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You mentioned headphones. Headphones seem to be an essential part of open plans. Not only do they send a don't-bother-me signal, they also drown out the noise.

But that's also a really annoying part of it. I don't want to have to put on headphones all the time.

If the top post indicates anything, it's the high precedence the psyche places on framing. Switch around your default- and exception cases and see if that helps take your mind off it.

It's a real thing. This summer, because my room would get hot at night, I had to leave a fan on. At first, I couldn't sleep with the noise. But now that it's getting colder, I've tried leaving it off, and guess what. Ha. Now I need the noise.

I have worked in an open office plan and simply can't work with people around me talking. I had to wear my headphones all day every day. I would never accept a job in an open office again.

I have an office of 4, which is bearable. I have gone for a few interviews recently, and open plan seems to be the norm. It seems difficult to find a productive working environment.

I was way more productive when there were just two of us in the same office. That was when the organisation was just starting out.

I got marked down as not a culture fit when at an interview with a digital agency - I pointed out that the camped noisy office environment (all working on laptops no double screens and popper docking stations) would be effecting their efficiency.

The role I was going for was as a technical consultant to improve the quality of the work - go figure

I bet I'm not the only one who sometimes puts headphones on with no music, solely to broadcast that don't-bother-me signal.

Good headphones are comfortable. I actually prefer them sometimes to no headphones, 'cause they keep my ears warm.

Try earmuffs?

I tried industrial earmuffs for a while (-25 dB), when I was in a noisy office, and they work. With another "layer" of in-ear phones you can work anywhere. They also send a stronger signal of "don't bother me", but some will find it rude.

LOL where is your office?

I've got the reverse problem: I'm _always_ warm. Keep a fan at my desk, on at all times. Over-the-ear phones trap a _lot_ of heat.

Instead I use earplugs.

I wear glasses and I have yet to find a pair of sufficiently isolating headphones that doesn't become painfully uncomfortable after 1 hour. And I've tried various high-end solutions.

Tried Etymotic earbuds? They come with a bunch of adapters to fit different sized ears. My model is of course discontinued but the mc5 looks closest. http://www.etymotic.com/ephp/mc5.html

edit: unlike any other earbuds I have tried, they are engineered to survive the inevitable wax-plugging. Just replace the filter & you're back in business.

> solely to broadcast that don't-bother-me signal.

Current workplace has a no-headphones rule, exactly because of that.

Many people were donning headphones as soon as they arrived in the office and not taking them off until home time, simply to avoid having to interact with anyone else.

So now no-one can avail of shorter periods of non-interruption, but I understand why they banned them.

In-ear earphones seem to be tolerated, so long as they are removed when someone comes to talk.

Sounds like a terrible policy for concentration. On the surface management might think they are getting better results (more interaction) but it is probably at the cost of individual productivity.

Also someone signaling the entire day that they are not available is a big red flag either in terms of their workload, stress level, interpersonal interactions with some people, or some feelings in general at the company.

Either way its something to tap to find out what's going on.

That's the only reason I've ever used headphones.

Protip: get earmuffs. The kind that construction workers use. They're about $20 on Amazon. If you combine them with earbuds, you literally can't hear a conversation right next to you.

This is the setup that pro Starcraft tournaments use so that players can't hear the announcers and crowd.

That has the exact same problem as headphones. I do not want to wear giant things on my head for 6-8 hours a day while I try to get into and stay in the flow.

(I don't have a problem with ambient conversation at, say, Starbucks, but I find myself very distracted by people talking about work stuff in the same room as me.)

Small nitpick: my understanding (perhaps moreso in more sound-dependent FPS) is that pro gamers are already sound shielded.

The two headsets were 1) voice chat with your team 2) large 'surround sound' headphones that really signaled direction.

Definiately not the case for league tournaments. In the spring split of EU LCS they wore 3M Peltor ear defenders over small in-ear buds for their actual sound.

More recent tournaments they seem to have integrated ear defenders with headphones with Mic's on. (Previously they had 3 headsets, the ear buds for sound, the defenders then their sponsors headsets around their necks for the mic.)

I tried construction worker earmuffs for a while. The biggest problem is that I wear eyeglasses. The arms for my eyeglasses have to go through the soundproofing system to hang on to my face, which leaks sound and makes them kind of useless. I assume construction workers don't wear glasses?

They also squeezed my head which was uncomfortable after 8 - 10 hours.

Lastly, people kept trying to talk to me, which meant I had to pull them off and put them on and pull them off and put them on which was a little maddening.

Also: http://i.imgur.com/bZwKOzy.jpg

One of the worst things for me in open plan offices is you can hear people eating at their desks. For me nothing is more annoying and distracting than to hear someone crunching on cookies or popcorn or potato chips at his desk. That's an instant headphones-on for me. It's worse than all the other background noise/conversations put together.

I work in China in a semi-open office, every afternoon they make fruit available for consumption. Whenever the fruits are relatively juicy (e.g. Chinese pears), I can't get any work done due to all the smacking and slurping around my work area; I have to go to Starbucks.

What gets me is the smell of delicious food being eaten by my coworkers...I have to stick to plain food in small quantities to keep from getting fat again, and I get jealous...

I worked in an open office situation once with a co-worker across from me who listened to sports talk radio all day - no headphones. I literally can't imagine a more distracting work environment.

Maybe you could have requested him/her to use headphones. Many a times in a situations similar to above I have requested my coworkers to use earphones, and usually they would comply.

Me neither! Did you ask him to use headphones?

Eventually, and amazingly we actually became decent friends... eventually. In the early days it was a matter of picking my battles, and there were other more important things to work on. (Hard as that might be to believe.) So for a while I just put my headphones in and tried to tune it out.

(Initially I just asked him to turn it down, and I don't recall the exact response, but it was probably approximately, "No.")

Peter: Milton? Uh, could you turn that down just a little bit?

Milton: Uh, they said I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven while I'm collating….

Peter: But, no, no, no. I know you're allowed to, I was just thinking, like a personal favor, y'know?

Milton: I, I told Bill that if Sandra's going to listen to her headphones while she' working, I can listen to the radio while I'm collating...

> One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you.

A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say, it's awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I'd all but forgotten what I was asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing how long I'd have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of focus.

No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just aren't very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.

This isn't really a feature of the environment, except accidentally. What's really at stake here is striking the balance between the short term cost of integrating a new team member and the long term cost of failing to integrate them well.

I sat next to my very first technical mentor for a few years, and he had no compunction about holding up a finger and saying "hang on" curtly when I'd start to ask something. If you all agree that it isn't rude in this context, I think that reaction can help. I do it myself occasionally and usually can keep about 80-90% of my flow.

Try doing that to your wife on work-from-home days at your own peril.

Wife nothing, try doing it to the exact same mentor who felt entitled to do it to you.

If my experience / observation is any guide, the result is utterly epic shitfit.

I have done that, and no explosions, nor any shitfits.

It depends on both the way you do that, and the way people talk to each other there (aka the culture).

Work with better people?

At my last job (less applicable now as I WFH), it was acceptable practice to give a "hold on" to everyone you'd run into on a daily basis. Maybe not the CEO, but the VP of Engineering would wait a sec if you needed to get something done Right There.

Some kinds of work respond very poorly to interruption, and for others it's trivial. Breaking a coder out of their 'zone' kills their productivity. Breaking a typist out of their 'zone' is trivial. This being said, if someone is meant to be mentoring you, then this will require special tactics as it is a special relationship.

Great point, I've also experienced that as a new hire.

The best new hire layout I've had was purposely being assigned to share an office with my mentor. Since we were in a physical office, I wasn't afraid to ask any questions, even the dumb-sounding ones that otherwise would be overheard by everyone within ten feet in an open plan.

Amen. Worked in an open floor plan (30ft long rows with 8 people at each) and now work in an office of cubes (6'x7'), so actual desk space is the same. I found the developer collaboration and communication far better in the open plan than the closed plan. People were always communicating the the former and almost never pop their heads up for air in the later.

Today a coworker was IM'ing me and I then I realized that he was sitting literally 18" from me behind a partition so I just starting talking out loud to him. Seemed to unsettle him. Collaborate damn it!

> Collaborate damn it!

Do they want to hear you talking to him? I sure wouldn't want people talking while I'm trying to concentrate.

"Collaboration" doesn't have to mean annoying your coworkers. If you need to do things aloud, that's fine--I sometimes find it better too--but it's vastly better go somewhere private for it.

People collaborate on open source projects all the time without uttering a damn word.

Yeah, I feel weird about emailing/ iming people in the same room as me when something could be solved with a 30 second or so conversation.

It depends on the social norms. In my office, thankfully, there is a norm that you only go to ask another person after you've looked through the documentation and attempted to understand the code or error message yourself. I don't mind being interrupted in my current work environment, because I know that 90% of the time, the interruption is a worthwhile one - that there is a non-stupid question for me to answer.

I have worked at offices where this norm did not exist. I would strongly challenge your assertion in that case. My productivity definitely was adversely affected. What I think a lot of people lose sight of is that interruptions are additive. If you get interrupted once or twice, that's fine. You can recover and get on with whatever you're working on. But if the interruptions are a regular feature (especially when they're for little things that take two to five minutes to solve, but require you to drop all your current context) it takes longer and longer to recover. At some point (usually around lunchtime in my case) I'd just give up and hop on IRC or Hacker News, knowing that it was unlikely I'd get much work done that day.

It got to the point where I'd come in at 6:30am and leave at 3:30pm just so that I could have a few hours of uninterrupted coding time at the beginning of the day. And this was in an office where it was just other developers I had to deal with. I would probably last less than a week in an office that I had to share with non-developers (especially sales, who have to be constantly on the phone).

Your middle paragraph is exactly what I see of myself.

I go in the morning and everything is ready to go and so am I, but then attempting to load my brain with whatever I am working on, getting a question every 5 minutes or so makes it seem like a running a marathon and the cognitive load is such that I would rather just dedicate the time and work on it at home.

> As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply.

This is a weaird problem to me. At my last job, we had the "ask async first" thing--but, yeah, if they're not responding and it's urgent, then of course you go ask them, that's just obvious. But the point is that this behavior should be rare because it's not "momentarily" losing their flow, it's often losing it for ten to fifteen minutes. A two-second IM is less likely to make them lose it than you walking over, so start there.

I often find the opposite. We discuss details, and go through options changing our minds a number of times on the way.

Via email (or text based communication), then the result is clear, and I can refer back to it afterwards. Also meetings with non-technical users tend to go around in circles where they discuss trivial details that are pretty irrelevant.

But if you implement all of that perfectly, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of having an open office? (I.e. to stimulate more spontaneous collaboration)

The main purpose of open offices is to save on real estate costs, stimulating more spontaneous collaboration is just a flimsy excuse.

Partitions can still be installed between the work pods to provide a measure of privacy. Many of the open-plan offices I've seen have no partitions, the only thing between you and everyone else is a computer monitor. It's insane.

Partitions don't do much to cut down on noise unfortunately.

With partitions, at least I don't have to watch the office gumbies milling around flapping their arms and smacking their pieholes. Half of my monkey brain is tracking their movements for threats, and the other half is struggling to prevent me flinging handfuls of my faeces at them out of annoyance.

For sound? I can just put on headphones.

It depends on the partitions and how other surfaces are finished.

With sufficiently high walls (about 6'), carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, you'll actually cut noise quite a bit. Lower and sound travels in straight lines.

One of my gigs had a "pod" style cubical layout with 6' high walls, glass in the upper 2' or so, arranged in groups of four (see diagrams below). It's still one of the best workspace designs I've seen, period.

https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...

I think one benefit is the cost savings? More people in smaller area + large area for group chats when needed, etc?

Cost savings until Cold/Flu season hits. Watch that burn through the office...

They are recirculating too much HVAC air, too.

If people are in the same office space overall, everyone will likely catch whatever's going around anyway.

The actual purpose of open offices is to save money.

The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.

It highly depends on the team. In a small team that know each other well, it can work. Most of the time it's not the case, however.

Depends on the kind of work you do. If you're in sales or marketing the open office plan may indeed stimulate creativity or whatever.

But for people who have to concentrate (like software developers) it's a productivity killer. Joel Spolsky used to touch on this occasionally - he claims all sorts of research shows the most productive arrangement is to put everyone in his own office with a door.

Where I work that will never happen, because there are corporate-wide rules about who gets an office and who doesn't. You have to be a director to get your own office, which is two levels above non-managers. They're so anal about it one time I worked on a floor with no directors and they left all the offices unoccupied. They crowded everyone into cubes and even doubled one up when they ran out of (cubicle) space.

Then the question comes: Do they really save money, or does it just appear like they do?

Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.

Money saved on office space is easily measurable and directly attributable to the bean counter responsible.

Productivity loss is hard to measure, and even when it's blatantly obvious, it's easy to shift the blame.

I would add to that: don't have fewer rooms than you have continual need for.

In a previous job, we had an open office layout with a handful of small conference rooms. The rooms were always being fought over -- resulting in the institution of a byzantine booking system involving Outlook calendars and admin permissions, with the office manager as bottleneck to booking a room.

As a client-facing person (i.e., someone who needed to be on the phone a lot), I hated it. More often than not, I found myself walking around downstairs, in the building lobby, or out on a balcony somewhere when trying to conduct business. I got sick of fighting over conference rooms, and sicker still of trying to evict squatters from rooms that I'd booked for urgent meetings or calls. And if I ever needed a quiet place to go concentrate on something, that was pretty much out of the question for most of the day. I ended up taking a lot of work home with me every night, simply because I couldn't get it done at the office.

I enjoyed some great chit-chat with coworkers, and I probably saw more YouTube videos and memes in that office than I have anywhere else. Productivity kind of sucked, though.

> Open offices can work, but only if you go out of your way to make them work. Just throwing a few dozen devs in a warehouse is a recipe for dissatisfaction. I think that that happens more often than not, resulting in things like this study.

No, they're universally bad. No door, no privacy and a constant stream of chatter from other people. Yuck.

Open office does not scale beyond 6-10 people. There was an article though about a firm that did have open office but had special function areas - like quiet work area or meeting room are. If you are in quiet room area, you don't talk there at all. Huge open office I think is bad as it invites distraction.

Many companies grow from open offices as startups but then they have to change they way they do the open office if they want to preserve the "open office". my 2c.

I worked in one of these places where we were expected to do real engineering work, but with an overhead loudspeaker paging system for incoming sales and service calls. "Bong, Rick Line 1, Bong Dale Line 6" Those were the days... (not really).

But if no one talks in the open plan layout, what's the benefit of open plan at all? Might as well give people their own private space free of visual distractions.

Private space for everyone costs more. The entire point of the open plan is to save money, but it gets sold as something entirely different.

Policies that enforce silence is what's needed for open office plans to work. But silence would also cancel out any supposed creativity benefits.

I'm in a cube farm right now and I don't find that the cubes make the noise any softer than my co-workers in another office that have an open plan. I can still plainly hear everything that people around me are talking about. I still find headphones a necessity.

I can still hear my coworker clipping his toe nails each week two cubes down. Cubes don't help much.

I completely agree, wrote up essentially the exact same thing: http://dev.hubspot.com/blog/open-plan-offices