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Comment by ergothus | Hacker News Reader

One of my offices, after vocal complaints about the open office plan, did a quick survey.

Roughly 50% were fine with the open office plan. (this office was mainly devs, HR, recruiting, and data scientists) As someone that is drained by social interactions (I _like_ them, but afterwards I'm drained, not energized), that is easily distracted by movement, and who can't hear conversations in the background without instinctively trying to focus on what is being said, open offices are hell for me.

I was utterly mystified by the "other" 50%. How do you just "choose" what to focus on? That's like controlling a reflex. I knew there were extraverts, but SO MANY?!

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Can't find it anymore, but I could swear there was a study that recently hit the HN front page that found that everyone's productivity objectively takes a hit in a distracting environment. But, subjectively, extraverts perceive themselves as being more productive, while introverts don't.

This. Extroverts are likelier to choose the survey response that reinforces their identity. If you’re a social person, then “I love open office plans, they totally make me more productive” is the pro-social answer.

I would rephrase 'reinforces their identity' to 'helps maintain their sanity and happiness'.

I am not even saying they don't take a hit to their productivity. Just that that's not the important metric to those folks, they just would dread a job where they're isolated.

Yup it’s been proven that libraries are good places to get work done not cafeterias.

They really should have collaborative AND personal spaces. Not a forced airport-like office setup.

What were they smoking when they designed those?

For me, a little noise is the worst. A busy cafe with a constant level of noise is easy for me to tune out. If everyone is silent but like every 30s something happens: Someone coughs, a bag of snacks is rustled, a cardboard strap is opened. That's the worst.

Agreed.

I'm fine when the general level of noise is way up, because there's less for the brain to latch onto and get distracted by. I've churned out serious lines of code in a noisy cafe, but always churn out more when I'm at home: my noises, no distractions.

It's the human interaction though that drags me away from the work-from-home/work-in-a-cubicle lifestyle.

I find even quiet conversations in an open environment to be the worst of all distractions. The clacking of pens and the slurping of drinks in a library set my teeth on edge, forcing me to wear headphones, which means I may as well be outside with the rabble.

This makes me wonder if the core of the problem is the lack of control over your own environment somehow

Sure but a cube farm isn't going to save you from this.

This is driven with money-saving in mind -- at least short term. Consider it is easier to lease space as a landlord if it is open space floorplan, and it is easier to deal with a 1-2 year temporary space as a startup, than actually pay to modify it.

A lot of this depends on people on the maker's schedule vs. the manager's schedule.

Or put another way, some people like the office environment because it matches how they communicate and get things done. The office environment is built around the idea of real-time conversations, which can be helpful for collaboration if it's not overused.

With that being said, the office (especially open-offices) take this idea way too far. I just finished a post about it a couple minutes ago: https://www.friday.app/office-vs-remote-distance-communicati...

Trying to tune out the background conversations is especially hard when most of them are in a language you speak usefully, but not fluently.

Works the same in the reverse case: I'm a native speaker in the office language, but many of my coworkers are not. One of them is impossible for me to tune out, only because of a difficult accent (his grammar etc are actually better than the ones that I can tune out). It feels as if a mental background process for flagging keywords or something like that keeps bailing out with an exception, "sorry consciousness, you take over". I discovered that I can limit the effect with positive framing as a naturally occurring experiment that grants an interesting window into the inner workings of the mind. At least this way, the distraction does not get compounded by annoyance (which also would be quite unfair). I can only imagine how bad it must be when everyone around you causes that kind of escalation to consciousness.

Surveys like that don't work very well. The same people would probably also have been "fine" with their own office. Many people just want to get along, and enduring this and that is something that we learn all the way from childhood.

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