341–350 of 377 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there some complaint from another team or something? That is just so illogical.
I have no idea if someone complained or not. There were regular visits by senior management and remote team members. Some of whom were jealous that we had cubes at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to avoid open offices where people sit on long benches shoulder to shoulder or just have a bunch of desks jammed together. A guy I know who works at Dell recently got moved from a cube to one of those, he's posted pictures of his workspace, and just looking at those pictures set off my claustrophobia badly. The cubes at my company are huge. If company policy here didn't forbid photography, I'd show you. I'd gu…
>people sit on long benches shoulder to shoulder How do you sit on a bench for 8 hours a day?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why good managers will tell their employee to go home when they're ill. There are companies that have strict policies for that, to avoid exactly this problem. Even though it's a problem that probably mostly affects flexible working space. If you don't share your desk with anyone else, you should usually be >3ft away from other people, lowering the risk for contagion.
Yeah, and this should be encouraged by everyone, not only managers. You should definitely tell your workmate to go home if he is sick.
I've been working in open office environments for the last 5+ years, also at one of AmaFaceGooSoft. I find it's a non-issue, it doesn't bother me or others, I can't recall a time in the last 1-2 years when someone complained about it. Saying that o.o. is not effective is a bit fishy given how successful some of the companies employing it are. I remember 10+ years ago at my first job we had a nice office building (it…
Maybe they're trying to be polite? I would think they it could come off as they don't want to talk to their co-workers when they say they don't like being in an open office layout.
I would hate working in an open office, but I still don't think I'd complain openly to everyone about it.
Anyone wanting to dig deeper into some of this might be interested in reading Susan Cain's "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking". [1] It was a paradigm shifting book for me, made me understand some people in my life in profoundly new ways, and helped me discover stuff about my own personality. It's particularly interesting to think about introversion / extroversion in terms of managing e…
Maybe it'd help the homicidal thoughts go away.
I like open offices because I want to feel like I'm working with people, not in solitary confinement. When I'm alone in a private room, I'm usually playing; not working. I find it incredibly difficult to get into working flow when in a private space. I'm sure I'm not the only one. That's why people go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home".
That's why some people (not me!) go to cafes to work when they have to work "from home".
Or maybe those people just like coffee?
I hate open offices with a passion, for reasons well explained in the article (and many others that regularly pop up here). However, many companies that have open offices enjoyed an incredible success and some even achieved world domination (Facebook). How is that even possible is what I'd really like to know.
The overall din of my open office doesn't bother me so much, but people talking to themselves under their breath as they work the copy machine certainly does. I don't know why 90% of my co-workers do this.
So many people just can't seem to think (or read) without talking out loud.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted. I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.
> having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers So, about that... I work in a cube farm, and I love it. But because we're running out of space, they stuck me in the only open cube they had, and so I'm not sitting anywhere near my team or even my department. I'm in network engineering, but the other people on my row are sales engineers (for a product I have nothing to do with), the…
If you were working in close proximity to people doing a similar job, you wouldn't have that luxury.
In my workplace, it seems rude to have headphones on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of the main takeaways from the story tho. In an open office those who need silence cannot get it, even if there are private rooms available: "Some of us even feel that escaping to a quiet room is a sign of weakness" and "it can feel as if we’re not pulling our weight if we’re not present"
Over ear headphones are a pretty good workaround if you don't want to be distracted by the noise.