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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.
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!
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
Sounds — and smells — like a startup.
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.
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.
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.
And this, of course, applies to everyone but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
...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."
How things have changed. In the 90's I went to a startup (sw) and we had offices, all of us. The company we left had switched from offices to cubicles. And in keeping with true PHB mentality, the prior company had taken a poll if we wanted to stay in offices or switch to cubes. They pinky-swear promised they would do what the employees wanted. Of course the employees overwhelmingly voted for offices and when the results came in, the PHB's said we "know" you really wanted cubes, soo they went to cubes.
Where I work there's a guy sitting about 2 metres away who grinds his teeth. Constantly. Every single day. Have you ever heard the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt"? This is a perfect example. The sound is not unlike the creaking sound an old wooden chair makes when you sit in it.
Then there's the guy who purposely sneezes as loud as he possibly can for reasons only he knows.
Now, one of them makes noise without realising it and stops when he's asked to (briefly) but the other...
Working every day with either of them is bound to make any sane person pissed off.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
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
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.
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.
Actually, constantly distracted thumb twiddlers who know how to, say, program, but have given up trying to get real work done cost way more.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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?
At one job I worked at, management installed software to remotely monitor the desktop of each workstation. One morning my supervisor came running over to inform that I can't be browsing Amazon on company time. That is until he saw that I had a breakfast burrito in hand, as company policy allowed employees to browse the Internet on their breaks. I told him to bugger off. The workaround for many employees was to buy a Wifi-enabled PDA and browse the Internet via the open access point next door. Since we were hunched over our desks while using our PDAs, management throught we were working hard as no one was browsing the Internet on their PC.
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
When I started my first "real" job there was a guy on my intake who after a couple of months got transferred to some esoteric team. When I asked how it was going he said it was OK, apart from the guy who constantly quacked.
I thought he was taking the piss. I went round there a few days later (you couldn't just walk in; it was semi-secure but I found an excuse) and it was totally true.
I caught up with him ten years later. He was still there. I didn't ask whether he got used to it or just strangled the loonbag.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and then they said work though lunch at your desk.
They've been saying it for 35 years but the 'convenience' of open-plan offices continues to be forced upon workers.
You have to realise that there are some people who over the years have gone or are going completely nuts working in an office 9-5, Monday to Friday. Given mortgage, bills, car and other completely idiotic responsibilities we've unfortunately taken on, the choices are (1) make quacking noises at desk or (2) take the rope you keep on top of your wardrobe, tie it around a beam in your garage, put the other end around your neck and jump off a chair.
I am one of those people.
Thank you for your understanding.
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
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.
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.
Same. I worked for the same company for years. They had 4 person offices for the software engineers (who also frequently had support calls with customers). They changed office space and said that it would be cubicles one way or another. We weren't too happy. They had a vote between three cubicle models. One was a half-height model. The votes were split, with almost no one voting for the half height model. Guess which one they went with? Yeah. The half-height model. It was all pacified by a promise to install a noise-cancelling machine. This was three years ago, and I left over 2 years ago. You can take another guess on whether or not that active noise-cancelling device was ever installed.
Pretty sure he wasn't referring to 2011.
I'm pretty sure I was. ;)
Things may have changed since Facebook moved to Menlo Park.
In the bay area, I'd bet heavily that this is not true, even despite the huge cost of land there. A typical worker's desk is about 2 meters wide, and they need a bunch of space behind them to wheel back into, so lets go with 2.4m x 2.0m - this is conveniently the standard "minimum" area a worker should be allowed as defined by the HSE in the UK. Compare that against an office, plenty I've seen have been of the order of 3.5m square for two people sitting in opposite corners. Lets call it 4m square to account for walls and doors etc (probably an overestimation)
So then, we're talking about 4.8 square meters for a worker in open plan, and 8 square meters for a worker in an office. In the bay area, office space leasing costs about $500 per square meter per year, so you're looking at $1,600 per year overhead for putting workers in 2 man offices vs open plan.
A typical bay area engineer salary is of the order of $160,000 a year (plus bonuses etc). For seniors, more than that even. That means you only need to make a worker 1% more efficient by sticking them in an office for it to pay off. The reduction in sick days (if you can cut out 2 sick days a year, you've made them 1% more efficient) alone accounts for that. Add their increased happiness, and productivity, and it's very very likely to be a huge win sticking people in offices.
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.
Is that you Milton?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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.
That's why things are getting off shored, and at least where I work, the Silly Valley/Bay area teams are slowly getting shutdown.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
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+
It's very likely he's got a family to feed, etc. But if Fragnet is rolling solo, I too vote the Bolivia option, he can always find work. If no jobs are available, he can join some paramilitary group and, well, that's also work but at least it's outdoors.
Only I can judge you.
It was really exciting and a lot more fun than having my own office.
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! --
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/...
11 is never a reasonable volume.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Oh, how I long for the days when I had an office instead of being thrust into the company of a dozen other people that I can see or could see me, and hear me, and smell me, and interact with me involuntarily. An office has a place, but the problem for many of these companies is that they still see an office space as a luxury to dangle over workers heads and because they are too cheap to go to spaces with offices.
Where I work there's a guy sitting about 2 metres away who grinds his teeth. Constantly. Every single day.
Damn you've got good hearing...
No, it's just very loud. People even further away from me can hear it.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
I think you mean cow-orker
>/
Oh what I wouldn't give to have cubes. At my work they've almost completely done away with partitions entirely. There's a tiny partition between me and the person next to me. No partition to the person sitting across from me, just some monitors. The noise and the intrusive feeling of constantly being watched. Feeling self conscious anytime I even have to blow my nose just because I know how loud and irritating it must be.
The office overall is quite nice looking and we have a great view.... but often I feel like it doesn't make up for it. I'm far less productive here than even the last "open plan" office we had which had partitions and bigger desks. I don't think I've been able to get in the "zone" with my work (I'm a developer) since we've moved. Unless I get here at 6am before everyone else. Then I might have an hour or so of peace... Cubicles would at least give a minor illusion of private space.
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.
Yeah when we were being moved into our "open office environment" crap, we got all the talks about how studies showed it helped people work better (when the info was the exact opposite) and that people "collaborate" more and all. Bullshit, just be honest and say you're doing it because it's a lot cheaper. I can at least respect being told the truth rather than being lied to.
I ended up buying a pair of Parrot Ziks and drown out the outside noise with the music/movie of my choice off my ipad. I need music or the TV in the background when working at home to actually work anyway... I can't work in complete silence. I used to listen to music in my office, at a reasonable volume so it didn't bother neighbors, when I was in an office.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
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.
Wow, our first job as a new employee was to build our desk too. First you went with the prez in the minivan to pick it up at the warehouse club along with the chair. But we only got a few hours to build. You must have had nicer desks...
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.
There is an old Klingon proverb.
Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.
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You can't find anybody this willing for such low cost?
---Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A START
11 is *always* a reasonable volume.
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.
You had cubicles? Luxury! At my startup, there were 100 of us working out of a 20 long by 7 foot wide corridor.
We could only dream of having a cubicle.
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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.
Or alternatively, there are always the two more common options.
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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."
"...workers are happier when they are in enclosed offices..."
In other news shocking discovery that water is wet.
Unless it was made by melting dry ice?
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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
"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.
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.
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.'"
Correct. However, management loves hearing the accountant (who did the simple calculation of savings per employee * number of employees) who says "hey, we can save $xK/month". But no one listens to that same accountant when he says "hey, we might be losing some money because we have everyone packed in like pigs heading for slaughter."
"Could be worse...could be raining." Igor
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.
How things have changed. In the 90's I went to a startup (sw) and we had offices, all of us. The company we left had switched from offices to cubicles. And in keeping with true PHB mentality, the prior company had taken a poll if we wanted to stay in offices or switch to cubes. They pinky-swear promised they would do what the employees wanted. Of course the employees overwhelmingly voted for offices and when the results came in, the PHB's said we "know" you really wanted cubes, soo they went to cubes.
And in the 00's the company decided to switch from cubes to open plan... and everyone realised how much they missed the privacy that cubicles provided.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
This is obviously bullshit. That's 1.4 square feet per person. Even the Tokyo subway isn't that dense. That wouldn't even leave you room to have a computer, much less sit down.
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?
One of the simple ways to make everyone _in management_ hate open plan and cubes is to encourage singalongs.
Ones disparaging the management are best. If you're loud enough it will penetrate the office walls.
Keeping noise levels up and deliberately going quiet en masse when a manager steps out of his office is also a good tactic as it plays to their paranoia.
"management loves hearing the accountant"
This kind of change isn't usually driven by accountants. Apart from simplistic book keepers they know that the costs for this kind of change are far beyond hardware (ask any accountant what goodwill means and why it's important)
It's all about power and control. Management have offices, That's what demonstrates they're higher than the plebs.
As a manager I see my role as running interference between the people who actually do the work and the higher-ups, so that work can get done. If my staff want privacy they get it (You can run cubical walls up to the ceiling) and no two people have the same requirements.
Cubicle farms are indicative of a lack of company vision or creativity. Their primary function is to impress upon staff that they're unimportant cogs in a machine - but noone likes being a cog.
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.
Be honest. Why did you choose the quack name Milton? Is there an amusing cartoon I've been quack missing?
"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.
Ouch, that one hit too close to home.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
Too many people think having someone you're paying being on the hook for support (even if/when that support sucks) trumps OSS.
- My favorite error message: xscreensaver, running on an old Sparc 5 w/ 8bit color: bsod: Couldn't allocate color Blue
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.
Office Space, a good movie.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+