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Going to work from home today – our office is too loud
- thatcherclay 13y agoWe had a caved in office in our last space, and the expected downsides from now having enough casual conversations bit us. Engineering did not know what client services was doing, client services did not talk to sales, and leadership was hard/nonexistent. Our new space is night and day - we have a big open floor plan and enough conference rooms so that you can always find a quiet place to brainstorm. We still have some of the old cultural problems that the old space created, but we are trending upward.
- varelse 13y agoMy favorite past employer had a sea of 8x8 cubes. The solution to communications issues like this was all you can eat Friday night pizza parties. People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza. That was the end of that. A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted 2 months. Productivity had plummeted. Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.
- notahacker 13y ago>People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza For the price of a meal the company got up to six hours of overtime from staff members at the beginning of the weekend and they decided to cut it to a third of a meal?!
- ameoba 13y agoIt was the bean counters that put the kibosh on the all-you-can work pizza parties? Fire the bean counters. Compared to the hourly wage of an engineer, even a whole large pizza per hour is a great deal. Granted, the institution would have fallen apart in the long run. Eventually people would get lives outside of work (families, friends, hobbies...) and realize that 'free pizza' in exchange for 4-5 hours of off-the-clock labor is a shitty deal for anyone making more than minimum wage. People would get hired on that just saw the company as a paycheck & wanted to get out after their 9-5.
- mason55 13y agoWe're the same way. Big open floor plan with conference rooms (although not enough). We have ~35 people in our big room and it's relatively quiet all day. People take phone calls in the conf rooms and everyone in the big room is usually working on heads down work (mix of programmers, project managers and data analysts). Conversations pop up throughout the day and there are little pockets of noise but everyone is pretty happy. In fact I just hired a developer who said one of the things he liked was the large open floor plan.
- bluedino 13y ago>> Big open floor plan with conference rooms (although not enough) My last boss drew the office up with ONE conference room. Big mistake. You need at least 3 for the size of our office. One for actual conferences and a phone call room and a 'war room'. The lunchroom was sized too big, and was only used for lunch from 11:30 to 1:00, so it became the second conference room or place to take a phone call.
- geophile 13y agoOpen office plans suuuuuuuuuuuck. They are soul-crushing, productivity-destroying disasters. Especially if you are trying to code while the telemarketer android is right next to you, repeating his or her script for the 90th time that day. But even if its just developers. Everyone talks about productivity, but its also the lack of privacy. I find that just draining. The "get shit done" part of it, however, may be something different. If you have to defend yourself against heavy incoming meeting emails, and if those meetings are purposeless, meandering blancmanges, then WFH is really a way to evade the meetings.
- sdoering 13y agoWe are only 8 to 9 people in our room here. We have our own conference-space inside this room, without separation. I am siting between editors, but I am a data-wrangler. I do code (ok, ugly code, but code non the less). I try to wrap my head around sql-commands, awk, sed, grep, python and so on. And absolutely yes, this is the most frustrating and draining environment, I was ever forced to be in. Productivity is something I do not really know anymore.
- scrabble 13y ago"Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"
- OrwellianChild 13y agoI can vouch for open plans being terrible even in a non-dev intensive environment... Open plans stifle the ability to have the ad-hoc meetings that actually allow things to get done, since having that conversation at a person's desk disrupts the entire floor within a large radius. Natural light is critical to happiness, at least for me, but I exit to coffee shops rather than attempt to corner the limited supply of conference rooms.
- rohall 13y agoFor me, it's not necessarily the frequency of random conversation/noise/etc, but the lingering feeling that you could be interrupted at any time. That idea keeps me from concentrating and working to my full potential. A single day working from home might equal 2-3 days of productivity at the office (provided you can seclude yourself at home). Glad to know I'm not the only one struggling with this.
- zentiggr 13y agoI'm currently working in a support position for a relatively large building, both floors of which are almost exclusively cubes except manager's single desk offices. My area is a total of three cubes of space, all of which is open to the walkway. Interruptions are de facto day-to-day existence. On the other hand, I don't often do much that's truly put-on-blinders-and-earmuffs, so it doesn't seem as draining. I would still like to have an enclosed space with a door that the desk can face, instead of having people walk up behind me all day.
- ds9 13y agoAffirming both your experience and the parent poster's. The worst place I worked, in terms of these factors, had cubicles with an open side behind the employee, all kinds of employees side by side, and a high-traffic aisle on the open side of the row of cubes. So, you're trying to ponder some data structure or where to put a method, and people from different departments are holding loud conversations in the aisles, rapping on steel columns as they walk by, letting their phones blare obnoxious ringtones at top volume, holding speakerphone meetings in their cubes - then a co-worker walks up quietly behind you, pops a can-top, and when you jump, laughs and says "oh did I wake you up". Soon you're so frazzled that you can't focus on anything, just being on edge all the time wondering how long you have until the next startling interruption. And the managers can't be convinced that this has anything to do with productivity. Anything said about it is interpreted as whining about trivial details, and gets an answer like "everyone has the same conditions, maybe you should work somewhere else". Pretty soon I did. And that organization still has no clue.
- JohnBooty 13y ago
- nodata 13y ago"Caves": why is he inventing a new term?
- showerst 13y agoI'm not a big fan of open plan offices, but now 8 people are moving into two offices with no natural light, and 3 people right right next to them. Unless those hallway walls are glass, that feels like an awfully depressing place to work.
- rhizome 13y agoNobody is saying there's no such thing as a bad non-openplan office. There are more than two choices between a sapping openplan office and a cramped windowless one. I mean really.
- showerst 13y agoSure, I was referring to the two particular offices in the original article's plan. I don't see those as an upgrade.
- varelse 13y agoOpen offices are a line-item cost cutting measure and nothing more than that. While they destroy the ability to write code and ergo engineering productivity, they are providing important data on the minimal environment from which productive results can be obtained. Call this the Sweatshop Event Horizon. I'd ask why oh why should anyone have to wear noise-cancelling headphones and/or install white noise generators just to get work done, but why bother? This is an intangible loss so the MBAs and management consultants behind this can claim they saved big bucks and then blame you for your lost productivity at your next review. Finally, the worst part is when the HR department starts citing this morale-mashing pox as a perk: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-tech-companies-changing-times http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-t... That said, if all you want to do is play foosball and talk to your co-workers all day whilst whittling away someone else's VC money, it seems like an excellent approach to doing so.
- greenyoda 13y agoIt's ironic that the same companies who pay high salaries to attract top talent then go on to fritter away that talent through distracting work conditions, in an effort to save a few bucks on office space. Salary plus benefits are a much bigger yearly cost than office space for expensive employees like developers, so it seems like they're trying to optimize the wrong thing: if your employees are working at 50% productivity due to distractions, you'll never make up that amount of wasted expense on office space savings. Also, the companies that complain about how hard it is to find qualified employees might consider that many of the most qualified people might not want to work for them because of their working conditions.
- ds9 13y agoWell said. I think part of the problem is that the people who specify the office conditions just have no idea of what conditions are best for productivity of software developers or engineers, or the importance of factors like noise, or even that different jobs need different physical surroundings.
- Joeri 13y ago
- jcutrell 13y agoI completely identify with this. Certainly, some of this is introversion, but more of it is science. Peruse Hacker News for a few days and another article will pop up justifying what we all feel when we're at work: interruption is poison, and casual environmental talking sucks brain power. I like the idea of caves. We share our office with another company, Southtree[1]. Our nook of the office holds about five of our desks. We've decided to move our desks to the walls, so we don't face each other but still benefit from some of the pieces of an open office. I can say this has definitely helped our productivity, but we're still susceptible to flipping our chairs around and talking. At that point, I think it comes down to discipline. I would prefer, I think, to have a "shut down zone" of sorts, like your cave but less cubicle. Maybe slightly darkened glass walls or something, so the feeling is open but the noise is not.
- scrabble 13y agoI would love to work in an office that has caves like that as opposed to the open office I'm in now. I'm constantly distracted both audibly and visually -- the constant visual distractions being the big kicker. I definitely think open office plans for software teams are not the way to go.
- numo16 13y agoWe have individual offices at my company and it is quite excellent coming from an open office/cube farm layout previously. Being able to just close the door and window blinds to signal you want to be left alone work and think is something every developer should be able to do.
- JohnBooty 13y agoThe eternal "open floor plan versus programmer-friendly caves" debate makes it painfully clear: there's no one right answer. Why is this hard to understand? Different people have different styles and needs. In fact, the same person might have different needs on different days. Sometimes I love working in a beehive when collaboration is key; other times I'd much prefer to be working in a soundproof underground bunker. Why is this so hard to understand? Why do nearly all offices try to adopt a one-size-fits all approach that is just so obviously going to frustrate at least 50% of the employees? It just seems so simple - design a workplace with both collaborative and private work areas. Let people take their laptops and sit wherever the %(#*@ they want on a minute-to-minute basis. That's really so difficult?
- kps 13y agoYes, it is. Your back and/or hands will explain why soon enough.
- fixedd 13y agoI've been working exclusively with laptops for > 6 years now... how long do I have to wait?
- Touche 13y ago> It just seems so simple - design a workplace with both collaborative and private work areas. Let people take their laptops and sit wherever the %(#*@ they want on a minute-to-minute basis. That's really so difficult? Option 3: It's 2013, the internet exists, let people work wherever in the world they feel most productive. Judge them on their output, not their butt being in a seat for 8 hours.
- tribaal 13y agoWe do exactly that. I've never been more happy and productive in my life. And before someone jumps in to say it doesn't scale, we're 600 employees, or of which about 400 work from home, so while we're not huge, were definitely past startup size :)
- dsr_ 13y agoYour redesign also needs walls around the scrum zone. Specify a high-density soundproofing insulation in those walls, and you'll be cut noise transmission all through the office.
- vessenes 13y agoThese are almost exactly IBM's recommendations from their 1970s era analysis of programmer productivity. A couple short items from their studies -- productivity for knowledge workers improves until they get 100 sq. feet of space and 30 sq. ft of desk space(!). They recommend walled off areas for functional teams, three to four people per, 300 to 400 sq. feet per team. The teams can close the door when they want. You'd give them a couch and a whiteboard, etc. in there. This gets you private time for functional work teams who typically want to be heads-down or talking at the same time.
- tzs 13y agoThe desk space recommendation almost certainly no longer applies. In the '70s, it was not uncommon to work with printed listings of code and printed memory dumps for debugging. These were printed on large fanfold sheets. If you were working with a code listing, a memory dump, and the program output, that could easily take up almost half of 30 square feet. Toss in a giant reference manual or two, and a desk calculator, and it is easy to believe that desks under 30 square feet could interfere with productivity.
- varelse 13y agoI gotta say it - those 160 column printouts of code were awesome for debugging over a cup of coffee... And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident even on a 30" screen. Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous bugs.
- worldsayshi 13y agoI'd say another point for using oculus rifts for development.
- kylemaxwell 13y agoIf only their resolution were better...
- rotten 13y agoIf you want to understand everything that everyone is working on, where does the time and energy come from to do that? It comes from everything else you are trying to do. It is not "free". An open office plan may make it easier to see and hear what everyone else is doing. That seeing and hearing, however is going to take time and energy away from what you need to get done. In college, did everyone study in the cafeteria? No. Programming and learning and implementing new technologies are a lot like studying. Why would you try to do that in the cafeteria? Why do typical organizational structures break management down to a few direct reports per person? Because it is really hard to keep track of what more than a few other people are doing with any degree of precision. I suppose if you have an open office, you can get rid of all middle management and have everyone direct report to the CEO because you all (including the CEO) know what everyone else is doing all the time?
- crazygringo 13y agoMaybe... but I flat-out refuse to work in an office without natural light. It's just too soul-crushing to spend 5/7 of my daytime hours away from the sun, under fluorescent glare. (I'm sure that for many people, this doesn't bother them.) Open plan offices certainly can have their problems, but I'll take natural light over a private room any day.
- spolsky 13y agowhy wouldn't a private office have natural light?
- RogerL 13y agoBecause most buildings have a large footprint, and only the offices on the parameter have windows. I am typing from a windowless, interior, private office. It is pretty depressing, but I prefer it to open space (which I could easily get here). Others, of course, like the person we are replying to, would feel differently.
- bryanlarsen 13y agoOne of Spolsky's articles pointed out that hotels are also large buildings that manage to get an outside window on every room...
- bartonfink 13y agoIf you think about it, that analogy doesn't really work. The rooms that guests stay in are almost all along the outside because guests are paying customers. The janitor's storage rooms, room service kitchens, elevator shafts, mechanical access corridors and other such workspaces are located on the inside in the less valuable parts of the building. Not every room has an outside window - only the rooms for VIP's, which is oddly similar to the situation in most office buildings.
- Joeri 13y ago
- lnanek2 13y agoReminds me of working at Worksmart Labs/Noom. They had a noisy open plan office, but still felt they should max out the stars on the Joel test in their hiring ads for giving programmers a quiet working environment. If you are going to have an open plan office, it is a cost cutting measure. That's it. Being honest about a lack or fault is better than lying about it. Good to see a startup doing things right in this article!
- jacquesm 13y agoIn some places natural light is legally mandated, hard to use a large chunk of floorspace, have natural light and give everybody a room of their own at the same time. Especially older buildings can't be adapted to this.
- touristtam 13y agoWhere is that? I never heard of such a law existed.
- acgourley 13y agoI don't think it's cost cutting - the price of office space is far outweighed by knowledge worker salaries. I think it's a whole range of factors, but the largest is this: when a tech company becomes successful, they grow fast and are too busy to do a search for a proper office. So you see a lot of successful tech companies with tight, open layouts. Then you simply confuse causation and correlation and say "oh it must be their cross team communication!"
- tzs 13y agoSerious question: in these completely open plans that so many startups seem to favor, where does one pick one's nose or scratch one's nuts? [1] [1] The commentator is asking out of curiosity about what other people do. This comment is not an admission of either nose picking or nut scratching at work on the part of the commentator. [2] [2] The first footnote that disclaims nose picking and nut scratching at work is not meant to imply that the commentator picks his nose or scratches his nuts at home.
- _JamesA_ 13y agoI worked in an open plan once. One guy would let an (audible) fart rip about once a day. The manager (female) had family issues and would start screaming and/or crying over the phone a few times a day. There was no separation between personal and business matters. It was the most unproductive environment I have ever encountered.
- baddox 13y agoYou might as well ask where teachers, or bus drivers, or college students, or any number of a wide variety of people who aren't alone in a room all day, pick their noses or scratch their nuts.
- JabavuAdams 13y agoIn the fart-room ... I mean ... kitchen.
- mrt0mat0 13y agoI've worked in open settings, as i am now, and worked in an office with two other people spaced out comfortably. In both we used irc or another similar chat to communicate regardless of the distance, so we didn't distract others. The open office i can't stand. I can never focus, and every time personX is looking for personY, they just pool the whole floor, which is annoying. i get noise cancelling headphones and what not, but i also get that if you're not wearing them and personZ is trying to get personY's attention, you have to listen to somoene yell. I wear headphones but get sick of wearing them after about 3 hours straight. I'm in a corner and face a window, which is nice, but i would rather be shut in a quiet room, working. I have also worked from home 5 days a week. love/hate there.
- diego 13y agoPeople in the software industry keep rediscovering this all the time. Managing software teams without having read Peopleware is like coming back from Paris without having seen the Eiffel tower. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces
- caublestone 13y agoEvery time I see something about designing office space I struggle to be convinced that it is better than the format of Pixars. From now on, I will be posting this link as a reminder in the comments. http://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/ http://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/
- mixmastamyk 13y agoOne of their innovations was to have the bathroom in the middle so everyone bumps into each other. Sounds gross but they say it works.
- typicalrunt 13y agoWhenever this topic comes up on HN, something that nobody discusses is the impact to people's health surrounding the overuse of headphones. Talk to any audiologist and describe how often you wear headphones; they will want to reach out and slap you across the face. Even if you play your music at a low volume, your ears were not meant to be covered by ear buds or over-ear headphones constantly (as in, hours at a time). And yet, this is something that people in the IT industry have accepted as common practice. Just think of the looming health implications when everyone's ears get a little older, and less likely to heal properly. About 5 years ago I had an ear infection that left one of my ears with a permanent loss of hearing. Now, it's only 5% at the top end of the spectrum (soft Ss, iirc), but it's enough to aggravate me daily. But the downside is that I can no longer wear headphones for anything more than 20 minutes at a time (it feels like pressure is building up in my head...a very weird feeling), even with no music playing. So here I would sit, in a loud open plan office without the ability to wear headphones and being asked to solve hard problems. If this were a leg or back injury and I was made to use something in the office that aggravated that problem area, I'd have a worksafe (OSHA?) problem, but for some reason people's ears are not a health issue. Just remember, your ears are extremely sensitive instruments and they rarely get better if you destroy them. And if you think not being able to hear properly is the only side-effect, just ask someone with hearing loss what they go through. They'll likely tell you about slurred speech[2], random phantom noises, pain, etc. [1] http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your-health/health-conditions-library/general-health/Pages/headphone-safety.aspx http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your-hea... [2] This is caused (over time) by you not being able to accurately hear what you are saying. You hear your own voice via two mechanisms: internally through your jaw bone (mandible) and externally through your ear. Fun fact: most of your voice is heard through your jaw, which is why everyone says their voice sounds funny through when they hear themselves on video. [Edit] spelling
- redthrowaway 13y ago>for some reason people's ears are not a health issue. You appear to be in Vancouver or thereabouts. Worksafe BC absolutely does cover hearing loss. Here's the claim form: http://www.worksafebc.com/forms/assets/PDF/4.pdf http://www.worksafebc.com/forms/assets/PDF/4.pdf
- qwerta 13y agoIt is surprisingly easy to get nice quiet private office. I charge 40% extra for work in loud open-plan office.
- smrtinsert 13y ago3-4 person caves are awful. They encourage cliquish behavior which translates into uncooperative competition. Completely open plans might be noisy, but 3-4 is too small a unit. You can always call the big bullpen the quiet room and the smaller rooms the conversation rooms. I've worked at several start ups where that was in place and it worked wonderfully. To blame the plan is to blame the tool - it was the hammers fault! Also consider that sometimes the biggest producer is sometimes the most introverted and least connected in terms of personnel graph. Putting up walls everywhere dramatically increases that persons social barrier to communication which translates directly into business drag. Open plans ease that persons burden.
- doubt_me 13y agoDon't forget to mix in some standing desks
- traughber 13y agoWhat about a bunch of partitioned rooms with soundproof glass walls?
- mcguire 13y agoOooh! The fishbowl approach. Don't tap on the glass! It'll make their hearts explode!
- canadiancreed 13y agoIt beats open concept warehouse space, although only for audio distractions
- HPLovecraft 13y agohi guys -- i just wanted to say that this thread is fantastic. this is why HN is so sweet! Thanks all!
- baddox 13y ago> I’m cognizant that this recommendation flies in the face of conventional wisdom, which says that open layouts lead to better organizations because communication is more free-flowing. This is the opposite of my observation. I seem to be the only programmer that likes open office plans and the ability to collaborate and start conversations with low friction.
- canadiancreed 13y agoThis postings instantly reminded me of this Dilbert comic from a few weeks ago http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/90000/1000/500/191585/191585.strip.gif http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000...