Everywhere I work is an open office and we all wear our noise cancelling headphones, playing whatever music doesn’t break our concentration, and communicate via Slack.
[1]: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i...
Saying "toughen up and use headphones" is such a dismissive response to noise that employers use. I'm extremely sensitive to noise distractions, and music is, for me, just as bad as coworker chatter. Even white-noise apps make me feel like I'm getting barraged with sound. I want "library quiet." It's amazing that "open office" workplaces don't generally have a policy to keep the space as quiet as possible so people can get real work done.
I follow some of the executives of the company I work at (we have an open office) and they are constantly posting pictures of "teamwork and collaboration" that just have a bunch of people standing around each others desks talking. They see all the movement and noise and they love that it seems like everybody is hard at work, collaborating and discussing problems etc. But if you look a little closer, the people doing actual work are hunched over their desks with huge headphones on, and everybody standing around are either not talking about anything related to work or they are rehashing discussions that have already happened over IM/email/meetings. I expressed to my manager that I had a hard time working in this environment and would like the chance to work from home a more often but was dismissed because he "likes the open office" and our management has the view that if you are working from home you probably aren't working.
Of course I don't think that's necessarily 100% true, but it always stuck with me.
/r/IBM is an IBM-controlled sub, and the original was deleted by the IBM-employed mod, hence the screencap.
The executives tend to be extroverted and at the top of the primate social-power higherarchy. Much of this is unconscious, or at least un-admitted, but the people in charge of our offices get a rush when their subordinates visably do the work. They enjoy people gathering around them and telling them about the issue of the day. To an extrovert at the top of the ladder, that power wouldn't feel as good if it was manifested solely as Jira tickets, slack pings, and performance dashboards in a home office. They would not feel nearly as important.
One open office I worked regularly flew in parent company executives from around the world so they could watch all that geeky brainpower under their command grinding away at our Macbooks.
I think this psychology has had a cumulative effect on creating our work culture. Did an individual executive decide to build your office based on how it made them feel? No probablly not, but when you take the psychological profiles of all business leaders together you get the open office, the business trip, and the all day meeting.
It made me think of another: perhaps executives wrongly assume that what's a productive environment for them and their tasks is appropriate for everyone in the organization.
The ones that aren't are worth their weight in gold, though.
The book "Managing Humans" is worth a read if you're so cynical about managers. Though the actual problem is corporate culture in my experience.
Might as well put you all behind a big glass wall, with a placard underneath that says “Developers” and toss a few bananas in every once in a while.
I don't hear that phrase much lately. Which makes me quite happy.
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It doesn't even need to really show anything, just say it does. Kind of like the Connection Machine's random blinkenlights "activity mode".
I work in a similar dystopian open office panopticon, and I'm shocked, every day, that this isn't something that everybody is intrinsically aware of. But where I work, there are some Important People who have offices with doors - who leave the doors wide open, put their phones on speaker, and shout into conference calls all day, every day. The inconsiderateness of some people is really mind boggling.
Just a guess: some extroverts find "library day" just as unpleasant as others find non-library days?
I really like the way Amtrak handles this: At least on the Northeast Corridor, most of their trains have a "quiet car". Whether or not you sit in it is optional.
extroverts work at the office
introverts work from home.
The middle ground I have is noise-cancelling headphones (bose qc20) with white noise app playing a low volume mix of grey noise and... maybe brown. The grey gives a low feeling, and helps mask out some frequencies that the noise cancelling headphones miss. It's not perfect, and it's not "library quiet", but I've found the combination is relatively calming most of the time.
(and yes, noise cancelling headphones is still sound, even if it's out of phase! I even wonder if it's worse, as the effect might be constant sound pressure on the eardrum -- does anyone have the science on this?)
It’s 100% about virtue signalling to management. Headphones fit the visual stereotype of a hacker, so it’s OK. Ear plugs carry a connotation that the stuff generating noise is somehow “a bother” or “a nuisance” ... which of course is true, but you’re not allowed to actually acknowledge that truth.
When I’m actually listening to music, only earbuds will work for me. I suppose I could try to get earplugs that look like decoy earbuds.
However, if your comment was meant seriously, i.e. that employees should do some noise-cancellation arms race song and dance with employers, that mildly terrifies me. How could any person actually think that it’s acceptable to let your employer treat you that way? It’s insane.
The actual best option is to first do excellent work that makes your employer respect you and really count on you to such a degree that firing you for expressing reasonable preferences is not realistic for them. Then once you have established that bar of credibility, find the right ways to constantly remind your manager and other managers that the workplace conditions are unacceptable. This requires political tact because outright grumbling or long-winded feedback sessions will be used against you. Rather instead, you have to find key moments to unassailably undermine your boss by visually demonstrating just how hard you’re working but keep pointing out that because of noise and distractions, nobody (not even good, old trustworthy you) can get the thing done on time or get the full set of features implemented, etc.
You have to convert your pain into your boss’s boss’s pain, or it will never change. Capitulating with headphone contortions is a terrible approach.
But in tech companies it’s all about optics.
The downside is that every time someone wants to actually talk to me, I have to take my headphones off and take at least one earplug out.
As far as a DC offset, that doesn't exist in actual sound pressure waves. That's an artifact of discrete representation of sound as an electrical signal. When a DC offset is connected to a speaker you don't actually get any sound pressure, because the sound pressure comes from the cone's movement pushing air (resulting in pressure waves in air).
A DC offset just means that the speaker is being held still at some offset from it's "zero" or resting position. But the speaker is still being held still, un-moving, so no pressure waves are created. The "pop" you sometimes hear when a DC offset is present is the transition from a neutral signal (no offset) to the DC offset. The immediate change in the signal causes the speaker to move as fast as physically possible to get to the new position, creating a short, often very strong pressure wave (the pop). But once the speaker is at the offset it doesn't move unless the signal changes.
As you say, there is no "constant pressure" in acoustics. Or more accurately, it's typically not a factor in sound reproduction. Technically we are all subject to the constant atmospheric pressure. But it's not the pressure that causes acoustic phenomena, it's the rapid fluctuations in pressure. It's even possible that the headphones are forming a seal around your ear and subjecting your ear to varying pressures as you move and the headphones shift on your head (too slowly to be perceived as sound).
Active noise cancelling is what fancy Bose and Sony and (simply put) it involves cancelling outside sound out by playing the opposite sound. This shouldn't cause hearing damage because the opposite sound waves actually sum to 0, but I'm unaware of any studies about this so who knows.
Passive noise cancelling is when your headphones block out outside sounds the same way that typical ear protection does - by physically preventing it from getting inside the ears. Most headphones (excluding open-back headphones) will have some degree of passive noise cancelling just because they need to cover your ear.
You can buy headphones designed to passively block as much noise as possible. They are typically called IEMs (in ear monitors) because they are commonly used by musicians on stage to hear their instruments and what not.
This kind of noise cancelling will absolutely not damage your hearing or cause pain. In fact, because of the lower ambient noise while listening, you will be able to listen at lower levels. That will cause even less hearing loss and pain.
I've got a pair of these [1] Etymotic IEM's. I also use Etymotic's musicians earplugs and the IEM's block out pretty much the same amount of sound and fit in the ear the exact same way. Other notable brands are Shure and Westone.
If you want, you can go the extra mile and have custom molds made of your ears. Those will be far more comfortable than universal IEM's and will block more noise, too.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Etymotic-Research-Noise-Isolating-Ear...
Increasing collaboration is a bullshit excuse, but so is cost.
The only way to avoid this is to have the chance (e.g financial and social opportunity) and to use the chance (e.g by working and choosing) to set yourself in the right environment for you. Wanting the environment you are in to change does not work.
Just like you don't get more money by negotiating with your current boss, but by negotiating with bosses in other companies.
You can, and my, decide it's your mission to change your environment. It's possible. But you usually can only one mission in life, so choose carefully.
- can you pull it off ?
- does the cost outweigh the benefit
In that particular case, some people can't pull it off. They need the job or don't have that many opportunities. Some, like as both the chance to be able to, and have the mean to. That's a combination of luck and the result of your previous choices.
Now, does the cost outweigh the benefit is a personal evaluation. Personally I will decline working for a company with an open floor plan unless I can work remotely. It's on of my important items.
For some people, the prestige, the project, the team or the money can override this.
It's not rocket science really.
I've learned the hard way that you appear to be right, one can't change this alone and doing so is maddening, depressing and frustrating. Especially when the verbal outward presentation by people is that they want and value the things I mentioned, but the actions don't match up.
I think I need to change, but, I can't help feeling cynical, like I'm giving up and running every time I see such a situation. And then I wonder, if everyone follows the same pattern, how are we actually improving the situation on a bigger scale?
I guess a question is, is it better to stand whatever ground you are on to help encourage positive growth and values, or just find new ground, as you seem to be saying.
I'm getting older and I still haven't figured it out. I think you might be right, but it seems depressing to me to accept it.
I don't have a total answer, but I suspect a basic problem is that we have too simplistic an understanding of human psychology.
It's also possible that it's a chasm you and/or I can never cross, because to effect the kind of improvements you're describing requires having a particular persona.
I'd love to hear any ideas people have on solving this issue.
I agree completely and have no argument with change cannot be forced. And I also agree that most of the time, the thing you have more control over to change is yourself and your environment.
My only thought was, there must be some kind of equilibrium or balance that tips one way or another here. For example, if you're in a place that cannot achieve what you as an individual see as best - so you change your position - what if everyone does that and then nobody is left to do the work in that place?
That might force the place to change. Or, it might just attract people who don't care about how that place is. So in that regard, while it might have been better for you as an individual, and in a sense, by leaving you did that place a favor by demonstrating your convictions, you also didn't stay to work through the challenges and maybe improve the place you were.
So, I'm saying that, if everyone does that, is anyone staying to fix things in place? Or does the world really work if everyone gravitates to only the places where everything is working well and we leave behind the places where things don't work so well?
As someone who only tries to hire grown ups, I can assure you that many employees do not act like grown ups at all.
Here's a weird one: There's a number of people at my work who leave filled coffee mugs on the restroom countertops.
Refers to cubicles which in my experience DID solve a lot of problems. People talk less when they don't see other people around them.
I suspect cubicles effectively cost more than $200/year because they eat more space than open-plan desks, which forms the real cost. But even so, I suspect you could find a lot of people who would give up $1000/year of salary for that benefit.
And even closed offices could probably be offset on a salary level. I think a lot of mid-career or later devs would probably give up an annual raise in return for a private office if they were offered an explicit choice.
I could be wrong about specifics, maybe it's not cost effective to offer. But I seriously doubt that's how the choice is being made - I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about 'better collaboration', or just want to look like other companies.
Somewhere else on this page is a comment from me that I'd take $20K/year less for an office with a door. I got my wish. There are other aspects to the job that make it appealing (short commute, laid back atmosphere, etc.), but if it were open office, I wouldn't have taken the job for the money it pays.
Midway compromise, that we've joked about at work: Use those walls per-team instead of per-person.
A little more spending would have obtained traditional cubicle walls to close off the open side, but it worked pretty well in practice.
On the other side of the room were a whiteboard and a conference table, and lunch was typically eaten at that conference table.
That said there were only like 5 desks in that room, and I'm not sure how well it would scale.
The architect insisted on 8ft aisles and cramming in so many completely unused "collaboration" spaces we couldn't get enough desks in.
Just note that the kind of "open space" that's designed to both maintain/boost individual "deep concentration"/research work and boost collaboration requires more space pr worker than individual offices.
In the typical "cramped open" setup; either any one on one conversation will disturb everyone, so people are polite and don't collaborate that way as easily as dropping by an office with an open door; Or people gets lots of collaboration done, but no "deep work" done.
Though try working as a contractor at Microsoft without your ass in that chair eight hours/day and see what happens.
BUT, why the elaborate dance around that fact? It’s always dressed up as something else? It comes across as a sham explanation when anything but cost is attributed.
If you're taking the whole company on an international vacation, or paying to do their laundry and offer daycare, or offering whatever other widely-mocked perk you care to name, it's hard to imagine that worsening employee experience to cut costs is the goal. (Especially when you see open-plan offices even at non-urban companies.)
I think a lot of people really do believe the hype about open plan being better, especially if they're the boss and don't have to actually experience it.
If you can get a community of people who work together to ignore the basic human idea of privacy by cramming people together such that they are forced to live out in the open without privacy, it then becomes easier for them to ignore questions about privacy when creating privacy violating services.
Big successful new companies started out scraping by being built in garages with just a computer, table, chair to use, no private offices. When they grew up they saw no reason to change because it worked for them. So now the company is big and successful and believes that part of its success was the open plan office. So now other companies try to emulate the new young fresh hip fashionable company and so everyone gets open plan, even if its worse than offices.
Considering everyone is wearing noise cancelling headphones, and everyone is on Slack anyway, I don't believe this claim.
More importantly: Stress.