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Comment by jackhack | Hacker News Reader

There are two mutually exclusive groups of people: "Concentrators(1)" and "Communicators(2)". Concentrators must have conditions that allow one to form and hold complex ideas, and act upon them. This is almost always some degree of a quiet environment, without visual or auditory distractions. the opposite of the ideal conditions of Communicators. Communicators must interact with others to do their job.

(1) Typical of this group: mathematician, engineer, scientist, writer (2) project managers, C-class executives, sales, support

It is as unfair to ask a Concentrator to work in a noisy environment as it is unfair to ask a Communicator to work in silence. However, if one puts both in an environment together (which is often the case) the Ccommunicator always "wins" by suppressing the Concentrator's ability to work through the mere act of performing their duties.

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Counterpoint: John von Neumann, arguably one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, claimed to do some of his best work in front of the TV. In my personal experience, I know plenty of engineers who don't mind noise. I think it's a personal thing more than anything and it's hard to generalize.

countercounterpoint: he was choosing to sit in front of the television.

I think this is it -- he had control. Once others are free to intrude into your space, injecting distraction, all is lost.

Anecdotally, I often (during evening/side projects) work with a TV on in the room.

However a TV is entirely different than people being around me. There's noise from various directions, distances, and volumes—not to mention the awareness of people being near which always heightens my awareness of a situation, distracting from what I am trying to focus on.

I find I can focus pretty well in a noisy coffee shop, but if I'm in an office and someone on the desk next to me starts having a conversation, I lose all focus.

I think generally it's easy to know you won't be needed by other patrons in a coffee shop, or that their chatter won't require you to weigh in or judge, so your brain just keeps an ear out for normal danger noises.

At work, headphones off, my brain is subconsciously trying to keep me informed about the noise around me in the workplace, so that I can respond if needed (generally I'm not) not helpful, brain. :P

Using JVN who was one of the most distant outliers of human cognitive performance ever seen as an example is not helpful.

Attention control with distracting external stimuli is associated to higher intelligence.

Source?

You can google “attention control intelligence”. For more info “attention control aging” for more studies on the ability to focus declines as we age due to cognitive decline.

When I'm really cranking away at something, I like loud music. Like, really loud. I really don't like silence ever, to be honest, and I don't consider myself a member of the 'communicator' group.

Second this, although perhaps not as loud. I prefer music for concentration, which has melody and harmony, rather than ‘silence’ which is usually interrupted by noise such as chatter or scruffing or chairs scraping etc.

A TV is not calling you to chat every 15 minutes, or even talking anything important work-related to distract your focus. It's just noise, the same as working listening to music.

An aside, but an important distinction is that a TV is definitely not something that is going to interact with you, it's just background, it will not change it's behaviour without specific defined inputs (remote control); It cannot affect you either except for the changing of light in the room and it's fully controllable without impacting anyone else.

It's the difference between sitting next to a busker in the street for 8hrs per day and listening to recorded music on your phone.. in that it's a _huge_ difference.

TV to Von Neumann was probably like white noise to the average person. Plenty of people use white noise to help them think, fall asleep, etc.

Yes, I need the sound of air-con to help me fall asleep.

It’s not as clear cut as this. I form and hold complex ideas communicating with colleagues when designing and implementing a broad range of software systems (we work on core libraries used across our company) - we bat things around a lot and get to pretty decent solutions rapidly. I’m fortunate to be amongst people who work like this. I’ve also worked in teams where members preferred to concentrate on problems individually. While I can work like that, I much prefer more communicative teams.

Some people work in both modes; they need quiet for concentration but communication for collaboration.

One solution for this is to have many easily accessible conference rooms, including one-person rooms for calls, with sufficient soundproofing that you can't hear such calls from the nearest cube outside them.

its not a bool, its a scale. I do concentrator work just fine in a distracting environment. Other "concentrators" get more pissed off about it than I do.

Yes, I've seen this, and experienced it myself. It's possible, but hardly preferred.

Do you ever wonder how much better could you perform in a non-distracting environment?

ye but then I'd lose the subconscious background shit. Part of my good is that I'm broad.

You're taxonomy sounds plausible, but it's not obviously true based on my experience.

Do you know of any empirical studies that support the generalization?

Thank you. I don't, unfortunately. It was formulated purely on my own experience and instinct.

This was part of a presentation I gave in the early 2000s, literally begging my management not to destroy productivity by moving our company from cubicles to an "open floor plan/hot desk" environment. I wanted to boil down the issue to its essence and this dichotomy was the product. As others have pointed out, the real answer is that people work on a continuum, but my point is that if we are going to pursue a change in environments, we should attempt to understand the nature of work and strive for an ideal. Why implement a "solution" that only works for one end of the concentrator/collaborator scale?

In my case, implementation of the hot-desk program proceeded anyway, and I left the company soon after. Life is too short to be treated with such lack of consideration. The company has since laid off 10s of thousands of employees and sold off most of their once-glittering R&D campus buildings, bulldozing others. Only a thin shell of what used to be persists.

I regret that I did not ask a rhetorical question such as the following: "if you had to re-take a college mathematics exam in eight hours, and your continued employment depends on a passing score, where would you go to study? A quiet room, or a busy place like the food court at the shopping mall or a bus terminal?" but I realize the executive Q&A sessions were merely a show trial, not a true inquiry. The decisions were made well in advance.

While this is certainly a spectrum, I'm definitely at the extreme end of Concentrator. My productivity is basically zero when there is any background noise. I suspect this is related to my ADHD (which I've never taken medication for ;-).

I'm also strange in other ways. Music does nothing at all for me and I have a really hard time remembering things that are spoken to me (but have an almost photographic memory of anything I read). I suspect I have some sort of auditory defect that all of this is wrapped up in.

The problem here is also that it's usually the concentrators who do the actual productive work. The communicators are often just intermediaries for the results of the concentrators.

I don't know which group suits me. When I'm concentrated I don't care about my surrounding.

He said they're mutually exclusive. So, clearly you do not exist.

>There are two mutually exclusive groups of people

gonna have to stop you right there mate

Indeed. There are as many exceptions to the OPs point as there are examples.

In fact I will flit between those two extremes in any given day based purely on the work I'm doing. eg if I'm doing management administration then I tend to be more chatty because it's lots of small jobs that often require coordinating other people vs when I'm solving engineering problems and I just want a quiet controlled environment.

This is no longer true. Most younger people in engineering/CS fields are the "communicator" type and like to work in noisy, open-office environments, and frequently side-by-side.

It's usually older and/or more introverted people who complain about the open-office craze, but there's absolutely no shortage of programmers who will strongly defend it.

Citation needed. Otherwise, this is just reads as ageism.

Easy, just look at the reply in this thread from "AmericanChopper".

Every single time this topic comes up on an online discussion like this, there's plenty of people like him saying the exact same thing. And I have to partially agree with him: most engineers I work with do not have a problem with these offices. It's only a few.

AmericanChopper claims that he's never met somebody who disagrees with him but seems to feel comfortable diagnosing those people, whom he's never met, with autism. Not a great comment and I don't think he made it in good faith. Saying that people who disagree with you must be autistic is too common online for me to give any comment like that the benefit of the doubt.

No longer true because those are the only people who can succeed in the poor office environment?

I've yet to meet a programmer who strongly defends open offices. They seem to range from "doesn't mind it" to "literally unable to tolerate it."

I love them. They vastly improve team members ability to work together imo. Personally, I’ve never met an engineer in real life who complains about them, I’ve only ever seen this on HN or Reddit. I’ve always suspected it had something to do with this:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6483953/

Did you ever stop to think that maybe it's because people working in open offices are self selecting to work in open offices?

No, because non-open-plan offices pretty much don’t exist anymore.

There are plenty of companies without open layouts, add remote workers to that and self selection is a big factor. Add to that the possibility that people aren't comfortable complaining to someone who is very obviously pro open layout.

Also every survey I can find says that employees don't want open office layouts by a large margin. There's clearly something else going on beyond autistic programmers complaining.

I don't know why AmericanChopper keeps getting modded down; his points are absolutely valid.

I'm not a fan of open offices either, but I've worked in a bunch of different places over the years, and he's right on many points. There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind, and I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey. I also find that my younger coworkers seem to really enjoy the open layouts. At my current workplace where I work in a closed lab, the complaint is about the lack of windows, not the noise or the lack of privacy. Some people will make comments about certain teams having meetings that are extremely loud, or about how quiet the lab is when those teams are in their meeting, so there does seem to be some desire for a little more quietness, but these same people have no trouble having a fairly noisy conversation while people are trying to work. In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.

>I don't know why AmericanChopper keeps getting modded down

They're getting modded down because the argument is: people don't complain to me about open offices, therefore everyone is happy with open office layouts except people with autism.

> There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind

Depends on what you mean by open office. Not many places have dedicated private offices for each developer, but cubicles, small team rooms, temporary private spaces etc... are very common.

>I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey.

So take surveys with a grain of salt, but not anecdotal evidence? It's much more likely that you're suffering from selection and confirmation bias than it is that every survey I can find online is. We're not talking about online polls open to anyone, but randomized samples. Here's one where they hired an independent research agency that randomly sampled over 4k adults in the US. 66% of the office workers want a closed office layout. That's a huge margin--big enough to overcome any minor issues with the survey. And definitely stronger evidence than 2 people on hacker news saying that people don't complain to them.

https://files.getroom.com/ROOM-2018-Open-Office-Woes-Report....

> In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.

You are definitely suffering from confirmation bias here.

Also basically every study that has been done on open office layouts shows that it's detrimental to business and moral.

If you truly have never met an eng that complains about open office spaces, I submit that you have not worked in an environment where engineers feel safe to voice their true personal opinions.

Agreed. Especially if when one kinda did once, they were told they might be autistic. Not that there is anything wrong with autism, but you can see how armchair psychiatry would put other people off discussing issues ever again.

Where did you get the idea that I go around telling my coworkers that they’re autistic? I have somebody very close to me quite seriously affected by autism, and I simply see a very strong parallel between how they struggle with sensory issues in perfectly normal environments, and the HN trope of complaining about how open offices are too loud. I’ve worked in more than a hundred offices as a consultant, and the only one that was loud enough to be distracting was a particularly raucous sales floor. Contrary to the baseless conclusions you’ve drawn, the offices I’ve worked in where people enjoyed open-plan the most were the ones with the most open and supportive cultures. The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy. If noise is the reason you don’t like it, then you either work in a very loud office, or you’re much more sensitive to sensory input than the average person.

Fair enough then, good for you. Sorry if that was harsher than I should have worded it. I've seen things like that happen before tho, so there definitely are places where staff are afraid to speak up for that reason.

> The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy.

Still going to call citation needed on you tho. I've heard many people complain in person, and this wasn't a big reason I heard. The last place I worked, almost every single person spent a lot of money on noise cancelling headphones.

I was on a team where the team jointly decided to convert their half-cubes to an open office. There were two hold-outs, myself, and another guy next to me who just wanted to keep his cube. (He had a loud voice to begin with, but now he would have long conversations by yelling across the office.)

Like any strongly held belief, you're going to find like-minded people and convince yourself that you're a majority. And, especially, we're unhappy and that means we want to justify our unhappiness, and if we were the majority we'd obviously be justified.

But I think all these things are true at the same time:

1. There is a minority of people who are genuinely miserable in open offices.

2. A sizable group of people dislike specific things (too much chatter, clicking pens, etc.) but they don't think about it much.

3. A plurality are oblivious to the noise and are having fun at work.

4. And open offices decrease everyone's ability to focus and are no better for collaboration than any other design.

5. The raison d'etre of an office is to get work done and silence facilitates that.

So we're a minority, but regardless there's a solid case against open offices.

The question is if these communicator types actually get stuff done or if they just freeload on the work done by the introverted people but are more visible then those.

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