Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
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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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
Oddly enough, I can be very helpful to others in an open space, but I've never managed to get my own work done.
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?
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antsylabs/fidget-cube-a...
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 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".
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.
[1]https://abc.xyz/investor/news/earnings/2016/Q2_alphabet_earn...
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.
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.
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.
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.
That IS bullying.
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.
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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).
Of course, if it's a painful pressure, please don't risk it :)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
--
What's HN opinions?
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
I don't think there's a solution for that.
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.
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?
I have similar observations about their UI. Maybe a consequence of Conway's law, that the office plan is implicitily reflected in the software?
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.
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.
Java is superior to everything else. Go and C# only came in much later.
Javascript is the only language supported by browsers.
It's not pop culture, there are real historical and practical reasons for them to be where they are.
- 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.
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".
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.
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 saw something a lot like this in a coworking space in Santa Monica once but of course the goal was very different.
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.
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.
So the people who prefer open offices already have a ton of choice. Those who don't have almost no choice.
Because people keep trying to disguise penny-pinching stinginess as "collaboration" when it's proven time and time again that it doesn't work.
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.
Its about choice.
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)
Or, you know, you can just interrupt everybody for a useless bike-shedding session at the drop of a hat.
Definitely.
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.
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.
Might get the message through...
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
Has anyone suggested piping nature sounds/sea sounds through the loudspeakers as an experiment (you know, a bit of disruption)?
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.
If so, you have your strategy.
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.
Now working from home I make more progress per day then I did on a weekly basis there.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
I would bet that introverts are _over represented_ in tech, but of course they put us all in open office plans.
Want to work alone? Close door.
Want to work alone but be aware of things going on? Leave the door open.
Can't stand working alone? Go to the open area.
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.
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?
Although I will admit it is hard to start my side project after work and is probably due to being drained.
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.
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.
Seriously: swap with someone who desperately needs some quiet - perhaps make the availability of your office known to a small network of people.
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?
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.
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.
Right now I'm in a cafe that has 50+ people and thumping bass music, all sweet white noise. With a beat.
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.
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.
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.
So she's even more quiet than requested. Sounds like a win. :-)
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.
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 .
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279190533_Creating_...
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.
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.
My other comment for details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12800201
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 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.
They are bloody expensive, though.
I should probably buy some Plantronics stock, shouldn't I? Just a happy consumer :).
At one point I noticed there's mould in one of the muffs. :(
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.
Microwave oven? (Faraday cage approach)
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
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.
I think I'm approachable enough that they take the offer at face value, and not as a passive-aggressive "don't you dare".
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!
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.
It also upgrades the quality of any flight.
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 could play music, but sometimes I like the roar of silence.
http://www.tinnitus.org.uk/hyperacusis
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.
"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."
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.
still would prefer an office, obviously.
Your mileage may vary; some people find this stuff puts them to sleep.
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.
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?
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...
- Is Facebook’s Massive Open Office Scaring Away Developers? [1]
- The Opposite of the Open Office [2]
The previous discussion of one of that post also appears on HN. You may check it out here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12677866.
[1]: http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/09/is-facebooks-massive-o...
[2]: http://calnewport.com/blog/2016/10/19/the-opposite-of-the-op...
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Fireproofing-transpar...
http://stab-group.com/en/products/of%D1%96sn%D1%96-peregorod...
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.
Unstructured space is terrible for working and terrible for collaboration.
I couldn't fucking stand the noise and distractions.
Now I work remote, at home, on my own gigs. Never work in an "open office again"
With them, you can easily turn off or on ambient noise.
It would be interesting given a poll who would opt for:
- open plan, no separators
- hot-desking
- individual offices
- individual offices + open areas
We don't need to work in libraries, we need to just adapt.
I find it hard to take your statement seriously
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.
Great! Put on some headphones, then?
The point is - its just as easy to block noise, so take the responsibility on your side rather than asking others to change for you.
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.
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.
I work in a noisy office. The only reason why my productivity goes down is because I'm nosy as shit and have all these opinions I want to share.
I honestly can't understand people that can work in those depressing conditions.