion of sound privacy, but actually make people less aware of the noises they create."
i've noticed that if coworkers tend exhibit a high level of emotion in their voices during their conversations, that's very distracting -- e.g., some people seem to just have a pattern of vocalizing stress or confusion in their tone of speech, either to each other, or on the phone etc.
it took me a long time to identify exactly what was bugging me (besides it obviously being noisy), but then it dawned on me, and now i pay close attention to it -- being able to cateogrize it, and then compartmentalize it away, helps a lot i think.
moving to an off-site coffee shop on occasion has made all the difference, despite being an equal or greater amount of noise.
My solution is over the ear head phones + nature sounds. I personally like:
http://texashighdef.net/http://whitenoisemp3s.com/ (these are for purchase, but I've found them to be of very high quality and return to them repeatedly).
Your mileage may vary; some people find this stuff puts them to sleep.
It's very strange that HN seems to sway so heavily against open offices.
I genuinely think the reality is that opinions are split squarely down the middle, otherwise hacking/working in coffee shops wouldn't be a thing for example (people seek out that specific experience)
It also implies that the likes of Google/Facebook aren't being as productive as they can be, which is hogwash in my opinion.
If you've ever been to a Google/facebook office you'll know that it's mostly deserted. It works to some extent mostly because people aren't actually at their desks.
More likely the people who choose to hack in coffee shops are people who are good at shutting out distractions. Or maybe the alternative is worse, e.g. working at home with wife and kids who can't seem to fully comprehend what it means to be working.
Maybe they are working on some "light" tasks that don't require deep concentration?
For me the difference between an open plan office and a coffee shop is direct interruptions. I can drown out the ambient noise of a coffee shop and get into flow when coding. In an office, people walk up to you/phone you/whatever which is a direct distraction "aimed" at you specifically, which is much more jarring and difficult to ignore.
I work in an open office and honestly it doesn't bother me. When I'm working on a problem intently I tend to get into a headspace where I don't notice the distractions around me.
Sometimes if I'm deeply engrossed in a problem a coworker will have to repeat my name several times before I realize they are trying to get my attention.
Other people in my team complain about the environment a lot. The ones that do tend to listen to music on headphones to tune out.
I think a lot of it depends on your upbringing. I grew up as the oldest child in a house full of younger siblings my home environment was always very noisy so I suspect I have a higher tolerance for working/studying etc in a distraction rich environment.
The benefit I see to an open office is being able to contribute to colleagues discussions several times a week I'll overhear a conversation or a colleague will be listening to mine and be able to interject.
Several valuable conversations have started based around "I overheard you were working on... I had a similar problem I solved by doing... Then often a third colleague will jump in etc. If we were each in private offices this wouldn't have occurred.
Edit: Related anecdote when I was at University I spent some time working as an apprentice the company wasn't expecting me to show up or there was some communication issue etc didn't have a proper desk for me when I arrived so for several weeks they shoved me into the room with all the photocopiers and this huge B0 drafting printer the Mechanical Engineers used to print technical drawings. This thing was based on old dot matrix technology used to make a hell of a lot of noise when it fired up it would scare the crap out of me every time. That obviously was distracting...
It seems like you could have, say, 1.5m of solid partition and then higher transparent partitions and a few lightweight doors and sort of have a cube farm that allowed in light but blocked noise.
I'm a little late to this discussion but I wear headphones/earbuds the entire time I'm in my office and if people are being loud I just turn up my music. I am no fan of open floor plans but at the same time they don't bother me as long as I can wear my headphones and people aren't constantly trying to get my attention vis non-chat methods (chat me and say you need to talk, saying my name or waving at me it not going to grab my attention).
When it gets real bad, sometimes I put in my handy old industrial orange foam ear-plugs[1]. What's good for bringing the scream of a chainsaw down to a dull wail will just about block out all but the loudest conference calls completely. Although I suppose it might be a tad ruder than headphones...
I can relate to a lot in the article having worked in open plan for 10 years. I always get a lot more done working from home - ambient distraction level is really low. The worst thing is sick people contaminating and rowdy loud people especially when we are expected to take regular video conferences at our desks.
It would be interesting given a poll who would opt for:
For those who might be distracted by music, I bring earplugs to work. That you also have to take them out to talk means that you're also distracting less people. They should be giving them away at the front desk. Bright orange so people know not to disturb you unless necessary.
I find if there is a big contrast in noises, say if the office is usually quiet and a coworker starts making noises, they are more distractive than if in a constantly noisy environment and a loud coworker makes noise. I would say the contrast is a huge factor as the article seem to suggest
Bought a pair of good closed back headphones after using semi-open headphones for ages. Lots of money you can pour into these, but can't complain having great sound and not able to hear the noise of my colleagues.
Beyerdynamic DT-1770. But I had a good DAC and my old head amp already, so it was an obvious choice. If you're missing these, I'd go with Shure SRH-1540 for lower impedance.
Caves and Commons. Have an area where people can go to work without interruption, and have a common area where people can work in an open space and collaborate. Don't anchor an individual to either space.
How many people in one room makes open space? I work with 8-10 people in one room and found a moderate distraction till I've turn my desk to the wall and I have everyone behind me.
I understand people can be and are distractions but from my background I believe you should be able to perform your tasks regardless. While a legitimate issue, this sounds like searching for excuses. You perform in the environment you are in. Everyone else is suffering the same distractions.
If your eyesight is bad, there are things YOU can do for YOURSELF to fix that problem, without asking anyone to change what THEY are doing.
The "quiet office" is something that only some people prefer. Many of us (I'm one of them) prefer noise - music playing, background noise, etc ... I find it hard to concentrate in silence, and I know more people like me.
To ask others to be silent to ask them to change how they comfortably work to suit you. Let everyone work how they work best.
So everyone should just adhere to how you want the world to be? yeah, that makes sense.
I'm not asking anyone to change what they are doing. I'm asking them to stfu and do their job. They are the ones interrupting me, and getting into my business. Your the one asking people to change themselves to conform to your preferences.
Actually, no. You're asking them to behave in the way you prefer. You see, humans aren't naturally driven to be quiet - we're a social animal. We have inbuilt need to communicate, and we're not built to sit in little boxes and stare at a screen in quiet all day. You're asking others to do that though, rather than embrace the natural way our minds prefer to work for many of us. You can use ear plugs, listen to white noise, use good noise canceling headsets, etc. You aren't at their mercy, no more than they are at yours. Your desire for quiet shouldn't overcome their desire for socializing/noise. Everyone should handle themselves, and not ask of others to concede to their wishes.
You are incorrect. We are social, just not all the time. Just because we like talking sometimes != we like being distracted all the time.
Study after study has shown that humans work better with less distractions, especially with office-type jobs (focus/thinking oriented). You may like it, and thats fine. Your also rounding back to my first point. It may be "natural" for us to talk, but that doesn't make it better. Glasses aren't "natural", but they sure help me out.
Additionally: noise-canceling headphones have been shown to cause long-term issues, and not everyone can use them.
> You aren't at their mercy, no more than they are at yours.
Simply untrue. I'm not injecting my quiet onto them. They are injecting their noise onto me. If I punched someone in the face everyday, would you say they are being rude by trying to get me to stop? They are, after all, hampering the "natural" urge for human violence.
It's hard not to be "nosy as shit" when the conversation a couple of desks over contains just enough high-relevance keywords that your subconscious keeps pinging you to say this might be important.
It's better to work in somewhat noisy environment, where everybody can stare at your monitor, than commit suicide after two years of sitting in dark gloomy gray-walled cubicle without any natural light.
I honestly can't understand people that can work in those depressing conditions.
I would take a pay cut to be allowed to work in a cubicle. (Especially if other people would cut back on the chatter a bit, as typically happens in cube farms as opposed to open offices.)
Where I work, I have a budding tupperware percussionist, three imminent victims of whooping cough, some parents managing high-maintenance offspring over cell phones, and one guy who conducts teleconferences with his desk phone. So I often sneak off to empty conference rooms with a laptop if I'm trying to concentrate.