Trading desk, as a research quant. The office was open-plan, there were constantly people passing behind me, and expletive-laden interruptions related to market conditions were frequent.
For the first 6 months, it was very exciting, but eventually the sensory overload and taxing environment got to me, and I started having health problems. In retrospect, I think the open-plan office was much more of a contributor than the noise, which could be tuned out pretty easily. Open plan => needing to pay constant attention to how one is perceived => anxiety => diminished productivity => more anxiety => immune system fails => very sick.
I think 107 F is worse, though. I stop being productive around 90, and I'm pretty sure I'd die after 8 hours in that heat.
Being the trading app whipping boy to a bunch of BSD (not talking about Unix here) equity traders; one of whom actually complained to me that he couldn't log into his trading app because his username wasn't pre-filled in the login prompt of the app.
Etymotic HF-2s (or similar) noise-blocking earbud headphones. People know that they'll be distracting you when talking, and they reduce the outside noise quite a bit.
As for the perception issue, that's more of a showmanship issue. For people who aren't in your field but do judge, I find a few stereotypes work out well. At my last job, I filled unused screen space with random API references. The busier and more technical my screen looked, the busier and more technical I looked as a result. It's the game you have to play when people don't let good work speak for itself.
I definitely had the screen set up as you described, but I still found working with constant open-back visibility to be pretty terrible.
As humans, though we share this with most animals, we have a strong desire to do important things (eating, defecating, sex, spiritual journeys) with at least some degree of privacy. Work, at least of the mentally taxing kind, falls square into that category.
For the first 6 months, it was very exciting, but eventually the sensory overload and taxing environment got to me, and I started having health problems. In retrospect, I think the open-plan office was much more of a contributor than the noise, which could be tuned out pretty easily. Open plan => needing to pay constant attention to how one is perceived => anxiety => diminished productivity => more anxiety => immune system fails => very sick.
I think 107 F is worse, though. I stop being productive around 90, and I'm pretty sure I'd die after 8 hours in that heat.