121–130 of 217 posts
Used these for years to help me sleep (I have insomnia and the slightest background noise wakes me up).
They also work brilliantly at cutting out background noise when I'm trying to focus (even use them at home if I have the windows open), silence is golden!.
WFH + Open plans are great and should generally be encouraged. The open plan facilitates communications and general discussion. I encourage my team to spend at least 3 days a week at work during our 'core' time (12-5pm/MWF). It gets a bit noisy and productivity drops a bit, but team morale is good and there is a lot of cross pollination of ideas and knowledge. The only difficulty I've had is nearby teams haven't adop…
Kudos to you for allowing folks to WFH! That's a great thing for improving your employees lives.
Bring back the cubicles. Open offices are done not for collaboration and openness, but done to save money
A pair of Bose QC25's has been my most objectively productive purchase this last year. I highly recommend anyone in an open plan office to buy some, or something like them - they're expensive but worth every cent.
The "being watched" feeling is the big one for me. I don't mind wearing headphones because I love listening to music and I don't listen to it that loudly, but the sensation of feeling someone's eyes on you (to catch you on the split second you've refreshed reddit or facebook or something) is incredibly profound on the time it takes to zone into zen mode. Anecdotally funnily enough, the opposite seems to happen for me…
You need breaks during the day. Programming is creative work. Some people can just march on like a machine, but I know my own style is to have an incredibly high output stretch of 3-4 hours, punctuated before and after by lots of email writing, bug reading and goofing off on reddit / hn.
The "being watched" feeling is the big one for me. I don't mind wearing headphones because I love listening to music and I don't listen to it that loudly, but the sensation of feeling someone's eyes on you (to catch you on the split second you've refreshed reddit or facebook or something) is incredibly profound on the time it takes to zone into zen mode. Anecdotally funnily enough, the opposite seems to happen for me…
Now to be fair I am in favor of giving employees isolated rooms to work in, however the reality is that at small startups they simply cannot afford that kind of office space. If you're concerned about noise and also the loudness of music playing in headphones, you can always get what construction workers use to block out noise: http://www.homedepot.com/p/Howard-Leight-Thunder-T3-Noise-Bl... They look pretty intense b…
I've never seen great code come out of an open-office. It can be good but the inability to focus in these environments usually show up in the resulting code.
Interesting question: How many companies who use open offices style floorplans have executives who still have their own offices? Maybe this is just another permutation of the out of touch boss problem. Nothing makes it harder to understand the downfalls of an open office than not working in one yourself.
At age 32 my hearing is apparently at the level of a 66 year old. I'm not much of a concert attender nor drug user so the only real explanation the doctor could give for my disappointing audiogram was my habit of regularly working with headphones on (I always took care of moderate volume, mind you). I wasn't expecting this result at all, I actually thought my hearing was perfect but hearing loss starts at the highest…
I recommend noise-cancelling earphones, because they deal with the delta problem for the most part; but you can obviously still run into the problem of setting and forgetting the volume, which is fine for one thing but too loud for something else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with "real" micro-offices is that a lot of SMBs don't own the physical property, and instead they rent. These properties often have drop ceilings, so even if the "walls" of the office(s) hit the ceiling, sound would still very easily travel up and over (and removing the drop ceilings is expensive/hard). Companies had an alternative: Cubicles. They were modular, relatively inexpensive, and gave the experie…
Wouldn't micro offices block out natural light? I know many developers thrive in the dark, but I can not work without sunlight for long. Even with vitamin D supplements I start feeling lethargic and mentally down, which has major performance implications for both how I interact with coworkers, my creativity and how much I can get done. Surely I'm not the only person who experiences this?
Didn't find great pics but here's a GIS https://www.google.com/search?q=We+Work+Offices&espv=2&biw=1...