111–120 of 197 posts
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I bet I'm not the only one who sometimes puts headphones on with no music, solely to broadcast that don't-bother-me signal.
Good headphones are comfortable. I actually prefer them sometimes to no headphones, 'cause they keep my ears warm.
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F%!#, what a ripoff. IEEE want $31.00 for that paper.. and sadly, it's the same price whether you're an IEEE member or not. So much for the idea that one of the advantage of being an IEEE member is that you get better pricing on papers from journals you don't already subscribe to. Even sadder, IBM used to publish their journal archives online, available to anyone, for free. IBM Systems Journal wasn't always behind so…
I agree. It's extremely annoying how IEEE carefully segment their library access to maximise revenue instead of member value.
I don't think open offices are necessarily bad, but that they're harder to get right. What you need is: - A a decent cultural protocol around it. One place I worked had the very strong rule that you start all non-emergency communication asynchronously (usually text chat), even if the person is right next to you. Another place I worked at strongly respected headphones as the "don't bother me" signal. - A reasonable nu…
One of the worst things for me in open plan offices is you can hear people eating at their desks. For me nothing is more annoying and distracting than to hear someone crunching on cookies or popcorn or potato chips at his desk. That's an instant headphones-on for me. It's worse than all the other background noise/conversations put together.
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I thought telecommuting was a great idea until I tried it. I have enough trouble focusing on my work at work. At home, no one can tell that I'm playing Team Fortress in my underwear as long as I keep the IM window open, and my productivity basically craters. I'd like to think that I'm a grown-up who doesn't need someone looking over his shoulder but, well, I'm not.
Then you should work in an office. Different strokes for different folks. I only object to the bullshit people sometimes throw out that just because they personally are a better team player in an office, they assume everyone else also must be.
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Well, it sounds like you're mostly just an antisocial kind of person. I mean, if you decide to put an arbitrary wall between you and your co-workers where you are simply not allowed to make friends with anyone, that's a pretty sad existence. I mean, this job takes up ~50% of your waking life, and during that time you can't treat anyone around you as a friend? If all your co-workers are such uninteresting people, mayb…
Whether or not my coworkers have unique and interesting lives shouldn't really matter in a work environment, no? Shouldn't the thing we're all working on and the goal were all striving towards be number one? My bend at work is definitely more towards the antisocial simply because I would like to focus on work. Bother me if it's work related otherwise maybe wait until 5pm or whenever we're all wrapping up. I'm down fo…
Otherwise work is a priority, but not the only priority and maybe not the top priority. I love building things my customers love, but that's not the only thing I love. I expect to share some of who I am and learn some about my coworkers during the 9 to 5. The ability for my coworkers and I to click, on multiple levels, is important. It helps both for building rapport among teammates to solve business issues and as compensation in the form of a positive work environment.
And while I expect many intense work environments are much more focused, I also know some of the most intense environments still have small talk, sometimes intentionally thrown in to diffuse that intensity. It helps people view each other holistically as actual people, not just tools to solve problems or obstacles to overcome.
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Partitions can still be installed between the work pods to provide a measure of privacy. Many of the open-plan offices I've seen have no partitions, the only thing between you and everyone else is a computer monitor. It's insane.
Partitions don't do much to cut down on noise unfortunately.
For sound? I can just put on headphones.
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Good headphones are comfortable. I actually prefer them sometimes to no headphones, 'cause they keep my ears warm.
Try earmuffs?
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What do you think it is about your current shared cubicle that makes it the most productive ever?
It's not better than the urgent care, but it's on the high end. Mainly, the work is quite interesting and there's lots of it. Case-report quality stuff comes across my desk daily and large studies are in the making. I have dual screen monitors, (also had that at the standing desk at the last job), but I have also customized my world a bit more: I have vim tuned better (works reasonably well with Dragon, but could be…
It's interesting your productivity goes up in Starbucks. I'm the same way too. Distracting conversations are bad but white noise is fine. Plus there may be something to the whole anonymity thing, in that you don't think about or engage the people around you as much.
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I bet I'm not the only one who sometimes puts headphones on with no music, solely to broadcast that don't-bother-me signal.
Good headphones are comfortable. I actually prefer them sometimes to no headphones, 'cause they keep my ears warm.