Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
31–40 of 151 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#32Headphones don’t make things quiet. You are just replacing noises.
Think of a library.
I have not even brought up the visual or olfactory distractions, either.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#33I'm an introvert and like to have a quiet place of my own. I work way better this way. I'm not alone in my office, though, we're 2 in the same room, and the door is always open, and everyone else in keeps his office's door open unless they need privacy. Best of both worlds.
I can't work with music/headphones. I tried, but it doesn't seem to work for me as I tend to focus on the music.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#34You can hear everything. Coughs and other sharp noises go straight through ANC headphones. You're exposed to everything. People will tap you on the shoulder. While I'm the same as you, I don't particularly enjoy the feeling of having noise cancellation headphones on for the entire workday - it starts to feel a bit vertigo-ey. Some people don't like making small talk.
Totally agree.
With respect to the noise cancellation vertigo though - this varies with headphones ; apparently, some headphone response curve causes feeling of vertigo and/or pressure/vacuum on your eardrums. There was even research about that in the HN front page 4 months ago or so - will try to post it when I am not on phone.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#35I see sound. Open offices have lots of it. I think visually. This doesn't mix well.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#36The commute to my office is a few meters, and I really like that. It also has perks like private bathroom & fridge & coffee maker & oven, etc. I wouldn't want some company to have their open office so close to my bedroom.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#37I personally like them a lot, and I know plenty of people who range from also liking them to being indifferent about them. It’s just one of the topics HN shows a very strong groupthink about. Wrong opinions on open plan offices are downvoted very aggressively, and complaints about them are comically exaggerated.
I think most people who complain about them here haven’t experienced the alternatives. The most likely alternative is cubicle farms, which are soul crushingly terrible, or a number of different solutions which all require use of much more floor space. The economics of a more-floor-space approach would reasonably make everybody about $20,000-$50,000/year more expensive to employ, and well you can guess where that money would come from...
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#38Working from home for the past 3 months taught me that a lot of my constant tiredness and apathy came from the constant noise you get in an open office. Some people can't handle being productive in a extremely loud, and extremely bright environment. It doesn't matter how much I destroyed my hearing by putting loud music over noise-cancelling headphones, I always felt tired after ~2 hours of work. Open offices seem to…
In our elementary school cafeteria, we had a large traffic light that was sound activated.
Reasonable noise levels were green, but if we got too loud it would turn yellow to warn us to quiet down, but if it turned red, it would make a loud buzzing alert, and we were not allowed to speak during the red light.
If you did speak during a red light, you were written a ‘ticket’, and would not be going to recess that afternoon.
It would turn back to green after a specified time.
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#39I'm not actually against open plan offices....at team level. I'm against open plan offices at large corp level. I have 300 people on my floor, the group closest to us is from business and spends 2/4 hours a day on the phone. It saddens me because the largest openly claimed benefit of Open Plan offices is "increase collaboration". What I literally see is people locking themselves with headphones and trying to hide in…
Does that not just create silos though. So many things require cross-team working. If each team has its own private space then information bottlenecks will occur
Re: Ask HN: Why are you against open plan offices?
#40Personally, my productivity drops when I get external stimuli. Movement? Lots of color? I won't get into a deep concentration and flow.
Fortunately, I work from home most of the time. I've build the antithesis to an open plan office: I've built an even smaller office in my office where I've essentially put up black curtains all round my desk. Working with a VR headset might be an option as well, but from what I hear they're not quite production ready yet for long term office/programming work.