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Comment by ronnier | Hacker News Reader

I truly dislike open offices. The constant sound of mechanical keyboards clacking really gets to me, and I'm not sure why. I wear headphones listening to loud music to cancel out the sounds of these damn keyboards.

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Keyboards, random conversations, people getting up etc. so much noise and so many distractions. I also do the earphones thing, but it seems to be contributing to long-term hearing loss.

Wear a good pair of ear defenders over your earphones so you can turn down the volume greatly while still blocking out all external sound.

I escalate to noise cancelling earbuds worn inside noise cancelling headphones - when that's not enough, I throw a tatrum of go work in a library (or just go home and do something else).

I like my work colleagues, but sometimes I need to concentrate (or I'm just grumpy for some reason).

You can also use foam earplugs, then a noise-canceling headset for sound. Works even in extremely high noise environments.

Most active noise-canceling head-phones work pretty well even if you don't listen to anything.

Active noise-cancelling only seems to work (in my very limited experience) with 'constant' noise though - predictable. Spoken conversations often aren't. But, I might've just had a bad experience with those in the store. I'll stick with passive noise cancelling / in-ear with foam things.

Or, you know, tell people to be quiet.

Currently working at a growing startup in Waterloo, it's an open office with a lot of people and it can quickly become very loud (picture 150 people in a big room).

I completely agree with you, without music, noise cancelling headphones are pretty much useless to help you focus by canceling 'asymmetric' noise.

My personal setup is to have a pair of earplugs in resina as a first layer, my headphones as a second layer, the noise cancelling option on and finally low volume music. With that setup I can't hear anything to the point where I get scared shitless if someone disturbs me. That's how deep in the zone I become!

>With that setup I can't hear anything to the point where I get scared shitless if someone disturbs me.

Solution for this was proposed in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Engineers were working in big room, but they were so focused, guests had to use special protocol: stand beside desk and wait quietly until you are noticed.

Then there is the open plan office, combined with the clean desk policy. That way you have to endure the inane yacking going on around you and god forbid you try and figure something out on a piece of paper while you're working and go grab a coffee without locking said piece of paper in a drawer or it's a written warning.

I hate the modern corporate office environment. HR should just be upfront about what open plan offices are about: saving money. It lets you cram in as many people in as small an area as possible. That's it. Nevermind if they're productive or not. We're SAVING MONEY!

There are good and bad implementations of every system. That sounds like a bad one.

There is also a policy of stuffing laptops in locked drawers or taking them home after work, although it's perfectly fine to leave one when going out for lunch.

Which wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that company laptop is unusable for approximately 30 minutes after boot (or hibernate/suspend), when it tries to scan the whole drive for viruses or whatever.

I don't even want to count how many hours of productivity are wasted because of stupidities like these.

When i worked for Reed Elsevier in london I used to boot my laptop and go across the road to get breakfast in the 10-15 mins that took the laptop would have booted :-)

To be completely fair, that's just an awful working environment rather than a necessary condition of modern office space.

This idea that open plan offices are about saving money needs to go in the bit bucket. If it was really about money, they'd have people working from home, which offers far greater cost savings. It's not about money, it's about power, the visible display of subservience.

I'd say it's both. Starting with the constraint: Employees must be in the office, so I know they're working, the cheapest option is an open plan.

Am I the only one that experiences anxiety when imposing sensory deprivation on myself in a crowded environment?

When headphones are effective at masking background noise, people sometimes tap me on the shoulder or knock on my desk. It can be really jarring if you're lost in thought and not aware of your surroundings. Interruptions are normally costly, but being surprised like that makes it so much harder to regain focus afterward.

Mechanical keyboards? Luxury. Most (all?) places cheap enough to go with open offices give everyone cheap rubber dome keyboards.

Yeah, I suspect the coworkers brought in their own mechs which makes them at fault here. Mechanical keyboards are loud enough to disturb others in a private office setting, I can't imagine hearing multiple nearby with no walls.

Try working in midtown Manhattan! The street noise will make a swarm of mechanical keyboards sound like a lullaby.

I work in an open office of ~20 people and did exactly what you described - I brought my own keyboard to replace the standard issue flat Apple keyboard my company purchased in bulk. It has made a big difference in my typing speed. In fact there's four of us in here with mechanical keyboards and nobody seems to mind. But maybe that's because one of them is the CEO :)

We've honestly never had it come up as a problem.

Huh, that's cool that mechanical keyboards are that well-spread. I thought it was a fairly niche internet hobby I stumbled into, because I've had to be the mech evangelist among my friends.

Maybe you could sneakily suggest that they try an ergonomic keyboard. I haven't seen an ergonomic keyboard which is noisy and mechanical yet, at least.. :-)

ergodox with cherry blues? :)

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