Such a bad solution. The guy is complaining about a loud sales team, his team making phone calls and talking and a goddamn gong. The red light solves none of those problems. Sound travels regardless of whether or not you have a red light on or not. Headphones only go so far too. I don't WANT to listen to music or have my ears covered all day!
Agree on not wanting to listen to music all day. I listen to music for pleasure and not work, I can't listen to my music as I find myself drifting into the music and not work. The only think I've found that works for a reasonable period is an app called white noise that I play a storm with thunder rolling through it.
This does nothing about being visible from behind, nor the insane surveillance culture that programmers have to endure these days.
It seems like another case of engineering types addressing the symptom (noise) rather than the underlying problem, which is the low social status that got programmers into open plan cattle pens in the first place.
Go away from open plan offices. I'm really baffled that that wasn't one of the solutions in the article. Red and Green coloured cubes? Lights? Ugly attempts to mask the symptoms, rather than fix the real problem: Open plan offices suck for productivity.
That's what I was thinking, especially reading this line:
> With the vast majority of us now working in open concept offices — some studies have said that 70% of US workers work in this kind of environment — companies are being forced to come up with novel ways to ensure we stay productive and don’t find ourselves driven delirious from the noise and chaos.
They are being forced. Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
Stupid managers that will then either go to conference rooms for meetings or into their own office. That's the way it works here. All of the devs & qa that need a quiet environment are stuck in cubes or open offices while the managers, directors, VP, etc all sit in their offices with the doors closed. I absolutely hate it.
About 10 years ago at a different employer, we planned a trip to a customer's office but I woke up late and missed the car by literally 5 minutes. We were in an open office plan where we faced each other...sales was also in the same room sitting right next to me. Since I missed the trip, I was the only person in the office for the rest of the week. Holy-cow did I get stuff done. My productivity shot through the roof and I swear in a few days I did probably 1 - 1.5 months of work. I told the owner about this and listed the things I did while they were away. He said something along these lines: "800 bucks per month to rent an office for you is nothing compared to your salary." A couple weeks later we all had our own offices. That should be an easy message for management. Don't nickle and dime the small stuff that greatly increases ROI.
> Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
I always figured zoning laws usually discourage heavy development, so companies are heavily incentivized to use open-plan offices to save on rent.
Here's a listing for 3 offices for 900 sq. feet for $63.33/year, or $55,197/year. Each office might be something like 10% of your fully loaded cost, so a company with at 10 employees is spending an entire employee on rent. https://42floors.com/us/ca/san-francisco/235-montgomery-st?l... .
You could cram them into a box and they would whine, but it might be worth it if you can get an entire extra employee out of it.
Though, there are 3 8-hour shifts in a single 24-hour day, so I'm surprised they don't stagger scheduled times for employees so they can share the same space. I myself usually like starting work at 4 or 5 AM, since there are fewer people around. There's probably way too much social inertia for that in general, compared to spending a few thousand $ on some cubicle walls.
If you can afford more than 10 employees, you're probably quite profitable and the margin on well-run software companies is pretty high, so maybe they don't care about rent at that point.
> Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
For startups — budgets. If closed offices were the same price I doubt we'd hear so much discussion about the benefits of open offices while turning one's head the other way when it comes to the downsides.
I'm pretty sure open floor plans are so prevalent because they are so much cheaper. I've been places where they actually switched out all our desks for smaller ones so we could fit more employees. These proposals are at least stabs at getting privacy and productivity in the horrible low cost setting that's taken over.
Yep. At my company, first they got rid of cubicles and set up the open office plan. Then they moved us into rows facing each other getting rid of any extra space we had ( with only monitors keeping us from staring at each other). Then they moved us to a smaller building (right next our apparently very funny finance group). I cherish the hour when everyone else goes to lunch.
You're forgetting the mentality you're dealing with: as far as they're concerned, if you're not productive, regardless of the environment, the problem is you. Never them.
It depends on the 5-7 people. It only takes one person clipping their fingernails at their desk (yes, it happens), chewing with their mouth open, and talking loudly (all the time) to ruin it for everyone. Yes, I'm talking about the same person.
I think the pendulum still has a way to swing yet. Quite a few places I know of are touting their new "activity based working" arrangements - which is HR/PR/Marketing speak for "hot desking, because rent is too expensive to even give you all your own desk in an open plan office, so you get to share desks and fight over what's left whenever you run late".
Many of the people I know who I consider to be in the "10x developer/PM/designer" category start picking up all the recruiter calls as soon as that's announced. I _strongly_ suspect whoever got "implement ABW to reduce real estate costs" as one of their KPIs also snuck "reduce renumeration costs by organically cutting headcount" written into their end-of-year-bonus goals, while explicitly leaving out anything to do with productivity (or more likely, ensuring the "productivity" KPI got dropped onto a career-ladder-rival...)
I could see hot desking work for companies that are mostly work from home. For some reason (probably the ones you listed) it gets cargo culted by companies that don't allow remote work.
When I started working for the government, there were alot of old timers who would acquire surplus cabinets other things to build mazes to their workspaces. It seemed to be a instinctual compulsion.
The ultimate was an angry desktop manager who came up with some security excuse to get a large open area in a basement. They wired up a security camera in the front, and when you got an audience to deal with him in person, you'd need to navigate a maze of palletized equipment (mostly surplus junk) to get to his office. While you did that, he'd slip out a back door.
Every other day at work I joke I will build myself one out of pizza boxes. Honestly, I'd have done that long ago, if I wasn't worried about management disapproving.
Is there anyone reading this who has been involved/got the inside scoop in implementation of an open office plan. Was the change in productivity an issue? Did it happen? Was cost savings the only driving force?
Working in Arch firms, I have had conversations with business owners about ambient noise and I've never met one who cared - once the conversation moves to estimates.
Yes, cost is the major driving force, Lead time/schedule isn't really an issue... outside of coordinating power, lan, HVAC, and server racks. The ADA, IBC, NFPA, and life-safety codes require slightly larger spaces than you might expect in an office setting (e.g. 36" doors and 60" wide hallways typ.) When you compare how many people 'fit' into the open space vs walls, you might be a bit underwhelmed as an owner.
Basically, doors are only for those who need closed-door conversations or security.
Aha - so the building codes force a company to use considerably more floorspace for a group of people if those people are divided by walls? I hadn't really thought of that before - I thought someone was saving just the price of walls and the difficulty of organizing people.
> Carpenter says that the red-green block has made a huge difference. [...] “It’s amazing. Just by flipping something I can say I’m busy,” he says. “And I need that.”
I echo every other "stop building open floor plans" comment in here.
It's kind of hard to overstate the sad hilarity of so many orgs with vast resources being constitutionally incapable of using technology like walls and doors. There are few more concise arguments for the intellectual bankruptcy of cool-kid business practice.
Don't bother reading this article. The "solution"presented is to install red/green lights at your desk to signal to people not to walk up and interrupt you.
That isn't the problem. The problem is NOISE, NOISE EVERYWHERE!
When I was younger, I was perfectly happy to listen to music all day long while coding. Now I find even that distracting and need quiet. It seems insane that in order to do our job effectively we have to put headphones on and play white noise!
Yes, tuning out other conversations around me takes a lot of my energy to where I trudge through the day and want to go to sleep when I get home. I find when I work in a space by myself I am energized and productive. I'm currently at a desk by two other devs who have to talk to each other all day and I'm considering leaving an otherwise great job because of it.
The solution is to penalize the offenders, in a nice way.
I interned at Goldman Sachs on an FX trading floor (very open plan). We had an Interrupter Jar. Everytime someone interupted another person, the interrupter was required to put 20$ (yes 20$, it's chump change for FX Traders) into it. When it filled up, we'd go out and buy beers for the entire team.
It worked quite well until we had a fratboy from Boston College. He would interrupt me just so he can fill up the jar and we go drinking.
I am getting so sick of open office plans. I have a colored light (a Blink(1), for those curious), and I have keyboard shortcuts for turning the light red/green, with a large sign next to the light that says "If light is red, I'm busy." I also wear very visible (and expensive) noise-cancelling headphones.
Even these very direct techniques don't work--people ignore the light and interrupt me anyway. It's gotten to the point where I straight up tell them that they're being rude and interrupting me, and to just ping me on IRC or email. They continue interrupting.
It's really sad that one of my main motivations for getting promoted is so I can get an office and avoid all these completely avoidable distractions.
Between the ops culture's endless interruptions, "Agile" ceremony, and open office plans, I don't know how we manage to get anything done.
It sounds like a cultural solution might be more helpful than a tech solution in this case. Something like a standardized headphones policy. Or separating the people whose work is mostly quiet vs mostly talkative.
I don't care about people coming up to talk to me. It usually means they have something they need help with or an answer to. What bothers me is the noise, and no noise cancellation set of headsets work because they block out white noise but not people talking. In fact, noise cancellation headphones tend to enhance voices, since there is no background noise to dull it.
Lights don't solve this. Hats don't solve this. Walls and space solve this.
I've got beats in-ear headphones. They manage to block out enough noise for me not to unwillingly listen to someone else's conversation. How many consecutive hours can you wear headphones though? I don't think that having something stuck in your ear for 40+ hours a week brings any health benefits.
Yes, it's the noise. I am happy to be interrupted by someone to discuss something relevant. But I don't like the noise of other people's discussions. I also don't want to wear headphones the whole day. Having a window to look outside is also very nice. It seems that execs know this and make sure their meeting rooms and offices have windows.
I care a lot about people talking to me. When it happens stochastically a dozen times in a day, that day is completely destroyed for writing code. It needs to be batched when it's not an emergency.
Why not simply implement the policy: Only say a word while in the open office if it is an emergency that is a matter of life and death (say fire).
Whoever violates this policy must put a significant amount of money into the kitty for each violation (say, 50 €/$ per violation - it really should not be cheap). This should reduce the noise problem by a lot.
When the first offender will be asked to put the money down, he will laugh it off, everyone will look at each other, crack some jokes, and the kitty will just become a paperweight.
If you could actually coordinate well enough in the office to enforce such a rule, you wouldn't need the kitty - a gentlemen's agreement would be enough.
66 comments
[ 1.8 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadSince it's the other kind of open office, I suggest noise-cancelling headphones and the freedom to publicly shame loud eaters without reprisal.
Realistically, though, interruptions happen when they are unplanned. Need many meetings? Set the time slots and schedules.
It seems like another case of engineering types addressing the symptom (noise) rather than the underlying problem, which is the low social status that got programmers into open plan cattle pens in the first place.
Go away from open plan offices. I'm really baffled that that wasn't one of the solutions in the article. Red and Green coloured cubes? Lights? Ugly attempts to mask the symptoms, rather than fix the real problem: Open plan offices suck for productivity.
> With the vast majority of us now working in open concept offices — some studies have said that 70% of US workers work in this kind of environment — companies are being forced to come up with novel ways to ensure we stay productive and don’t find ourselves driven delirious from the noise and chaos.
They are being forced. Who chose the open office concept in the first place!?
About 10 years ago at a different employer, we planned a trip to a customer's office but I woke up late and missed the car by literally 5 minutes. We were in an open office plan where we faced each other...sales was also in the same room sitting right next to me. Since I missed the trip, I was the only person in the office for the rest of the week. Holy-cow did I get stuff done. My productivity shot through the roof and I swear in a few days I did probably 1 - 1.5 months of work. I told the owner about this and listed the things I did while they were away. He said something along these lines: "800 bucks per month to rent an office for you is nothing compared to your salary." A couple weeks later we all had our own offices. That should be an easy message for management. Don't nickle and dime the small stuff that greatly increases ROI.
I miss having competent management around.
I always figured zoning laws usually discourage heavy development, so companies are heavily incentivized to use open-plan offices to save on rent.
Here's a listing for 3 offices for 900 sq. feet for $63.33/year, or $55,197/year. Each office might be something like 10% of your fully loaded cost, so a company with at 10 employees is spending an entire employee on rent. https://42floors.com/us/ca/san-francisco/235-montgomery-st?l... .
You could cram them into a box and they would whine, but it might be worth it if you can get an entire extra employee out of it.
Though, there are 3 8-hour shifts in a single 24-hour day, so I'm surprised they don't stagger scheduled times for employees so they can share the same space. I myself usually like starting work at 4 or 5 AM, since there are fewer people around. There's probably way too much social inertia for that in general, compared to spending a few thousand $ on some cubicle walls.
If you can afford more than 10 employees, you're probably quite profitable and the margin on well-run software companies is pretty high, so maybe they don't care about rent at that point.
For startups — budgets. If closed offices were the same price I doubt we'd hear so much discussion about the benefits of open offices while turning one's head the other way when it comes to the downsides.
You're forgetting the mentality you're dealing with: as far as they're concerned, if you're not productive, regardless of the environment, the problem is you. Never them.
That's sounds kind of coo.
Many of the people I know who I consider to be in the "10x developer/PM/designer" category start picking up all the recruiter calls as soon as that's announced. I _strongly_ suspect whoever got "implement ABW to reduce real estate costs" as one of their KPIs also snuck "reduce renumeration costs by organically cutting headcount" written into their end-of-year-bonus goals, while explicitly leaving out anything to do with productivity (or more likely, ensuring the "productivity" KPI got dropped onto a career-ladder-rival...)
Offices.
At Google. somebody went as far as to build a little hut around his cube using cardboard boxes that he'd glued together. I wish I had a picture..
The ultimate was an angry desktop manager who came up with some security excuse to get a large open area in a basement. They wired up a security camera in the front, and when you got an audience to deal with him in person, you'd need to navigate a maze of palletized equipment (mostly surplus junk) to get to his office. While you did that, he'd slip out a back door.
Like this => https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/bc/17/61/bc17615c9...
Yes, cost is the major driving force, Lead time/schedule isn't really an issue... outside of coordinating power, lan, HVAC, and server racks. The ADA, IBC, NFPA, and life-safety codes require slightly larger spaces than you might expect in an office setting (e.g. 36" doors and 60" wide hallways typ.) When you compare how many people 'fit' into the open space vs walls, you might be a bit underwhelmed as an owner.
Basically, doors are only for those who need closed-door conversations or security.
I'm not convinced this article isn't satire.
It's kind of hard to overstate the sad hilarity of so many orgs with vast resources being constitutionally incapable of using technology like walls and doors. There are few more concise arguments for the intellectual bankruptcy of cool-kid business practice.
That isn't the problem. The problem is NOISE, NOISE EVERYWHERE!
Also, prepare for lots of folks with hearing issues once the headphone overuse kicks in. It won't be pretty.
I interned at Goldman Sachs on an FX trading floor (very open plan). We had an Interrupter Jar. Everytime someone interupted another person, the interrupter was required to put 20$ (yes 20$, it's chump change for FX Traders) into it. When it filled up, we'd go out and buy beers for the entire team.
It worked quite well until we had a fratboy from Boston College. He would interrupt me just so he can fill up the jar and we go drinking.
Now that's a pathological case.
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.
I share your feeling about noise, and so does the person who wrote that guideline. But allcaps is noise in its own right.
Even these very direct techniques don't work--people ignore the light and interrupt me anyway. It's gotten to the point where I straight up tell them that they're being rude and interrupting me, and to just ping me on IRC or email. They continue interrupting.
It's really sad that one of my main motivations for getting promoted is so I can get an office and avoid all these completely avoidable distractions.
Between the ops culture's endless interruptions, "Agile" ceremony, and open office plans, I don't know how we manage to get anything done.
Give people offices, or proper cubicles.
Holy shit I'm a genius.
Lights don't solve this. Hats don't solve this. Walls and space solve this.
It's the constant, unrelenting, distracting chatter and noise that stops me from getting any work done.
If you could actually coordinate well enough in the office to enforce such a rule, you wouldn't need the kitty - a gentlemen's agreement would be enough.
Like these: https://www.alibaba.com/showroom/transparent-office-partitio...
Or has anyone been able to actually choose such things because they had enough power in their organisation?
They would still enable lots of people to be packed in but noise could be cut substantially.
And how does a red light on my desk stop noise?