
Going to work from home today – our office is too loud - darrennix
http://blog.42floors.com/our-office-is-too-loud/
======
varelse
Open offices are a line-item cost cutting measure and nothing more than that.
While they destroy the ability to write code and ergo engineering
productivity, they are providing important data on the minimal environment
from which productive results can be obtained.

Call this the Sweatshop Event Horizon.

I'd ask why oh why should _anyone_ have to wear noise-cancelling headphones
and/or install white noise generators just to get work done, but why bother?
This is an intangible loss so the MBAs and management consultants behind this
can claim they saved big bucks and then blame you for your lost productivity
at your next review.

Finally, the worst part is when the HR department starts citing this morale-
mashing pox as a perk:

[http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-
school-t...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_24032940/old-school-tech-
companies-changing-times)

That said, if all you want to do is play foosball and talk to your co-workers
all day whilst whittling away someone else's VC money, it seems like an
excellent approach to doing so.

~~~
greenyoda
It's ironic that the same companies who pay high salaries to attract top
talent then go on to fritter away that talent through distracting work
conditions, in an effort to save a few bucks on office space. Salary plus
benefits are a _much_ bigger yearly cost than office space for expensive
employees like developers, so it seems like they're trying to optimize the
wrong thing: if your employees are working at 50% productivity due to
distractions, you'll never make up that amount of wasted expense on office
space savings.

Also, the companies that complain about how hard it is to find qualified
employees might consider that many of the most qualified people might not want
to work for them because of their working conditions.

~~~
Joeri
What also really gets me are employers trying to save money on laptops for
knowledge workers (not just programmers, but desk workers in general). They
are OK with wasting a week of cumulative time per year because of slow and
inadequate hardware, just to save $500 on the purchase price of something that
is written off across 3 years. Incredible.

I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's for everyone and they're
still dragging their feet. It's so frustrating because I know this is costing
the business money.

~~~
JohnBooty

      I've been trying to get my own employer to get SSD's 
      for everyone and they're still dragging their feet. 
      It's so frustrating because I know this is costing 
      the business money.
    

Amazingly, I had good success "converting" my company to SSDs /because/
they're cheap and drag their feet on tech upgrades.

They're a very traditional and somewhat penny-pinching company in an industry
that has been slowly shrinking and consolidating in the past few decades.

Once I showed my boss how fast my SSD-equipped laptop booted, he was a
convert.

These days, he's using SSD upgrades to squeeze fresh life out of old desktops
and laptops. A 128GB SSD doesn't cost much more than $100, and dropping one
into a 5 year-old laptop or desktop makes it feel fast as hell again.
Management likes spending $100 on a new drive better than spending $700 on a
new machine, and users like the fact that the don't have to reinstall all
their stuff.

------
typicalrunt
Whenever this topic comes up on HN, something that nobody discusses is the
impact to people's health surrounding the overuse of headphones. Talk to any
audiologist and describe how often you wear headphones; they will want to
reach out and slap you across the face.

Even if you play your music at a low volume, your ears were not meant to be
covered by ear buds or over-ear headphones constantly (as in, hours at a
time). And yet, this is something that people in the IT industry have accepted
as common practice. Just think of the looming health implications when
everyone's ears get a little older, and less likely to heal properly.

About 5 years ago I had an ear infection that left one of my ears with a
permanent loss of hearing. Now, it's only 5% at the top end of the spectrum
(soft Ss, iirc), but it's enough to aggravate me daily. But the downside is
that I can no longer wear headphones for anything more than 20 minutes at a
time (it feels like pressure is building up in my head...a very weird
feeling), even with no music playing. So here I would sit, in a loud open plan
office without the ability to wear headphones and being asked to solve hard
problems. If this were a leg or back injury and I was made to use something in
the office that aggravated that problem area, I'd have a worksafe (OSHA?)
problem, but for some reason people's ears are not a health issue.

Just remember, your ears are extremely sensitive instruments and they rarely
get better if you destroy them. And if you think not being able to hear
properly is the only side-effect, just ask someone with hearing loss what they
go through. They'll likely tell you about slurred speech[2], random phantom
noises, pain, etc.

[1] [http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your-
hea...](http://www.osteopathic.org/osteopathic-health/about-your-
health/health-conditions-library/general-health/Pages/headphone-safety.aspx)

[2] This is caused (over time) by you not being able to accurately hear what
you are saying. You hear your own voice via two mechanisms: internally through
your jaw bone (mandible) and externally through your ear. Fun fact: most of
your voice is heard through your jaw, which is why everyone says their voice
sounds funny through when they hear themselves on video.

[Edit] spelling

~~~
jdietrich
>Talk to any audiologist and describe how often you wear headphones; they will
want to reach out and slap you across the face.

That's completely false. There is nothing special about headphones, other than
the fact that they make it easy to listen to loud music for protracted periods
without annoying anyone else. Headphones are a serious concern to
audiologists, but not because there's anything inherently damaging about
headphone use, it's simply a very common way for reckless people to expose
themselves to high SPLs. Good quality headphones can be used perfectly safely
by anyone with the common sense to use them at an appropriate level.

If you're concerned that your use of headphones might be damaging your
hearing, there is a simple and foolproof fix - purchase a pair of headphones
fitted with a calibrated limiter. These are standard items in broadcast
environments, where all-day use of headphones is commonplace.

In many environments, headphones actually function as hearing protection. A
good pair of custom-fit IEMs or isolating headphones can attenuate background
noise by 25-30dB. In many workplaces, you'll be reducing your overall noise
exposure by listening to music at a reasonable level.

~~~
typicalrunt
_That 's completely false._

Pump your brakes...

But I'll tell that to my audiologist the next time I see him. I guess he's
been reading the wrong research all these years.

There is a balance to be struck with everything and the message I'm making is
that headphone usage should be done in moderation. Wearing headphones and
listening to music without breaks is going to damage your hearing no matter
what. Hell, even wearing ear plugs in prolonged use can backup earwax enough
to potentially cause impaction and bacterial infection.

------
vessenes
These are almost exactly IBM's recommendations from their 1970s era analysis
of programmer productivity.

A couple short items from their studies -- productivity for knowledge workers
improves until they get 100 sq. feet of space and 30 sq. ft of desk space(!).

They recommend walled off areas for functional teams, three to four people
per, 300 to 400 sq. feet per team. The teams can close the door when they
want. You'd give them a couch and a whiteboard, etc. in there.

This gets you private time for functional work teams who typically want to be
heads-down or talking at the same time.

~~~
tzs
The desk space recommendation almost certainly no longer applies. In the '70s,
it was not uncommon to work with printed listings of code and printed memory
dumps for debugging. These were printed on large fanfold sheets.

If you were working with a code listing, a memory dump, and the program
output, that could easily take up almost half of 30 square feet. Toss in a
giant reference manual or two, and a desk calculator, and it is easy to
believe that desks under 30 square feet could interfere with productivity.

~~~
varelse
I gotta say it - those 160 column printouts of code were _awesome_ for
debugging over a cup of coffee...

And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread
over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident
even on a 30" screen.

Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous
bugs.

~~~
worldsayshi
I'd say another point for using oculus rifts for development.

~~~
kylemaxwell
If only their resolution were better...

~~~
notjustanymike
In time. I do worry about putting 2 screens 3" from my eyes for hours on end
though.

~~~
ehsanu1
Apparently, the main issue with eye strain from close monitors and such is the
fact that your eyes have to focus closer. But the oculus has two screens and
optics, which they use to let your eyes focus at infinite distance. Hence, eye
strain is not an issue.

You'll get sick in the stomach long before any effect on your eyes in any case
- having it on for _hours on end_ is extremely unrealistic right now.

~~~
JabavuAdams
> Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

There are other subtle effects like fish-eye that are lead to a disoriented
feeling when I take off the Oculus.

Think of it this way: your cortex is always learning. Always. So if you
present visual input that is subtly different (eye-spacing, fish-eye / pin-
cushion, lag) for long periods your brain will learn that. Take it away and
you've effectively got mild (hopefully reversible) brain damage wrt the
physical world.

~~~
ehsanu1
Isn't that mostly a matter of adjusting IPD and other calibration?

~~~
JabavuAdams
There are software issues caused by the game / simulation camera FOV mismatch.

E.g. if you walk up to a wall in the Tuscany demo, it'll look like the wall at
the center of your view is slightly closer to you than the wall off-center.
It's not such a bad artifact in-game, but when I take the goggles off, flat
walls IRL look slightly bowed _away_ from my center of view for a while, and
things feel ... different.

It's similar to when you stare at a scrolling screen, and then look at a fixed
object. The object seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

------
geophile
Open office plans suuuuuuuuuuuck. They are soul-crushing, productivity-
destroying disasters. Especially if you are trying to code while the
telemarketer android is right next to you, repeating his or her script for the
90th time that day. But even if its just developers. Everyone talks about
productivity, but its also the lack of privacy. I find that just draining.

The "get shit done" part of it, however, may be something different. If you
have to defend yourself against heavy incoming meeting emails, and if those
meetings are purposeless, meandering blancmanges, then WFH is really a way to
evade the meetings.

~~~
scrabble
_" Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!"_

~~~
zentiggr
"Good morning, thank you for calling Initech --- JUST a moment!" Yep.

------
crazygringo
Maybe... but I flat-out refuse to work in an office without natural light.
It's just too soul-crushing to spend 5/7 of my daytime hours away from the
sun, under fluorescent glare. (I'm sure that for many people, this doesn't
bother them.)

Open plan offices certainly can have their problems, but I'll take natural
light over a private room any day.

~~~
hamburglar
I can understand not wanting to work under fluorescent light all day, but
having had offices of all types, from window offices with great views to
interior offices with and without windows into the hall, to a basement dungeon
that was actually supposed to be a telecom closet, there is a simple, magical
transformative thing you can do to your office to make the lighting less soul-
crushingly artificial: Get a desk lamp. Dead serious; try it.

Ever since I figured this out, I really couldn't give a shit if I had a window
or not. Ok, getting a window is a status symbol, which is nice, but whatever.
Give me the option of a corner office shared with two other people or a
telecom closet, and I'll take the closet, so long as I can have my lamp.
[jesus, i sound like the guy with the stapler]

~~~
bentcorner
Not to get into nit picky details, but have you found if color spectrum of
your lamp matters?

I'm a fan of warmer lightbulb colors, even though they don't quite match the
cooler tone of natural sunlight.

~~~
hamburglar
I'm sure it has some effect, but I've never really put any effort into
comparisons. I currently have a cheapo LED bulb, but it's under one of those
standard yellowish brown lampshades, so it still feels nice and "warm" to me.

------
diego
People in the software industry keep rediscovering this all the time. Managing
software teams without having read Peopleware is like coming back from Paris
without having seen the Eiffel tower.

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces)

------
jcutrell
I completely identify with this. Certainly, some of this is introversion, but
more of it is science. Peruse Hacker News for a few days and another article
will pop up justifying what we all feel when we're at work: interruption is
poison, and casual environmental talking sucks brain power.

I like the idea of caves. We share our office with another company,
Southtree[1]. Our nook of the office holds about five of our desks. We've
decided to move our desks to the walls, so we don't face each other but still
benefit from some of the pieces of an open office. I can say this has
definitely helped our productivity, but we're still susceptible to flipping
our chairs around and talking.

At that point, I think it comes down to discipline.

I would prefer, I think, to have a "shut down zone" of sorts, like your cave
but less cubicle. Maybe slightly darkened glass walls or something, so the
feeling is open but the noise is not.

------
rohall
For me, it's not necessarily the frequency of random conversation/noise/etc,
but the lingering feeling that you could be interrupted at any time. That idea
keeps me from concentrating and working to my full potential. A single day
working from home might equal 2-3 days of productivity at the office (provided
you can seclude yourself at home).

Glad to know I'm not the only one struggling with this.

~~~
zentiggr
I'm currently working in a support position for a relatively large building,
both floors of which are almost exclusively cubes except manager's single desk
offices.

My area is a total of three cubes of space, all of which is open to the
walkway. Interruptions are de facto day-to-day existence. On the other hand, I
don't often do much that's truly put-on-blinders-and-earmuffs, so it doesn't
seem as draining.

I would still like to have an enclosed space with a door that the desk can
face, instead of having people walk up behind me all day.

~~~
ds9
Affirming both your experience and the parent poster's.

The worst place I worked, in terms of these factors, had cubicles with an open
side _behind_ the employee, all kinds of employees side by side, and a high-
traffic aisle on the open side of the row of cubes.

So, you're trying to ponder some data structure or where to put a method, and
people from different departments are holding loud conversations in the
aisles, rapping on steel columns as they walk by, letting their phones blare
obnoxious ringtones at top volume, holding speakerphone meetings in their
cubes - then a co-worker walks up quietly behind you, pops a can-top, and when
you jump, laughs and says "oh did I wake you up". Soon you're so frazzled that
you can't focus on anything, just being on edge all the time wondering how
long you have until the next startling interruption.

And the managers can't be convinced that this has anything to do with
productivity. Anything said about it is interpreted as whining about trivial
details, and gets an answer like "everyone has the same conditions, maybe you
should work somewhere else".

Pretty soon I did. And that organization still has no clue.

------
JohnBooty
The eternal "open floor plan versus programmer-friendly caves" debate makes it
painfully clear: there's no one right answer. Why is this hard to understand?

Different people have different styles and needs. In fact, the same person
might have different needs on different days. Sometimes I love working in a
beehive when collaboration is key; other times I'd much prefer to be working
in a soundproof underground bunker.

Why is this so hard to understand? Why do nearly all offices try to adopt a
one-size-fits all approach that is just so obviously going to frustrate at
least 50% of the employees?

It just seems so _simple_ \- design a workplace with both collaborative and
private work areas. Let people take their laptops and sit wherever the %(#*@
they want on a minute-to-minute basis. That's really so difficult?

~~~
crazygringo
It's funny... that would be awesome for me. But most of my coworkers want to
plaster their iMac's with to-do post-its, put up photos, store
snacks/Advil/whatever in their drawers, keep knicknacks/doodads/plants on
their desks, etc. -- personalize their space.

I'm not sure how they'd feel about enforced mobility. I guess you could
reserve a certain % of the office for mobile-people-only spaces?

~~~
vl
Valve is said to have workstations on moveable desks - you need to work on
other project or in quieter place - unplug your desk and roll it to other
location.

------
rotten
If you want to understand everything that everyone is working on, where does
the time and energy come from to do that? It comes from everything else you
are trying to do. It is not "free".

An open office plan may make it easier to see and hear what everyone else is
doing. That seeing and hearing, however is going to take time and energy away
from what you need to get done.

In college, did everyone study in the cafeteria? No. Programming and learning
and implementing new technologies are a lot like studying. Why would you try
to do that in the cafeteria?

Why do typical organizational structures break management down to a few direct
reports per person? Because it is really hard to keep track of what more than
a few other people are doing with any degree of precision.

I suppose if you have an open office, you can get rid of all middle management
and have everyone direct report to the CEO because you all (including the CEO)
know what everyone else is doing all the time?

------
mrt0mat0
I've worked in open settings, as i am now, and worked in an office with two
other people spaced out comfortably. In both we used irc or another similar
chat to communicate regardless of the distance, so we didn't distract others.
The open office i can't stand. I can never focus, and every time personX is
looking for personY, they just pool the whole floor, which is annoying. i get
noise cancelling headphones and what not, but i also get that if you're not
wearing them and personZ is trying to get personY's attention, you have to
listen to somoene yell. I wear headphones but get sick of wearing them after
about 3 hours straight. I'm in a corner and face a window, which is nice, but
i would rather be shut in a quiet room, working. I have also worked from home
5 days a week. love/hate there.

------
thatcherclay
We had a caved in office in our last space, and the expected downsides from
now having enough casual conversations bit us. Engineering did not know what
client services was doing, client services did not talk to sales, and
leadership was hard/nonexistent. Our new space is night and day - we have a
big open floor plan and enough conference rooms so that you can always find a
quiet place to brainstorm. We still have some of the old cultural problems
that the old space created, but we are trending upward.

~~~
varelse
My favorite past employer had a sea of 8x8 cubes. The solution to
communications issues like this was all you can eat Friday night pizza
parties. People stayed to 11 PM hashing over issues of the week. One day, the
beancounters decided to put a 3-slice quota on the pizza. That was the end of
that.

A few years later they tried to shove engineering into 6x6 cubes. That lasted
2 months. Productivity had plummeted.

Naively imposing open offices to improve collaboration is like naively
imposing scrum to improve communication - both are externally imposed edicts
attempting to establish by fiat something that needs to grow organically.

~~~
ameoba
It was the bean counters that put the kibosh on the all-you-can work pizza
parties?

Fire the bean counters. Compared to the hourly wage of an engineer, even a
whole large pizza per hour is a _great_ deal.

Granted, the institution would have fallen apart in the long run. Eventually
people would get lives outside of work (families, friends, hobbies...) and
realize that 'free pizza' in exchange for 4-5 hours of off-the-clock labor is
a shitty deal for anyone making more than minimum wage. People would get hired
on that just saw the company as a paycheck & wanted to get out after their
9-5.

------
tzs
Serious question: in these completely open plans that so many startups seem to
favor, where does one pick one's nose or scratch one's nuts? [1]

[1] The commentator is asking out of curiosity about what other people do.
This comment is not an admission of either nose picking or nut scratching at
work on the part of the commentator. [2]

[2] The first footnote that disclaims nose picking and nut scratching at work
is not meant to imply that the commentator picks his nose or scratches his
nuts at home.

~~~
baddox
You might as well ask where teachers, or bus drivers, or college students, or
any number of a wide variety of people who aren't alone in a room all day,
pick their noses or scratch their nuts.

~~~
tzs
Recess; at the turn-around point of their route; between classes.

~~~
baddox
Right. The point is, all of those people have breaks available to them, and
programmers in an open office plan are no different.

------
scrabble
I would love to work in an office that has caves like that as opposed to the
open office I'm in now.

I'm constantly distracted both audibly and visually -- the constant visual
distractions being the big kicker.

I definitely think open office plans for software teams are not the way to go.

~~~
numo16
We have individual offices at my company and it is quite excellent coming from
an open office/cube farm layout previously. Being able to just close the door
and window blinds to signal you want to be left alone work and think is
something every developer should be able to do.

------
showerst
I'm not a big fan of open plan offices, but now 8 people are moving into two
offices with no natural light, and 3 people right right next to them. Unless
those hallway walls are glass, that feels like an awfully depressing place to
work.

~~~
rhizome
Nobody is saying there's no such thing as a bad non-openplan office. There are
more than two choices between a sapping openplan office and a cramped
windowless one. I mean really.

~~~
showerst
Sure, I was referring to the two particular offices in the original article's
plan. I don't see those as an upgrade.

------
lnanek2
Reminds me of working at Worksmart Labs/Noom. They had a noisy open plan
office, but still felt they should max out the stars on the Joel test in their
hiring ads for giving programmers a quiet working environment. If you are
going to have an open plan office, it is a cost cutting measure. That's it.
Being honest about a lack or fault is better than lying about it. Good to see
a startup doing things right in this article!

~~~
jacquesm
In some places natural light is legally mandated, hard to use a large chunk of
floorspace, have natural light and give everybody a room of their own at the
same time. Especially older buildings can't be adapted to this.

~~~
touristtam
Where is that? I never heard of such a law existed.

------
smrtinsert
3-4 person caves are awful. They encourage cliquish behavior which translates
into uncooperative competition. Completely open plans might be noisy, but 3-4
is too small a unit. You can always call the big bullpen the quiet room and
the smaller rooms the conversation rooms. I've worked at several start ups
where that was in place and it worked wonderfully. To blame the plan is to
blame the tool - it was the hammers fault!

Also consider that sometimes the biggest producer is sometimes the most
introverted and least connected in terms of personnel graph. Putting up walls
everywhere dramatically increases that persons social barrier to communication
which translates directly into business drag. Open plans ease that persons
burden.

------
dsr_
Your redesign also needs walls around the scrum zone. Specify a high-density
soundproofing insulation in those walls, and you'll be cut noise transmission
all through the office.

------
baddox
> I’m cognizant that this recommendation flies in the face of conventional
> wisdom, which says that open layouts lead to better organizations because
> communication is more free-flowing.

This is the opposite of my observation. I seem to be the only programmer that
_likes_ open office plans and the ability to collaborate and start
conversations with low friction.

------
caublestone
Every time I see something about designing office space I struggle to be
convinced that it is better than the format of Pixars. From now on, I will be
posting this link as a reminder in the comments.

[http://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-
hq/](http://officesnapshots.com/2007/07/16/pixar-hq/)

~~~
mixmastamyk
One of their innovations was to have the bathroom in the middle so everyone
bumps into each other. Sounds gross but they say it works.

------
canadiancreed
This postings instantly reminded me of this Dilbert comic from a few weeks ago

[http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000...](http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/100000/90000/1000/500/191585/191585.strip.gif)

------
qwerta
It is surprisingly easy to get nice quiet private office. I charge 40% extra
for work in loud open-plan office.

------
traughber
What about a bunch of partitioned rooms with soundproof glass walls?

~~~
mcguire
Oooh! The fishbowl approach.

Don't tap on the glass! It'll make their hearts explode!

~~~
canadiancreed
It beats open concept warehouse space, although only for audio distractions

------
nodata
"Caves": why is he inventing a new term?

~~~
adestefan
It's not new. I've heard that term almost 10 years ago.

~~~
nodata
For holes in stone, or for _cubicles_?

~~~
adestefan
For open office design. Desks all in the open and then "caves" for "private"
rooms.

------
doubt_me
Don't forget to mix in some standing desks

------
HPLovecraft
hi guys -- i just wanted to say that this thread is fantastic. this is why HN
is so sweet! Thanks all!

