I'm personally more or less a fan of open offices, but the noise really is a problem and unfortunate -- I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
In the meantime, I find that using ear-plugging headphones alone with some ear-muffs (for like construction work) over the top of the head, without actual music, is reasonably effective at stopping sound.
> I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
Most open floorplans I've seen don't have sufficient private space, so moving conversations into offices ends up being impractical for the people working there.
Most open floor plans I've seen are also woefully lacking in noise-absorbing materials. A giant room with drywall and hard floor is a recipe for loud noise. Best case, you have acoustic tiles for ceiling and short-pile carpet, and everything else bounces the noise around. Libraries tend to have layouts that are conducive to noise absorption, with all the shelves of books and the small seating spaces scattered throughout.
> I'm personally more or less a fan of open offices, but the noise really is a problem and unfortunate -- I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
Then what's the point of open offices outside of penny-pinching?
Personally, I just enjoy the feeling of being around other people. I worked in a private office in my first job out of college, and found it a bit lonely. In college, most things got done in libraries or coffee shops or in small gatherings of students or in computer labs, and it worked well. It wasn't like people were completely silent, but there was an understanding you wouldn't be distractingly loud, which isn't a social norm that seems to exist with open offices, for whatever reason.
"louder conversations" doesn't mean "all conversations".
That said, there are advantages and disadvantages to a high-interaction cube farm, and I'm not convinced the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. In particular, the productivity hit for people less comfortable in such a setting seems higher than the productivity gain for people more comfortable in such a setting. As much as many offices try to put everyone in the same type of environment, I think it would make sense to design floorplans that incorporate both offices and cubes, with different types of employees in different types of work environments.
You say penny-pinching, but not all companies can afford the office space for all their employees from the get-go.
At least where I work, we do get an implicit understanding of when it's quiet time, and when it's discussion time. Unfortunately the understanding isn't always in sync, but we're most of the way there.
> You say penny-pinching, but not all companies can afford the office space for all their employees from the get-go.
With the caveats that is is one situation and we are in Dallas, my company could afford to give everyone a private office in the building we currently occupy for less than the cost of my salary alone. IMO, if you have enough money to pay developers market salaries you have enough to give them their own office if you wanted to. In fact, I would take a pay cut to get one.
Obviously some markets like SF proper and Manhattan are stupid expensive and this likely isn't true there. I'd wager that most of the world i closer to Dallas than SF, though.
In the meantime, I find that using ear-plugging headphones alone with some ear-muffs (for like construction work) over the top of the head, without actual music, is reasonably effective at stopping sound.