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Comment by tps5 | Hacker News Reader

My office is switching to an open design. And none of the people who work there are happy about it. It was decided by the folks who own the company, several thousand miles away.

I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor. But that's all bullshit. It's just a fairy tale that fools outsiders. Open offices look great to someone coming in for an interview or an executive visiting from company headquarters 3 states away. But at this point I think we can be reasonably sure that that's where the benefits end.

I don't think this change will damage my productivity much. I'll have headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day. Seems like a lot of trouble for that kind of outcome. I'll probably enjoy shopping for some new headphones though.

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To me open offices remind me of factories or cattle pens, where people are forced into acting like machines. Unlike many you I cannot code while listening to music as being a musician, my brain winds up analyzing what I am hearing instead of concentrating on work. The worst thing of all is having music piped into a huge room making it impossible to even use headphones if you don't like the tunes. You may as well shoot me at that point.

Thank you! I have this same problem and was never able to articulate why before, but it is for the same reason; I am a musician, and I can rarely let listening be a 'background' task.

I've never heard about PA music before in office environment. Who's mad enough to do that?

Try something like noisli. It still has that masking background-noise effect without being music (i.e. without drawing your attention).

It basically allows you to play a configurable mix of background noises; e.g. Wind blowing, rain faling, white noise, train tracks.

Heck, writing this makes me want to try it tomorrow again.

As someone who is sensitive to sound quality, I've been using a combination of mid-range Shure 315 earbuds with custom ear sleeves which is low-fatigue compared to over-the-ear.

Noise-cancelling equipment isn't as effective for human voices, so I've used low-to-high volume music to mute out my coworker's voices. This works great until early afternoon when. I. am. Just. Acoustically. Exhausted.

I'm susceptible to music and can only use it as background for 2-3 hours at a time.

The other day I came across HN user's grahamburger's suggestion to "add in some white noise on top of" using over-the-ear noise-cancelling headphones. [0]

So, I did some research/shopping and am going to experiment with audio tracks from "The Very Best Sound of Nature - Birds, Waves, Rain (with Forest, Creek, Wind, Thunder) [Sound for Relaxation, Meditation, Healing, Massage, Deep Sleep, Yoga]".

Also, as a result of your suggestion for Noisli, I'm going to try a background-noise generating application. Thank you for the suggestion.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13564539

I personally find white noise to aggressive, mostly due to the high pitch. Pink noise works better, but it still keeps me on edge. That's why I like the more natural background sounds. They still mask outside signal, but give me less tension.

Have you tried earplugs?

Earplugs don't work. They cut out the lower volume background noise which ends up enhancing the piercing voices that get through.

They've always been a big drawback for me whenever I go interview. It's hard to imagine going to actually work in the space when you don't know how annoying the people that would be around you are. It increases the amount of variables in the form of people's personalities - will you sit around the nice guy who won't ever shut up, the always distracted person, or does everyone have a good work mode but it's hard to break the silence?

For one it makes "meta" discussions about the workplace not happen except out of office. I've seen over time there's a lack of office improvements in open office situations compared to places with private spaces. People also treat others with a bit less professionalism.

It's about look, alright; the look of the balance sheet when you can cram more people into a cheaper space! Offices take up too much room, and even cubicles are inefficient. If you put people shoulder-to-shoulder at rows of back-to-back workstations, you can fit, like, a hundred of them in a room.

"Open offices look modern"

Yes, and perhaps the factor underlying that truth is that corporate management types are deeply and essentially conformists (selection pressure alone results in that). Management is almost entirely fashion-driven (which incidentally explains the egregiously semi-literate, antiscientific, ahistorical crap that dominates business/management best selling book lists).

Open offices don't look modern. The steno pool from a '50s enterprise was open office.

Open office allows companies to save dozens of dollars per employee in rent per month, which is visible and measurable. Creativity and productivity, on the other hand, is not.

>Open offices look modern

They look like "open plan" offices from the late 19th-early 20th century [0].

[0] http://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1900s.htm

Don't forget management and guests being able to walk in to see if everyone is working.

> I think the real allure of open offices is how they look. Open offices look modern. They look like the kind of working area a hip, young, collaborative, industry-disrupting company would favor.

(I'm using a throwaway because my main is tied to my real-life identity, and I'm not comfortable talking about my current employer where anyone can google my username and find out what that employer is. And that goes double when I'm talking about my employer's politics. I hope that's OK with the mods.)

I guess this is why I'm strongly drawn to companies that are socially and culturally conservative.

I work in a cube farm at a mid-size (~500 employees) company in a conservative industry (B2B telecom). The TVs in the break room and the reception area are constantly tuned to Fox News. At the last holiday party, the VP of HR gave a speech where he went out of his way to say it was specifically a Christmas party.

And I love working here. While I'm politically liberal myself, it is my experience that the most conservative companies are the best companies to work for. They actually, you know, take care of their employees. That my company is conservative makes me like them more. I'd rather work in a cube farm at a conservative company than in an open office at a liberal company (because I love cube farms and hate open offices). It's a great working environment. And you know what? They never had a single problem with me being trans, which is more than I can say for the freewheeling liberal startup I worked for two and a half years ago.

I look for liberal politics in my friends and conservative politics in my employers. It's worked out pretty well for me, in terms of both friends and employers.

Research shows that listening to music engages the creativity part of the brain so it's not used for the work you do at the same time. Headphones are NOT an adequate substitute for a writer office for a creative knowledge worker.

No; they probably picked this design because it's cheaper to run and adds more space for more people (I.e. Pushing to employ more people)

> I'll have headphones on all day, instead of 10-20% of the day.

I worry about the damage that my office headphones have on my hearing. I wonder if there's some sort of OSHA regulation regarding it, and if I have recourse against my employer because I am forced to don headphones are be distracted.

I actually did end up with tinnitus. I had other things going on (sleeping through alarms, sinus issues, watching too much TV, but I was also spending WAY too much time with headphones on at work) . If I could take it back....

And often the people cooking this up have a nice window office and their meeting rooms are along the windows.

That makes no sense. The non open-offices I had were all much better looking.

But they don't look like the places cool startups do cool startup things and the company wants to foster a cool startup feel so that everyone acts like it's a cool startup and starts doing cool startup things and attracting all that cool startup talent so that all that cool startup money starts flowing in and cool startup vibe permeates the office.

/cool startup.

That makes no sense. There was nerf guns, game tables and underpaid young developers. There is no need for an open office to have that.

/coolER startup.

90% of 'cool startups' fail. Is that who we're trying to emulate?

Stop bringing logic and data into this discussion.

That makes no sense. Data driven is cool.

/cool decision process

It's about packing in more workers per square foot of space.

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