4 ms·

I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it'

I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it's what the company calls a "pod" with high walls and a single doorway. I would say 90% of all distractions etc. come from inside the pod. Moving us into our own room would make no difference. It does get pretty loud sometimes in the building, but it's mostly white noise and easy (at least for me) to ignore. The only way to work mostly without distractions here is to wear headphones, which generally signals to others that they should leave you alone, but even then people will still just wander over and bother you because you're right there. For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird. The most productive times I have, hands-down, are when I work from home.

techsupporter 7y ago
> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird. This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person. It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending. I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate. Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating. 0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.
- LordFast 7y ago
  > Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test. Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form. Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
  - techsupporter 7y ago
    > so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing. To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet. I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated. I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
    - LordFast 7y ago
      Ahh, gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding your point.
  - Mountain_Skies 7y ago
    It'll be interesting to see if SpaceX's Starlink LEO internet service will spur remote workers to spread out even further into places like Montana. We've already had to deal with some remote workers relocating to developing countries and in one case, even an active warzone, without telling the company first.

techsupporter 7y ago

> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird. This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes off his headphones and looks up at the person. It's not just one person that does this or we might could get the behavior to change. Apparently humans in group spaces just really, really, really want to verbally speak to other humans in those spaces and there's no amount of "hey guys I'm really trying to work here could you keep it down" that doesn't come across as rude or condescending. I guess part of it for me is there seems to be no escaping from the noise of life any more. At least at work I used to have an office with a door that I could close for a couple of hours of solitude and heads-down real work. Now, after the building redesign, there are 950 people in the building and a pittance of conference rooms and phone rooms and "team rooms" (little conference rooms supposedly shared between just two or three teams sitting in larger "pod rooms" but, in practice, squatted in by one or two people all day). I've spent twenty minutes walking around my building and the adjacent one just trying to find somewhere to do a phone screen for an interview candidate. Combine that with the rest of the world getting louder[0] and it's becoming a little frustrating. 0 - Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test.

LordFast 7y ago
> Right now I can hear my neighbor upstairs walking around on the hardwood floors all of our apartments have with his hard-soled shoes like he's been doing for the past hour, the traffic outside because apparently density should only exist next to busy arterials in the city where I live, planes loudly going overhead because the cloud ceiling is lower and they're taking a more direct route to the airport, and now the backup generator for the newly-constructed senior home is running its weekly test. Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form. Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
- techsupporter 7y ago
  > so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing. To be 100% clear, I still love living in the dense city where I do and I have no plans on moving away from it. But I don't think employers have yet figured out that taking away the quiet(er?) spots at work does a lot of harm because it means loss of hours of quiet. I also readily admit that a good chunk of this is on me. I am increasingly a curmudgeon, probably because of changes at work, and so I take it out on the other parts of my environment by quietly being frustrated. I've lived in the middle of nowhere before and hated it. I've lived in the "quiet" suburbs and hated it. At least living in the city, with the attendant noise, I get more out of it than I lose; I'm just still frustrated at my employer (and my industry) for taking away my office door.
  - LordFast 7y ago
    Ahh, gotcha. Sorry for misunderstanding your point.
- Mountain_Skies 7y ago
  It'll be interesting to see if SpaceX's Starlink LEO internet service will spur remote workers to spread out even further into places like Montana. We've already had to deal with some remote workers relocating to developing countries and in one case, even an active warzone, without telling the company first.