I'm shocked at how many people here find loud environments to be totally OK, some even preferring those to quiet ones.
If you are working in absolute silence and start to feel uncomfortably, you can always introduce some custom noise, be it a rain sound or ocean shore or noise of any color you like. Feeling chatty? Take Bob to a cooler and chat what you want, he's a chatter, too. On the other hand, it is very problematic (and really rarely effective) to just stand up in the middle of the noisy room and ask everyone, however kindly you manage to do that, to shut up at least for ten minutes, because you absolutely cannot concentrate in this goddamn noise that's been driving you nuts since said Bob came in at 9:05.
The point being, I want to be in control of my sound environment. Preferably without the need of earplugs or bulky headphones or other extreme measures like showing up at 7 a.m. or staying late just to get some shit done when the office is finally empty. I cannot concentrate, cannot even think clearly if there is almost any kind of noise - chatter, music, phone talks nearby, traffic noise from the street when the window is open or almost anything else, including my own voice. I know a lot of folks that, like me, would rather spend a night in the forest than an hour in the open space office.
From some comments I presume that it is probably impossible to convey to some lucky people with their extreme tolerance towards loud sounds how excruciatingly painful constant, unavoidable noise may be, but let me try anyways: it is a real damn torture resulting in days of not zero but of negative productivity. It's been my worst enemy at every place that I've worked at (close second are constant distractions, but I think these two are cousins), to the extent that my only special requirement for any job or workplace now is: please, let me sit in a quiet place.
I'm so fascinated how this varies so much person to person.
For me, my biggest "focus" times are almost always with noise-cancelling headphones on with blaring music that I don't have to think too much about (no vocals, etc). Even when I'm alone in the office, I still need something like that to be at maximum productivity.
However, if I can hear people talking around me, my mind almost immediately gravitates toward their conversation; one of the biggest distractions to my work.
As someone who has worked in music for several years, I find that listening to it makes focusing on any other task, like coding, much more difficult. Even without vocals, I can't help getting distracted by details of the production or composition ("oh that's a great snare sound" or "I would have used a tele for that part"). So I tend to work in complete silence, if possible, and an ironic consequence of devoting myself to music is that I never listen to it anymore.
I had this same problem for years, and it made me sad because I never listened to music.
Then I realized that it wasn't the case for music I know really well. Even jazz or complicated folk (Chris thile) is great if I listen to an album over and over. I get in the zone. Try an album where you know almost every musical element and lyric. Put the album on repeat and see if it works.
I can filter out people talking (as long as they're not listing numbers when I'm also doing numerical work) but get driven insane by little noises like repeated sniffing, foot-drumming, or even one coworker with a particularly squeaky scroll-wheel whose job seems to be to scroll through log files at high speed all day. The first two of these seem to cut through any music I put on headphones, too.
So for me a "library rules" office would just mean fewer conversations to drown out the little noises that nobody even realises they're making. I'm sure I unknowingly make some variety of noise that someone else hates too.
Many open-plan offices, if you can't switch to private offices, install white/pink/brown noise makers in order to help mask such sounds. They're not too expensive, try getting your employer to install em:
It's filtered pink noise; last time I checked sox didn't have a brown noise generator.
Edit: what do you know, I just checked the man page again, and sox does now have a synth brownnoise option. You can play with the "band" parameters (or omit it) based on your local noise spectrum.
Edit 2: you can also use the "bass" and "treble" filters instead of "band"; the former are easier to understand IMO. It's been a long time since I read the sox man page; it's crazy how much it can do.
I worked out that command line years ago, and I don't even remember what it all does. And all of my machines are linux, so I can't test out what it is for OS X. But from looking at the soxformat man page, I'm guessing you might try replacing "alsa pulse" with "coreaudio".
You can also look at the output of "sox -h" to see what audio device drivers your sox has.
I've mentioned before how birdsong/dawn chorus is my white noise of choice, and I was pleased to hear on the BBC Radio 4 program "All in the Mind" (about mind/psychology-related issues) about research linking birdsong with a sense of well-being:
This is probably the most valuable post I've seen on HN in about six months, as it does a good job of communicating, in a way that I can appreciate, how someone else might feel about noise.
I go to the office for the noise - In fact, just before a long weekend, or thanksgiving, when my area of the office starts to get a bit quieter, I go absolute batshit, and either have to leave the office and go somewhere where there are people, or start yelling out at random to people to make some noise. The silence is deafening.
Some of my most productive coding, documenting, or troubleshooting sessions have been done in coffee shops, where there is a lot of background chatter and activity.
I much prefer Open Cube cultures, where you can see and hear people talking. I don't think I would last very long in a "Library Quiet" culture.
This post, as well as others, just again highlights the 'to each his own' truth; some people prefer silence, some prefer noise. As an employer, if they care about noise when it comes to a working environment, this must be a very hard thing to balance / get right.
I'm shocked at how many people here find loud environments to be totally OK, some even preferring those to quiet ones.
And I'm a little bemused how so many people can cope with living in urban environments rather than rural ones. The noise, smells, neighbors right through the wall, traffic, etc. But I suspect the majority of HNers live in urban environments. Noise tolerance, like urban, population density and crowd tolerance, is personal and subjective and it's tricky to rationalize why people do or do not want to "control" it.
I fall asleep more easily if I have chatter around me (so I listen to podcasts). This is unusual but not something I need to rationalize away. It's just how I tick and other people tick other ways.
Urban noise is like a noisy clock ticking in the other room, or an air-conditioning system blowing air around. 99% of the time you honestly have absolutely no perception of it, but that last 1% of the time you can't understand how it wasn't driving you crazy before.
This is pretty much me. I have reasonably expensive sound-dampening headphones, on which I play music to ensure that I don't hear conversations. I am seeking to enter the zone where I can do what I'm hired to do and spent years and a (small) fortune educating myself to do. Listening to your blather about The Game is not that- nor is listening to your conversation about your code with someone else.
Yes, I am that distractable. Everything is that interesting to my magpie-like mind. But conversely, when I take your noises away and move into the mental headspace, then I will make magic happen. I am hired to do magic. There are other people like me. Please give us the space to do what we got hired to do.
;; if you want to talk, please schedule meeting, ping me on irc, or use IM.
I'm similar. I wear sound-isolating earbuds (not active noise cancelers) when I need to work when other people are around, though I never reach pure focus, at least not what I can achieve when I have genuine quietude. Often the "quiet floor" at the library is really not quiet enough because people find it ok to have small chit chat and whispers every once in a while.
I haven't yet found music that doesn't distract me, but I am heavily used SimplyNoise, and their new rain simulator SimplyRain. I'm finding the rain with ~50% intensity and rare thunder to be more comfortable than brown or pink noise myself. Other rain simulators haven't worked this well for me in aiding focus.
I find that the "zone" requires a couple things to be entered for me.
- zero to slight physical discomfort. Taking time off to blow nose, stretch from back pain, etc, is not helpful
- clear head. Intrusive thoughts and worries, as one might expect, do not help me focus.
- Total quiet is nice, but not required. So long as its not insistent or random loudnesses (i.e., doesn't grab my attention), I am OK with it.
- Often, a drink ready to hand. No idea why.
- With respect to sound, I prefer over-the-ear headphones, since sticking stuff in my ears is not my thing. I favor upbeat/peaceable music - Iron and Wine is one of my standbys.
- And finally - and worst of all - an interesting problem. I have to actually want to work on the thing to really get going, otherwise it's a effort where I have to essentially mentally set aside my distractions and prepare to "go deep".
I have to actually want to work on the thing to really get going
Couldn't agree more. If I have to put down what I'd rather work on and force myself to a different project or some uninteresting code, all self-motivation crumbles.
You're not alone in this. Open-plan is a fucking disaster. I've thought about getting together all the anxiety/panic sufferers out there for a class action against all the companies with open-plan offices (greater than 10 employees; below 10, you use the space you can get) that make it hard or socially unacceptable to escape. The problem is that I'd be black-balling myself by doing it, but it's a good idea and I hope someone does. I know a couple people whose (long-term) panic problems were caused by open-plan offices.
For me, it's open-back visibility. Noise I can shut out. Being visible gives me the creeps. If I am going to be in a place for the amount of time equal to a trans-Atlantic plane ride, then give me a goddamn decent space rather than treating my flight-or-fight response as your own personal toy. Asshole.
I think the ideal is private offices (with doors) with enough space for 3 people comfortably sitting and working, and 8 to cram in standing. Offices are cheap compared to engineers.
Add some conference rooms of various sizes which can be taken over for weeks (the "war room" model), and some other meeting areas.
Plus some lounge open spaces which can be used for working, too (like, say, an actual library type space, where there are people but it is quiet, and also a video area)
Even spending $2500/mo/engineer on facilities doesn't seem unreasonable. That could get you quite a nice office. Even $1k/mo should do it (500 square feet per person in a place like Mountain View outside downtown)
My "ultimate" office setup is 2 person offices with laptops + lots of big displays. Prefer pairing of the two folks in the office, although not required 100% (I think there are diminishing returns after a certain point). A few empty offices with laptop stands, keyboards/mice, and displays. If you want to pair with someone who isn't in your immediate office, pick up your laptop and head into one of the spare offices so as to not disturb the other office occupant.
Lots of shared space for meetings (with high resolution projectors!) and general chit-chat/hangout time, but any actual work-work is designed to happen in the offices. Not that you couldn't take your laptop into the "lounge", but it wouldn't be optimal.
I worked in a pretty terrible open plan environment. Headphones and music were banned but it seemed loud personal conversations were not.
I worked opposite a lady who would have various male admirers who would come over several times a day to chat her up. So these guys would either stand directly behind my chair and try and talk through me or go around to her side and whisper stuff to her and they would sit and giggle.
Of course nobody achieved any actual work there, so projects were always late. Their solution was to add more people to the project and more people = even more noise.
What possible justification was there for not allowing headphones? Did the people in charge think banning headphones would make people collaborate better?
My wild, bystander-who-knows-nothing peanut-gallery guess: some manage-osaur had the internet use logs mined and found out that a lot of people were on Youtube (for music) and decided that people were "spending too much time" "on" Youtube.
Open plan is fine, even for large offices, so long as everyone knows that quiet is the rule. I've worked in huge rooms with 70+ engineers and it was next to silent. Those that wanted noise put headphones on.
I'm not sure what's up with the anxiety - are you constantly trying to hide that you're on the web all the time and getting nervous as a result?
> Open plan is fine, even for large offices, so long as everyone knows that quiet is the rule.
I don't agree with this.
Bullpens/developer rooms are designed for collaboration and they have been for the last fifteen years. They are for developers to whiteboard or bounce ideas off of each other. If you are in a bullpen the expectation shouldn't be quiet.
With that said you cannot (or should not) have bullpens without open offices that developers can choose to walk in and shut the door. Offices should be some distance away from the bullpen and be unlabeled-first-come-first-serve (they should be designed for quiet focus). You should also be able to work from home whenever it best suits you.
Also, after reading some of the other comments, a bullpen is not a way to stuff the developers, call center team, and the sales team into one cheap room! If any company does this it's a sign of poor management.
I'm a headphones-focus person and I can't stand people talking around me when I focus. However, unless it is excessive (someone doing a conference call on speaker every day) then it's just how offices have been since... well forever. However, in every place that I've worked there has been offices that you can use to focus (or a liberal work from home policy). I typically spend most of my time in a closed door office getting all of the hard think-work done and then the remainder in the bullpen doing CRUD work.
A company that has a bullpen and enforces a quiet rule feels like a company that simply does not know how to build a proper development environment (Oh, developers are supposed to be in, like, big rooms or something, but our developers don't like noise... okay how about we make it a 'quiet only' big room... or something)
I've never heard of a bullpen before, it sounds like a pretty horrific work environment.
A civilised, open plan engineering office should indeed be quiet. Not silent, but fairly quiet.
We did exactly the opposite to your method by the sounds of things - meeting rooms for 4 to 5 people, and one or two much larger rooms, were available around the edges of the floor to go and bounce ideas around or discuss things. The rest of the floor was quiet space but informal conversation was fine. It worked very well for us.
I have the desire to avoid people hanging out immediately behind me, too, in the sense that it can keep me from losing myself in my work. In my case (and maybe in GP's case), the issue is not that they can see what I'm doing, but that it increases the expectation that I'm about to be interrupted, which destroys my ability to get into flow. A camera behind me connected to the intranet site wouldn't bother me in the same way.
I'm not sure what's up with the anxiety - are you constantly trying to hide that you're on the web all the time and getting nervous as a result?
I am somewhat of a misanthrope. I don't trust most people. I don't expect them to trust me. They shouldn't trust me if they don't know me, especially if the stakes are high. Much of the answer to the ubiquitous question, "Why Does Work Suck?" is that the stakes are just too high to trust anyone. The activity of work isn't so bad. The social bullshit and paranoia are intolerable.
I wouldn't let 20+ strangers in my house, 5 days per week. I resent that I have to let so many people-- even though there's nothing wrong with them as people, it's more that I don't know them and I have no choice-- into my career. It's not a problem with the people as people. The people themselves are fine. (They're in the same miserable, cramped boat that I am in.) I just resent being visible and the constant second-by-second impression management makes it hard to get anything done. I spend 90% of my emotional energy on appearing productive and that leaves little for actually being productive, and it sucks.
you use that word. I don't think it means what you think it means - or that it has the implications that you think it has; I am a misanthrope, but that does not influence my reaction to the floor plan of the office I work in. actually, I'd most likely go insane in a cubicle farm. there are ways around to signal that you don't want to be disturbed in an open space.
given that you write:
> I don't trust most people. I don't expect them to trust me.
followed by:
> The social bullshit and paranoia are intolerable.
I do assume that you're referring to your own paranoia, here...
> [snip the rest of the workplace description]
... which leads me to think your problem is not the office planning, or your social issues (with or without medications): I think it's your current job. my entirely serious suggestion is to either change it, or ask to work remotely, if you still think that you'd enjoy it more (and if they don't allow remote work, I'd seriously consider changing jobs anyway).
That said, open-plan signals to me that the company doesn't actually value productivity so much as image and availability. This is something that I have learned with age not to take personally, but I still dislike it.
That's just what it signals to you. To others it signals a healthy environment. If you have a problem with it I seriously suggest you take it up with your management, but I very much doubt that their thought process was anywhere close to the one you describe. If it was they'd be shooting themselves in the foot deliberately.
Meds help, and I'm exaggerating my anger because I rather like the anarchist web presence that I've developed, but I shouldn't have to put medication, that I otherwise wouldn't need, into my body to overcome your failure to design a decent office environment.
I realize that 99% of white-collar work for the most talented is compensating for other peoples' fuckups, but I don't have to like it.
I think it's unfair to say it's an inability to design a decent office environment.
It may not be your perfect office environment, but that doesn't mean that other people (me) don't work much better when in an open space with some casual (quiet) impromptu collaboration possible. I would find being stuck away in individual or small offices quite isolating and stifling.
You ought to talk to your employer about making other working arrangements if you feel so strongly about it, assuming you haven't already and I'm not just being patronising here.
I don't actually have panic attacks in open plan offices anymore. I used to, but I'm pretty well stabilized and I don't need medication most days. But a lot of people have this problem a lot worse than I ever did and they shouldn't be marginalized just because they can't handle horrible office environments.
I don't let it get to me. It's not personal, and I know cognitively that no one's really watching me. (I spend more "web time" in open-plan offices because I can't get into flow.) It's just creepy. It probably reduces productivity by 80%, but surprisingly that doesn't seem to matter, because modern work environments seem to cripple everyone about equally.
What open plan says to me is that my employer cares more about my personal availability than productivity. Which is not worth taking personally, but it is a depressing statement.
>I think it's unfair to say it's an inability to design a decent office environment.
No, it is perfectly fair and accurate. You can still collaborate just fine without an open office. Read peopleware, noisy open offices are detrimental to productivity, even for the people who claim to like them and "need" them.
Again, it isn't a question of like, it is a question of productivity. Open offices lower productivity, even for those people who like them. When I mention "read peopleware" I mean "read peopleware", not "repeat the same statement that was already addressed".
Open-plan isn't as much of a disaster as it is just simply not useful for all types of work. No matter how much people complain about open-plan, it is useful to be nearby people you are working on a project with. If you erect walls around every employee and give them doors, not only does it cost astronomically more, it is not useful for a quick question.
That said, it does seem like the pendulum is moving back toward privacy in offices, though what that will look like is anybody's guess.
I for one am a fan of the office design concept known as Activity Based Working, where the work areas provided are the one's that are most conducive to your particular company's need. Not all companies, and not all tasks are best served by either having all open or all closed workspaces. Instead, offering a variety of places for employees to use seems most prudent - but again, only offering things your employees need. So if you don't need an executive boardroom, don't add one to you plan as it will just go unused.
Oh yeah. The problem is, that the questioner normally does not know, what his/her quick question means in terms of time lost for the maker (be it a writer, coder, anyone who makes things).
And in my experience educating them does not help, as long, as the managers are resistant. I had a lot experiences, were the managers came again and again with this sort of behavior and whatever I did to educate (or show) people, that I am in a "do not disturb"-moment was fruitless. Headphones == tap on shoulder. Hood of jacket == tap on shoulder + strange look.
If the culture, set by managers does not value makers, you are doomed. And educating managers, who live and breath a meeting, question work-style is really not easy. If a manger has never been a maker, you are lost. You won't change their minds.
An idea might be to work from home, if you need to focus. State why you're working from home before doing it, so people know not to disturb you via IM, phone or whatever.
Well, that might work - if companies allow working from home. In Germany a lot of companies don't allow this, as this would mean loosing control, how long a worker is actually working.
A lot of corporate culture here is not so much result-focused, but sitting on your back, doing your time.
And in a lot of cases, this might work. If I were the typical product manager, this would work. But having found the bliss of automating things via scripting, I feel more and more like a maker and can more and more understand, not to disturb the makers and what it costs to be the disturber. But here most product managers are more managers, then makers - so the live and breath a manager-schedule, being able to cope with interruptions quite easily. So no problem for them, but a problem for our developers (and to some extent guys like me)...
... but as it is mostly my problem (and has been in previous gigs as well), it is something that I have to deal with obviously, as I am part of a minority here.
Thanks for the tip. But living in our own home here results in being tied to this region (at least for a while).
The situation is not so bad, that it kills me right now, but I will keep looking - and using my time, learning some new things while "doing my time in front of a monitor" ;-)
I can buy that there's a lot of benefit in there being low barriers to communicating with your coworkers ... but I don't think talking in meat-space in your open-plan office is the best way to fill that niche. My teammates and I are always in irc (and campfire or whatever would meet the same need). Conversations can be archived for later reference, people on different continents can participate, you can drop links to gists of code or log lines, and you can have a handy place for bots to tell you when the build is broken, or when a deploy is happening, or whatever. Things that need to be private can actually be private conversations, without conspicuously grabbing someone and walking to a glass-walled conference room. Plus, when you're not actively part of a conversation, you can easily ignore it and actually work.
Being able to get a quick answer to a question is important. Being able to ask my question in a way that only distracts the person to whom it is addressed, and in a way that allows them to defer answering until they're at a natural stopping point makes us all more productive. As does being able to save the answer so I never have to bug anyone for that question again, or even share it when other people encounter the same issue.
Right, I don't think being interrupted constantly is an awesome thing either, and agree that there are some great technology solutions to cut down on these sorts of interruptions. But I still believe that proximity is a useful feature of open plan layouts.
Having an "open plan" for a smaller team - say under 10 - is probably a good way to go. That way each team can develop rules like this 'Library Rules' idea, or a more interruptive one if thats the way they feel they get more work done.
>it is useful to be nearby people you are working on a project with
I can think of a few reasons why I disagree with this.
- Your peak productivity can only be reached if you are not disturbed every five minutes from the work you are doing on your computer. We all know that focus is important, and indeed it is hard to focus in a noisy environment. I remember that the guys at GitHub have some kind of "no live talk" rule : if you need to speak to someone, do it on the internal chat room, even if he's litterally 1 meter away from you. It has several advantages : you can choose when you want to read messages and when you want to reply to them. If you're in the middle of a hardcore debugging session, you are free to continue. It also has the big advantage that chat can be recorded and reviewed and searched at a later date : live speech can't — or at least not easily.
- On the other hand, if you're in the phase of a project where you need a lot of interaction with other people and where it would be to cumbersome to do it via chat, like when you're trying to design your architecture, or when trying to agree on rules, specs, etc... Then just set up a meeting : that's what they are for.
Here's something concrete you could charge the employers with: hearing loss. I've heard that it's only safe to listen on headphones 1 or so hours a day, not 8 - 10. It's like second-hand smoke, only, it's not cancer, and probably no-one's going to do the study. But I too have thought that it's lawsuit material.
It is especially shocking since a very compelling case was made (with actual evidence and everything!) for quiet and against open plan layouts back in 1987.
If you are working in absolute silence and start to feel uncomfortably, you can always introduce some custom noise, be it a rain sound or ocean shore or noise of any color you like. Feeling chatty? Take Bob to a cooler and chat what you want, he's a chatter, too. On the other hand, it is very problematic (and really rarely effective) to just stand up in the middle of the noisy room and ask everyone, however kindly you manage to do that, to shut up at least for ten minutes, because you absolutely cannot concentrate in this goddamn noise that's been driving you nuts since said Bob came in at 9:05.
The point being, I want to be in control of my sound environment. Preferably without the need of earplugs or bulky headphones or other extreme measures like showing up at 7 a.m. or staying late just to get some shit done when the office is finally empty. I cannot concentrate, cannot even think clearly if there is almost any kind of noise - chatter, music, phone talks nearby, traffic noise from the street when the window is open or almost anything else, including my own voice. I know a lot of folks that, like me, would rather spend a night in the forest than an hour in the open space office.
From some comments I presume that it is probably impossible to convey to some lucky people with their extreme tolerance towards loud sounds how excruciatingly painful constant, unavoidable noise may be, but let me try anyways: it is a real damn torture resulting in days of not zero but of negative productivity. It's been my worst enemy at every place that I've worked at (close second are constant distractions, but I think these two are cousins), to the extent that my only special requirement for any job or workplace now is: please, let me sit in a quiet place.