Hacker News Reader

Comment by nimbius | Hacker News Reader

As someone who works in a garage most of the day as a mechanic, just what is office noise? they all seem pretty quiet to me. What are we trying to reduce?

Around the shop I carry a few pairs of disposable foam Howard Leight earplugs. They come in small plastic bags, or you can buy them in boxes of 500. I'll hand them out to apprentices I catch not wearing ear protection or to old timers so they can sneer at me. they work wonders for any kind of noise. We once had a garbage truck plow through a rolling dumpster out back and I never knew about it until lunch.

View on HN

As someone who works in a garage most of the day as a mechanic

As someone who has worked as a mechanic professionally, and now slings code for a living, I'll take a whack. You've put a set of brakes on a Chevy, you've put brakes on about all of them. Hell, put disc brakes on a car of any make, and you've got the general idea. I'm not saying it's not a tough job, hey, I've been there. But he nature of the work is different. What makes an alignment hard is not the same as what makes implementing this piece of code hard. What makes an alignment hard is frozen fasteners and having to go reference the manual because Mercedes decided that fifty years of prior art on caster adjustment just wasn't good enough for them, and invented their own. What makes this morning's software task difficult is that, though similar work has been done, no one has had to make it work quite like I need to do today (otherwise, I'd just buy something off the shelf). I'm making a new invention; not on the scale of the light bulb, but it's still new and there is no reference manual.

So, in the shop I can be fine with lots of noise and music as m 3/8" air ratchet backs out the brake caliper bolts. I don't need to concentrate on that much, I'm not going to bring the whole shop down if I screw it up. Pull the bolts, pull the caliper like I've done a hundred times. That Mercedes alignment, yeah, I might turn the radio down while I think about what I'm doing. But an oil change? Crank it up! (But even for an oil change, I recall having forgotten the drain bolt before putting in oil at least once.)

Software, OTOH, I need to mentally hold fleeting abstractions in my head. Someone droning on about the fscking SeaPigeons game on Sunday can easily break the tenuous grasp I had. I didn't even like being interrupted in the middle of a brake job if I were in the flow, but at least the brakes are right there in front of me when I have to go back to it. Not so with that algorithm for...oh, what the hell was it?

In summary, the nature of the work is quite different, such that mechanical work can be more interrupt-tolerant than software work.

I'm guessing, based purely on my own experience, that there's something neurological going on - that programming involves heavy use of parts of the brain that are also kicked into gear by certain kinds of auditory stimulus. Language almost certainly, but maybe some other bits I don't know about.

Me, I can deal with sound in general, and I even like to listen to music while I work. What really messes me up is words - people talking, music with lyrics, stuff like that makes it very difficult for me to get my work done. Strong rhythms are also a bit of a challenge. So the sounds of people walking are tricky, my mechanical watch needs to go into a drawer if the room is particularly quiet, and the music generally needs to be something classical.

But there's also a threshold where there's so much cacophony going on that my brain just gives up and tunes it all out, and I'm back to my productive zone. When my coworking space is starting to get a bit too noisy for me to concentrate even with my headphones on, I typically deal with it by packing up and going to a nearby coffee shop that I can trust to always be busy.

As I've narcissistically considered my own comment since I wrote it, I think it might have to do with noise our lizard brains feel it has to process. Because as I thought back to my time in the shop, with the air tools, compressor in the back room, cars in and out...you know, I could probably plop down with a laptop and be fine hammering out some code. It's just noise (and for some reason, the thought of an air tool sound makes me think in a Pavlovian way that work is getting done!).

But "Hey, how about that game last night!" behind me and...

LizardBrain: "pattern identified: human speech. Attempting to parse...colloquialisms not found...setting parsing process to 'high' priority...audio sensitivity set to 100%."

ConciousBrain: "nooooo, I don't give flying shite about the SeaPigeons! Trying to work here!"

Yeah, and, at least for me, people's attempts to try and be respectful of each other in an open office type situation make it worse instead of better. Talking in hushed tones makes the speech harder to understand, which makes the lizard brain work even harder.

Working in an open office where the main language is your native language: you spend some cognitive energy tuning it out.

Working in an open office where the main language is a language that you understand well, but not natively (my every day life in Germany): you spend a ton of cognitive energy tuning it out, because your lizard brain insists on having that surrounding speech parsed first, just in case it has something to do with your work, because every so often, it absolutely does.

Working in an open office where you have absolutely no comprehension of the language (two weeks in Seoul): amazingly productive, because the lizard brain doesn't even bother.

I'd agree with a lot of this experience. There's a huge amount of music that I can just zone out while I'm programming. Though I'd add that new music will typically pull me out of it, much as a conversation would. Maybe it's something about new stimuli that triggers the brain to get out of the zone, and conversations always count as new stimuli, while listening to Led Zepplin IV for the thousandth time isn't doing anything new for my brain.

Additionally, I have a really hard time focusing without _any_ music. Typically I need some beat to be able to get in the zone at all. It doesn't matter what the beat is - EDM, ska, soundtracks, lo-fi beats to study to, but there needs to be something.

> As someone who works in a garage most of the day as a mechanic, just what is office noise? they all seem pretty quiet to me. What are we trying to reduce?

It's not about the loudness, it's about its nature. I can't give you a precise characterization, but for me the most distracting noise is other people talking about stuff potentially relevant or interesting. Other things are easy to ignore, unless I'm in an irritable mood. Also note that people (myself included) often fight this kind of noise by playing even louder noise on their headphones - but that latter noise is not distracting and completely under control. Programming is a job requiring a specific kind of deep concentration, and it's easier to tune out a 747 flying directly overhead than two cow-orkers talking in the same room.

For me it is an officemate talking loudly on the phone that is really distracting. Last year a guy in the office would have long, loud, sometimes heated conversations on the phone with me and 2 other people sitting in the office. Apparently, he was also a preacher and his cell phone ringtone was "Our God is an Awesome God" and he was one of those people that when he made a call on his desk phone he would put it on speaker phone, dial, let it ring, and then pick up the phone. That's when I brought in my over the ear hearing protectors.

Luckily, he got a different job but oddly, the person who sat behind me moved to his desk and now she has started making lots of calls. Maybe that desk is cursed or something?

Should've asked the guy to perform an exorcism on the desk before he left the job.

The problem isn't raw noise volume or surprising sounds, it's background chatter that drowns out the internal monologue needed to carry out the work at hand.

Crude analogy: Picture you're working on some annoying electrical gremlin under the hood and you've got the shop manual open trying to troubleshoot. The manual's telling you to find the blue wire and set the jumper to position 23, then turn the smallest hex bolt adjacent clockwise two and a half turns. You've got the flashlight out and there are about 20 different blue wires and several dip switch panels.

Now imagine three people stood around you talking at an un-ignorable audible volume 'nimbius blue green 24 41 brown nimbius twelve yellow forty three hedgehog..' on and on, indefinitely. More people come and go all the time and they never stop.

You're gonna keep re-reading that shop manual and it's gonna keep getting pushed out of your head by the chatter. You will get frustrated. That's what it's like, all the time, coding in an open office.

Many offices are very quiet normally. Then when people are talking, even relatively quietly the sound carries and it is very distracting. A fountain to make some white noise, or a better arrangement of cubicle walls can make a big difference on cutting down these distractions without preventing people from having conversations.

Imagine trying to fix something that's not exactly like things you've dealt with before, but of the same nature. While you're concentrating on the problem, several people around you are talking about related things, using similar terminology, but trying to accomplish something else.

It's wonderfully distracting.

We were recently moved into a temporary space where there's a dozen or so people in a 40x40 room at any one point.

A lot of them have meetings with our business partners, which requires a lot of talking on the phone.

This noise isn't background noise, it isn't random white noise, it's noise that diverts your attention constantly because you may know what they are talking about. It's not something you can tune out.

I'm currently googling for noise blocking headphones.

Impact wrenches hurt your ears. People talking hurts your brain.

I'm going to piggy back off of your comment to say that I have no problems working "in the zone" in an open office. I can just ignore what is going around me. And I had HR sitting right behind me (as in 1.5m away) for a while. The sales guys were also quite close. Lots of loud phone calls.

Just to bring a counterweight to the usual "I'm a virtuoso that needs absolute silence to work" stuff that gets posted every time open offices get mentioned.

I think that is a particular ability - I can do so as well, but I also recognize that it may be more the exception than the norm.

That said, I very much like private offices more.

I'm not saying I need quiet because I'm a virtuoso genius. I'm saying I need quiet for programming like I needed quiet for my math finals in college.

From my experience, it is not so much the noise level, but the distractions that they create. A nice set of noise-cancelling headphones allow me to focus in on my tasks.

I never knew how much noise the AC made in my office until I got noise cancelling headsets. After my first week of using them I noticed how loud the HVAC fans really are.

One thing I did notice was I have to pop my ears when I have the noise cancelling on. A few times it also made me feel nauseous when I turned them on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com