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By the way, striking resemblance of the design of inside of The Francis Crick institute to that of H.M.P. Pentonville [1] not too far away. Same architect, maybe?
https://static-independent-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/i/s/stat...
I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople. There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their…
When I really need silence at work I use ear plugs in addition to construction grade ear muffs. I may look a bit silly but it really does block out almost all sound.
It's still better than the incessant jabbering of phone meetings and other office noise.
Some days, the noise puts me on the verge of another breakdown. And no one in management cares.
I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople. There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their…
Personally I use my trusty Bose over ear noise cancelling headphones when i’m with a customer that has loud open plan offices. I’ve had my Bose headphones for almost a decade now. Today I use them even when I’m at my office which is quiet But because its open plan I still get distracted and we are working on acoustics however most of us are deep thinking engineers and we have a liberal work from home policy so our work environment is good enough to get stuff done.
I would talk to someone you have value to the startup and people don’t even think about this till its too late.
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DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying this to be a jerk. This is not uncommon. There is a fair chance that your core annoyance is something else. That is, if you somehow got a perfectly sounds proofed workroom of your own, you would after a while realize that you're still irritable, find it difficult to concentrate etc. Often, we don't want to face our real problems and assign discomfort to some external thing we have no power…
So, to be clear, your suggestion is—having no personal space, no quiet area, a constantly shifting work environment, for what is presumably a programming profession in a field dominated by introverts, and the poster stating this is a problem to the extent that escape seems a viable alternative—that the source of his or her stress is some unmentioned, unrelated personal problem.
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I love them. They vastly improve team members ability to work together imo. Personally, I’ve never met an engineer in real life who complains about them, I’ve only ever seen this on HN or Reddit. I’ve always suspected it had something to do with this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6483953/
If you truly have never met an eng that complains about open office spaces, I submit that you have not worked in an environment where engineers feel safe to voice their true personal opinions.
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I know this isn't a great solution, but could you try a lightweight pair of headphones, and some relaxing music? Not particularly heavy music mind, but just something you can leave in the background. Maybe a movie soundtrack. I use videogame OSTs but that's not everyone's cup of tea. This would maybe make the headphone issue more bearable (lightweight - much less uncomfortable for long periods), and the goal isn't to…
I’ve never understood how some people believe that the problem of too much noise could be solved by adding more noise. There’s too much light in my eyes, and dark glasses are uncomfortable. Well, have you tried shining another light at your face? Maybe a different color of light would help.
Noise cancelling AirPods and gentle background sounds may provide a smooth enough waveform to be ignored, while stopping the increase in audio sensitivity, and smooth out “spikes” of surrounding noise.
Perception of sound is not just some cumulative scalar, that view is far too simplistic
A lot of people (in this thread, CEO of my company) say "just wear headphones". Noise should be opt in; not opt out. Recently all of marketing went to a conference for a few days; the difference in the quality and quantity of work done was noticeable...
>Noise should be opt in; not opt out. That's a great way of putting it. One of my pet peeves is along a similar line. I have a quiet voice. When I was younger, I had a quieter voice. The change happened because people were happy to ask me to repeat myself or, in a more blunt way, that I need to speak up. That's fine, it's my problem, it's me failing to communicate properly, and I've learned to be loud enough most of…
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This baffles me. There are so many alternatives to working for a startup with no real office in a dense, expensive city.
Yes, you can also work for an established company with cramped offices in a dense, expensive city. Or you can take a massive pay cut, tank your career, and go live in the middle of nowhere. Sounds great.
Considering the ancestor comment and how the situation seems to weight on that person, I would advise to try and find a better situation, because from personal experience, when you start grinding yourself for a job postitve outcomes become very unlikely.
My biggest triggers are people who eat crunchy food with open mouths; people who slurp their drinks; people who are oblivious to their environment and sing loudly in open offices. Colleagues next to me eating hard carrots, chips, anything crunchy. Or Chinese expats who slurp their soup and coffee (normal in their culture; rude in mine)... it drove me crazy. The singing one drove me insane at my last job. An office la…
We had a guy who narrated whatever he was doing, in third person. Let's call him Bob. Suppose Bob needed to FTP a file from a server, print it, staple the pages together, and then give it to me. During this entire process, Bob would talk, saying something like this: > Bob is starting the FTP program. Bob is typing his name and password. Bob is starting the file transfer. Bob's exiting. Bob is selecting the file and p…
I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople. There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their…
1) Sony XM3 headphones. They are the 2nd most comfortable after the Bose headphones and have the best NC. So far, nothing you haven't done before.
2) High quality foam earplugs. I have the Mack's Ultra Soft plugs, with 32 decibel noise reduction rating. Anything with 27 decibel reduction or above should be good enough though. You may need to alternate between a few brands and variants before you find one that's comfortable enough to go many hours with.
3) Pink Noise. Play it quite softly so that you can barely even hear it at all with the plugs in. It helps to drown out the remaining external noises that come through without registering in your brain as extra noise itself (which is why I play pink noise instead of other suggestions such as calming music). I like this one: https://youtu.be/8SHf6wmX5MU
I combine all 3 for the nosiest areas like studying in a busy cafe, but you won't usually need the whole stack.
