
How to survive an open office - dijit
https://blog.dijit.sh/how-to-survive-an-open-office
======
tombert
I really wish this open office trend would just die already. I like all my
coworkers just fine, but the combination of conference calls and casual
conversation (don't even get me started on how bad it gets during the World
Cup) and people constantly coming and going from the office ends up being
really distracting.

What I find more frustrating is all of the open-office apologists, that claim
that they work _better_ in an open space. Statistically, this seems unlikely,
but even if that's true, a vast majority of people work measurably worse with
this kind of setup [1].

This isn't everyone, but what's worse is that there isn't actually any kind of
cafeteria/sitting-area to eat at my company, and living in NYC, going out to
eat every day gets kind of pricey, forcing me to eat at my desk.

I've been debating asking if I can work remote for three days a week.

[1] [http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-
blog/2014/sep/29/open-...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/work-
blog/2014/sep/29/open-plan-office-health-productivity)

~~~
duiker101
People can even feel different from you. The shock! Personally, I really don't
care about open office. I get my stuff done one way or another. However,
working remotely is definitely my preferred option, mostly because I don't
feel any need to be in the office and I am just more comfortable at home.

What I never even want to imagine is having to go work in a office where then
I have to feel lonely. That's the worst of both worlds.

~~~
Raphmedia
I have the impression that people who are not afraid of open offices did not
work in an office that was particularly bad. When the manager joins in the
constant chatter, talking all the time about video games or sports, it's very
difficult to do get work done. You have no one to turn to because the
management is in on it.

I worked in open offices that didn't bother me. Generally large companies with
more than 60 employees. The noise becomes an indistinguishable background
sound and long conversations are almost non-existent.

It's the smaller ones that annoy me. Those with 10 to 15 people. Conversations
are easy to hear and understand, so your brain picks up on them. Since it's
small, it turns into a bunch of little friend groups who have constant
conversations.

...

Describing it just now, I notice that I am describing a high school class
versus a university class. That's exactly how they feel. It only takes one or
two disruptive agents to ruin everything.

~~~
degenerate
Yes, I worked in a small office 2 weeks ago, and every conversation made it
into my ears. Now I'm in an open office with 60+ people and it's like sitting
in a fast food restaurant, noisy chatter that I can tune out. If there's some
conversation particularly loud/annoying I just put on my headphones. It's not
that bad, but I have the ability to tune it out, and I feel other types of
people can't do that.

~~~
bradknowles
I’m glad for you. You can tune it out. Some of us can’t tune it out, no matter
what.

Well, not until we either put on our maximum NR headphones and play our music
at hearing-destroying levels. Maybe by the time we are completely and totally
deaf, we will be able to tune it out.

------
dangus
> How to survive an open office

Step 1: Instead of working, write a blog post about how you don’t like it and
post it to Hacker News.

Step 2: Cash your $5,000 paycheck and spend it on service employees who live
with 3 roommates in order to make rent.

(I call the latter concept “open homes,” and I plan to write a blog post about
it later)

~~~
dijit
This was advice for those who might struggle like I do.

I even admit that it's the first worldiest of first world problems. But that
doesn't make it not a problem.

I don't make $5,000, and I have made it part of my negotiations when entering
companies before but there aren't any non-open-office companies anymore. So I
make my peace and live with it.

The point of the blog post is to bring this topic up because there might be
advice I'm missing, obviously I'm not the only one, others must have other
coping mechanisms.

~~~
dangus
I honestly can’t figure out what’s wrong with open offices. If they’ve got
carpet and enough conference space they’re golden.

I’ve been in a state government cube center, you don’t want that.

As they say, silence is deafening. So are awkward doctor’s office calls taken
in cubicles.

Being around that level of dust and hoarding wasn’t my jam, either.

~~~
pjc50
Noise and distractions. You must be one of those lucky people who can think
without the narrative of others talking over their internal narrative. I can't
program if I can hear people talking, or any other kind of intrusive noise.

------
joezydeco
I'm becoming more and more vocal in my office about noise-cancelling
headphones.

The problem as I see it is that NCHs keep you from being aware about how much
external noise you are making that bothers others. Most do not have any
sidetone† enabled by default, so users that start to engage in conference
calls and chats while wearing NCHs begin to raise their speaking volume to
disruptive levels...and they don't know it.

When this is brought up as a complaint, the answer is "well, you should get
your _own_ pair of NCHs". This is not a solution.

†
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidetone)

------
jmkni
Interesting read. I agree with a lot of it.

I find noise cancelling headphones uncomfortable and claustrophobic. I have
really bad tinnitus, so all noise cancelling headphones do for me is amplify
that.

I find that coming in early and leaving early does work. Getting in before
others and getting a couple of hours work done is effective, then taking a
proper hour for lunch off-site helps as well.

------
d0paware
I'm not against collaboration, and maybe open offices can be good if they are
treated like public libraries. People can go and discuss things in a room
somewhere where they won't bother everyone else. The problem is finding
someone (HR, management, etc) who will enforce this policy and actually
provide consequences to violating the quiet zone rule.

How about a 0.5% salary pay cut every time you randomly interrupt someone's
flow via tangent conversation or unwarranted shoulder tap?

Open office plans originally exist purely to save on costs. If a company
doesn't do it to save on costs, is it appropriate to blame cargo culting in
the name of "synergy and collaboration"?

If I really need to concentrate and think about something, I need complete
silence. No music (even if it is instrumental or repetitive), no headphones,
no coworkers taking phone calls, arguing over their code review, or discussing
how everyone died in last night's TV episode.

My brain for some reason decides it has to eavesdrop on every single
conversation within audible range, and trying to re-align myself to the task
at hand becomes excruciating since every 5th word I hear is like a call to
`Thread.interrupt()`. If you put me next to a jet turbine or some other white
noise, I'd do much better. It might even solve my problem permanently by
making me deaf.

If I already know what I need to do and it's just a matter of hitting the keys
on my keyboard, I can tolerate the noise.

I commonly joke to my peers that perhaps management is doing us a favor by
slowing us down day-to-day so we don't automate our jobs away too quickly. We
should all be thankful!

Previous HN discussion: The open-plan office is a terrible, horrible, no good
idea -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513843](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513843)

~~~
AstralStorm
Making open office essentially a nunnery never works. We tried many times.

If you tie salary to noise levels people _will_ quit. Bonus points if you
benefit people for being team players, talk about conflicting priorities.

About the only half workable solution is isolation headphones - like for
shooting ranges, or earphones for those who prefer it. Enhance online
communication too. (For our purposes, Mattermost or Slack work well, with code
review tools second.)

~~~
d0paware
Yeah Peltor earmuffs are about the only thing that have worked for me. And
you're right, a salary or fine is never going to work out practically - just
wishful thinking on my part :)

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
I am kinda happy that open offices exist. The collaborative kind of setting
really helps in creating a nice vibe (I am a weirdo in that I like my team, my
teammates and my job in general) as opposed to being stuck in a room.

But more importantly, as an ex-FB employee I am glad that open offices let
companies give nice perks to employees even in extremely expensive real-estate
markets like the valley. I would rather have a well-equipped onsite gym and a
roomy cafeteria and a free ice-cream shop than that space being filled with
100 'offices'. The former are what make the office space fun and distinctive.
The latter is the equivalent of a concrete jungle.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
I come to work to work - it's not for the fun perks - the perk is being paid.
That's the one perk that keeps me working. Do I think having "fun" takes away
from that work? No. But I don't particularly care - I'm a professional, doing
professional work, and if I could get 4 walls and silence, I'd happily light
the ice cream machine on fire myself. If you want to collaborate, sure, do
that - go to a meeting room, or meet in your own pod, and if you really want
that open office charm, go work in the lunch room.

~~~
kinkrtyavimoodh
FAANG style employees get the best salaries in the world AND the best perks in
the world. What exactly is the tradeoff here, if salaries is all you care
about? Also, if all companies in the bay area moved to giving each employee an
office, where do you think that money is coming from? It will cause depression
in salaries.

Open offices work in favor of your salary. And despite the weekly posts on HN
about open offices, hardly any employee uses it as a bargaining chip.
Microsoft has open offices, and yet not once I have heard anyone on HN saying
they would chose MS because of that.

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> I am glad that open offices let companies give nice perks to employees even
> in extremely expensive real-estate markets like the valley. I would rather
> have a well-equipped onsite gym and a roomy cafeteria and a free ice-cream
> shop than that space being filled with 100 'offices'.

You're saying companies trade out having open offices for perks. I'm saying I
don't care about those perks, and would rather have less perks and 4 walls.

~~~
neuroticfish
It feels like we're being astroturfed by SV recruiters. It blows my mind when
I see people playing ping pong, pool, and arcade games at work. Why would
anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather than just
getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family, friends, pets,
or hobbies?

~~~
folkhack
> Why would anyone spend an hour or more playing games in the office rather
> than just getting their work done and leaving to spend time with family,
> friends, pets, or hobbies?

I worked for a SV company with a ping pong table, video games, board games
etc.

If you don't participate you're seen as "not a team player"... It's the same
with lunches etc. They want you at the office as much as they can get/keep you
there, and now they're doing their best to create "inclusive social
environments".

It creates an "in" and an "out" crowd, and if someone decides you haven't hit
your monthly Go Karting/drinking event/fancy dinner quotas you're the office
outcast. Managers love this because it's all under the guise of "family" or
"team building" etc. and it gives them a totally arbitrary metric to nickle
and dime someone on.

~~~
JohnFen
> If you don't participate you're seen as "not a team player"

In other words, it turns what should be a recreational activity into a job
requirement? While I haven't experienced that myself (but then, I don't work
in SV), if I did, it would make me actively angry to have a job requirement
that did nothing but take away from accomplishing what I was hired to
accomplish.

------
apsdsm
At this time, aparantly what you do is “retry later”. Sounds legitimate.

------
spacehome
Twice in my life I've been given an office upon joining a company later to be
relocated to an open office, which I hate. After the second relocation, I
thought that the next job I take I will try to negotiate upfront for an office
in my contract, in writing. Has anyone ever heard of anything like this being
done?

~~~
tombert
My dad did this (in writing), but it was specific to the exact position he was
in (something he didn't realize would be an issue). He got promoted, and a
month later they took him from his private office to a cubicle. Admittedly, a
cubicle isn't an open office, but it's still a downgrade from a regular
office.

~~~
lonelappde
Cubicles at pretty good for productivity, if well built and not in a phone-
heavy work environment. They combine audio dampening , partial visual blocking
with visual airspace, natural light, and easy collaboration.

~~~
tombert
Yeah, they're not so bad overall; I think he was more upset with the fact that
they took the office away from him more than anything else.

~~~
spacehome
Yea, sort of. If, when I joined, the company had said upfront that they had
open offices, I wouldn't have been quite so sore about it.

It feels like I agreed to work there under one set of circumstances and then
the company unilaterally changed the agreement. It qualitatively felt like a
bait-and-switch, but that's not quite the right analogy, because the two
companies never said that the office situation wouldn't change. I just
assumed, and that's on me.

I want to change the dynamic at the next job I take. And I am curious if
anyone else here has made some think like that work.

------
mrbonner
The one annoying but fun thing about my open office is that people can bring
dogs to work. I have had a few occasions in which my co-space mates’ dogs
couldn’t stop humping my leg

It’s a weird situation to be in while your female teammates happen to be
around. Some turn away. Some can’t help but just laugh with remark like “He
loves your leg”

I don’t feel bad, though. Normally, I just let the owners yank the little
devils away. I think the benefit of being able to play with them for free
everyday outweighs the embarrassment for me anyway

------
Raphmedia
I have invested in a quality pair of earbuds that double as foam earplugs.
This passive sound isolation means I can set some music at low volume and be
completely isolated from the outside world.

Active isolation is rubbish because it lets voices through.

Here is what I use : Shure SE215 -
[https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/shure/se215#compar...](https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/shure/se215#comparison_2088)

I consider that with those, I can work as well as I can alone at home.
Otherwise, I also suffer from a very noisy office with constant laughter,
anecdotes, movie and TV show reviews, people reading emails out loud to team
mates etc. and can't ever enter the flow.

I am also a big fan of using fake babble noise to mask surrounding chatter.
After about 5 minutes, the brain ignores all of it including the real chatter
that is around you. Namely this
[https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/babbleNoiseGenerator.php](https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/babbleNoiseGenerator.php)
or this
[https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerat...](https://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cafeRestaurantNoiseGenerator.php)

\---

Disclaimer: This is a repost from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277513](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277513)

~~~
JohnFen
I found that I can't wear headphones of any sort in an open office
environment. It puts me on edge and I'm always checking to see if someone has
come up behind me or is trying to get my attention.

It's a nice idea in theory (and it clearly works for a lot of people), but for
me it just makes the situation even worse.

~~~
Raphmedia
I am the same. However, when it's too noisy I have to choice but to put
headphones in. I used earplugs for a while but the absolute silence (and the
ringing in my ears) drove me crazy. That's why I found those. I usually leave
one ear free and only put the second plug in when it gets very noisy.

~~~
loco5niner
>(and the ringing in my ears)

Yep. I also have tinnitus (ringing) due to overuse of headphones at the
office. I have to be very careful about volume.

------
prions
Open offices are ruined by people.

Some people cant work and interact with others in a respectful manner. Just
because you're in an open office doesn't mean that others DON'T have the right
to a low-disruption work environment. It gets really tiring to have to
constantly fight off rude people just so I can get a few minutes of
uninterrupted focus.

"It doesn't bother me, therefore it doesn't bother anyone" is such a common
trope.

------
jsutton
In my experience, open offices help out the team's productivity and rapport,
at the expense of personal productivity.

I get the desire to have one's own semi-private space to focus on their work
and not be bothered. But if you're working in a team, then open plans probably
are beneficial and worth the trade off.

~~~
hetman
How can the team be productive if its members are not personally productive?
It seems to me about the only person that would be getting a productivity boon
out of this is the team leader.

~~~
jsutton
It allows for more questions for the team leads and ad-hoc pair programming,
which likely cuts the productivity of the team lead (or more knowledgable
workers) while benefitting the members on the team with less experience.

------
Ftuuky
The only way I found to do some actual deep work in an open space + hotdesk
office is to set all status notifications as busy, put some good noise
cancelling headphones and avoid the urge to check some mail or chat
notification. Come in early or leave later. It doesn't work that well but it's
what I can get. I'm constantly being bombarded my emails, skype calls, slack
queries, everyone schedules meetings and webconferences, etc, I barely can get
2 straight hours for "real work". Sometimes feels like I failed hard in
personal time and project management but don't know how. Funny because I work
as a project manager of sorts.

~~~
dijit
That’s not really anything to do with the office. If you’re able to do those
things then I applaud you sincerely.

Digital distractions have an off switch. But colleagues don’t. And they can
physically interrupt you.

------
kinkrtyavimoodh
I'd also like to add a point about productivity and efficiency that everyone
talks about.

It seems like people take for granted that open offices are less efficient and
that people are more productive inside four walls. I'd say it can very well be
the opposite. It's easy to get distracted by random internet browsing when you
are in a room all by yourself, but if you are outside in a common place, you
won't for example just start watching a movie.

~~~
opo
We don't need to rely on anecdotes or our personal opinions . There are plenty
of studies on open offices and how they affect productivity. For example:

>...The design of the research was simple but incredibly clever. Study two
Fortune 500 companies planning to make a switch to open-plan offices and
compare how employees interact both before and after the new office design.

>To do this, Harvard researchers Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban had 150
participating employees wear a gizmo called a sociometric badge. For three
weeks before and after the redesign it recorded wearers' movement, location,
posture and, via infrared and sound sensors, their every conversation with
colleagues. The researchers also reviewed the number of text messages and
emails subjects sent during the test period.

>The results have just been published in the journal Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society B. What did they show? In short, as walls
came down, so did the number of interactions among co-workers. Simultaneously,
the number of emails and text messages shot up.

>"Overall, face-to-face time decreased by around 70 percent across the
participating employees, on average, with email use increasing by between 22
percent and 50 percent (depending on the estimation method used)," says the
British Psychological Society Research Digest blog, summing up the results.

[https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-
you-o...](https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-open-
plan-office-is-making-your-team-less-collaborative.html)

>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than
40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices
clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor
Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics
issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the
penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-
plan office configuration."

[https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-
that-...](https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-open-
plan-offices-destroy-productivity.html)

An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides
the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:

>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark,
Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in
a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased
apace.

>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced
cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of
sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’
ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to
music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found,
impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll
on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists
Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office
noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we
often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.

[https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-
office-...](https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-trap)

------
komali2
> Avoid any company doing “Hot desking”

Is this real? I'm so messy, there's no way I could hot desk. I'd leave a trail
of destruction behind me in the form of scribbled notes on legal pads, weird
gadgets I'd fiddle with, mousepads, pens, postcards... How could anyone not
have a "space" for themselves at work?

~~~
jamesgeck0
Having done this for a few months, I always grabbed the same desk and carted a
streamlined collection of my odds and ends in and out each day. Not great, but
better than just having a laptop on a desk.

------
JohnFen
When I tried working in an open office, I tried most of those suggestions.
None of them were worth the effort for me.

What I learned is that I am unable to work in an open office setting, so I
won't take any job that requires it.

------
aripickar
What open offices could really use is those kinds of spinners that they have
at Brazilian steakhouses, where you could flip from green to red, depending on
if people are open to being talked to.

------
rolph
Does or has anyone conceived of a "coding cubicle" the idea being the cubicle
is like a dark room, donot disturb scenario. how a supervisor determines you
are working and not screwing around is a point, but this seem like a possible
hybrid, so that collaborative portions of development can be skeletally
accomplished in a common environment, then the actual transposition of flow
charts to code can occur in sequestration.

~~~
loco5niner
> how a supervisor determines you are working and not screwing around is a
> point

This should be determined by "do they deliver?" rather than constant
monitoring.

------
lvh
How to survive a HN hug of death:
[http://archive.is/r8pHs](http://archive.is/r8pHs)

(The site was down, I archived it.)

~~~
dijit
Thank you, I guess I did a booboo by reverse proxying a svbtle site. I've
added caching, hopefully that helps.

Thanks again. :)

------
ericfrederich
"Retry later"

Nice, short and to the point. I will say, even though this "blog" doesn't look
professional at least it doesn't have any ads on it.

------
borumpilot
I have grown used to all the eyes, smells and sights around me in open
offices.

What I will never ever get used to, is the fact that the dumbest, densest &
deafest people tend to pollute the soundscape for 80% or more.

------
jressey
The article won't load, but I have a hot take anyways: Why the hell are you
complaining? If your bosses want to provide a chill spot where you get to hang
with your friends while you are underutilized, why not just enjoy it?

Also working as a team is most definitely helped. Issues are surfaced
immediately and can be addressed together.

~~~
Will_Parker
> while you are underutilized

There's a kind of person who isn't able to be content without a certain amount
of autonomy to do the best job possible, and just isn't able to accept being
unproductive. I've been able to assert such a position several times in my
career but I think the only way to do it is to earn it by proving I can
accomplish large things that can make an impact by myself, without
micromanagement. I probably need to work partly in my own time to do this.

Even simply for mental health, it's worth it.

------
geggam
This is really the advice ?

 _So one of the things that I really recommend to people is that you Create an
imaginary office even when theres’ no door to actually close. There are
several ways to do that, in our office we’ve done that with those really great
noise cancelling headphones._

~~~
mikestew
All I could think of was Les Nessman from the old television show _WKRP in
Cincinnati_ :

"Les believes that as the news director, he should have his own private
office, so he puts masking tape on the floor around his desk indicating where
his office walls would be. He insists that anyone who approaches his desk must
knock at an imaginary door and wait for permission to come in. He mimes
opening and closing a door whenever he sits down at or leaves his desk; once
he even took out a set of keys to lock the nonexistent door."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Nessman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Nessman)

------
lexicality
Mirror:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20190718133141/https://blog.diji...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190718133141/https://blog.dijit.sh/how-
to-survive-an-open-office)

------
b1gtuna
I am fortunate to have my own office. That's right. 4 walls and a door.
However I still find myself frustrated because the project managers refuse to
use headsets and use the speakerphones all day.

------
kristianc
"Retry later"

Probably an error, but would make good advice in this scenario too.

