People should not HAVE to do buy/use something just to be productive. It's downright disrespectful to expect your workers to just "deal with the noise in a professional manner".
In a typical corporate office, I would not tolerate it. I would push back, and I encourage anyone with sufficient job security to push back too.
Very early in my career, when I as still operating in the break/fix world of help desk support I toured an office during an interview. It was a boilerroom sales team, complete with a gong that someone bashed as I walked along the back wall to the conference rooms, everyone cheered madly, papers flew, loud music started playing off of a set of overhead speakers. I winced the moment the music blared and almost visually grimaced from the volume. Along the way the hiring manager interviewing me pointed to an area in the back of the office with laptops stacked up to the desk from the floor, monitors, cables everywhere-directly underneath one of the speakers. He didn't have to tell me, I figured it out, but he told me anyway
"And over there is where IT sits".
I stopped the recruiter before we made it to the conference room and politely pardoned myself from the interview process. No way in hell.
IMO, that push back needs to start early, as early as possible where possible. Not everyone may have the circumstances to punt on an interview like that, completely understandable, but the interview is just as much for your benefit as theirs. Candidates should evaluate as much as they can by sheer power of observation as they can verbally asking about working from home.
That means taking in what you can that you might not be explicitly shown-or worse, steered away from if you're brought in for an on-site interview.
I'll quickly summarize the majority of HN conversation for the uninitiated: if a potential employer asks you to write something on a white board or solve a take home coding problem, politely gather your things, leave, and start contributing to an open source Rust project until a more ethical employer makes you an offer. Follow the same procedure if a potential employer has an open office, uses recruiters, or employs anyone with the job title "Scrum Master."
But to answer your question, apparently like everyone that posts to HN. ^_^
I made my feelings known most emphatically, but I stuck it out for 2 years, and now we are moving back to cubicles. The thing is, so many people now work from home that the open office layout isn't so bad.
I’m sure they could be repurposed the way you suggest. But don’t most people in open spaces use slack or equivalent for that?
Surrounding yourself by whiteboards might also allow you to approximate walls.
I've got two colleagues that are horrible about this. Fortunate enough to have an office with a door, and play music quietly at my desk so I'll hear it if someone knocks--since I face slightly away from the door.
Except they'll skip knocking and just walk in and around my desk to do the shoulder tap if the door's open.
I've been training them out of this behavior by saying "oh hey did you knock? I must have missed it, what's up?"
Time will tell how this goes, heh.
Although I do wear headphones pretty much constantly, I have always made a point to be responsive to people and not ignore them. If someone needs my attention, they will get it, and I made a point of doing everything I can to help people. Yes, I'd rather not be disturbed, but if they really need my help, then I will gladly stop and help. This is no different than if I were in a cubicle or my own office. I have no problems with that kind of distraction. It's the unintentional distractions that we need to eliminate.
After 8 hours, my ears actually hurt from wearing air-traffic-controller style headphones all day.
The guys in the tower are ATC, they do ground control (still ATC) and local control, surface to 2500' with a 5-mile radius. The dark room guys (TRACON) do surface to the top of their airspace (depends, 18k, 23k) with a 60-mile radius (roughly). Then there is center/en route, which does air traffic above the TRACON when you are level flying at 30k+.
Simplified version.
Source: Was an air traffic controller.
Private office, closing door. This should be the minimum price to hire someone.
Now we actually have a flexible remote policy, but that's an entirely different can of worms, as I liked having a place to do deep work in that wasn't a coffee shop. My home is a bit too distracting sometimes.
Cube walls, over the years kept getting shorter and shorter until finally doing away with them entirely.
The point is - the business requires that you have zero privacy or any kind of time to yourself in any capacity outside of assigned breaks.
The whole purpose is to create a panopticon of a work place, where even when you aren't being watched you modify your behavior on the possibility that you're being watched
Open offices are inherently authoritarian in a corporate/cyberpunk sort of way. That's their primary function. All this crap about collaboration and fostering open communication is just the face of it.
I'd have a hard time caring about that if I had to wear headphones and play them loud enough to drown out the noise around me in the first place.
(Luckily, I have a door and a pair of headphones with a noise cancelling function that is usually good enough without even any music playing.)
But even in a very noisy environment, think the tube in London, where the noise level when going through a tunnel can be similar to a factory floor, surprisingly, people will hear your noisy iphone and will be annoyed by it. Now if it is in London they will be too polite to let you know. But I think not making annoying noise is also a form of politeness I like to adhere to in any case.
Why would you want to ADD to the problem instead of being part of the solution?
It's possible that escalating a "buy me PPE" request to the company lawyer could raise a few eyebrows into exactly what conditions you're being asked to work under.
In addition to being completely unable to filter out any distracting noise, I also have misophonia, so an open office is anything between distracting as all get-out and torture, but the headphones and some good loud music mitigate that greatly.
(I once worked between someone who tapped their feet and someone who drummed on the desk constantly. Those weeks were not productive, even with headphones.)
You need Steel-Toed boots and Earplugs for some locations - I'm not sure how much of that is compensated. For waste processing, you either "deal with it" or have a purchase some form of smell-cancelling equivalent (peppermint oil on a cotton swab is an example I've heard used in a hospital). What about slip-resistant shoes for cooking in a kitchen?
By all means, I don't enjoy the open office layout - I literally spent 20 minutes this morning talking to my immediate neighbor about NOTHING.
HOWEVER, I suppose what I'd like to ask is - "what makes a white-collar job's comfort more important than other occupations, to the point they should be either compensated for purchasing items to maintain it or isolated with [cubicle] walls put up?"
[Slippery slope fallacy incoming] Maybe that music or podcast is distracting you from work, I mean we wouldn't want you to see a 20, but think 10 because your podcast was simultaneously playing their 10% Squarespace ad. You are right, noise is distracting and corporate is now providing all employees with noise-cancelling earplugs.
EDIT: Since I've been downvoted, can I have an explanation, or is this a simple I'm saying something the HN community disagrees with?
Steel-Toed boots and earplugs are necessary because of safety requirements. You can crush your toes and lose your hearing as a result of that job.
Waste processing smells because of the fact that, well, waste smells. There is utterly nothing the company or the individual can do other than mask the smell for them self.
Programming has no such utterly-unavoidable noise aspect (unless you count meetings and around-the-desk discussions, things which I personally can deal with to a reasonable extent). There is absolutely, positively no reason that a company of a decent size can't format their office in a way that is less distracting than an open-office format.
Drawing a line between white and blue collar jobs in this manner is a false equivalence and a strawman.
Is there a tech company which has an open floor plan for programmers only because they're cheap?
That said, I would still say that there are plenty of ways to improve (what I would consider) "comfort" in your work environment; however, they do not need to be reimbursed by the company (moving this back to your original post).
Likewise, as the other reply to this post mentions - cost.
Simply put, what is the cost involved and relative productivity gained/lost from each layout design. What about experimental designs? Without this type of information, it is difficult to convince a decision maker to improve these conditions. Those metrics need to be quantifiable, not anecdotal (I get more work when there aren't conversations around me vs. I resolved 10 bugs in the open office environment and 25 equivalent bugs in a cubicle).
This gets into more the MBA and Information Systems world of quantifying intangibles in tech (like productivity), but to obtain this in an environment that would be deemed acceptable for experimentation, you'd need a corporate culture interested in experimentation - because not every layout will work for every group or every person in said group. Even then, being a group that opts into experimentation is not indicative to a real work environment, and so better results would require a new cohort for each experimental layout.
Regardless, without decision maker buy-in and quantifiable metrics that can beat the cost/productivity metrics of open-office, articles like this only serve to form an echo chamber.
This has been well documented since the early 2000s. Programmers are statistically and significantly more productive if they have enclosed offices with closing doors. And decision makers that care have been acting on it for just as long (see Joel on Software, I'm not a huge fan, but this has been a harping point of his, as an owner of a software company, for years).
Any company that forces programmers to work in open-plan environments is either ignorant, or just doesn't care.
I'll agree with everything you stated but this as the terminology you use makes it sound malicious. Instead, I can imagine consulting firms with plenty of talking points convincing a decision-maker they were right. Furthermore, we cannot assume any particular environment will be optimal for all employees for all companies. "Productivity" was studied, but has branched into more concrete terms, rather than been solved. Even with a company that is open to helping improve conditions, what should they do, how long will the ROI take, etc.
While I accept the assumption of being more productive in an enclosed space, could you point me to a specific paper? Mostly because "productive" is not as well defined and is more a generalized term (respectfully, many terms can fall under the "productive" umbrella). I ask about the paper because a) I'd be curious to see how they define and measure productivity, and b) it may be beneficial for student learning (another knowledge-specific domain)
For boots, compensation is not required as "this type of equipment is very personal, is often used outside the workplace, and that it is taken by workers from jobsite to jobsite and employer to employer" [1] -- though I know some employers who offer a "Footwear Reimbursement", and/or loan out steel toe guards when requested.
Earplugs, yes, by law in the US.
[1]: https://www.osha.gov/dte/outreach/intro_osha/7_employee_ppe....
> "what makes a white-collar job's comfort more important than other occupations, to the point they should be either compensated for purchasing items to maintain it or isolated with [cubicle] walls put up?"
First, it has nothing to do with money. I've offered at several jobs to pay to escape the open office space, and I've always been refused permission. Other jobs are often isolated, when there's a possibility for distraction, even at these same companies.
Second, it's not about "comfort", either. Distractions make it impossible to concentrate, which is literally my only job. If they hired me to do a job, they can't simply put me in a situation where I can't apply my skills, and then judge me based on my performance there.
You're being downvoted because you're trying to steer the conversation into "compensation" and "comfort", neither of which are the issue here.
It's not necessary to assume that it's more important to express a personal dislike or suggest that it's counterproductive. So the fallacy here is strawman.
It's intellectual work that requires a high degree of concentration. Not all white collar work is like that and not all blue collar work isn't, but programming requires keeping a lot more in your head at once than someone on an assembly line and noise inhibits this. There's also the type of noise, people talking is a lot harder to filter out than other background noise, I can sleep with a train track a few meters away and can concentrate with music playing but I can't work in an open office.
Buying high wall cubicles or paying for a construction company to build out offices is still buying something to be productive.
I don't believe that productivity is hurt because of open office sounds, I think people just love complaining.
I've worked both with my own office and in an open office. The difference is night and day. I'm vastly more productive and much happier in a closed door office. Most people report the same.
To clarify, just because you're in a library doesn't mean it is absolutely pin drop quiet. There is basic atmosphere noise. I of course am in favor of a closed office, and cubicle farms and open environments are easily more favorable for the employer than employee, but it seems expected to have some basic noise in an open office that people love complaining about—instead of championing closed offices which is never going to happen in a lot of companies.
Your lack of belief does not invalidate other people's experiences. You may feel that your productivity isn't hurt in open offices, and you might even be right about yourself. But "this doesn't bother me so it doesn't bother anyone" (or even "so it shouldn't bother anyone") causes serious problems.
"It doesn't bother me, so obviously, it doesn't bother other people"