When it gets real bad, sometimes I put in my handy old industrial orange foam ear-plugs[1]. What's good for bringing the scream of a chainsaw down to a dull wail will just about block out all but the loudest conference calls completely. Although I suppose it might be a tad ruder than headphones...
Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
131–140 of 256 posts
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#132I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN and why it isn't accepted that some people legitimately prefer open office plans while others prefer quiet. And even more practical and intelligent would be to offer different kinds of spaces so that people can choose where to work based on a particular mood. But instead we just get weekly complaints about open offices. I'm probably more productive…
Its about having a choice. Open floors don't leave any choice for people who like to work quietly away from all noise. Not to mention some of us are little or a lot socially anxious which affects performance when there is lot of foot traffic.
In a place where primary place to work is office, still provides common areas where you can talk to your co-workers and have serendipitous conversations. People who seek social interaction find it anywhere, meetings, lunch etc.
Its about choice.
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have ADHD, meaning that open office is great to distract me... But also, one of the symptons of ADHD, with the "H" there, is that people must move, in my particular case one of the things I tend to do is tap my nails on the desk, use tupperware as drums, or if a actual musical instrument is nearby, even if I dunno how to play it, I play it. So, ADHD person in open office not only has terrible productivity due to ot…
One important thing to note for people reading this is that hyperactivity doesn't always persist into adulthood with the other symptoms or is greatly reduced and is often turned inward (mental fidgeting). As far as your firings go, if you haven't watched this video and/or read this doctor's books they really help with understanding exactly what you're dealing with: https://youtu.be/SCAGc-rkIfo It's long but worth wat…
video not found?
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have ADHD, meaning that open office is great to distract me... But also, one of the symptons of ADHD, with the "H" there, is that people must move, in my particular case one of the things I tend to do is tap my nails on the desk, use tupperware as drums, or if a actual musical instrument is nearby, even if I dunno how to play it, I play it. So, ADHD person in open office not only has terrible productivity due to ot…
One important thing to note for people reading this is that hyperactivity doesn't always persist into adulthood with the other symptoms or is greatly reduced and is often turned inward (mental fidgeting). As far as your firings go, if you haven't watched this video and/or read this doctor's books they really help with understanding exactly what you're dealing with: https://youtu.be/SCAGc-rkIfo It's long but worth wat…
[deleted]
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe they do all those studies and decide that the hit in productivity is worth the cheaper open space? Maybe individual performance just doesn't matter that much? I'd bet that the bigger the company, the less it matters how effective individuals are and the more it matters how effective teams are. As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together…
I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet env…
I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests.
HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#136I will never understand why this is such a point of contention on HN and why it isn't accepted that some people legitimately prefer open office plans while others prefer quiet. And even more practical and intelligent would be to offer different kinds of spaces so that people can choose where to work based on a particular mood. But instead we just get weekly complaints about open offices. I'm probably more productive…
Has anyone tried "free choice"? My suspicion is that it won't irk brillantly because even the loudest open-plan advocates generally perceive private offices as higher-status. Also, once people are in separate offfices you do need to think about information exchange slightly more actively (a good thing IMO -- but potentially a bit of a shift for the folks who find open plan, listen-in-on-everything to work well)
Deliberate communication is, I have experienced, usually a whole lot higher quality than ad-hoc, informal "collaboration". Let people go away and think about it, do their homework, and come back with backed-up, researched, opinions.
Or, you know, you can just interrupt everybody for a useless bike-shedding session at the drop of a hat.
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#137As someone with ADD, are work places required to accommodate for my learning disability and allow me to WFH or work in a quiet place? I'm in the US.
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Who were the loudest band in the world for a very long time. but Pete Townsend attributes headphones in the studio for most of his hearing loss.
Until Pete Townsend gets a medical degree I'm disinclined to just take his word for it.
I'll take r-squared loss for 40 dB, Alex :)
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#139Different strokes for different folks. I'm probably the only person on HN that prefers open office workspaces. I currently have an office to myself and it's so lonely and isolating. I think I'd go crazy working all day without human interaction, so I hardly ever use it. And, no, chat isn't an adequate substitute. I'll generally charge up my laptop and go out and work in a break room or some other common area with act…
The most productive week of my life, every other employee of the small company I was working for took off for a trade show. Most of our customers also happened to be going to the show, so the support email was pretty dead. There was also a blizzard that dropped about four feet of snow that week, so the entire office park, and for the most part the roads coming and going were a ghost town.
I got up in the morning, had breakfast, loaded up my dog and drove in. My dog bounded around through the drifts off-leash for a while, then we went inside and got to work. I discovered how to do things that we didn't think were possible, abused APIs in ways that shouldn't have worked, but did, and bent the bits to my will. It opened up a whole market that we had been previously forced to concede. I smashed together a workable implementation of one of our products for a new platform that we used, essentially unchanged, for a year and a half until the platform finally released a real API. By Monday when everyone came back, it was a fait accompli, and I demo'd it. I didn't speak to or hear a word from another human being the entire week. It was glorious.
Re: Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are A Distraction In Workplace
#140Has anyone ever worked in an open plan office space with high, transparent partitions like these:
https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Fireproofing-transpar...
http://stab-group.com/en/products/of%D1%96sn%D1%96-peregorod...
It seems like you could have, say, 1.5m of solid partition and then higher transparent partitions and a few lightweight doors and sort of have a cube farm that allowed in light but blocked noise.