141–150 of 356 posts
Red Hat's westford office has proper cubicles.
It's not acceptable. I've moved from a dev background to having a go at sre/devops/something-or-other; work aside, the culture is excrutiating, with people shouting across the office all day. Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The idea that open floor plans are productive is farce. I effectively have two jobs, the first being just trying to get any work done.
SRE/DevOps should generally be like dev: if you're in an open office, headphones on. > Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The person who is speaking usually needs to hear it. Sorry, I talk to myself every so often. :)
Several teams in Apple don't have an open floor plan. They pair two individuals in an office.
Except that the gigantic multibillion dollar new space ring was explicitly designed around big open office units, long tables with bench seating , and the 'privacy pods' are exposed clear glass on all sides..
Yes there is a big glass/sliding door but from what I have seen when closing the door it is quite soundproof (unlike some small conference room). And they provide inside each section different zone with huge whiteboard and sofa/chairs to help facilitate brainstorming/discussion, even each area has its own Apple TV to project on a huge screen through AirPlay.
So overall it is quite good from what I was able to see for the few hours I was there. Folks working there like it.
If you need to do more creative thinking, it is better to have a high ceiling, the higher the better (think cathedrals), though there must be a ceiling at some point.
It's not acceptable. I've moved from a dev background to having a go at sre/devops/something-or-other; work aside, the culture is excrutiating, with people shouting across the office all day. Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The idea that open floor plans are productive is farce. I effectively have two jobs, the first being just trying to get any work done.
SRE/DevOps should generally be like dev: if you're in an open office, headphones on. > Best case, someone talking to themself hour after hour, as if anyone wants to hear that. The person who is speaking usually needs to hear it. Sorry, I talk to myself every so often. :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Use noise cancelling headphones. They shut out the world with a bit of quiet music. I love my qc35. Doesn't fix the primary issue, but makes it more bearable.
> noise cancelling headphones They are very ineffective against voices! Passive insulating headphones are much better.
Yes I too would love to see this. Noise canceling headphone seem to cancel everything but voices and that is the opposite of what you need.
My preferred setup is ear plugs with head phones over them. The headphones muffle outside noise to some degree and add music to drown out what they can't muffle. The earplugs create an end result of just muffled music, which is basically white noise if you pick the right type of songs. The only downside is that earplugs can get uncomfortable after a long period of wearing them.
I use some Sennheiser PXC450 over-the-ear NC headphones; they work pretty well for noise cancelling and provide decent noise isolation too.
I work for Viasat; all of our new-build offices in the past few years have been designed around what we call the neighborhood concept. A neighborhood is a set of individual offices (maybe 60sqft-ish?) with three solid walls, and one glass/wood wall with a sliding door. All the offices open into a central room that can be outfitted in a bunch of different ways. There are neighborhoods of different sizes, and basically…
I worked in a similar environment at Apple, when Infinite Loop first opened: Pods with offices that surrounded a central courtyard, which was furnished with sofas, chairs and whiteboards. Each office had a simple (and heavy) door alongside a tall and narrow window. The door provided effective sound isolation, and years later I realized the window was a psychological link to what was going on in the inner "courtyard",…
why not just find remote work positions and set your own environment?