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> Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations it is much more important that you can discuss things with your coworkers and stakeholders quickly and figure out if you are working on the right thing

Fact: that has absolutely no relation to offices. And "offices" doesn't have to mean singles either (they usually don't in my experience).

> Provide the team with good quality headphones

I can't wear headphones. I literally, physically, can't wear headphones for more than 10~15 minutes, it starts hurting like somebody's driving nails through my eardrums. Now what?

> shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices

And people who have bodily functions, and people who put the volume too high on their headphones, and people who type too hard, and people with tics. Just shame people on a general basis really, that makes for great esprit de corps.

> Do this and all the problems with "focus" that open-office haters complain about GO AWAY.

Yes, everybody must love what you love and you can't be wrong, because "no setup works for everyone" except for the one you want.

>I can't wear headphones. I literally, physically, can't wear headphones for more than 10~15 minutes, it starts hurting like somebody's driving nails through my eardrums. Now what?

See a doctor? That's definitely not normal.

> That's definitely not normal.

You think? Sadly having fucked up middle ears isn't exactly fixable, it's something I can only make do with, so that didn't answer the question: how do you[0] handle employees who can't wear headphones when your[0] solution to noise issues is "just wear headphones"?

[0] this is a generic "you", I know the specific you is not the one who originally made this assertion.

Large over-ear headphones exert NO pressure on any part of the ear. They are basically inverted cups that go over and around your ear and insulate.

Are you saying those don't work for you?

Unless you're talking about the volume of music making your ears hurt in which case guess what - I didn't say anything about listening to anything on those headphones. Just having them on provides enough insulation that you don't need to pipe in any additional sound

> Large over-ear headphones exert NO pressure on any part of the ear. They are basically inverted cups that go over and around your ear and insulate.

You don't say.

> Are you saying those don't work for you?

Yes, it's not a question of pressure on the external ear or I'd have said "my ears are too large" and wouldn't have mentioned the middle ear.

> Unless you're talking about the volume of music making your ears hurt

No, it's not a question of volume.

> I didn't say anything about listening to anything on those headphones.

Neither did I, though

> Just having them on provides enough insulation that you don't need to pipe in any additional sound

Hardly, even with high-quality closed 'phones.

So then what are you saying? Wearing comfortable large headphones with quiet ambient noise and active noise cancellation causes you pain in your inner ear?

Middle ear, and no active noise cancellation is even needed.

You possibly just accept the 0.05% of your employees who cannot wear headphones are going to work somewhere else / be less performant.

Aside: I still don't quite get what exactly about the headphones is causing you pain? If you have them on, without playing anything, is that painful? (in which case maybe lighter ones that exert no pressure on the skull could help?) Is it the volume? Is there some weird property of sound produced by the headphones that is not present in general noise, that causes the pain?

(please don't take this as me disbelieving you, I'm just curious)

> [0] this is a generic "you", I know the specific you is not the one who originally made this assertion.

In case you're not a native speaker, the pronoun one uses in English is "one".

> I can't wear headphones. [...] Now what?

Thankfully you're in the minority and everyone else is quiet wearing headphones, so you don't have to.

Can't tell if you're joking. Poe's law...

Joking, but I'm guessing in practice it would be somewhat true?

Just because you like it does not mean that a lot of people likes it. As to reflect to your "Fact"s:

"Fact" 0: In today's agility etc: this is mostly true for startups where you have a product owner who does not really know what he wants. If you use for example SCRUM you plan beforehand and you have an immutable sprint when you know what to work on thus you can work uninterrupted for 1-2 weeks then you can have a meeting to discuss the direction and have a retrospective + planning. The "work for 6 months in a basement" is an exaggeration and no one works like that today (except for the developer of Dwarf Fortress but it is another story). So the point is: you can be agile/rapid/do MVPs/etc and uninterrupted at the same time. I have done it at many companies so I know it works.

"Fact" 1: Distractions have nothing to do with culture. People in an open office distract you simply because your preferences does not match:

* switches off air conditioning

* bumps your chair because of small spaces

* turns on the lights (which you don't like)

just to name a few. Another thing is that policies work in theory but in reality most people will think that their problem is more important than some policy and will go to your desk and ask about something (and in most cases the will know the answer when the have finished speaking). If you have a private office it acts as a barrier for such distractions.

You can go very far down the wrong path in a 2 week planned sprint. Sorry, even with a well planned sprint and an experienced product owner, you still have a lot of questions that need to be evaluated halfway through the sprint, and talking to others is how you resolve them.

As for distractions...are you such a precious princess that someone adjusting the light level or bumping into your chair completely removes your ability to be productive? How do you get by and achieve anything in this world?

Why are we optimizing to create work environments for such snobbery? What makes you assume that by default EVERY single problem that others might have is not worthy of an interruption enough that you need your own private office to protect yourself from the proletariat?

> In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations

You know, that line is a loud bullshit alarm all by itself.

But I'll bite anyway. Open offices make communication harder. Much harder. You can barely talk to someone with you equipment around without disturbing someone. So you must choose, either you talk or you produce something.

Which part is bullshit? Prototyping? Shipping fast? CD? MVPs? If you are working at a company in 2015 and you are not working on an OS, and you are not doing these things, you are a dinosaur.

Yes, you disturb someone. You let them consider whether they want to pause what they are doing and join your conversation, and make it more productive, or put their headphones on and tune you out. The choice exists.

> You let them consider whether they want to pause what they are doing

Too late. Train of thought already lost. Learn to do your own work instead of harassing those around you to help.

Looks like I inadvertently trolled a troll :)

No, none of those are bullshit. The idea that they are new is complete bullshit, and the idea that throwing those terms around justifies something is also so.

>Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical. Provide the team with good quality headphones, shame people who have non-silent notifications on their devices, create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted

Managers who deliberately create environments where headphones are mandatory should be brought up on charges.

Basic rule of thumb: If your headphones are loud enough to block out ambient conversation, they're damaging your ears. In 20 years, deafness is going to be associated with programmers in the same way we associate black lung with coal miners.

Also, I'm happy for you that your brain is only derailed by particularly loud ringtones or people tapping you on the shoulder, you lucked out on that one! But my brain is different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

It isn't just loudness that affects hearing loss. A large amount of the damage coming from headphones comes from the fact that they increase the temperature of your ear canals. That temperature increases the amount of bacteria which cause significant hearing loss.

Oh for fuck's sakes. I wear headphones 90% of my day WITH NOTHING PLAYING IN THEM.

We need to stop treating developers like precious children. You do not need ABSOLUTE SILENCE to be able to do your work. 99% of us are not writing the next PageRank or inventing the next Djkstra's Algorithm. And even when we are 99% of the time is spent on build environments and configuration and plumbing.

This does not require absolute uninterrupted focus surrounded by silence. Making a mistake does not cause a bomb to go off or a plane to fall out of the sky.

Put on a pair of comfortable headphones and do not plug them into anything and 75% of the noise around you is gone. Turn on some white noise or some gentle ambient music of dozens of lyrics-free genres and it goes up to 95%. If the only way you can work is if you can't hear any other noise outside of your own head, you have failed as a human being because no other profession requires that.

It would appear that empathy is not your strong point.

No, most people don't need to work in an anechoic chamber.

But any distracting noise adds to cognitive load, and since you're being paid to use your cognitive abilities, productivity suffers.

If you're paying people to do something and then making it harder for them to do it, the problem is not with the people.

Everything is a tradeoff. Cognitive load decreases productivity. Open communication and easy collaboration increases it. The argument is that it makes up for it. The current popular opinion on HN is it doesn't.

I'm sorry I don't have empathy for bullshit rare disorders like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia

Rationally, it doesn't matter whether you have empathy or not. But you need to demonstrate rational understanding of the issues, and I don't think you've done that here.

There's a lot of evidence that open offices destroy productivity, and almost no evidence that they increase it.

So whatever your reasoning hiring people, paying them a lot of money, and then making it harder for them to do their jobs is an irrational position.

While its true that headphones are associated with hearing loss, there are lots of headphones out there that have noise-canceling capabilities without being excessively loud.

Noise cancelling works great with cyclic sounds, such as an airplane engine. With acyclic sounds, such as conversations? They're rubish. No headphone in the market today can cancel out[1] a conversation with a method other than playing another sound high enough to cancel it.

[1] By cancel out, I mean make it impossible to understand the conversation, while the headphones are silent or playing in low volume.

I've got a pair of [1] in currently, no music, and they're doing a pretty good job of drowning out people talking at normal volume 6ft away. I'll admit they're doing a less good job of the strident conversation 10ft away and the plague of ringing phones but without music, I'm ok with that.

(NB. This reply entirely useless if you can't tolerate in-ear buds.)

[1] http://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/ek5.html

In ear monitors are often a combination of ear plugs and headphones. Mine are rated at -30Db rather evenly across the spectrum. I have to take them off to effectively engage in conversation below shouting level even when the audio input is silent. On the other hand, they also are quite expensive. At any rate, if you do have effective noise cancellation it can be quite alarming when someone tries to interact with you by tapping your shoulder and such.

I was not totally clear. My comment was about active noise cancellation. Passive cancellation, such as what you get with protective gear or, as you say, studio monitors, has a nasty side effect I can't tolerate: suddenly, sounds transmitted through bone transmission are much louder (breathing and heartbeat mainly).

Not all noise-canceling headphones are built alike. Its my understanding that it really depends on which ones you buy:

http://productivity.stackexchange.com/questions/7213/do-nois...

Sounds like a LOT of complaining, making engineers here look like a bunch of divas who are never happy. Stop whining and do your job instead of making up excuses why you can't.

> But no setup works for everyone.

Sure, but that doesn't mean you just choose whatever because it won't be best for everyone. You pick what will work best for most people, and studies consistently show that is not an open office layout.

> In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations

Not every developer is writing code for a seed stage startup trying to get an MVP out the door. In fact, most aren't. For small/early-stage startups I totally think open offices make the most sense.

> Provide the team with good quality headphones

Headphones help decrease audio distractions, but not nearly as much as offices or cubicles. They don't do anything for visual distractions. And not everyone is able to use them (many people find the music as, or more, distracting than the audio distractions they're trying to avoid).

> They don't do anything for visual distractions

Until recently I was sat next to someone who not only drummed on the desk and with his feet but spent half the day twirling around on his chair like it was a damned fairground ride. Since moving to a new desk, my office life is much less tense and I'm a lot more productive.

> Provide the team with good quality headphones

Headphones are a cognitive and physical distraction to me. When I think, I only want to think about what I'm thinking about. I only like listening to music when I'm not trying to accomplish something.

Headphones are merely an inferior office, with its walls shrunk down to fit your head.

> "Fact: In today's age of agility, rapid development, minimum viable products, continuous deployment, and short iterations..."

I don't think I would take a job anywhere that held these buzzwords in high regard. They have been discredited time and again as the wankery of company culture.

"age of agility"... No.

"MVP".... No!

"continuous deployment".... kill me now.

You mention stakeholders. At my last job, stakeholders were the biggest problem in the company. I had a desk in an open office, and for some reason that meant the project manager had an open invitation to walk up to my desk repeatedly throughout the day bugging me with brain-dead questions and pointless "standups". Yep, she wanted regular standups even though it was just her and myself for many of the minor projects. Jesus I'm glad I got out of there.

> "create a policy where people can indicate when they're deep in thought on something complex and would prefer not to be distracted"

What policy. Nobody does that.

>she wanted regular standups even though it was just her and myself for many of the minor projects

This was the most hilarious part of my last company; they hadn't hired any coders yet and I was expected to do a standup meeting with myself and two of my managers. Daily. At my current company we have a daily standup meeting for everyone where the CTO is in on it (can you say micromanager?) and it's just a hassle because you know he's going to come back a few hours later to each of us and ask for a status report anyway.

Just because "Agile" has been coopted by consultants, doesn't mean that the agile manifesto isn't a worthy axiom to organize by.

Minimum Viable product just means get things into customer hands early and get feedback, and refine.

Continuous deployment means build quality verification into your process and automate it.

These aren't buzzwords this is where modern software development at any serious software company is small and large. These are not fads, these are evolutions. If you don't see that, I don't see a lot of promise in the rest of your career as you will only be able to find work at old-guards that are not working on anything meaningful or significant.

> I almost quit but luckily was able to move to a team that had a team area with an open plan.

I've worked on a team that had its own large cubicle, with four people in it. We all mostly worked on the same thing, and we could roll ourselves over to screens and have whiteboard discussions. That was great.

I've had my own office, with a window. That was even better. Then I shared it with another person. That was still great. Then there were three of us. Conversation stopped. None of us worked on the same thing.

And of course I've worked in cubes. What evs.

I've never worked in an open office of long tables and no partitions. I know I'd hate not being able to raise my eyes and stare off into space without inadvertently staring at someone nearby. And the distractions would kill me. But I guess that's just me, and all I have to do is see that at the interview so I can say no; problem solved?

> Provide the team with good quality headphones

Every time when open offices are mentioned, there's a cure for people who prefer quiet working environment. Well, fuck headphones. I don't want to wear headphones all day just to be able to focus.

For me, life at work is really important. I want to enjoy my time at the office, and that includes socialising while working (where appropriate) - talking about the music we're playing, sharing work problems, complaining about being hungry, etc. I'd find it too stagnant and boring otherwise. My desk jobs (all web stuff) have been:

  - open room of around 15 people, bit of chit-chat but mostly quiet
  - small area of 3-4, disparate types so very quiet
  - large divided room of 10, pretty raucous, very fun, lots of trash talking
  - small area, quiet, mostly alone
  - room of 4-5, very social
  - room of 3-4, we barely shut up all day while working; put headphones on if you want to concentrate

I'd hate to have a room to myself all day. If I want a stretch like that, I come in early or work later than others.

You need to chill. It reads like you're shouting this to my face. "The best defense is an offense" style. Not saying you aren't allowed to be annoyed, just saying it's hard for me to read what you say and not be distracted by the boatload of hurt accompanying it.

> rather than going away for 6 months into some basement,

That's a false dichotomy.

> Fact: Distractions are cultural not physical.

Citation needed. Every study suggests you are wrong.