The Solution for Open Office Frustration
bbc.com
bbc.com
That isn't the problem. The problem is NOISE, NOISE EVERYWHERE!
Also, prepare for lots of folks with hearing issues once the headphone overuse kicks in. It won't be pretty.
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.
Now that's a pathological case.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
I share your feeling about noise, and so does the person who wrote that guideline. But allcaps is noise in its own right.
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.
> 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!?
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.
I always figured zoning laws usually discourage heavy development, so companies are heavily incentivized to use open-plan offices to save on rent.
Here's a listing for 3 offices for 900 sq. feet for $63.33/year, or $55,197/year. Each office might be something like 10% of your fully loaded cost, so a company with at 10 employees is spending an entire employee on rent. https://42floors.com/us/ca/san-francisco/235-montgomery-st?l... .
You could cram them into a box and they would whine, but it might be worth it if you can get an entire extra employee out of it.
Though, there are 3 8-hour shifts in a single 24-hour day, so I'm surprised they don't stagger scheduled times for employees so they can share the same space. I myself usually like starting work at 4 or 5 AM, since there are fewer people around. There's probably way too much social inertia for that in general, compared to spending a few thousand $ on some cubicle walls.
If you can afford more than 10 employees, you're probably quite profitable and the margin on well-run software companies is pretty high, so maybe they don't care about rent at that point.
For startups — budgets. If closed offices were the same price I doubt we'd hear so much discussion about the benefits of open offices while turning one's head the other way when it comes to the downsides.
You're forgetting the mentality you're dealing with: as far as they're concerned, if you're not productive, regardless of the environment, the problem is you. Never them.
That's sounds kind of coo.
Lights don't solve this. Hats don't solve this. Walls and space solve this.
It's the constant, unrelenting, distracting chatter and noise that stops me from getting any work done.
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.
Realistically, though, interruptions happen when they are unplanned. Need many meetings? Set the time slots and schedules.
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..
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.
Like this => https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/bc/17/61/bc17615c9...
Since it's the other kind of open office, I suggest noise-cancelling headphones and the freedom to publicly shame loud eaters without reprisal.
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.
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...)
I'm not convinced this article isn't satire.
Offices.
Like these: 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.
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.
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.
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.
And how does a red light on my desk stop noise?
Give people offices, or proper cubicles.
Holy shit I'm a genius.