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Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are Top Distraction in Workplace, Study Says (npr.org)
Sounds, especially those made by other humans, have ranked as the top distraction in the workplace, according to design expert Alan Hedge of Cornell. A staggering 74 percent of workers say they face "many" instances of disturbances and distractions from noise. Hedge says the noise is generally coming from another person, though it's much more disturbing when it's a machine that is making it. NPR reports: The popularity of open offices has exacerbated the problem. The University of California's Center for the Built Environment has a study showing workers are happier when they are in enclosed offices and less likely to take sick days. This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds. [...] Rue Dooley, an adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management, says HR professionals often call in, asking how to manage co-worker complaints about various bodily noises.
Jeesus, is it a professional office or a frat house?
>implying HR or company leaders will do anything about this
Thankfully the people who come to work sick and the office culture that promotes sick people coming to work are blameless.
tell them that they can keep there job if they don't use the letter "E" in saying why they should keep it!
So you'll just have to live with your open office. Sincerely, Management
There are people who seem to think that door slams, loud racking sounds of turned door knobs and juicy Ka-chunks of door latches engaging are just fine in a scholarly/academic office environment.
The main floor of our Engineering Library has a door that is going "Rack! Ka-chunk" a couple times a minute from persons passing through to other floors, all day long.
Spent 2 full days in a conference room with colleagues from numerous other institutions working on behalf of a Federal agency in Arlington, VA.
Not one door slam the entire time. Do the Federal agency people know something about concentrating on work that state universities do not?
When I came to the USA 15 years ago (from the UK), I was amazed at the ubiquity of cube farms everywhere.
As far as I can tell, its actually only management that like cube farms (or presumably more accurately, the $$$$ saved). Nearly all the residents actually would much prefer single offices and the associated peace and quiet that allows you to concentrate and be more productive, yet the myth stubbornly persists that cubes are the "popular choice".
In my last job there was this retard sales guy who never graduated high school, but would constantly kiss the business owner's puckered butthole, and to make himself sound important he would hover around the office on the phone talking extremely loud (just like the owner of the company)
Usually the most noisy co-workers are the most subversive parasites who have 0 talent and are only trying to someone impress their superiors by their assholishness
"This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds."
The rest of the civilized world has solved this problem, it's called paid sick leave.
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing. Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run. And if this is how they think they need to see what people are doing, they fail at being managers. It's simple enough to give people tasks with milestones, and monitor their progress. I'm fortunate in that I'm able to work from home periodically. I get much more accomplished there because the only interruptions are from the phone or the doorbell. That said, I don't want to give up the face to face discussions that happen in the break room and hallways at work.
Just another day in Paradise
If someone in the office is talking or making loud noises, that pretty much means I'm not getting anything done until the place is quiet again.
I take huge hits to productivity depending on who I must share an office with.
I was asked to take my Unicomp "clicky" keyboard (Unicomp has the license for the original IBM clicky keyboard design) home, and forced to use a crappy Microsoft keyboard because the prima donna in the next cubicle couldn't stand the sound.
This despite the fact that it was a huge, chaotic, open-office with loud-ass game developers, producers, etc. (Sony Playstation development studio.) Though we were in the more-sedate back-end/server development part of the office.
But, OK. It disturbed the prima donna. But was it my fault? Or a stupid office layout?
Really, my worst annoyance there was developers using IM to communicate, when we were in eight cubicles all together, just a few steps from each other. The plus of just walking over to the other developer's cubicle is that you can how busy they are, and decide to talk later, interrupt anyway because it is too important, etc. That is, use actual judgement instead of just casting out an IM and then stewing over it if not immediately answered.
But that would take actual COMMON SENSE.
1 take any productive workforce
2 force them into open offices to save money
3 productivity plummets, so fire workforce
4 profit
If you asked me if I get distracted in the workplace by noisy co-workers I'd answer yes.
If you asked me if I've ever solved a problem by overhearing a conversation from a noisy coworker, I'd answer CONSTANTLY.
For the occasions where I do need peace and quiet, well Bose QC35s live up to their model number, unfortunately at $350 and given the quality of sound they also live up to their brandname.
These are by far my worst favorite. I keep hearing the voice of my mother yelling "chew with your mouth closed!" It's never a problem at lunch or wherever expected. At my desk? Why do I need to HEAR people eat? I've had several colleagues over the years carbureting their food with open mouths, with chunks falling out onto the floor. I recently had to sit next to one guy that would make sucking sounds as he'd suck his fingers clean several times during his snacks, which were constant. Vegetarians & vegans need to eat quite regularly. The clanking of spoons on porcelain bowls. The resonance of hollow skulls munching on granola. The mushy sounds. My tolerance is about five minutes. Annoyance sets in at ten. Aggravation at fifteen. Psychosis at thirty. The last job... I took a lot of walks. This one guy would load up a bowl of snacks and proceed to noisily eat them for two hours slowly, savoring every bite and letting us all know. Without headphones, I would be in jail from my murderous rampage. I'm trying to grasp fifteen concepts in a head that can, at best, hold seven at once. The repetitious unnecessary noise of gluttony is a distraction.
The only time it became a choice at one company that I worked for was when management wanted to replace the tall cube walls with short cube walls that allowed everyone to see everyone else. Bad enough that we had to work in bullpens, but no one wanted shorter cubicle walls. Management backed off and later decided to shut down the office to save money before the company filed for bankruptcy.
"I has 1337 haxor skillz!"
But then I'm not and would not want to be in HR...
Hedge says the noise is generally coming from another person, though it's much more disturbing when it's a machine that is making it
he actually says the exact opposite:
"In general, if it's coming from another person, it's much more disturbing than when it's coming from a machine," he says, because, as social beings, humans are attuned to man-made sounds.
and I generally agree with him, not with the summary. But what is even more annoying is other people's Windows sounds. I'll never understand why these are on by default, they're an assault on everyone else's sanity.
To be fair the unicomp is about as loud as a keyboard gets - you could always get a cherry mx brown and have all the tactility with less noise.
Worker: doing any actual work here is difficult with all the noise..
Boss: well, I manage just fine
Worker: I said actual work
but for some reason, I'm not allowed to mute my coworker.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Cube farms were a step up from the open offices of the 50's/60's. Then the hipsters decided that cubes were bad and that open offices were the way to go. But the irony is that they are now discovering what was learnt in the 60's. From Cubicle
Propst concluded from his studies that during the 20th Century the office environment had changed substantially, particularly in relation to the amount of information being processed.[1][2] The amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain had increased dramatically. Despite this, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room, devoid of privacy. Propst's studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative.[1][2] On this, Propst commented "One of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone."[1][2] In addition, the employees' bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
It's sad that the wheel keeps being reinvented.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I'll take a cube form over what I have now...
We just moved to an open plan office from bullpen cubes (~20x20 ft cubes with 4 people per cube).
I worked corporate for 20 years and the vast bulk of that was cube farms or labs.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
I do my job amazingly. In fact, I'm not paid accordingly. You should adjust my pay upward by about a fifth to a third annually.
Thanks.
Where I used to work, we first had normal cubicles. Then management had this brilliant idea to go with open offices, but where everyone sat looking at other people's screens. This was to encourage people to spy and report coworkers.
It was a disaster because no one got work done, constant chatting and distractions.
Why do people (entire swaths of people) insist on discarding prior lessons learned.
Isn't that behavior the exact opposite of wisdom?
What's the word for that again? Oh, right: STUPIDITY.
n/t
And this, of course, applies to everyone but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
"No thanks."
...is /.
I share an office with another person (with a cubicle dividing wall between us, finally), and while I do get along with him, some days the constant sighing just wears on my nerves (like today, now). So loud, even my headphones with Rammstein playing doesn't drown it out. When he's not sighing constantly, he usually has his ear buds in with bagpipe music so loud I can hear it over my music. Very distracting. I had an office to myself for several years, which was awesome, close the door, have music over the speakers. I miss those days.
Did a copy of Joel On Software or Peopleware fall thorough a timewarp from 1833?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Leadership does not give a shit about minor annoyances. They have no qualms at all about making the environment hard to work in, and then setting policies that just force you to deal with it.
They know damn good and well that you are there for the money. They compete for talent on salary, benefits, and sometimes hours. And, in the current market, the cost of real estate is higher than the salaries, so they would rather pay a little bit more in salary in order to be able to pack more people into the same space. Also, they know that anywhere else you might go will be the same way, so you are very unlikely to leave just for that reason.
So, fuck you, deal with it.
Not only are our half height cube walls WAY more expensive than stick and drywall ($1200 per wall, 4 per cube 8 cubes in our area) but we have no privacy. The big issue with a lack of privacy is that 3 of us work with instructors and discuss student grades, etc. Which leads to possible FERPA violations - our dept. secretary and work study students have no business hearing me talk about a students grades with an instructor. And, since I am an adjunct instructor as well as a admin/professional employee, I discuss my students grades with them - and NO ONE else in my department has the right to hear any of it.
Did the facilties folk or my boss listen? Nope...
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Yep. Our building did this earlier this year. They pretended to ask our opinion on the matter (they had an 'express your thoughts' board up for a few weeks until it suddenly disappeared one day after 99.9% of the comments were negative with a few suspicious sounding positive comments mixed in) but we later found out that the plan was already in motion long before that board went up. So far they've done the upper floor and the response has been resoundingly negative. People complain that there's no privacy and they can't get any work done because their 'desks' are so small now. Basically they went from a standard cubical (with a wrap around desk) to a 3 foot piece of desk (with tiny little dividers on each side). The 'desks' are barely large enough for a computer and a phone.
We found out that they went ahead with the project because some vice president had it on their objectives this year because it saved money due to the fact that they were able to cram more people into the building rather than open a new one. Of course they didn't think about parking or bathroom space when they did that calculation so both are a disaster. Thankfully I'm in a secure lab that they've decided to ignore because they can't cram more people in due to security concerns. We've had tons of people try to get their managers to move them in though, even though they have absolutely no reason to be in here other than they don't like the new 'desks'.
A cube farm would be a luxury to what we get in Australia; when I started my current role, the norm was half-height walls between everyone, which you could just see over.
Shortly after that, a new manager of a team that we worked closely with decided it would be a wonderful idea to remove those walls so that the teams could work "even more closely together". I made it very clear that if they did that to me, I would not be hanging around.
Sadly, since then, all of those relatively large desks have been replaced with smaller desks, and a much shorter wall between them.
I can't remember the last time I saw a cube-farm anywhere in Australia.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
productivity but are not good for surveillance. So we have open office since your supervisor keeping an eye on you is more important than you getting more work done.
"No thanks, not today. I don't think you can insist on this."
Yup.
It's not so much that the cool tech companies have open offies. It's that they just buy desks and can't afford fancy cubicle furniture.
Is there some benefit to open office seating? Yes. For small groups in their own, partitioned area sure. Small teams workign together can collaborate easily.
Opening the whole office like that? Hell no. There's no real collaboration across 5 rows of desks without shouting and interrupting everyone in between. I've been through the transition from cubes to more open cubes, to very open 'cubes' to full open office, non-partition desks. I work out of my secondary office now because the noise is impossible. I can't even hear what's being said on conference calls half the time because someone is having some loud conversation (or socializing or whatever) 5 feet from me.
Oh, and my company decided anyone who's not an executive gets these new 'wonderful' seats that 'employees love'. Right.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
"...workers are happier when they are in enclosed offices..."
In other news shocking discovery that water is wet.
Obviously i'd prefer an office to myself but i'd MUCH rather have a cubical than an open office which i currently reside.
There are around 40+ people in my pretty small open office (small for the amount of people in it) and sometimes the noise is unbearable. You get the problem of noise ramping; it gets loud so you need to slightly raise your voice to be heard which increases the background volume meaning the next person has to raise their voice slightly more to be heard etc etc until you're all practically yelling.
Then, of course, there are those employees who just talk bollocks. I'm sure every large office has one; just a guy or girl who feels the need to vocalise their every thought or who seems to need to talk AT someone (yes AT not TO as we rarely even acknowledge them) almost constantly lest their tongue atrophy and fall off.
It's a nightmare; it KILLS productivity and encourages mistakes. I conservatively estimate i'd be 25% more productive if i were left alone in a cubical to get the damn job done. As it is i am interrupted, distracted or annoyed dozens, maybe hundreds of times per day slowing me down and making me need to double check more to ensure the interruption didn't make me miss something.
I have a co-worker who insists on wearing flip flops all summer long. hear the sweaty suction of each and every footstep. Was it really too difficult to put on a pair of shoes? Same co-worker gets blessed by about a dozen people every time she sneezes. The other 3 dozen people in the immediate vicinity just want to know why it is so necessary to vocalize a sneeze so fucking loudly. a-CHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!
Just stfu already.
I'd be more active and less whiny about it. One day when working late I'd pour epoxy all over the keyboard.
If you replaced it, I'd see what facial indentations it could make.
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna ... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
Bait aside, this is a perfect exampe of the types of distractions you get in open offices. People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
Holy crap. I work in an open office and we just hired this guy a couple months ago, 60+yrs self taught dev (ugh, don't even get me started, this guy is just dumb, i swear he must of just known the right buzz words to get him past the interview), and he eats like a f**kin toddler!
*smack* *smack* *sluuurrrrppppp* *smack* *sluuurrrrppppp* *ahhhhhhh* *smack* *smack*
THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T HAVE A WEDDING RING YOU FUCK!
I literally leave the office whenever he busts out his cute little cooler.
The real question that should be asked is what kind of work environment did, say, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jack Dorsey etc. have when they did the heavy lifting of originating their software concepts.
My bet would be quiet university dorm rooms or similar. In other words the opposite of the open plan office.
(Things that make you go Hmmm department).
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
You can call OSHA about the bathroom situation.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
/hat tip
That was amazing
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Desks! Bloody luxury.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Open plan is a complete concentration killer. Thank goodness I can work from home.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
at least we have 5' desks...
with little (pointless and ugly) dividers. I simply took an edge (which still has a 'corner'-ish desk) and spewed crap onto the desk next to mine before anyone selected it.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Holy sheet! I had the same problem! I have a mechanical keyboard too! I also had a Prima across from me who hated it! Small dang world!.... so I used some of my budget to buy everyone around him new fancy light up glowing mechanical keyboards (he refused to use the one I gave him). everyone loved the keyboards and I had a pose to back me up when the boss asked us to get rid of them.. the murderous glares of 15 engineers ( and some mutterings about how much desert we have out on the range ) and he backed off and just moved the Prima to a new area.
I am now working on getting all the folks in his new area the same keyboards as well as getting the IT head to spec them as the new "standard" keyboard.. :D
Ya... I'm an asshole
They've been saying it for 35 years but the 'convenience' of open-plan offices continues to be forced upon workers.
but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
Which they then congregate outside of to loudly talk with each other, various minions, visitors, etc. Right next to my cube. Or, my favorite: conference call on speakerphone with the door open. Then they get indignant when I close the door for them. Especially if I use superglue to keep it closed.
And using the speakerphone in the cube farm should be a capital offense.
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
Dealing with this problem for a couple of years now. The Workplace Resource guys just don't care about all the evidence I have collected so far. The cheaper open seating environment seems to work for them, in terms of saving money. Lost productivity is nothing they're measured on.
Coworker flatus can be a major distraction.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
+JustNiz "yet the myth stubbornly persists that cubes are the "popular choice"."
Oh, like the presidential candidates!
At home I share an office with my wife, and she is in sales and on the phone all of the time. So it is hard for me to use the office while she is home trying to work.
And as bad as the office situation is, it is still better than having your job shipped to India (which recently happened to some people I know).
This whole discussion reminds me of the "Desk scene" from the movie "Brazil". Worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.
Once worked across from a guy named swami that seemed to eat almost continuously... munch munch crackle crackle all day long. His eating habits also gave him a lot of gas, so he farted almost as often.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Just in case regular cubes aren't bad enough, a new high-level manager joined my company a couple years ago and decided to go with short-walled cubes so everyone can SEE each other and REALLY collaborate. Luckily that plague has not yet descended upon my location, and it looks like it won't. If it did, I'd just work from home 100% of the time. (Luckily my company is pretty good about that.) Besides the noise, I don't want to feel like everyone is staring at me all day long. Did I mention no one else on my team is in my city? (Or state, for that matter.) There's no collaboration to be had, in my case.
Noise sucks. Usually I work from home in the mornings when I (and all my neighbors at work) have calls, then I go in after lunch because my office is close and I don't want to be in the house every day, all day.
Different people like different things. Unfortunately, it seems that the people who rise to management are more often than not outgoing, and think fratboy bullpens are awesome.
Plus there's the little matter of physics. What do you have if there are 90 noisy people and 10 quiet people? A noisy environment. What do you have if there are 10 noisy people and 90 quiet people? A noisy environment.
Like the old joke: If you have a barrel of sewage and you add a cup of wine, you still have a barrel of sewage. If you have a barrel of wine and you add a cup of sewage, you now have a barrel of sewage.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
>
I can't remember the last time I saw a cube-farm anywhere in Australia.
Maybe they moved all the cube farming to the outback?
Pretty sure he wasn't referring to 2011.
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
You must understand that a lot of this is because of the new "autism spectrum" thinking that is catching like wildfire, which says that these hordes of brilliant software engineers, etc are people who are "somewhere on the spectrum", and as such, don't make eye contact and generally stay very focused on their work, meaning computer screen. Also the fact that the Millennials are already used to "tuning out" everything but their screen, so they are right at home with not being bothered by something as(ahem...) "organic", as peripheral vision.
For me, it's the rats in the walls.
I was asked to take my Unicomp "clicky" keyboard (Unicomp has the license for the original IBM clicky keyboard design) home, and forced to use a crappy Microsoft keyboard because the prima donna in the next cubicle couldn't stand the sound
Which is really funny when you consider that one hundred year ago, the work environment was all open floor plan hundreds of people WITH BLOODY TYPEWRITERS and no MP3 players.
Sorry, you don't get to whine about noise when the current "culture" dictates everyone sits in a big open room -- or at the SAME TABLE!!
Pretty sure he wasn't referring to 2011.
I'm pretty sure I was. ;)
Things may have changed since Facebook moved to Menlo Park.
I'm a pro and you know it. Bump up my pay or I quit. Two-fold minimum. No? Okay, good luck. Buh byeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I doubt HR has consulted any millennials and I doubt the 'cool' tech companies have large rooms with no partitions at all--though if they do I suppose that explains so, so much about all these data breeches. It's my understanding that physical access makes the task of breaking into a computer system distinctly easier, and a large office where it's child's play to walk in and get access to pretty much any computer you want would make this pretty easy.
It's not even like it'd be terribly hard to be unnoticed as you settled down to create the data breech if the employee workspace has a very 'lazily converted warehouse' feel...there'd be a better chance that everybody will just assume you're yet another new hire.
When I am doing easy work I like some music but when doing difficult stuff I like silence. So I seem to pick the wrong companies to work for. I spent two years developing interactive shop displays that play music. Left that job to work for a company developing audio systems. In both case a lot of loud music is the norm. I have kind of got used to it over time, it is surprising what you can tune out, although some choices of music can really annoy.
I meant when he/they were coming up with the idea and coding the original prototype.
That would have been before the existence of company office (or even company.)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The large orange construction site ones. I think I'll take the company CC and get me noise deadening headphones.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Make people work in open spaces with no walls, exposed pipes and ducts, and then act all surprised that it's too noisy?
Oh, and could somebody clean up the poo their dog leaves behind. It's not funny.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sounds like the mistake, here, was putting up an "express your thoughts" board. They should have instead supplied an "express your thoughts" email address, or some other medium wherein expressed thoughts are not publicly visible.
The obvious intent was to give the illusion of influence. It failed miserably due to high visibility.
Everything else sounds pretty standard.
Brazil is a favourite of mine. Been ages since I watched it, though--might have to do something about that sometime soon.
If I didn't take my job seriously, I could deal with the office. I could go there 9-5 every day and go through the motions and likely get away with it indefinitely. And get almost nothing done, because I simply can't think when random people are constantly walking by and/or talking to each other or on the phone. I am simply very much more productive at home.
My wife doesn't often work at home, but when she does, it's not usually a problem--she has her own desk, etc., in another room. Occasionally she's off work when I'm not--on those days I usually just resign myself to doing administrative busywork or whatever, as they tend not to be such great days for writing or coding. And I can't deny that it's sometimes nice to have her as a distraction.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I have a jerkoff near me that is grunting and breathing like Darth Vader all day. Then you see him outside smoking like a chimney. So I brought in the keyboard and have been torturing him with it for months now.
I also walk by his cube and release SBD farts as much as I can manage.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
Grove's office was an 8 by 9 ft (2.4 by 2.7 m) cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot."[15] Preferring this egalitarian atmosphere, he thereby made his work area accessible to anyone who walked by. There were no reserved parking spaces, and Grove parked wherever there was a space.[14] This atmosphere at work was partly a reflection of his personal life. Some who have known him, such as venture capitalist Arthur Rock, have stated that "he has no airs." Grove has lived modestly without expensive cars or an airplane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And that original prototype would be completely unsuitable for today's requirements. It's easy to hack something together to show someone for VC money, but a little more difficult to make something that works in the real world and is scalable.
"I would like a room with a door. No walls is distracting"
Like that?
tell them that they can keep there job if they don't use the letter "E" in saying why they should keep it!
OK.
"I am amazing."
...water is wet.
People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
The emerging standard in open plan offices is "wear headphones, idiot, it's noisy", with anything short of shouting being dismissed as your problem. Makes sense to me. You can't expect to constrain everyone around you.
What really pisses me off is the lack of dignity (and privacy is a big part of dignity). The older you get (and the more oddball health issues you accumulate), the more this matters - to everyone around, not just you. I'd prefer to know much less than I do about my co-worker's colostomy bag, for example. Thanks, management.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Water is wet and working in a cubicle farm sucks! Poor bastards. Been working remotely for 3+ years and there's no way in hell I would ever voluntarily go back to working in a germ infested office. The best part was a lady who used to clip her fingernails in an open office setting.
A young programmer was hired at my client's office with whom I was obligated to share an office when I was on site. OMG, the young fellow had a fondness for the loudest damned keyboard switches manufactured this side of hell. He paired that immense annoyance with a naturally loud voice that sounded like Captain Kirk trying to over-annunciate before a thespian society fish fry.
You're talking about the secretarial pool. They generally transcribed someone else's work, it didn't really require any thought at all. Data entry is not the same as creative work.
Only I can judge you.
This is because in the U.S. making an office with walls and a door is a "capital improvement" and is taxed. Making a cube farm is NOT a capital improvement, and is not taxed. Guess which one companies pick?
We do know how annoying we are. We don't care. We didn't ask for the stupid mess hall. You want to pay me six figures to fuck with my neighbor? I'm game. It's on purpose. That's why the office is open. So you all have to listen to everyone else. It's ON PURPOSE. Stop acting surprised, or like I am supposed to care. I do not care!
The last office job that I had played a local radio station over the PA system non-stop. The station's library could literally have been stored on an iPod Shuffle, I swear to god. It was an assault on your ability to concentrate.
When November rolled around the the music changed to Christmas songs I had to quit to save what little sanity I had left.
My wife's office is filled with headphone wearing workers. How is this accounted for?
There is an old Klingon proverb.
Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.
This space unintentionally left blank.
You can't find anybody this willing for such low cost?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
No problem, just pile up old gear and boxes high enough and you get your wall back.
They do go halfway to being as noisy as a mechanical typewriter so I get the prima donna's point even though I like the things. I have one in a server room and one at home, but wouldn't inflict it on my co-workers at close range.
I blame both the office layout and suspect the person who complained is too young to have heard a typewriter.
A lot of Model M's would survive that. The mechanism is underneath to avoid spill damage and keycaps are on top of the keys.
I've worked in all three common styles: office, open and cube. I'd take a cubicle over the open plan any day of the week. I'd LOVE a cubicle. I had plenty of personal desk space, a place to put my things and hang my coat, and just enough privacy to get work done if I needed to concentrate. Cubicles are amazing.
Offices are better, no doubt. They're everything a cubicle is and more. But the open floor plan is so fucking bad that cubicles seem like luxury by comparison. Given that there are realistically only two optionsâ"virtually no company is going to build offices for everyoneâ"you bet that cubicles are "popular". The open plan is a blight; the only people that like it are penny pinchers and people that think that constant interruptions are the same thing as collaboration.
People like that WANT to be heard. This is the guy the rest of them are IMing about. "He just stares at us until he decides we have time to answer his stupid questions."
What grinds my gears? People with headphones that leak sound. "Waaah I have headphones, why do you bother me?" "Because they're open.. because you play way too loud."
Open radios are even worse. The one guy that just has to force his music on the entire group of workers.
The antidote? Absolutely nerdy AKG K271S headphones. Sealed, I don't hear them, they don't hear me, and they look like something a WWII tank commander would wear. I bought them for the sound quality and isolation. Ruler-flat response and ruthlessly honest.
I've not worked in an open office since 1999, but I have no love for them. I'm actually a bit confused by their re-emergence. There's a happy medium and some companies have found it. I wish more did.
I got those AKGs a decade ago. Best office well-being purchase I ever made. Back then they were Made in Austria.. today they're Made in China... after Harman Kardon bought AGK. I have a MIC pair.. they sound just as nice. I have them at home, so I don't have to listen to the neighbor across the street blast his music while I'm trying to enjoy a book, a cigar, and a whisky.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
Noise isn't a problem. It's unpredictable noise or unwanted noise that's a problem. Or noise that cannot be controlled.
In IT, working in a deathly silent office is bugging. I need the background of fans spinning to "feel right", but I don't think it needs to be loud, or even immediately audible. And anything beeping will drive me to distraction as my brain is tuned to find that beeping thing and fix whatever the problem is.
But a tap dripping? Or headphones tizzing? Or someone tapping their foot or banging a door? Even a mouse clicking? That drives me mad. That's why the background hum is good - it washes them all out.
I work in an office with a technician. He's young, keen, not used to workplaces with lots of other young people.
We have a "swear jar" of sorts. It's for when he hums, whistles or breaks into song. Playing music, I've told him, is right out. Like others, I've worked in places with fed-in music and it drives me insane. I spent a year in an IT office with a badly-tuned radio locked to BBC Radio 1 and it drove me mad.
I work in schools, so some weeks/months of the year there is nobody around. All my speaker-sets go missing as the office and teaching staff use them to take advantage of the empty offices by having their music up louder than they'd ever be allowed while others are around.
Run an after-school event and all the kids want to plug themselves in while they work. I'm sure that's good for them but the noise leakage from their tiny in-ear things is immensely annoying and often means it's banned even through headphones (not just by me). Even on the school PC's, no apps, games or anything else that makes a sound and internal speakers are switched off - when you have 20 PCs in a room, that's just a cacophony of nightmares.
It's a matter of courtesy. Even if you NEED sound to concentrate, you need to understand that others NEED silence. If you can find a way to have your sound without interfering with their silence, they won't have a problem with you. But blanking out sound is immensely harder than drowning out silence. and there's a fascination with having music so loud that everyone can hear, even out of sound-insulating headphones. That's just unnecessary and rude.
And when you get into singing along, humming, drumming, tapping or anything else, I will break your fingers and shove them down your oesophagus. That's not necessary at all and does nothing but inflict your sounds on others that have already chosen not to listen to your music.
I own a couple of sets of headphones. At a reasonable price, set to a reasonable volume, you literally can't hear a thing from outside them. And I couldn't hear a thing outside when wearing them. So it's not impossible to cater for such tastes. But people don't do it. The problem is that there's no earplug or set of headphones that can provide silence in such a situation. The closest you get is bassy tinnitus coupled with heartbeat, blood-rush, swim-ear sounds, with the background slightly muted in the background.
So when you're on your own, out of earshot, do what you like. When there are others around who don't like sound you need to get a decent set of headphones and keep it to yourself. I know that means restraint in your personal tastes, but you also have to stop picking your nose, scratching your feet, farting, undressing, and all the other distasteful habits at that point too.
I will make one exception: With babies around, you should not be asked to be silent for them to sleep. All you're doing is breeding people like me who can't relax in silence by doing that. And a baby will sleep through ANYTHING. Babies will fall asleep outside in a noisy shopping centre, at a party, with a movie blaring, etc. *Sudden* noise might wake them but that's only more sudden and scary against the silent background than if you just all talked normally over the sleeping child and someone sneezed or whatever.
And if a baby wakes, it wakes. Nobody INTENDS to wake them. That's m
Yet you ignore your wife just fine when you're playing league of legends.... Funny how that works.
In the past, there were problems with the closed wall office arrangements where different teams had their own rooms. Some employees and managers would see it as "a perk" to have the seniority/freedom/permission to be able to wander over to other teams and "talk with the tech leads". Some managers would position their desk right next to the main entrance door to see exactly when someone had arrived late, was leaving early or had spent too much time at Subway for lunch. Other managers would have everyone have their desks face the walls in the room while they sat next to the door with their desk facing everyone else's screens. Sometimes the management structure would end up arranged around the layout of the building; one team per room.
Having an open plan office means that there's none of these domination games. The downside is that trying to work is like the VR version of Dreadhalls with random assorted noises; doors slamming, maniacal laughter when someone is on the phone, file cabinets being slammed closed, transport trolleys being rolled up and down the corridors, employees slurping on their lunch, mobile phones ringing (one person has a small bell chime whenever they receive an SMS).
I once had a room right next to a stairwell. At lunchtime it was like being in a shooting range as the firedoor kept slamming as people came to and from lunch. At peak time the door was being opened every 10 seconds. It became a seniority game to get a corner office, while those with least seniority got a room with no windows (much like rooms on a ferry or cruise liner). The worst is when people have a group conference right in front or behind your desk. Then they are bobbling right in front of your upper peripheral vision and sounding like a radio show you can't turn off.
Thankfully my boss doesn't use speakerphone. Unfortunately the reason may be that he doesn't understand how a phone works. No, it's not two cans connected with a piece of string, and no, you don't need to speak louder when you're talking to someone in a different city.
"but a little more difficult to make something that works in the real world and is scalable."
Not really, you just have to know what you are doing.
"We just moved to an open plan office"
Hot desk? I've not done it myself, but it sounds absolutely awful.
Except for the most expensive, noise cancelling headphones, headphones don't keep out the noise. The only thing you can do is turn up your own "noise" (aka. music) louder than the outside noise, making it even harder to concentrate.
IM has advantage of keeping a written record. I don't have to go back to my colleague to ask the same thing again. I look it up in the IM logs. If IM is bothering you, turn off notifications. Or go offline.
So yeah, I'm sitting in an office that is pretty much one huge room, and this place is considered "cool". No dividers, just desks. Everyone uses laptops which are locked away in safes at night. I don't like the layout and the noise and feel there isn't enough privacy though.
Cubes aren't inherently bad. I have been in offices which use cubes which have been lovely and I have been in offices which use cubes which have been shitty and the difference is very simple: did they choose cubes for flexible plan seating, or did they choose cubes because they couldn't afford walls? If the latter, they use short, cheap cube walls that do little to nothing to block noise and which everyone can trivially "groundhog" over. If the former, then they have 8' tall, sound-deadening cube walls. They can actually make your cube quieter than an office, if the ceiling is also sufficiently sound-deadening. I used to work at Silicon Engineering and I knew someone who worked for Parallel Computing. We had the cheap short shit cubes. They had the big tall plush cubes. Not only are they better for workers, but they actually look more professional.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna ... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
On a squishy keyboard I type about 80-90 WPM at about 99% accuracy, a little less. On a hard clicky keyboard I type 90-100 WPM at a little more than 99%. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the difference is larger for some other people — I have big, fat, strong hands because I occasionally do shit more strenuous than typing or wanking, and because I'm a super mutant.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
When I worked at Intel, I had a private office, as did everyone else in that building. Apparently the structure of the building did not allow for the walls to be removed. :)
To be fair the unicomp is about as loud as a keyboard gets - you could always get a cherry mx brown and have all the tactility with less noise.
+1
I found the middleground to be the most ideal. Open, but with a limited amount of people. So one room per team or department, depending on the size. And that with an absolute maximum of 15-20 peeople per team/department. Cut in half if larger.
Some places I have worked had done this and it is fun to see the differences in place to place. Some or quiet that it looks as somebody died. And that is each day. Other departments sound as if there is a party going on each day with all the noise. And each is happy how they are and would not like to be like the other teams.
People will be selected not only on their skill, but also on the ability to fit in the group. I have seen a person coming in for one job and got offered a different one, because that person would fit in better in that group. Putting the person in the wrong group would mean a disaster for both the group and the new employee.
And yes, there will be some people who are better working alone. Then perhaps the specific company is not for you. I have said no to job offers because of the group not being in what I am as a person.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Open plan office were designed by clueless bean counting managers trying to save money, not by intelligent people who actually need to get work done. Productivity will be cut by at least 50% in an open plan office.
Admittedly there are military environments where frequent, loud, startling sounds serve some operational purpose. An engineer working as a civilian contractor described a restless night spent underneath the catapult deck on the Ranger. Launching and recovering aircraft is part of the military mission in our nation's defense preparedness.
On the other hand, I read on Foxtrot Alpha that keeping things quiet is part of the culture onboard submarines. It is part of the military mission of reducing the probability of being detected by adversaries using passive sonar. Also, given the insane 18-hour days of 6 hours on watch or duty station, 6 hours personal time, 6 hours rack time (shared in a "hot racking" scheme), making loud sounds quickly earns the wrath of your superior and the resentment of your comrades.
In PBS Nova describing the contractor competition leading to the Joint Strike Fighter, the areas where the engineers worked appeared to be open-plan office arrangements without much solitude. Where the avionics software was developed was a "cube farm", yes, but it had subdued lighting and the office space had the "vibe" that a culture of keeping the noise levels down to foster concentration was the norm.
I have no idea regarding the work environment in the Combat Information Center of a surface combat Navy ship, but if I were engineering one or commanding one, I would put a premium on minimum aural distraction. Would the same apply to sonar operators?
With respect to persons in the military being conditioned to "screen out" distractions and focus on their duty station, I suppose there is a place for that. But would you want a Special Forces operative on night patrol in the habit of disregarding distracting sounds? I would think you would want people with acute hearing who are hyper-sensitive to sounds, say of an enemy sentry screened by cover pulling back a rifle bolt.
As to learning to focus on one's task, that applies to the original posting and the question of whether door slams, coughing, loud conversation, background music that you don't control merits any concern by management having an interest in the productivity of their workers, especially those in engineering or coding or other tasks requiring a flow between short-term and long-term memory?
As to my complaining ways that I need to reform, I was observing that an arm of the Federal government thought to provide a remarkably quiet environment for persons providing volunteer service in reviewing grand proposals whereas an arm of a State government thinks it no big deal that the persons they are paying to write grand proposals to bring critical funding in are working in a boiler factory? Sometimes the Federal government is much more enlightened than the state-level rubes.
I've worked in all three too (plus labs). Cubicles are only "amazing" when compared to open offices. Really, they're tolerable, and not bad at all if you're in a group that's quiet AND you're allowed to have "do not disturb" signs to prevent interruptions AND your group isn't next to some noisy group. I had that setup once (plus my cube was next to a window) and looking back, now I think of it as luxurious, even though at the time it was merely OK (but a big step up from my previous cube at the same company where I was seated next to some loudmouth asshole who was on the phone all the time, plus I had a big pole in the middle of my cubicle there).
Offices are the best setup. People who advocate for open offices should, IMO, be lined up and shot for the good of society. I'm not kidding about this; the amount of sheer misery caused by these people is incalculable.
I worked in a cubical environment where the bodily noises were people motormouthing - chatting to each other from their desks as if there were no semi-partitions. Just crank up the volume if they had problems hearing each other. Or talking loudly on the phone, or using speaker phones. Or 4 or more people 'grabassin' about their weekend. When I complained to one "colleague" I was informed that the person would NOT keep it down. A reorganization (reduction in cubical size) resulted in us being separated to different locations. The BIG BOSS who supervised the space allocation always had a big, very private office.
As I read this my officemate is very noisily chopping up a salad. I didn't even know someone could be that loud preparing a salad.
> HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them
Between the popularity of cubes, hillary, metrosexual beards, bicycles and apple products, fucking milennials have got a lot to answer for.
There are whole genres of music designed to enable concentration rather than distracting.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"It's easy to hack something together to show someone for VC money"
No you moron it isn't easy. You have to come up with the idea first. You know, the one that is going to catch on like wildfire unlike all the other lame ones. Yeah. Incredibly easy.
The rest is just good execution, which is a routine set of well known procedures and some mildly inspiring leadership.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I've been able to tune out everything whilst concentrating on books or other stuff since I was very young and still can at age 50
I cannot stand open plan offices or cube farms. They're a productivity and creativity killer.
Fortunately not hot desking... yet.
Good news is the COO and dept managers gave up their offices to join staff in open plan, converting their offices into conference rooms. I'll give them credit for walking the talk.
Still not thrilled with the idea though.
whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
Tom Clancy admittedly made a lot of stuff up, but he was a mil-geek who addressed concerns as yours in both his fiction and non-fiction books.
The AMRAAM (advanced medium-range air-to-air missile) was largely a software product, that is, it counted on thousands of lines of Ada code to make it something else than a gravity bomb. Owing to the difficulty inherent in any ambitious large-scale software project, the AMRAAM received a lot of hate for a very long time as being a "boondoggle."
It took a very long time for that software to be corrected of its shortcomings, but once the software "got well" in Clancy's words, the AMRAAM became a very potent weapon indeed. Buggy avionics software is nearly worthless, but once you correct the bugs, this boondoggle suddenly switches state to being the most capable weapon in our inventory.
Quoting from interviews, the pilots who used the AMRAAM in combat were amazed with its deadliness. Giving this weapon the nickname "Slammer", a pilot is quoted that fighting adversaries with it is akin to an unsportsmanlike hunting practice, comparing it to "clubbing baby seals. Whomp, whomp, WHOMP!"
It's easy to take pot shots at the F-35 at this state of its development and deployment. Clancy had suggested that weapons with high software content are like that. Once critical bugs are eliminated, people may have an entirely different view.
I was on a large software team using TSP when the company decided to move us to a new building with an open office environment. They cited gains from "collaboration" as the reason.
I later reviewed our TSP data and found that we had a 32% decrease in productivity after the move, which never recovered. At the time, half of our team members were located in a different state and did not go through a similar move. Those team members did not see any decrease in productivity over that time period, so it can't be blamed on team workload or seasonal fluctuations.
This translates to millions of dollars in lost productivity over just one year, let alone the potential losses of delayed products. Not to mention the absolute misery of attempting to work in such an environment.
It still baffles and frustrates me to no end that managers insist on doing things like this after seeing such conclusive data.
"Good news is the COO and dept managers gave up their offices to join staff in open plan,"
I'm being cynical, but due to the nature of their work, managers are not affected as much by the open plan office. Such schemes hit those who have to think and concentrate on one task all day long. A manager is often talking to people or in meetings. The very nature of their job involves talking to people pretty much all day long, unless they are preparing reports for the board or their superiors. As a result, I would argue that their presence in the bull pit is pretty much a token gesture.
I'm surprised they didn't go over the legally allowed limit due to fire regulations packing in people that tightly.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
My employer is going this direction at the HQ location. A post above describes a bay area, but doesn't say which one. I suspect it's the same. If I had to regularly work there I just couldn't do it. Too much stimulus. But between a combination of layoffs and lots of people working at home anyway, I've yet to see the floor my team currently occupies more than 25% occupied on a given day. So I guess I could understand density and minimal furniture given a low duty cycle, but the weird thing is that the clumps of desks are spaced fairly widely, for an agglutinated cells kind of effect. With each team given a dedicated scrum room that's used what, 15 minutes per day? Except that the acoustics are so bad that my team doesn't even use ours. There are also randomly placed clusters of elevated counters that are rarely used and filing cabinets that are *never* used, so the ammortized of floor space dedicated per employee is actually larger than some places I've been that had real offices with walls. I'm not sure if it's the limited number of people there, acoustic deadening, or what, but the place is actually preternaturally quiet, which is kind of spooky. I've been told that it's because it's cheaper than cubes, but then every desk is adjustable height, which sure can't be cheap. Contrast with our local office. Weird boomerang-shaped semi-cubicles. One jackass I fortunately no longer have to work with has a diploma-mill foreign-government-purchased PhD in an unrelated field which reinforces his narcissism. Despite the ubiquitous use of headsets he shouts on every call, and our company is call/meeting obsessed. It's so bad that I gave up going in at all because Stentor made it impossible for me to concentrate or be on any call, especially one that he was one because I'd hear him directly, then again with a half second reverb as his voice propagated digitally. I've been fortunate to telecommute for a number of years, and before that I was almost exclusively in places with single or dual offices. Given my personal sensory issues, I couldn't handle a work environment like this and dread a job change that would force me into one. When I left my previous employer I turned down one offer in part because I would have been expected to fight traffic every day to sit at a desk cluster not 8 feet from the main door into the suite. There was just no fscking way.
And then it becomes a problem because as soon as you put headphones in, people want to talk to you and not just e-mail or IM you. You literally can't win in this type of environment.