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The Solution for Open Office Frustration
- hprotagonist 10y agoBased entirely on the title, I thought i was about to read about markdown and/or google docs. Since it's the other kind of open office, I suggest noise-cancelling headphones and the freedom to publicly shame loud eaters without reprisal.
- lj3 10y agoThat reminds me of the novel jPod. Anybody who brought McDonalds (also known as 'the taint') into the office was shunned for the day.
- hprotagonist 10y agoreheating fish in a microwave is another classic horror.
- atemerev 10y agoThe best solution is to never even use open office layouts. Realistically, though, interruptions happen when they are unplanned. Need many meetings? Set the time slots and schedules.
- scblock 10y agoThere's no solution here. Red lights, seriously?
- busterarm 10y agoRoxanne!
- Haydos585x2 10y agoSuch a bad solution. The guy is complaining about a loud sales team, his team making phone calls and talking and a goddamn gong. The red light solves none of those problems. Sound travels regardless of whether or not you have a red light on or not. Headphones only go so far too. I don't WANT to listen to music or have my ears covered all day!
- mywacaday 10y agoAgree on not wanting to listen to music all day. I listen to music for pleasure and not work, I can't listen to my music as I find myself drifting into the music and not work. The only think I've found that works for a reasonable period is an app called white noise that I play a storm with thunder rolling through it.
- thwackxter 10y agoThis does nothing about being visible from behind, nor the insane surveillance culture that programmers have to endure these days. It seems like another case of engineering types addressing the symptom (noise) rather than the underlying problem, which is the low social status that got programmers into open plan cattle pens in the first place.
- Twirrim 10y agoI've got an amazing idea. Go away from open plan offices. I'm really baffled that that wasn't one of the solutions in the article. Red and Green coloured cubes? Lights? Ugly attempts to mask the symptoms, rather than fix the real problem: Open plan offices suck for productivity.
- greenshackle2 10y agoThat's what I was thinking, especially reading this line: > With the vast majority of us now working in open concept offices — some studies have said that 70% of US workers work in this kind of environment — companies are being forced to come up with novel ways to ensure we stay productive and don’t find ourselves driven delirious from the noise and chaos. They are being forced. Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
- angusp 10y agothey're being 'forced' insofar as they're usually locked in to continuing to occupying their current office.
- flukus 10y agoCubicle walls are cheap and you can keep the current office.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- fokov 10y agoStupid managers that will then either go to conference rooms for meetings or into their own office. That's the way it works here. All of the devs & qa that need a quiet environment are stuck in cubes or open offices while the managers, directors, VP, etc all sit in their offices with the doors closed. I absolutely hate it. About 10 years ago at a different employer, we planned a trip to a customer's office but I woke up late and missed the car by literally 5 minutes. We were in an open office plan where we faced each other...sales was also in the same room sitting right next to me. Since I missed the trip, I was the only person in the office for the rest of the week. Holy-cow did I get stuff done. My productivity shot through the roof and I swear in a few days I did probably 1 - 1.5 months of work. I told the owner about this and listed the things I did while they were away. He said something along these lines: "800 bucks per month to rent an office for you is nothing compared to your salary." A couple weeks later we all had our own offices. That should be an easy message for management. Don't nickle and dime the small stuff that greatly increases ROI. I miss having competent management around.
- zitterbewegung 10y agoThe solution for open plans offices is to give everyone a real office.
- bigiain 10y agoI think the pendulum still has a way to swing yet. Quite a few places I know of are touting their new "activity based working" arrangements - which is HR/PR/Marketing speak for "hot desking, because rent is too expensive to even give you all your own desk in an open plan office, so you get to share desks and fight over what's left whenever you run late". Many of the people I know who I consider to be in the "10x developer/PM/designer" category start picking up all the recruiter calls as soon as that's announced. I _strongly_ suspect whoever got "implement ABW to reduce real estate costs" as one of their KPIs also snuck "reduce renumeration costs by organically cutting headcount" written into their end-of-year-bonus goals, while explicitly leaving out anything to do with productivity (or more likely, ensuring the "productivity" KPI got dropped onto a career-ladder-rival...)
- flukus 10y agoI could see hot desking work for companies that are mostly work from home. For some reason (probably the ones you listed) it gets cargo culted by companies that don't allow remote work.
- chtfn 10y agoI thought mainstream media was finally going to recommend OpenOffice users to move to LibreOffice.
- molecule 10y ago> The Solution for Open Office Frustration Offices.
- drewg123 10y agoSome workers take to building their own symbolic barriers for privacy At Google. somebody went as far as to build a little hut around his cube using cardboard boxes that he'd glued together. I wish I had a picture..
- Spooky23 10y agoWhen I started working for the government, there were alot of old timers who would acquire surplus cabinets other things to build mazes to their workspaces. It seemed to be a instinctual compulsion. The ultimate was an angry desktop manager who came up with some security excuse to get a large open area in a basement. They wired up a security camera in the front, and when you got an audience to deal with him in person, you'd need to navigate a maze of palletized equipment (mostly surplus junk) to get to his office. While you did that, he'd slip out a back door.
- mrfusion 10y agoWas he immediately fired?
- Haydos585x2 10y agoWhy would that be a firable offense?
- sean_patel 10y agoIf he was using Amazon Prime cardboard boxes, then yes :)
- drewg123 10y agoEh? Why? Most people had Amazon Prime delivered to work at Google.. Better than letting it get stolen off your doorstep at home.
- jkaptur 10y agoThere is a company-stocked closet full of "construction materials" for this purpose. Of course, it's still an open office...
- fsloth 10y agoIs there anyone reading this who has been involved/got the inside scoop in implementation of an open office plan. Was the change in productivity an issue? Did it happen? Was cost savings the only driving force?
- officialchicken 10y agoWorking in Arch firms, I have had conversations with business owners about ambient noise and I've never met one who cared - once the conversation moves to estimates. Yes, cost is the major driving force, Lead time/schedule isn't really an issue... outside of coordinating power, lan, HVAC, and server racks. The ADA, IBC, NFPA, and life-safety codes require slightly larger spaces than you might expect in an office setting (e.g. 36" doors and 60" wide hallways typ.) When you compare how many people 'fit' into the open space vs walls, you might be a bit underwhelmed as an owner. Basically, doors are only for those who need closed-door conversations or security.
- fsloth 10y agoAha - so the building codes force a company to use considerably more floorspace for a group of people if those people are divided by walls? I hadn't really thought of that before - I thought someone was saving just the price of walls and the difficulty of organizing people.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Zikes 10y ago> Carpenter says that the red-green block has made a huge difference. [...] “It’s amazing. Just by flipping something I can say I’m busy,” he says. “And I need that.” I'm not convinced this article isn't satire.
- brennen 10y agoI echo every other "stop building open floor plans" comment in here. It's kind of hard to overstate the sad hilarity of so many orgs with vast resources being constitutionally incapable of using technology like walls and doors. There are few more concise arguments for the intellectual bankruptcy of cool-kid business practice.
- redwards510 10y agoDon't bother reading this article. The "solution"presented is to install red/green lights at your desk to signal to people not to walk up and interrupt you. That isn't the problem. The problem is NOISE, NOISE EVERYWHERE!
- chinathrow 10y agoIt's indeed the noise. I work in a co-working space for a few weeks now - the noise is unbearable. Also, prepare for lots of folks with hearing issues once the headphone overuse kicks in. It won't be pretty.
- redwards510 10y agoWhen I was younger, I was perfectly happy to listen to music all day long while coding. Now I find even that distracting and need quiet. It seems insane that in order to do our job effectively we have to put headphones on and play white noise!
- anonymish 10y agoYes, tuning out other conversations around me takes a lot of my energy to where I trudge through the day and want to go to sleep when I get home. I find when I work in a space by myself I am energized and productive. I'm currently at a desk by two other devs who have to talk to each other all day and I'm considering leaving an otherwise great job because of it.
- sean_patel 10y agoThe solution is to penalize the offenders, in a nice way. I interned at Goldman Sachs on an FX trading floor (very open plan). We had an Interrupter Jar. Everytime someone interupted another person, the interrupter was required to put 20$ (yes 20$, it's chump change for FX Traders) into it. When it filled up, we'd go out and buy beers for the entire team. It worked quite well until we had a fratboy from Boston College. He would interrupt me just so he can fill up the jar and we go drinking.
- 10y ago
- cle 10y agoI am getting so sick of open office plans. I have a colored light (a Blink(1), for those curious), and I have keyboard shortcuts for turning the light red/green, with a large sign next to the light that says "If light is red, I'm busy." I also wear very visible (and expensive) noise-cancelling headphones. Even these very direct techniques don't work--people ignore the light and interrupt me anyway. It's gotten to the point where I straight up tell them that they're being rude and interrupting me, and to just ping me on IRC or email. They continue interrupting. It's really sad that one of my main motivations for getting promoted is so I can get an office and avoid all these completely avoidable distractions. Between the ops culture's endless interruptions, "Agile" ceremony, and open office plans, I don't know how we manage to get anything done.
- tedmiston 10y agoIt sounds like a cultural solution might be more helpful than a tech solution in this case. Something like a standardized headphones policy. Or separating the people whose work is mostly quiet vs mostly talkative.
- serge2k 10y agoI have a solution. Give people offices, or proper cubicles. Holy shit I'm a genius.
- mmanfrin 10y agoI don't care about people coming up to talk to me. It usually means they have something they need help with or an answer to. What bothers me is the noise, and no noise cancellation set of headsets work because they block out white noise but not people talking. In fact, noise cancellation headphones tend to enhance voices, since there is no background noise to dull it. Lights don't solve this. Hats don't solve this. Walls and space solve this.
- prodigal_erik 10y agoI care a lot about people talking to me. When it happens stochastically a dozen times in a day, that day is completely destroyed for writing code. It needs to be batched when it's not an emergency.
- brokenmachine 10y agoI code also, but a few random conversations is not going to ruin my whole day's work. It's the constant, unrelenting, distracting chatter and noise that stops me from getting any work done.
- pawelwentpawel 10y agoI've got beats in-ear headphones. They manage to block out enough noise for me not to unwillingly listen to someone else's conversation. How many consecutive hours can you wear headphones though? I don't think that having something stuck in your ear for 40+ hours a week brings any health benefits.
- loco5niner 10y agoFor me, it brought on tinnitus....
- maxxxxx 10y agoYes, it's the noise. I am happy to be interrupted by someone to discuss something relevant. But I don't like the noise of other people's discussions. I also don't want to wear headphones the whole day. Having a window to look outside is also very nice. It seems that execs know this and make sure their meeting rooms and offices have windows.
- wolfgke 10y agoWhy not simply implement the policy: Only say a word while in the open office if it is an emergency that is a matter of life and death (say fire). Whoever violates this policy must put a significant amount of money into the kitty for each violation (say, 50 €/$ per violation - it really should not be cheap). This should reduce the noise problem by a lot.
- TeMPOraL 10y agoWhen the first offender will be asked to put the money down, he will laugh it off, everyone will look at each other, crack some jokes, and the kitty will just become a paperweight. If you could actually coordinate well enough in the office to enforce such a rule, you wouldn't need the kitty - a gentlemen's agreement would be enough.
- sien 10y agoHas anyone worked in a place that used transparent office partitions to kill the noise while keeping some light around? Like these: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/transparent-office-partition.html https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/transparent-office-partitio... Or has anyone been able to actually choose such things because they had enough power in their organisation? They would still enable lots of people to be packed in but noise could be cut substantially.
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- brokenmachine 10y agoWhy would I ever want to make my light green? And how does a red light on my desk stop noise?