I tend to be a bit skeptical when studies are based on extroversion and introversion, if only because I can test on all parts of the spectrum depending on my mood.
I think people shackle their identity to their *version, and it can be limiting.
I think there are many factors that should be controlled for in these evaluations. I know for me getting enough sleep and being in good health make a big difference in how sensitive I am to environmental distractions.
Out of curiosity, how are you defining the two? I ask because a lot of people tend to define them at "enjoys interactions with (larger numbers of) people" vs "does not enjoy interactions with (larger numbers of) people". The definition I like is that an extrovert gains (emotional) energy from interacting with people, while for an introvert those same interactions are draining. Both can enjoy the interactions, it's just a matter of how long they can sustain it.
I think of it in terms of energy gaining/draining, but I meant more from the "big 5" test perspective, as well as the other groups of personality tests you can take like DISC and Meters-Briggs.
In general I'm fairly skeptical of personality tests, beyond just intro/extro version, for the similar reason that a) I can test vastly different based on my mood and b) people tend to tie their self image to the results and you end up with a tail-wagging-dog situation.
This is generally a problem. We put people into these large categories like “liberal/conservative” or “introvert/extrovert” and then expect that to neatly explain a whole range of behaviors and preferences. In reality people rarely fall completely into these categories.
I'd almost compare it to gender. Yes there's a spectrum, but the outer areas are very lumpy. In the case of sensitivity to office noise, the only aspect I see as intersecting with extro/intro traits would be chitchat. Everything else seems like it would come down to distractibility level, which I don't think is tied to those traits at all.
I'm just glad so many managers are cool with responsible use of headphones & noise cancellation approaches these days. Certain tasks simply require more focus.
A lot of people who label themselves introverts have sensory processing sensitivities. If you measure sensory overload you're going to find 'introverts'.
Constant coughing and throat clearing drive me up the wall. I despise working around most smokers as many of them have this unconscious, horrid smoker's cough that they do a few times a minute on average, it seems (I haven't actually counted). But any constant throat clearing sets me off and I usually have to leave or I can't focus on anything.
The type of throat clearing I'm talking about is when someone really just needs a good, deep cough but for whatever reason they won't, and are constantly doing this "Ah-hmmmm" sound. Once doesn't bother me. Every 30 seconds is maddening.
More generally, I think this can be extrapolated to frequently recurring sounds with unpredictable intervals.
non smoker here. I get an acute case of this after drinking milk or anything with high cold dairy content, and it drives me up the wall when _I_ do it. like my own body has turned uncooperative out of petty spite.
I'm often one of those people. Not a smoker, but a bunch of allergies as well as asthma. Allergy shots and inhalers have made a big difference, but some days can still be pretty bad.
To be fair I don't necessarily begrudge them it, especially not in cases where it's a medical condition. I mean even with smokers there's not much they can do, the damage is done. Doesn't make it any less irritating though, but I know no one is doing it intentionally.
A few years ago we had a Salesforce BA on site under a fairly long (1yr+) contract. He matched this 'partial cough' pattern exactly as you described it.
I kept a clicker-counter at my desk and kept stats, and updated HR frequently with the numbers.
They finally saw the light and allowed him to work from home for the remainder of his contract term. My productivity immediately bumped back up 20% …
I hate this too. The rational part of my brain can generally persuade me to believe that the person does not want to be coughing or sneezing or sniffling, and even though it's still distracting, I can forgive them for it and empathize. I'll even start to feel guilty for being annoyed in the first place.
But all of that goes out the window when someone has developed a habit of obnoxiously and unnecessarily extending their involuntary sounds by activating their vocal chords. It's completely unforgivable to me.
A person at my work has developed a nose whistle whenever they inhale sharply to clear their nose. Sounds like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. At first it was sparse and everyone kinda looked around like "hey get that booger out of your nose", but now they seem to have embraced it and walk around tooting their nose 5 times a minute.
The disturbance of sound is the invasiveness it has on your sphere of control. It forces your control of your present attention to be taken away from you against your will by others.
This is why you might like the 'noise' produced by you voluntarily as in e.g. playing a 'busy office noise ambience' from YouTube through your headphones or speakers , while hating the 'real' office noises around you or even the same track played by your coworker.
People put with noise far more than they have to. Here are a few of my experiences:
- moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained.
- working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore industrial-strength hearing protectors all the time, which didn't help if you wanted to phone him. I suggested that moving the plotter would be a good idea (there were lots of places to put it), but as usual with engineering companies, a sensible solution is not top of the list.
- howling air conditioning - that place I left after a couple of weeks.
Bottom line, there is no way you have to put up with noise - stand up for yourselves and just say "no".
Although not about noise pollution, it does bring to mind the question of how well some of these studies might have controlled for the effect of noise pollution, which would likely have an effect on cognition, and correlate with air pollution.
Not sure how controlling for noise pollution affects studying air pollution - can you elucidate? Still, I don't understand how noise pollution anecdotes are relevant to an article on air pollution.
I double-checked myself every time I came back. And now, this is on the "Office noise" article. I don't have screenshots, so I have no idea what happened.
The logical conclusion to this is that we should not take any action in the face of incomplete information or uncertainty. This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts. The action of taking down the fence may not be based on ignorance, so much as curiosity. This could be viewed as subversive, and we can’t have that now can we?
> The action of taking down the fence may not be based on ignorance, so much as curiosity
While I sort of agree, it's not about a fence but getting as much info as reasonably possible before acting. Next time you change something you don't understand because of curiosity, there may be injuries or deaths.
> This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts
That's pretty much what you've done here; taken the extreme view of what I'm trying to say.
Back on the subject: the dot matrix printer was not the guy's property and it may have been streaming a hardcopy of some server's intrusion log. That would explain why it was there but nobody looked. It's there in case someone ever needed to.
(edit: it's printed door movements, not server stuff. If the doors are opened by badges, it's still movement detection, at least of the most basic, people-y, sort)
That isn't at all the logical conclusion. You're projecting your dislike of religion and ironically being just as dogmatic in your dismissal. They were responding to the TLC poster saying they threw away a piece of machinery just because it was loud and they didn't see anyone using it. Given that characterization, would you say they were acting out of curiosity? Curiosity would be asking people what it was for before throwing it away - which is what the parable implores.
This is one of these interesting issues that you can use to tell conservatives from progressive types. In some cases, there might indeed be some valid reason behind some old rule that currently seems elusive, but in many cases it's just superstition, and in any case you often can't find it out unless you challenge the rule.
Agreed! - so walk down the corridor and find out why.
Think: someone must have been feeding the printer paper or it would have run out years ago. It's there for a reason. See possibly why in my other comment.
I do agree to an extent: he probably should have just hidden the printer away somewhere where it would have probably not been found. Then, if it caused a big scandal, the printer could have mysteriously "reappeared", otherwise if no one complained, it could just stay there for years on end.
Chesterton's Fence works when the people in authority are willing and able to change things with adequate understanding and justification. Sometimes no one knows why the thing is there and the options are remove it and see what happens or keep devoting resources and accommodations to it while it reduces quality of life.
I'm usually critical of SV style creative destruction, but sometimes asking for forgiveness instead of permission really is the only way to get things done. As long as it's a strategy, not the strategy.
Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.
It may not have been a problem as they suggest, but not hearing anything is not the same as not causing a problem. I've had people just do things thinking I was making up the issue with what they wanted to do. Of course, it caused the problem, and I didn't know the source until they mockingly said "I did it and you never complained!"
>Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.
There's a big downside here. If he had asked the purpose of the printer, that would have identified him as the one who disliked it, and the most likely perpetrator if something happened to it.
Also remember the old saying, "it's always better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". It's true usually. If he had asked to do something about the printer, the likely answer would have been "no", because the superiors didn't want to expend any energy on it and it wasn't bothering them.
I worked in a place where my team of 8 was right next to a door that loudly clanged shut whenever one of the 150 people in the company used it, and they did 90% of the time as most of the desks were closer to that door. Well, it was kind of annoying, I had to constantly re-prop the door, and we weren't allowed to put signage or a door stop...maybe due to fire hazards or regulations?
The main issue: Upper management didn't care, they all had their own offices that were removed and much nicer. The rest of us peons were in an open office hell, my team was on an island that anyone could walk around at any time...we were unmoored and near a clangy door, it was very hard to focus.
I can top that. I sit right next to a Very Important Executive, who has an office with a door that closes (I, of course, as a very unimportant peon, sit in a noisy open office next to QA people who are testing voice-activated devices all day). However, VIE’s office gets hot if he closes the door, so he leaves it open all day. He also doesn’t like to use his telephone headset, so he leaves his phone on speaker. All day. Every day. And the thing is, he’s actually a really nice guy - it’s like it never occurs to him what an inconsiderate officemate he’s being to everybody around him.
That said, it is still probably the correct place to put my observation (unless original author comes around to post it too ...):
At one point I sat for months in a radio room, next to a really noise rack. Temperature was often 30 degrees C.
The reason I sat there was because the sound of the fans were much easier to block out than people (without support contracts : ) popping in to ask questions while I where supposed to help people who had support contracts.
My biggest hurdle—aside from undocumented code—at my new company, is fucking mouth noises from coworkers and the sound of crumpling snack bags in an open office. It's to the extent where I have to leave the area and regain composure before mentioning it. If I can't find a way to manage, I'll leave, but I'm not in the financial position to have that luxury yet. What will probably happen, is I'll work up to a slow competency with their codebase, and they'll fire me before I get to quit. Optimistically I'll find a way to cope, either by dampening the noise or leaving the office for a coffee shop; something I've started doing.
They do - bose qc20 have changed my life for the better.
I did work short term in an open office where someone suggested it was "rude" of me to wear earphones. Same person chewed with their mouth open while eating crunchy food at their desk all day, within earshot. But.... I'm rude somehow.
When noise gets bad for me, I put in foam ear plugs, wear large headphones and use the following command to summon a pleasant oasis somewhere under a tropical waterfall far from the misophonic hell.
alias noise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.02 80'
For other people thinking of rolling their own solution, p5.js has a sound library that is easy to use; should be pretty quick to write a one-button webpage that makes pink noise.
I've noticed this particular kind of issue is helped significantly by white noise generators. The last office I worked in (i'm now remote) had a white noise generator built in that cancelled out a lot of those sounds like chip bags and chewing that are super jarring in a vacuum. I didn't even realize it was there until the day it broke down for a few hours and we ended up with a sudden eerie silence. Suddenly I was being bombarded with those kinds of noises that had never been very distracting before.
Thanks for the suggestion. I hadn't thought about a physical ambient noise generator. Typically I'll try and use Coffeetivity and music, but it gets tiresome.
I have the exact same trouble with mouth noises. I couldn't explain the extreme irrational anger I felt when a co-worker was chewing on something while others hardly even noticed. It used to be very unsettling before I came know that it was a known condition with an official name[1]. While knowing that hasn't cured it, if I encounter someone making these noises, to avoid outbursts, I am now quick to put on headphones and play white noise[2] and mentally telling myself that it's me, not them.
I had to do this recently when a co-worker was eating from a glass bowl and kept slamming the metal spoon around in it. I don't know if I was upset at the sound or the sheer inconsiderateness, but I had to get up and take a walk.
A few days ago, my adjacent coworker started cracking and eating eggs in whatever form they can be cracked and eaten as a solid. I was repulsed for obvious reasons, and angry because of the sound. It seems like a comedy
This is what I have to do when I hear someone whistling in the office. Also other sounds and behaviours, i.e. the guy sitting next to me started clipping his nails at his desk one morning. I had to go stand outside for an hour before I calmed down.
I've definitely come across this and learned a bit about it. These links should be at least somewhat helpful for anyone in this thread who's unaware theirs a name. It's really distressing and I've come to realize that my dad and brother feel the same. In my case, I also have ADHD—or at least have been prescribed medication for it at 27—so being taken out of any zone I'd managed to get myself in is really unfortunate. Good luck with your solution! I've found headphones helpful, but at some point constant white noise gets tiresome and music loses its appeal.
I've been driven crazy by all that, and I won't say what else because I'm afraid that you'd notice it too.
What I'd suggest:
1. You're going to harp on it. It starts with the annoying sounds, but then you're telling yourself about how rude they are, how gross they are, the injustice of it all.
Yes, here and there you've got a point, but 99% of it is you trying to rationalize your feelings, and then it wants to assign blame because people are the perpetrators of it.
2. Take breaks to stop harping on it. I vape, so that's my excuse, but you don't even need one, you're just taking five minutes every hour or so to stretch your legs. Deliberately do something that occupies your mind and gets your stress levels down.
3. See if you can work from home a day a week, or even a half-day. Take vacation as regularly as possible.
I think it's both made worse by stress and increases stress levels, classic feedback loop, so my approach is to avoid it as much as possible and use other means to get my stress levels down.
You'll have good days and bad days, if you're really down and ready to yell at people, maybe talk to a shrink.
I think these are good on-point suggestions, all of which I'm doing to some extent. Outright blame is tough to control. I'm trying to continually remind myself that those are my opinions of their behaviour, and they just are habituated to that for whatever reason. I can't assume that, particularly in an ethnically diverse office, everyone would have an identical institutionalized definition of polite. Also that my experience of it is rational, in so much as something uncontrollable couldn't be irrational, and that's just better to find a way to work with or around.
Thankfully, this is a relatively small and flat org that somewhat embraces autonomy. I personally take as many breaks as I can or want because it's still part of work. Likewise working out of a coffee shop is something I'm very comfortable with, so I've started doing that as well. Working from home is less common here, so that'll be a discussion I think.
Also thanks for not mentioning whatever the other one was. The sounds I'm fully stressed about are the ones I mentioned, but others are just revolting in a vaccuum. Like farts, audible burps, coughing without covering.
You might be suffering from misophonia. It is a condition where you are extremely sensitive to certain classes of sounds, eating noises being one of the most common. Some self help patient groups do exist, but the condition is not well treatable.
Anecdotally, when I'm playing speed rounds on lichess if there’s any kind of background noise my score drops by 200 point instantly. I find that a good proxy for high-concentration activity and this realization made me change my routine to spend at least half of my office hours when there’s no one around.
I'm curious about this door access printer. Wonder if it was some attempt at building access logs, or if it was the product of some engineers having a slow day.
I see no mention of genetic predisposition to hating office noise. 23andme looks for a marker that indicates hating the sound of chewing, misophonia. Maybe something similar is at play for other noises.
I have a hatred of the sound of any marker dragging against (non-glossy) paper. It's torturous to me, makes me physically cringe and grind my teeth when I hear the noise. And conversely, marker-against-glossy-paper is a very pleasing sound to me.
Now I'm wondering if that's genetic and how many other people have the same experience with those sounds.
Everybody hates sounds like that. Why you might ask? The human brain confuses it with the sound of chewing something bad (eg a stone within your food) that's cracking, grinding and ruining your teeth.
I thought I was the only one! I think it's impossible for me not to wince when hearing the noise of a marker against regular paper, and I also really hate the sound of pieces of paper rubbing together.
I have this for any similar sound or physical sensation. I can't stand the noise of grinding or my girlfriend filing her nail. Similarly sensations like a nail file against my nails is probably even worse
I don't think it has anything to do with the sensations themselves, just my brain perceiving the stimulus as abrasive / piercing. It causes some kind of psychological pain, and weirdly I did not have this problem until my mid-20s.
I've started chewing nicotine gum while in the office/class and found that it helps a lot with making the noise more tolerable. I have a history of smoking and vaping, so I don't recommend it to naive people. It appears to be bad for me so I try to minimize it:
Do you have (or suspect you might have, but be undiagnosed) ADHD?
Nicotine is a stimulant. It improves concentration for individuals with ADHD, for much the same reasons that prescription stimulant drugs do. I picked up nicotine gum, and eventually switched to vaping myself, as a form of self-medication for my ADHD. If it really helps you block out distracting noises and sights from a busy office, that might be part of why.
If I could go back a few years and warn you against using nicotine to self-medicate ADHD, I would. I also have ADHD and kicked a 5 year vaping habit about a year ago. Nicotine might help you focus in the very short term, but if you can't re-up every half hour, it makes it a lot harder to focus in the long term! I spent 4 years as a developer, unable to vape in my shared office, being interrupted every hour by the need to consume more nicotine! Every time I'd come back in from a smoke break it felt like a race against the clock to get back into "the zone" before the nicotine cravings kicked me out again.
You know what has really helped my focus? BREAKING THAT ADDICTION. Please, if anyone else is reading the parent I'm replying to and thinking about starting to use nicotine to self-medicate ADHD trust me it is NOT worth it. It's not worth not being able to enjoy a whole movie or show because you need to intake nicotine. It's not worth being trapped in airplanes without being able to vape. It's not worth the chemical dependence, even if you "only" get addicted to the gum or patch. Please hear my appeal to what a terrible idea the parent comment is proposing! Nicotine is the absolute worst drug.
Oh geez, yeah, I'm definitely not endorsing self-medicating with nicotine, just saying, that I did, and that if nicotine helps you concentrate, you might wanna get evaluated for ADHD.
I was never a smoker, and I vape the lightest dose nicotine available (3mg/ml). I have definitely developed a light addiction over the years, but I can go all day without needing my vape. The worst my cravings get are a feeling of "Man, vaping would be really nice right now." I even went on a week-long vacation last year, left my vape at home, and didn't even think about the nicotine I was missing until I got home.
But please! Don't take my anecdotal evidence and think it means you should pick up vaping! I know it's not the best for my health, and you may become far more addicted than I am.
Huh.. your experience sounds similar to mine, although I was a heavy smoker for ~10 years. I currently vape 3mg and a) my vape never leaves the house (I never vape at work or around town) b) I often forget about vaping c) I left on a two week vacation, forgot my vape at home and nothing happened. I have the exact same craving sensation 'would have been nice to have a vape right now', usually when I'm bored. But I am a strong advocate against smoking (obviously) and vaping. Nobody should pick up vaping unless it's to attempt to give up smoking. It's still a nasty habit and super dangerous. When I say dangerous I mean the fact that in contrast to smoking, vaping has the risk of becoming a hobby.
It does. A very fun hobby, with lots of cool toys. I already mix my own juice. Originally that was just to save money, but now mixing is its own hobby. What do I feel like this week? My usual apple-flavored juice? Do I want to throw a little cranberry in this week just for fun? Or maybe I'm in the mood for something minty, my wife likes mints so we've always got an array to choose from.
I haven't even gotten into the world of rebuildables or anything like that. I use a basic Smok sub-ohm box (a T-priv), that I'm probably going to upgrade to the latest model in a few months, but I know there's an entire world of vape devices out there I've barely even glimpsed over the horizon, let alone explored. Luckily it's not too hard to talk myself out of fancy new hardware ($$) when my current mod gets the job done.
But flavors? I went and spent around $70 on flavors a couple weeks ago. Sounds crazy, but it's still cheaper than spending $100/month on commercial juices. And now I have a vast array of cool flavors to play with, and design my own recipes from.
Just chew nicotine gum, sheesh! These kids and their vapes..
Anyway, you're right, nicotine is a pain to quit and I wouldn't recommend it obviously. But vaping seems to be even more unhealthy and more distracting.
Nicotine gum is as expensive as cigarettes, if not more. I spend about $30/year for my vape supplies. I buy juice by the liter and the coils are the only other consumable and those are about $2 apiece every few months.
I mix my own juice. I did the math a few months ago, and I can make 60ml of juice (which lasts me about a week) for about $1.50. Coils usually last me about a month to a month and a half, and I usually pay $5ish a piece. So yeah... my monthly vaping costs are about $11/month at the most.
So, doing the math, as I use 3mg/ml juice, I vape about 720 mg of nicotine a month. If I bought the cheapest Wal-mart generic brand gum, in the 2mg pieces (because to replace my vape, I'd want a low dose per piece), 720 mg of nicotine in gum form would cost $81/month.
That is a huge difference. Even accounting for the fact that my vape device cost me originally $70, it's still cheaper, potentially as soon as the first month, to vape over chewing gum.
Coating regular gum would probably not work. The nicotine is embedded in the gum base itself. That's why the instructions for using nicotine gum say to chew just long enough for you to feel the tingle that nicotine creates against your oral mucosa, then tuck it between your gum and cheek for 30ish minutes or until the tingling stops. Then you give it another couple chews, just enough to expose more of the nicotine to the surface, and place it between gum and cheek again.
The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.
I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.
Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.
I know how to make gum and it would be a hassle and a half for this purpose. I'm fine with unflavored juice composed of compounds that have been used for inhalation purposes for decades.
After living in Europe for some years now, I find whenever I am back in the US, it is really irritating (not misophonia-level, more just a "what the fuck are you thinking") how unnecessarily loud everyone seems to be by default in the US. Seems common that people are speaking easily twice as loud as is necessary to accomplish the communication required.
Normally I just remove myself from those sort of situations, but sometimes that's not socially possible. My family reunions always leave my ears ringing. Some people seem to think that your volume should be proportional to your enthusiasm.
Restaurants and bars and public spaces (for example, the doctor’s office this morning) across the USA. California, PNW, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Philly.
No real sample data from MN or the deep south, as yet.
My pet hate is technical videos in nasally valley-speak: excessive vocal fry, dramatic pauses, and glottal stops. I literally cannot listen to them and have to go to other sources.
I'm a data point that favors surrounding noise. For years, my most productivity-dense time of the week is when i bring my laptop to a local sports bar for prime time NFL games. Something about the consistent noise, available momentary distractions and wandering eyes keeps me on-task and cradled in thought in a way no office (home or formal) does.
Fascinating question. My mother ran a day care from our home, so almost certainly above what is the norm, though i wouldn't describe it as particularly noisy/rambunctious.
I tend to think a lot of our core personality traits are developed during an imprinting period (mostly between 7 and 11).
I grew up as an only child on a fairly pastoral 15 acres, so very different environment compared to most people who have siblings. As an adult, office noise bothers me a lot more than most, especially conversations.
The idea of being productive in a cafe / starbucks is almost absurd to me, like a Monty Python sketch. Although, I sort of feel the same about Open Office plans, which is less funny, especially in the Bay Area.
The vast majority of the time I don't notice noise at all, but when I'm doing something at the edge of my ability, when I can't quite nail it, noise becomes extremely distracting.
A game in the background provides structure to the noise and, for me, makes "random" background noise more tolerable and ignorable, the same mechanism that helps me focus when I'm listening to regular music.
The thing about offices is that in my experience it's unstructured, so anything that can catch my ear might require my attention, and that takes a lot of focus away from the thing I'm actually trying to do. That is, the psychoacoustic form of the noise makes a difference, at least to me.
At least for me, that's because you can focus with the knowledge that the background noise will never require your attention. The same is not true for open offices, which is where it breaks down for me. Any voice I hear could be trying to get my attention, and I have to pay attention to it in order to realize that it doesn't.
I think you've got some cocktail party effect going on there.
Conversely, one of the most distracting things for me is barely hearing people talking. My brain keeps trying to interpret the murmuring as words before it can reject it.
> Conversely, one of the most distracting things for me is barely hearing people talking. My brain keeps trying to interpret the murmuring as words before it can reject it.
Same! My family loves calling each other on speakerphone. Asking however politely and considerately for them to use a headset or hold the phone is a mortal sin.
Coincidentally, when I moved out on my own, my ability to focus suddenly shot through the roof. Like putting on glasses for the first time when you're nearsighted.
Going back home I don't lose that sense of focus. Until the phone calls start again...
I'll frequently wear my noise cancelling headphones at work without even playing anything, just to damped the ambient noise. Noises distract and startle me easily.
some of them are. I'm typing this on a keyboard with browns in an open plan office, and the three people who sit within two feet of me have no issue with it.
I work in an open office with 5 other programmers around, and none of us are bothered by each other's mechanical keyboards. We have a mix of Cherry Blues and Browns. We all agree that it's the least annoying thing about our open office.
It's a shared cultural thing unique to each company, no need to cast a blanket statement.
Blue and green switches are inappropriate for a shared office, but if you get brown switches and install sound dampeners then they can be as quiet as a normal keyboard.
I had one for a while until people told me to get rid of it. I guess there is a difference between you make yourself when typing and others having to listen to it...
It depends on the switches. A significant percentage of people in my office use the Apple keyboards and they're definitely louder than my Cherry MX Silent Red switches. I don't even have o-rings on them and they're almost completely silent as long as you aren't slamming on them.
Yes - they're inappropriate for open offices and there's a very good chance that you're bothering someone.
Best way to handle this is communicate. Last office mate I had asked if he could bring his in, and since it was something that's never bothered me I was totally fine with it... I brought mine in shortly after ;)
Depends entirely on the "culture" of your team. I have pretty strong misophonia that's been nothing making my life very difficult since I was a kid but switch noises are actually satisfying to me. A lot of devs feel the same. Mechanical switches sound like concentration, good work, precise engineering. It's all about the consistency of the background noise and the mental associations.
On the other side of things, the sound of a door closing too strongly will ruin my concentration and put me in a mood.
Your question made me think way back to shared terminal labs where the terminals made an electronic noise for each key press, either a short beep or a harder click. I imagined this feature was an already anachronistic crutch for people who remembered typewriters and typing pools.
At university, I shared an office with a student who made so much noise typing that I could only stop and ponder with amazement. This guy typed like the keyboard was a piece of meat, and his hands were basting mops. Somehow, his fingers mashed out whole words and phrases as he dragged his paws across the keys.
Ugh in my current open office the team next to me has entered a machismo fueled arms race for who can find the loudest clacky keyboard possible... even with the biggest and baddest noise cancelling cans I could find twelve hours of my day are just clack clack clack, I’m going slowly insane!
The blame needs to get placed appropriately here: one shouldn't be bothered by the keyboard; one should be bothered by the horrendous office layout that allows trivial sounds to propagate so easily.
I use a mechanical, as the Apple keyboards gave me RSI. My pain has gone away since, and I've not had any complaints about noise. (Much of my office uses mechanical, and most of us do it for our wrists.)
I use some of the quieter switches; I'm not in mechanical for the noise, but for the feel & layout. That said, it's about on-par noise wise with an Apple keyboard, but people think mechanical == noise.
It depends on the people, but it's safe to err on the side of yes clickety keyboards annoy some.
Nobody will be excessively interrupted/distracted by a quiet keyboard. The same is not true for the other direction.
At my last position, open office, a few people on my team complained about other members' loud buckling-spring-like keyboards. Since it was an open office and we were all complaining about noises well beyond some of the keyboards, like sales calls and constant conversations, it was somewhat moot and nothing was really done about it. But it definitely increased animosity within the team, it pays to be especially considerate of your neighbors, particularly ones you need to collaborate with.
Yes. Absolutely. It's distracting. Clicky switches, like blues and greens, should not be allowed in an open office.
It's possible to type softly enough on non-clicky keyboards that they aren't loud, but most of my coworkers seem to love bottoming-out on every stroke.
I use QMX-Clips to silence my keyboard. It's only slightly louder than a normal membrane keyboard.
I've never had any complaints but I use a keyboard with Cherry MX silent switches. Highly recommended if you are worried about the noise, although they are harder to find on keyboards than other switches.
The guy I sit next to uses a mechanical Logitech keyboard with their custom switches and I've never heard any complaints about that one, either.
My biggest triggers are people who eat crunchy food with open mouths; people who slurp their drinks; people who are oblivious to their environment and sing loudly in open offices.
Colleagues next to me eating hard carrots, chips, anything crunchy. Or Chinese expats who slurp their soup and coffee (normal in their culture; rude in mine)... it drove me crazy.
The singing one drove me insane at my last job. An office lady walked around the office, she would loudly and falsely be singing nonsense like: "LALALALA POMPOM PIEWPIEW LALA" (verbatim) and sometimes fragments from pop songs, in her broken English: "I CAN'T GET NO SASIFICTION LALAPOMPOM".
I wanted to murder her. No joke. If I could get away with it, I would have. The anger was physical and deep. Rage and disgust was the feeling, and I felt personally attacked. It felt like a "fight or flee" instinct, where I'd prefer to fight.
Many angry looks thrown at her (not just from me!) didn't make any difference. She must've felt like she was a rock star or something.
On my last day in the office I mentioned her to the rest of the office. Turns out everyone was annoyed by her. Nobody spoke up.
I have misophonia. The hospital close to my home in Amsterdam did a lot of scientific research into it. And nowadays I work from home, fully remote, as a software engineer. Life is good.
> My biggest triggers are people who eat crunchy food with open mouths; people who slurp their drinks; people who are oblivious to their environment and sing loudly in open offices.
For me it's people who talk while eating and who read emails aloud while writing them. So annoying!
I have had to resort to taking noise cancelling headphones to work.
Most of us were hired consultants in the open office that we shared with her. Management and internal staff sat in private offices, mostly. The instructions from my employer were always to not disrupt the status quo. She was their employee, and it was not up to us to complain about it.
I complained to my employer, who did nothing about it because he thought it was funny.
We had a guy who narrated whatever he was doing, in third person. Let's call him Bob. Suppose Bob needed to FTP a file from a server, print it, staple the pages together, and then give it to me.
During this entire process, Bob would talk, saying something like this:
> Bob is starting the FTP program. Bob is typing his name and password. Bob is starting the file transfer. Bob's exiting. Bob is selecting the file and printing it. Bob is selecting two sided printing. Bob has sent the file to the printer. Now Bob is walking to the printer. Bob is picking up the sheets. Bob is looking for a stapler. Bob found it, and is stapling the sheets. Bob is walking to tzs' desk. Bob's handing the printout to tzs.
This sounds like a way to maintain an Instruction Pointer in working memory. Keeping track of one’s current task can be a challenge. I find it better to type that into a notebook app like Bear.
> I wanted to murder her. No joke. If I could get away with it, I would have. The anger was physical and deep. Rage and disgust was the feeling, and I felt personally attacked. It felt like a "fight or flee" instinct, where I'd prefer to fight.
Just in case you're not using hyperbole, you might consider some visits with a good counselor. I think most people can learn techniques to avoid getting so angry, and the unhappiness that comes with it.
Does counselling work for misophonia? It really does feel like an involuntary fight-or-flight mechanism rather than just “anger”. Would be interested to hear if anyone’s had success with it, cause boy does it ruin family dinners when you have to either leave the room or sit there with your fork in a death grip trying not to kill everyone.
It has also not been researched very much. That said, I've suffered brain damage for which I'm medicated because I didn't have any brakes on my emotions anymore. That helped bringing me back to normal levels of dealing with emotions, and it also reduced the levels of anger I felt dealing with misophonia triggers.
The feeling was absolutely real. The feeling is best described as feeling cornered and attacked, with my only way out being extreme violence.
That said, I've also been tested for all kinds of problems (yay affordable health care + endless supplies of mental care), and I'm completely normal and not dangerous. I just have misophonia.
They did studies on misophonia and I was part of it during another unrelated rehabilitation (accident related) for which I was treated in the same hospital.
Some of the sounds (in addition to those already mentioned) that do (or have) driven me nuts: fast scraping to get last bit of yogurt from plastic container with plastic spoon, chewing/cracking gum where the chewer makes little air bubbles in the gum and then pops them (x10 if they're chewing with their mouth open), whistling, humming, tapping fingernails against table top, tapping foot against floor/chair/desk, digging in purse, cell phone ringing/dinging/alerts, sighing.
I once worked with a guy whose normal breathing made a whistling sound. I was sitting about 20 feet from him and one day I was about to go insane. I immediately bought a pair of Bose QC-15 headphones and it made all the difference in the world.
Currently, there's a lady who sits on the other side of my cubicle wall who wears a charm bracelet. The sound of her charm bracelet hitting and dragging across the desktop all day drives me batty.
I suppose I must have misophonia (first heard about it in this thread). There are times when I wish I were deaf.
I hear ya (pun somewhat intended), I wish there was an off-switch in my ears. I'd miss music and the voices of loved ones, but the peace and quiet would make me infinitely more productive in life.
I recently escaped a situation sort of like the one you describe.
5 desk smallish office, we had one coworker who already has a very high natural voice volume and tone, who could not be stopped from having all sorts of personal calls while at the desk.
Boss would do nothing (but was closing his office door not to hear him) since he was a pathological submissive introvert.
We asked politely to at least leave the room. We asked not so politely. We had the office manager come and talk to him, the quiet would last two or three days and then it will all start again.
Calling his spouse, calling his kids and doing homework with them at the phone, calling his parents, mechanic, house renovator and whatnot.
We started counting and averaged around 7 calls a day, which we could not avoid to hear.
i’ve worked in cube farms, on shop floors, in the field at saw mills and open offices and the only time i’ve had an issue with noise was (4) barking dogs in a small office.
There are two mutually exclusive groups of people: "Concentrators(1)" and "Communicators(2)". Concentrators must have conditions that allow one to form and hold complex ideas, and act upon them. This is almost always some degree of a quiet environment, without visual or auditory distractions. the opposite of the ideal conditions of Communicators. Communicators must interact with others to do their job.
(1) Typical of this group: mathematician, engineer, scientist, writer
(2) project managers, C-class executives, sales, support
It is as unfair to ask a Concentrator to work in a noisy environment as it is unfair to ask a Communicator to work in silence. However, if one puts both in an environment together (which is often the case) the Ccommunicator always "wins" by suppressing the Concentrator's ability to work through the mere act of performing their duties.
Thank you. I don't, unfortunately. It was formulated purely on my own experience and instinct.
This was part of a presentation I gave in the early 2000s, literally begging my management not to destroy productivity by moving our company from cubicles to an "open floor plan/hot desk" environment. I wanted to boil down the issue to its essence and this dichotomy was the product. As others have pointed out, the real answer is that people work on a continuum, but my point is that if we are going to pursue a change in environments, we should attempt to understand the nature of work and strive for an ideal. Why implement a "solution" that only works for one end of the concentrator/collaborator scale?
In my case, implementation of the hot-desk program proceeded anyway, and I left the company soon after. Life is too short to be treated with such lack of consideration. The company has since laid off 10s of thousands of employees and sold off most of their once-glittering R&D campus buildings, bulldozing others. Only a thin shell of what used to be persists.
I regret that I did not ask a rhetorical question such as the following: "if you had to re-take a college mathematics exam in eight hours, and your continued employment depends on a passing score, where would you go to study? A quiet room, or a busy place like the food court at the shopping mall or a bus terminal?" but I realize the executive Q&A sessions were merely a show trial, not a true inquiry. The decisions were made well in advance.
its not a bool, its a scale. I do concentrator work just fine in a distracting environment. Other "concentrators" get more pissed off about it than I do.
Counterpoint: John von Neumann, arguably one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, claimed to do some of his best work in front of the TV. In my personal experience, I know plenty of engineers who don't mind noise. I think it's a personal thing more than anything and it's hard to generalize.
Anecdotally, I often (during evening/side projects) work with a TV on in the room.
However a TV is entirely different than people being around me. There's noise from various directions, distances, and volumes—not to mention the awareness of people being near which always heightens my awareness of a situation, distracting from what I am trying to focus on.
I find I can focus pretty well in a noisy coffee shop, but if I'm in an office and someone on the desk next to me starts having a conversation, I lose all focus.
I think generally it's easy to know you won't be needed by other patrons in a coffee shop, or that their chatter won't require you to weigh in or judge, so your brain just keeps an ear out for normal danger noises.
At work, headphones off, my brain is subconsciously trying to keep me informed about the noise around me in the workplace, so that I can respond if needed (generally I'm not) not helpful, brain. :P
You can google “attention control intelligence”. For more info “attention control aging” for more studies on the ability to focus declines as we age due to cognitive decline.
When I'm really cranking away at something, I like loud music. Like, really loud. I really don't like silence ever, to be honest, and I don't consider myself a member of the 'communicator' group.
Second this, although perhaps not as loud. I prefer music for concentration, which has melody and harmony, rather than ‘silence’ which is usually interrupted by noise such as chatter or scruffing or chairs scraping etc.
A TV is not calling you to chat every 15 minutes, or even talking anything important work-related to distract your focus. It's just noise, the same as working listening to music.
An aside, but an important distinction is that a TV is definitely not something that is going to interact with you, it's just background, it will not change it's behaviour without specific defined inputs (remote control); It cannot affect you either except for the changing of light in the room and it's fully controllable without impacting anyone else.
It's the difference between sitting next to a busker in the street for 8hrs per day and listening to recorded music on your phone.. in that it's a _huge_ difference.
It’s not as clear cut as this. I form and hold complex ideas communicating with colleagues when designing and implementing a broad range of software systems (we work on core libraries used across our company) - we bat things around a lot and get to pretty decent solutions rapidly. I’m fortunate to be amongst people who work like this. I’ve also worked in teams where members preferred to concentrate on problems individually. While I can work like that, I much prefer more communicative teams.
Some people work in both modes; they need quiet for concentration but communication for collaboration.
One solution for this is to have many easily accessible conference rooms, including one-person rooms for calls, with sufficient soundproofing that you can't hear such calls from the nearest cube outside them.
This is no longer true. Most younger people in engineering/CS fields are the "communicator" type and like to work in noisy, open-office environments, and frequently side-by-side.
It's usually older and/or more introverted people who complain about the open-office craze, but there's absolutely no shortage of programmers who will strongly defend it.
Easy, just look at the reply in this thread from "AmericanChopper".
Every single time this topic comes up on an online discussion like this, there's plenty of people like him saying the exact same thing. And I have to partially agree with him: most engineers I work with do not have a problem with these offices. It's only a few.
AmericanChopper claims that he's never met somebody who disagrees with him but seems to feel comfortable diagnosing those people, whom he's never met, with autism. Not a great comment and I don't think he made it in good faith. Saying that people who disagree with you must be autistic is too common online for me to give any comment like that the benefit of the doubt.
I love them. They vastly improve team members ability to work together imo. Personally, I’ve never met an engineer in real life who complains about them, I’ve only ever seen this on HN or Reddit. I’ve always suspected it had something to do with this:
There are plenty of companies without open layouts, add remote workers to that and self selection is a big factor. Add to that the possibility that people aren't comfortable complaining to someone who is very obviously pro open layout.
Also every survey I can find says that employees don't want open office layouts by a large margin. There's clearly something else going on beyond autistic programmers complaining.
I don't know why AmericanChopper keeps getting modded down; his points are absolutely valid.
I'm not a fan of open offices either, but I've worked in a bunch of different places over the years, and he's right on many points. There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind, and I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey. I also find that my younger coworkers seem to really enjoy the open layouts. At my current workplace where I work in a closed lab, the complaint is about the lack of windows, not the noise or the lack of privacy. Some people will make comments about certain teams having meetings that are extremely loud, or about how quiet the lab is when those teams are in their meeting, so there does seem to be some desire for a little more quietness, but these same people have no trouble having a fairly noisy conversation while people are trying to work. In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.
>I don't know why AmericanChopper keeps getting modded down
They're getting modded down because the argument is: people don't complain to me about open offices, therefore everyone is happy with open office layouts except people with autism.
> There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind
Depends on what you mean by open office. Not many places have dedicated private offices for each developer, but cubicles, small team rooms, temporary private spaces etc... are very common.
>I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey.
So take surveys with a grain of salt, but not anecdotal evidence? It's much more likely that you're suffering from selection and confirmation bias than it is that every survey I can find online is. We're not talking about online polls open to anyone, but randomized samples. Here's one where they hired an independent research agency that randomly sampled over 4k adults in the US. 66% of the office workers want a closed office layout. That's a huge margin--big enough to overcome any minor issues with the survey. And definitely stronger evidence than 2 people on hacker news saying that people don't complain to them.
If you truly have never met an eng that complains about open office spaces, I submit that you have not worked in an environment where engineers feel safe to voice their true personal opinions.
Agreed. Especially if when one kinda did once, they were told they might be autistic. Not that there is anything wrong with autism, but you can see how armchair psychiatry would put other people off discussing issues ever again.
Where did you get the idea that I go around telling my coworkers that they’re autistic? I have somebody very close to me quite seriously affected by autism, and I simply see a very strong parallel between how they struggle with sensory issues in perfectly normal environments, and the HN trope of complaining about how open offices are too loud. I’ve worked in more than a hundred offices as a consultant, and the only one that was loud enough to be distracting was a particularly raucous sales floor. Contrary to the baseless conclusions you’ve drawn, the offices I’ve worked in where people enjoyed open-plan the most were the ones with the most open and supportive cultures. The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy. If noise is the reason you don’t like it, then you either work in a very loud office, or you’re much more sensitive to sensory input than the average person.
Fair enough then, good for you. Sorry if that was harsher than I should have worded it. I've seen things like that happen before tho, so there definitely are places where staff are afraid to speak up for that reason.
> The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy.
Still going to call citation needed on you tho. I've heard many people complain in person, and this wasn't a big reason I heard. The last place I worked, almost every single person spent a lot of money on noise cancelling headphones.
I was on a team where the team jointly decided to convert their half-cubes to an open office. There were two hold-outs, myself, and another guy next to me who just wanted to keep his cube. (He had a loud voice to begin with, but now he would have long conversations by yelling across the office.)
Like any strongly held belief, you're going to find like-minded people and convince yourself that you're a majority. And, especially, we're unhappy and that means we want to justify our unhappiness, and if we were the majority we'd obviously be justified.
But I think all these things are true at the same time:
1. There is a minority of people who are genuinely miserable in open offices.
2. A sizable group of people dislike specific things (too much chatter, clicking pens, etc.) but they don't think about it much.
3. A plurality are oblivious to the noise and are having fun at work.
4. And open offices decrease everyone's ability to focus and are no better for collaboration than any other design.
5. The raison d'etre of an office is to get work done and silence facilitates that.
So we're a minority, but regardless there's a solid case against open offices.
The question is if these communicator types actually get stuff done or if they just freeload on the work done by the introverted people but are more visible then those.
While this is certainly a spectrum, I'm definitely at the extreme end of Concentrator. My productivity is basically zero when there is any background noise. I suspect this is related to my ADHD (which I've never taken medication for ;-).
I'm also strange in other ways. Music does nothing at all for me and I have a really hard time remembering things that are spoken to me (but have an almost photographic memory of anything I read). I suspect I have some sort of auditory defect that all of this is wrapped up in.
Indeed. There are as many exceptions to the OPs point as there are examples.
In fact I will flit between those two extremes in any given day based purely on the work I'm doing. eg if I'm doing management administration then I tend to be more chatty because it's lots of small jobs that often require coordinating other people vs when I'm solving engineering problems and I just want a quiet controlled environment.
The problem here is also that it's usually the concentrators who do the actual productive work. The communicators are often just intermediaries for the results of the concentrators.
At one previous job, during a 1:1, boss was pressing for anything I would change about the job, anything that could be improved. I had said no nothing several times, and so I replied in what I hoped would be understood as jest, “I guess Billy’s gum chewing”.
“Have you talked to him about it?”
“It’s really not a problem”
“Well I could sit you farther away from him, but we don’t have any open desks on this side of the office, do you want to sit on the other side by yourself?”
“I didn’t mean that, I’d rather keep my desk.”
“Well I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
“Well that went downhill fast.” - I did not say out loud.
I got the vibe I wasn’t the first to bring it up, and perhaps others had been less ambivalent towards the interruption.
I like my dead pan delivery of ridiculous statements. I had not considered the ramifications of that one being taken seriously, nor that it might be.
It's the job of the organisation to tackle this via policy - I've worked at companies where the policy is that if a conversation is anything more than a few exchanges, it should be taken to a meeting room, and everyone is required by policy to point out to others if they've forgotten the policy and strayed into a long open conversation by mistake. It worked well. Same company had a rule about holding onto the handrail when using stairs, and not walking with drinks that don't have a lid on. And everyone is expected to point that out when others do it too. When everyone buys in it works well, and people thank you when you do point out that they aren't following policy. I'm normally pretty juvenile and rebellious to rules like this, but when it's done sensibly and sensitively - and when the benefits of following the rules are obvious - even I will conform without complaint.
Small offices with a few people, preferably with junior-senior pairing. I'm a junior in an office with a senior, and being near someone who knows our systems well is invaluable to me, and has helped me onboard much much faster.
I don't even believe the argument of open offices being more space efficient is true.
I work in a co-working space with an open office section (fortunately there is a written rule that you must be silent), and surrounded by offices that sit 3 - 6 people. The offices have the same density as the open section - they are just separated by glass walls and a door.
I've used the silicon moldable ones and the plastic ones that go in the earl canal - but they are not very re-usable, and when someone pops over to chat taking them in and out is a chore.
Noise can be blocked out for the most part: either noise-cancelling headsets (or turning the volume up to 11) to get block out noise-based distractions. But silence or not, what is more disrupting to me are the interruptions from email, slack, or a coworker (or boss!) stopping by or asking a question that could have waited. The real problem is task switching and if it knocks you out of flow it's a productivity killer. Sound can certainly do this too, especially in pet-friendly offices where the pets don't get along with each other, but I digress...
noise cancelling headsets give me a headache, and the slight (although thankfully not omnipresent) ringing in my ears reminds me of the price of cranking volume to 11.
Noise-canceling headsets work for repetitive noises that are easily predictable, such as engine noise. Human speech is very unpredictable, and noise-canceling headsets have very little impact on them. Turning up the volume on headphones quickly leads to hearing loss, and should never be the recommended solution.
I have a set of noise cancelling Sony MDR-1000X (previous generation) and just having the headphones switched on without music playing, they don't do much to block voice. However if I play music quietly I can't hear anything, even if someone is talking right next to me (or at me).
I currently work for a startup and all three of us are hotdesking. We're constantly moved to new spaces in the hotdesking space because a new company is leaving/moving in. I've sat beside recruiters, property managers and salespeople.
There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked.
My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their should be and a room beside the kitchen which is used late in the night.
The only quiet I can wrangle is a few hours at a local library on weekends before the kids come in for the reading and writing sessions.
The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.
Yes, you can use noise cancelling headphones but:
1. They're uncomfortable for long periods
2. They don't really block all the noise and you live in anxiety waiting for that one blaring ringtone to squeeze through
3. I find it difficult to concentrate with them on. It feels like a heavy, constricting object squeezing my temples.
No solutions, just a rant.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more on the transit to work this morning. I believe the constant battering to my senses has made me more irritable. I tend to avoid my flatmates and reply with dismissive grunts and hand waves. Ditto for people in the shared space. Small things upset me even more. A failed build pipeline or a new Jira request will infuriate me. I've been countering this with more breaks from the screen to take walks around the office block.
I am finding No. 1 and No. 3 to be absolutely true in my new job (open office). Loved my Bose QC headphones when I was using them occasionally at a coffeshop or on short flights, but for 6-8 hours? I'm finding that I'm leaving work with a headache now. It's making me consider the Airpods Pro since they're not vice-like but do include noise-canceling.
Considering buying the airpods for that same reason. I have a pair of WF-1000xm3’s, the earbud equivalent of Sony’s Bose QC competitor.
But they’re bulky and it causes me pain wearing them for longer than an hour. Tried multiple ear tips and even bought some comply foam tips for additional noise isolation and comfort.
I bought WF-1000XM3 a couple of months ago, but as soon as AirPods Pro came out, I decided to give them a try, and never looked back and sold my Sony's. They actually even feel lighter than the original AirPods and are absolutely much comfier than Sony's. I don't have to fiddle with them for a solid minute to get that good fit (that doesn't even approach a "perfect" fit in the end with WF-1000XM3, just "acceptable"), and they don't feel like they are digging deep inside my ear canal to the point where they start hurting after an hour. I like the sound on them more too, but that one is debatable, from what I hear.
I switched from WF-1000xm3s to AirPods Pro and it was the best decision ever (I still love my WMs). They are lighter and much more comfortable. Usually I can't wear in ears more than a couple hours but I could leave APs in all day.
There are less connection drops, no voice announcements like "noise cancellation activated" just a discrete blip, the transition between modes is quite smooth, and the "pass through mode" aka transparency mode feels like you're not wearing anything. And I do find the ANC quite excellent, there's a much less reduced "ringing" you get from other NC gear (could be due to better algorithms, chip, or the mic on the inside that processes noise inside your ear canal). Overall one of the best purchases I've made.
Have you tried the in-ears (the qc20s)? I use those for long periods of time and don't really get any issues. I moreso get fatigued from whatever I'm listening to, so I have to change it up a bit.
Aside from the headaches that wearing over-ear headphones for long can give, they also leave a semi permanent dent in my hair that I absolutely hate. I am so glad that companies are moving towards noise cancelling in-ears now.
I thought that was absolutely hilarious when I saw it as a kid. Fast-forward a couple of decades and now this is on store shelves: http://malkorganics.com/
>Yes, you can use noise cancelling headphones but:
>2. They don't really block all the noise and you live in anxiety waiting for that one blaring ringtone to squeeze through
NC headphones aren't designed to block all noise, only repetitive noise, basically white noise. Other noises, like ringtones, actually are louder or easier to hear on many models of NC headphones, as is speech around you. Noise-cancellation's purpose is to attenuate white noise, such as the drone of your office A/C, or your airplane's engines. It's not meant to block anything else, and if your headphones do, it's because they're also acoustically isolating (e.g., they have bin "cans" over your ears physically blocking noise, but that has nothing to do with NC).
You're generally right (in my experience) regarding ANC but I've found that Sony's WH-1000XM3 over-ear headphones do an excellent job with higher frequencies and "one off" sounds. I'm also a big fan of Mubert, an iOS app that generates non-distracting instrumental sound tracks.
Thanks for the Mubert recommendation. I'm going to give it a go. I've generally found "elevator music" to be quite pleasant. No words or unique instrumentals that distract.
The ironic thing is "noise cancelling" headphone turn down the volume on the things easiest to tune out, and turns up the volume on things that are the most jarring.
Which is why I don't use noise cancelling headphones, instead you need passive blocking of noise, ie: material to dampen the sound from the office.
I disagree, I have the Sony's commented above (WH-1000XM3) and everything is muted, while background noise is gone. I regularly have coworkers calling from behind me and I can't hear them.
If you actually have something that jarring out of your control, I would say you have a bigger problem then just "noise".
Probably not a particularly PC comment, but occasionally I am jealous of people who need hearing aids to hear that they can turn off if they need quiet
I use 3M PELTOR X5A Over-The-Head Ear Muffs with 3M Peltor HY80A Gel Ear Cushions. They are comfortable for long periods of time and block all types of noise. They won't make your work environment completely silent, but I am pretty sensitive to noise and they all me to work in an open floor plan office.
I'm going to give the advice here that saved my sanity in an open office: use headphones with "passive" noise canceling. I bought a pair of 3M WorkTunes with Bluetooth. They're just passive, sound deadening, hearing protection ear muffs like you would wear on a factory floor or in a construction workplace, with Bluetooth built. It blocks out all noise, not just white noise, and they're much cheaper than ANC head phones.
I wear the WorkTunes, plus ear plugs, plus I play cafe or brown noise through the headphones, plus I sometimes put on music. If that hadn't worked, I was going to go insane from the sound of the keyboard next to me.
Have you tried in-ear variants like the bose qc20? I have no problems with them for long periods of time.
Also, as other users have pointed out, noise-canceling just counteracts constant noise like machine hums, and the like. It won't do anything about human speech because it 1.v aries constantly and 2. takes place across a large spectrum of sound. Noise-canceling headphones can adapt but it's always going to lag behind speech or other non-constant sounds like ringtones.
The only recourse there is to use noise-canceling + blast music/pink noise/rain sounds, whatever.
Do you get used to the sounds of your own body? Between my low grade tinnitus and breathing it would drive me insane to just hear myself. Or do you have music on?
I second this. I can't use over the ear ones because I'm wearing glasses. Then I got Bose qc20 and it's been working great for me so far. I can use it for a couple of hours without any major issue.
The only minor issues is that moist starts to accumulate in the ear after a while, which I guess isn't a big deal.
Not the qc20 but the WF-1000xm3. In ear just hurts after a while. I do combine the noise cancelling with some background audio. It's the best combination so far.
I bought some of these for plane flights and I'm always amazed at how much it reduces my stress levels when I wear them somewhere else. I feel far less crowded just walking through a supermarket or sitting on a train while wearing them.
I'm wondering if you're dealing with hyperarousal (nothing to do with sexual arousal), especially given the reactions to the pipeline or Jira request. Perhaps a path for your research.
> I'm considering quitting my job and running away
If there were an alternative, we'd all run with you. There isn't, though. Something to think about when they say there's supposedly a "talent shortage" and they're having trouble "recruiting top performers".
Well, I work for a Fortune 150 company in not cramped offices in a not dense, not expensive city that is definitely not in the middle of nowhere. Its a great working environment in a great location with great benefits and pay. Such things do exist, you just have to get out of the bubble and look for them.
I suspect everyones definition of middle of nowhere is a bit different. For example, to a NYer or Bostonian anything outside their respective cores is "nowhere". To people further south and west it seems to be a much more expansive definition.
For Boston some have this attitude about anything outside of Route 128. However historically that’s where almost all the tech jobs were. Today more has moved into the city but a large number of tech jobs—especially large companies—are well outside Boston/Cambridge.
For me it's more of a suburbia vs inner city thing. I want to live where I'm a few minutes walk from a grocery store, a few bars and other amenities along with easy public access (walking, riding, public transport) to work. I could live in a large rural town if they catered to this but few seem to.
The other big thing is the lack of job opportunities in smaller cities, solvable via working remotely but still relatively uncommon, particularly for new hires.
I moved to the middle of nowhere and did not take a paycut. Now I work remotely and I'm saving so much money that I might even take a year off after this job expires.
It still sucks and I hate working, but it's the least bad path that I could find.
I'm a remote worker in middle of nowhere paid a competitive industry salary. Cost of living is ridiculously cheap compared to big metros. If you can't increase your earnings, decreasing costs is just as well.
Some do. Mine doesn't. I work in an Indianapolis suburb, all devs have their own offices with real doors, and we work at home about 50% of the time (in our large quiet houses).
You can easily make 150k in this environment, where a 250k home is 3k sqft in a good neighborhood. I'm making quite a bit more in the management/director track.
To me, this sounds like "there is no alternative" defense. I don'know whether it is made with the idea of making one's situation feel less miserable, but it is plain wrong.
Considering the ancestor comment and how the situation seems to weight on that person, I would advise to try and find a better situation, because from personal experience, when you start grinding yourself for a job postitve outcomes become very unlikely.
I think, you can ask to take no pay cut: it's a win for the company too, if you move the company will have you an could hire another employee on the free place. I moved into the middle of nowhere without a pay cut.
We'll all run to remote work, and encase our home offices with layers upon layers of sound proofing.
Meanwhile, I predict the new fad will be airline offices, because who wouldn't want all the fun and adventure of flying at the office? They'll all be sitting in economy class seats and working off tray tables, while the person in front of them leans their seat back and has loud conversations on speakerphone. And it'll be family friendly, too, with every day being "bring your screaming child to work day."
They aren't perfect, as they tend to amplify sounds from within your own body; I can't drink or eat with them in. However, they are still light-years better than dealing with random throat clearing and chewing.
I really want one of those egg shaped sound-blocking chairs for work. I read in a wing-back chair and it's amazing how much sound deadening it provides.
Seconded. I actually use the EAR Classic Plus, and they’re excellent.
I work in a coworking space.
They’re not quite comfortable enough to wear continuously all day. If you take periodic breaks, and remove them when you go to the bathroom, get coffee, take a walk, that’s enough make it so you can keep them in while working at your desk.
Breaks are good so I don’t really count this as a negative.
They even perform well in super noisy coffee shops.
I have a 1.5hr commute each morning and night which adds a lot onto my day but I also living in a quiet village and work in central London. Being able to take refuge in the village on evenings and weekends makes the noise in London bearable.
There is also the additional side effect that I have a reasonably large house for the same price that I would have paid for a small room in London.
Travel does cost me a lot but it’s more than made up for with the size of property in a desirable neighbourhood.
There’s no right or wrong answer here though. Some people might prefer a shorter commute and I can’t blame them for that. For me, I’d rather have a longer commute but live in a larger house in nicer neighbourhood; somewhere quiet to bring my family up.
The added bonus is most IT jobs these days offer remote working so I don’t have to travel into London five days a week if I didn’t want to. Though sometimes the commute itself can be enjoyable because it’s a good chance to catch up on reading or personal programming projects (etc) since it’s 90 minutes of uninterrupted time away from the family.
I feel you. I recently changed jobs from an office environment at max capacity and open to the extreme, to one at 1/3 capacity and a lot of nooks and crannies designed for those who need a little space. It's amazing how much less fatiguing the latter environment is.
I even rather like an ambient social environment like a coffee shop. But I’m pretty sure working in close quarters with inside or recruiters would drive me crazy.
I know this isn't a great solution, but could you try a lightweight pair of headphones, and some relaxing music? Not particularly heavy music mind, but just something you can leave in the background. Maybe a movie soundtrack. I use videogame OSTs but that's not everyone's cup of tea.
This would maybe make the headphone issue more bearable (lightweight - much less uncomfortable for long periods), and the goal isn't to block out all sound, but rather to give your mind something else to focus on from an auditory standpoint. I find, personally, that having a musical anchor makes the task of mentally filtering out the noise much easier; I end up subconsciously following the melody and grooving with the rhythm a bit, but because there's no lyrics, it doesn't pull me out of the task at hand.
Everyone's different, so what works for me might not work for you, but maybe give it a shot for a week and see how effective it is. Worth a try at least.
No. The noise is the businesses responsibility to resolve, not the individual employee. We need spaces which take the needs of employees into account first when creating work spaces, not finance people masquerading as office space gurus.
Sort of, the noise is also your problem to solve if you want to be productive and keep your job in the long term. It's not just the companies problem. Especially as more companies move to this model it's not like you can just leave for a different gig with quieter space as it might not exist.
> The noise is the businesses responsibility to resolve, not the individual employee.
This may be a reasonable view for a large company, but they're talking about their experience at a three-person startup. At that scale if there's something that needs to be different you have to step up and change it yourself, and set the culture for the company you're building.
I’ve never understood how some people believe that the problem of too much noise could be solved by adding more noise.
There’s too much light in my eyes, and dark glasses are uncomfortable. Well, have you tried shining another light at your face? Maybe a different color of light would help.
Your comment seems a bit tongue in cheek and you probably know, but anyway... Theoretically, the brain can get used to certain kinds of regular noise and filter it out, and then, if the disruption is a small sound that occurs irregularly... if you add constant white noise that's louder than the sound, then the sound should get quite literally lost in the noise.
There is an analogy to light that actually applies. Imagine a small green LED in your field of vision that flashes now and then. Might be distracting. But now imagine the room is 100x brighter than that small green LED. You might be unable to perceive the LED anymore. (However, if the problem is, as you state, that there is "too much light", then, yeah, adding more light wouldn't help unless you could somehow create destructive interference.)
Whether all this actually works for a specific person is a different matter. I personally hate listening to white noise, so that wouldn't help me. Perhaps other kinds of noise could work.
White noise is actually very harsh. When people say "white noise" they usually mean softer variants such as brown noise.
I sleep to brown noise (have done so for the past 8 years -- so this is not a fad thing for me), and I use a different brown noise with headphones at work to help me concentrate in a noisy office environment.
I use Noisli profiles to generate these noises, but any number of apps will do the job.
I won't claim it works for everyone, but this combination works very well for me.
p.s. Ear plugs at work also work amazingly well. Low tech and effective.
> Theoretically, the brain can get used to certain kinds of regular noise and filter it out, and then, if the disruption is a small sound that occurs irregularly... if you add constant white noise that's louder than the sound, then the sound should get quite literally lost in the noise.
Just an FYI, while this is basically true for neurotypical people, for some people (for example those with ADHD or who might be on the autism spectrum), there's difficulty filtering, so this ends up just adding cognitive load rather than accomplishing a filtering effect.
To use a dumb visual analogy, imagine you tried to hide some carpet stains by putting another rug over it. Some people can partially see through rugs, and so now they have to deal with the rug _and_ the carpet stains.
Of course this stuff is still worth trying out, ultimately a lot of these kinds of things are deeply personal, and it's pretty easy to try.
White noise machines are recommended for people with sound sensitivities who have trouble falling asleep, including those with ADHD and autism. Whether it works well or exacerbates the issue depends on the individual, but assuming that it would simply add to the cognitive load is a stretch, and I wouldn't be surprised if in fact it worked more often than not.
One of the most popular white noise machines is the Marpac Dohm Classic, which many people (including myself) would vouch for.
I don’t think you’re correct. Stimulating background music (like EDM or video game OSTs) can do wonders for ADHD sufferers as it helps stimulate their brains which helps them focus (this is a similar
mechanism to ADHD drugs).
What “theory” is this? Because I’ve tried it (not by choice) in practice, many times, over the decades, and never found it to work at all. I’m genuinely curious why people think it could ever work, when empirically it does not.
Theoretically the brain will adapt to working while hanging 100’ in the air, too. I adapt to height fairly quickly and don’t mind working up in the air. Many people apparently do, and no amount of telling them that it’s “theoretically” possible will make them productive workers there.
It seems patently unfair that modern offices picked the one type of distracting sensory input that happens to be my kryptonite.
If you're lucky enough to have that neural protection.
Not everyone does. I don't, for instance.
I damaged my hearing trying to have enough sound to drown out the triggering sounds around me. (misophonia got a lot worse during working in open office too)
It's counter-intuitive, no? Actually though, the trick isn't to add more noise. Or... specifically, I suppose we need to first establish that the noise isn't the problem; noise is easy to tune out. Your brain is doing it right now: focus on your surroundings, and odds are there's the low hum of some air conditioner, or the whine of a CRT monitor, or the sound of that florescent ballast down the hall going out, or whatever. You barely even notice these things, because your brain is good at filtering out anything repetitive or constant.
What kills productivity in an office environment is actually signals that cut through that noise. Phones ringing, conversations between coworkers, printers whirling to life, someone opening a cellophane wrapper and chewing on a candy, etc. Most of these things aren't useful, but they're distracting, because your brain is tuned to constantly be on the lookout for new audio signals to shift your focus to. This is probably a survival instinct, as becoming aware of an approaching predator is important to avoid becoming lunch. In an office, the goal isn't thus to add more noise, but to mask the noise, so that it is less distracting.
Music is not "more noise," but more like a big, obvious beacon of focus. You might think of it like a controlled, intentional distraction. It's juuuust enough of an audio signal that your mind can keep its focus in one place, and just barely loud enough that when your coworkers phone rings, it isn't quite so jarring. That tiny, tiny little adjustment in the relative weight of the signals can make all the difference in the world, preventing you from unnecessary context switches throughout your day and helping you to maintain flow while working on a complex task.
It's not perfect, no. Obviously the perfect environment would be 100% in the control of the worker, who could dictate the noise level and comfortable temperature and everything else on a personal level. But, well, the real world isn't perfect, and it can be good to have options. :)
Ever been bothered by a bright clock in your bedroom? Or the bright red light on the smoke detector or thermostat? In a pitch black room, these lights annoy the shit out of me. Do those don't bother you more or less during the daytime in a sunlit room?
Sounds I choose let me create my own auditory environment, one that suits how I want to feel. Sounds my co-workers choose, don't.
Ive got in-ear noise cancelling headphones and they're amazing. I often come up for air to hear a debate going on not far from me. Because they're noise cancelling I can set the volume lower than I would otherwise.
Edit: I play music I know well so it doesn't distract. My wife uses rain/wave sounds. White noise would work for others.
It may seem contradictory, but for me it actually helps. I use a macOS app (Noizio) to get a mixture of different sounds (rain/thunder/fire) and, in combination with noise cancelling headphones, it is the only thing I've found that allows me to thoroughly concentrate in a noisy space.
Same here. I found out that music of any kind not only doesn't do the trick for me, but is counterproductive - it distracts me from trying to focus on the task at hand.
Perception of sound is a differential sense. If you sit in a very quiet room your sensitivity to noise goes up, similar to how your pupils open when it’s dark.
Noise cancelling AirPods and gentle background sounds may provide a smooth enough waveform to be ignored, while stopping the increase in audio sensitivity, and smooth out “spikes” of surrounding noise.
Perception of sound is not just some cumulative scalar, that view is far too simplistic
Wear headphones that are comfortable to wear for a long time (like big ones that go all around your ear but don't press on your earlobes) and use a white noise generator. I use one that adds like rain and thunder and campfire so it sounds like I'm in a log cabin during a storm and I just crank up the volume to where it drowns everything else out. Literally right now there is jackhammering going on in my office and I can't hear it at all until I take my headphones off. (I use asoftmurmur.com personally but anything should be fine)
I just got the new AirPod Pros with noise cancellation, and have found them excellent and filtering out a lot of the ambient office noises. I turn them on and the AC whoosh, keyboard clicks and other white noise disappear. I can still hear voices, but they're much quieter and easily defeated with some music. If you haven't tried them it might be a good option, I find them comfortable to wear for hours at a time.
Sounds rough, good luck coping. I think you're on the right track with prioritizing break time. The more stressful something is the more of a need to cooldown afterwards.
Consider connecting wireless headphones to your laptop instead of to your phone
I suggest listening to one of the following:
1. Music you don't already know because you can't hum along to them and won't get distracted by the lyrics (Spotify radios can be great, though they get repetitive if you listen to them a lot)
2. Classical music is great if not too tired otherwise it puts you to sleep
I have found Soma FM to be excellent for the purpose of masking annoying noises at work, and pay them a small subscription. They have various channels with a variety of useful genres.
To some extent particularly screamy metal has so much noise it works pretty well too. On particularly bad days, Taake was probably the most effective - not only lyrics in an unknown language but a sound level that felt more like ocean waves, completely washing out the surrounding sound landscape.
(of course it helps if one likes this kind of thing, which I do)
When I really need silence at work I use ear plugs in addition to construction grade ear muffs. I may look a bit silly but it really does block out almost all sound.
So, for sleeping I'd go for softer plugs like those made by Howard Leight for shooting (Laser Leights) or Moldex Spark Plugs.
Hearing protection always talks about attenuation in terms of dB(A) (A-weighting being a sensible thing to do when measuring perceived sound levels). 30dB(A) is a significant attenuation (logarithmic scale, don't forget). 35dB(A) is quite an improvement over 30dB(A).
For long-term use, ear plugs aren't great. But ear defenders can be had cheaply which will work well; I know of some people who use ear defenders atop in-ear active-noise-cancelling headphones as a double-whammy.
The correct answer is to work/sleep in quiet places, though, but I realise this is fast becoming a luxury.
I agree with all these. If you are choosing one blindly, my preferred earplug for comfort is the Howard Leight Max Lite. Ideally, though, buy a sample pack from someone (like this, https://www.earplugstore.com/unfoamtrialp1.html) and see which one fits your ears and needs best.
Note that there is a considerable amount of technique in using earplugs correctly. You don't just shove them toward your ear and hope for the best. Normally, they are rolled tightly, and then inserted fairly deeply into the ear canal, where they then expand. Have someone demonstrate, watch a video on it, or read the instructions very closely.
I'm not a huge fan of the foam ear plugs and find 3M's
"Peltor Sport Tri-Flange Reusable Earplugs" something that's comfortable for me to wear on long international flights to sleep. The downside of the non-foam design is 26db vs. 32db. They are around $5 for a three-pack.
Sorry for the late reply, I had a look at what I have. I started off with orange 3M 1100 Foam Ear Plugs [0], but currently gone through two iterations of Moldex Pura-Fit Tapered Foam [1]. My main purchasing motivator is the decibel (dB) rating on the product, which blocks more sound -- which is standardized with Noise Reduction Rating (NRR).
Using both at once is effective. My brother, a naval flight officer, swears by a combination of passive isolation and active noise cancellation. Personally I just use passive, but I have much less noise to contend with than him.
It sounds like the company is being penny-wise, pound-foolish. It absolutely makes sense to spend a few hundred extra per month to have a suitable work environment. I'm sure your increases in productivity will more than offset the increased expenditure. To get the other two to realize how serious this issue is for you, tell them you're seriously considering quitting if they won't get a quiet office.
I would start working on a plan to finding a quiet space that is yours.
That might mean a small town, or it might mean a $3000/mo+ studio apartment. How do you get to having enough cash flow to afford that space? Can you nix the hotdesking membership? Worst case, can you bail on the startup and join a megacorp?
Does any employer offer private offices during the day to rank-and-file employees? I'm assuming that's an unsolveable problem, but hopefully a salary would make it easier to rent an apartment.
DISCLAIMER: I'm not saying this to be a jerk. This is not uncommon.
There is a fair chance that your core annoyance is something else.
That is, if you somehow got a perfectly sounds proofed workroom of your own, you would after a while realize that you're still irritable, find it difficult to concentrate etc.
Often, we don't want to face our real problems and assign discomfort to some external thing we have no power over. "If only X was gone, I'd be happy". But when X disappears little changes.
> There is a fair chance that your core annoyance is something else.
People desiring quiet places or isolation to think isn't a particularly new phenomenon, so there's a good chance that this is the core problem.
That said there's a lot of things that can add stress and in isolation this one particular one might not be too bad. But then it becomes an optimization problem, there are many sources of stress that are hard or difficult to solve but the work environment is low hanging fruit and easy to solve so we focus on that.
This is why touring the office is an important part of a job interview, the places with a good environment will be happy to show you around. Fortunately some companies are so clueless they'll even advertise their modern open plan office, you don't even need to apply to those.
Can you provide some research that backs up your claim here? Quiet, distraction-free spaces (libraries) for studying / working have been around roughly forever. Are you suggesting that these spaces provide no tangible benefit, and the millions of people who utilize quiet spaces for concentration are somehow mentally invalid?
I commend you on the achievement of reaching a state of mental nirvana that allows you to concentrate equally in chaotic and quiet environments - very impressive. I would venture to say that the vast majority of the population will never reach this state.
So, to be clear, your suggestion is—having no personal space, no quiet area, a constantly shifting work environment, for what is presumably a programming profession in a field dominated by introverts, and the poster stating this is a problem to the extent that escape seems a viable alternative—that the source of his or her stress is some unmentioned, unrelated personal problem.
YMMV. I can relate. When I'm stressed for various non-noise related reasons, I am more easily irritated by noises, and I usually, initially, assume it's the noise.
On the opposite note, I can perform extremely well in noisey environments if I am enjoying what I am doing - like I am able to just tune it out.
Circumstance and other stressors may be a main factor, or it could just be the noise. I imagine it really depends on the person.
I don't think that's true to be honest; sensory overstimulation is a thing with a lot of people, and workspaces should adjust to it accordingly. (there's also sensory processing disorder where it can get so bad people have a breakdown in the grocery store) However, there is also understimulation - some people can't work in a quiet office, as the article itself also points out.
Long story short, a workspace has to cater to multiple different people - shocking, I know.
Raise the point with your partners, and the co-working space.
Consider alternatives. Libraries can be excellent work environments, if quiet. And talk to staff about getting a quiet area -- many libraries are tending increasingly to "conversations allowed", which can be annoying.
I'd find lack of access to my own frequently used materials, notes, papers, etc., to be frustrating, though.
Many academic libraries (ranging from community college, to public or some private colleges and universities) have quiet spaces.
Off-hours / off-season spaces may be findable, though that can get creative.
I'm rarely out without a few pair of high-efficiency earplugs myself. These can block much (though not all) noise quite effectively. You'll want the ones which block speech specifically, not just high-frequency sounds.
When I took a few months off to work on some of my own projects I found that universities have a lot of quite space that is open to the public. Sometimes it's the study area in the main library or in department specific libraries. My local university library also offered a special library card for the public that let me access all the resources in the library including scholarly papers which was even more useful for what I was working on.
Maybe there is a good startup opportunity here - to provide quiet space for those who need to work/study/read/sit in peace. In my hometown, there used to be many such "study rooms" and I saw them pretty much full all the time, yet very very quiet. Silence was strictly enforced.
I use the local library for this. There are some really nice libraries where I live (in Chicago) and they are generally quiet, except for the few that have a kids' area that isn't sufficiently isolated.
I know in some countries there are dedicated study spaces which you can pay to access. That would indeed be nice. Co-working spaces could have served this role except many play up the social aspects and have open office configurations. They do have private office spaces but they are expensive.
There are some (higher-end) hearing-aid style ear buds that monitor external sound and filter it out or focus in on local sounds only.
This is far better than the whole totally enclosed ear-muffs + disposable ear buds approach (which does work but creates an uncomfortable pressure on your ears):
> Scenario 2: You find yourself at a popular new restaurant, where loud music and reverberant acoustics make it difficult to hold conversations (even if you don’t have hearing loss). Your hearables are monitoring your mental effort, again by tracking your brain waves, determining when you are struggling to hear. They then appropriately adjust the signal-to-noise ratio and directionality of their built-in mics to make it easier for you to understand what people nearby are saying. These hearables can distinguish your friends from the patrons you wish to ignore, based on audio fingerprints that the device previously collected.
Some of these are still in development or super expensive.
In terms of some practical solutions today, there's a brand called IQbuds ($300-$500) which use a similar strategy and can be custom-molded to fit your ears (just like a hearing aid) so they can be worn over a full workday:
You don't have to quit! Run away to the small town without telling anyone. Just do it. Then just work from home in perpetuity until you get canned or they accept it!
In the long run that's "sort of" what I did. Except openly, publicly to work environment. I work for an employer that encourages remote work now. And yes, live in a much quieter town, about 1500km from where I used to live.... mind, I moved time zones and that's so far been the only real strain.
I've struggled with working in similar environments. For one year (in the last 15) I had my own office and was the most productive during that time.
I'm in an open-office now and use light over-ear headphones (I found the Bose Bluetooth ones good) and listen to white noise (by playing with the frequencies you can usually drown out what's bothering you). Of course my preference would be a quiet space, but this white-noise strategy has worked well for several years now.
I would also be anxious if I couldn’t do any any deep thinking in silence. It is unbelievable how bad co-work spaces are for for thinking.
Personally I use my trusty Bose over ear noise cancelling headphones when i’m with a customer that has loud open plan offices. I’ve had my Bose headphones for almost a decade now. Today I use them even when I’m at my office which is quiet But because its open plan I still get distracted and we are working on acoustics however most of us are deep thinking engineers and we have a liberal work from home policy so our work environment is good enough to get stuff done.
I would talk to someone you have value to the startup and people don’t even think about this till its too late.
I also hate external noise. Here's my nuke option.
1) Sony XM3 headphones. They are the 2nd most comfortable after the Bose headphones and have the best NC. So far, nothing you haven't done before.
2) High quality foam earplugs. I have the Mack's Ultra Soft plugs, with 32 decibel noise reduction rating. Anything with 27 decibel reduction or above should be good enough though. You may need to alternate between a few brands and variants before you find one that's comfortable enough to go many hours with.
3) Pink Noise. Play it quite softly so that you can barely even hear it at all with the plugs in. It helps to drown out the remaining external noises that come through without registering in your brain as extra noise itself (which is why I play pink noise instead of other suggestions such as calming music). I like this one: https://youtu.be/8SHf6wmX5MU
I combine all 3 for the nosiest areas like studying in a busy cafe, but you won't usually need the whole stack.
I worked in an office where they put speakers in the ceiling to radiate such noise. It was odd because no notice was given and it just happened. For the first week or two, we all thought it was airflow noise from the HVAC system until we noticed speakers in the ceiling.
It was effective, though. It did reduce the apparent noise, though our 15 person office wasn't terribly loud to begin with. An interesting side effect was that conversations, when they did occur, got louder because the noise made low volume conversations difficult to hear.
I agree that brown noise generally sounds more calming and pleasant, for example some people enjoy falling asleep to brown noise. In my personal use case of shutting out external noises, I find that it's only the higher frequencies that can make it through the noise cancelling headphones and earplugs, and pink noise helps my brain ignore those better than brown noise, as it melts into the pink noise more closely. It's definitely worth trying both out, in various environments, to figure out what works best for you.
sure. my personal is a mix of brown and grey with some airline and rain sounds blended in. using the "whitenoise" on iOS and macOS. I think the airline and rain sounds are some of the 'higher' ones that block out other stuff (and I'm usually using qc20 headphones as well).
I'm working at a client right now, where on my floor works an extremely loud person. I got these; 3M E-A-Rsoft FX, model ES-01-020. They are truly amazing and dampen sound with 39 dB, according to 3M.
>The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.
so, uh, my own solution? requires money, but is probably cheaper than giving up the big city wages (depending on your situation and remote-work opportunities.)
1. giant yellow passive hearing protectors at work with soft music.
Personally, I still kinda suspect that active noise canceling is just placebo. (I'm joking a little here, but passive noise dampening is a thousand times better than active, if you ask me.) Give me passive muffs. You still need some soft music, or your ears will adjust, but getting hearing protection earmuffs with bluetooth means the music can be soft. The other advantage is that nothing says "Don't bother me, I'm working" like giant yellow industrial earmuffs. (I like the '3m worktunes connect' - not exactly audiophile grade, but even with really soft music, it makes the office silent )
MMm. you say you find headphones 'heavy and constricting' - perhaps I should take back my advice. the passive earmuffs are both heavy and constricting. I find it kind of comforting? but if pressure is a problem, you probably won't like them.
2. at home: my own room with a solid door with weather stripping and walls with offset studs and triple pane windows. (weather stripping is super cheap and helps a lot with interior noise. A solid door is rather more expensive, and probably helps more, but as for relief per dollar, weather stripping is hard to beat)
Key here, I think, is that construction is more important than location.
3. I show up and leave work late. I get mornings (well, afternoons) for talking with people, and lots of evening time mostly by myself for actual work.
#2. is obviously pricey, but without it, I'd go insane. Personally, I find newer, well-built apartments to have less noise than older single-pane suburban housing. (but then, I think I have a lower tolerance for traffic noise than most; the neighbor warming up his junker in the morning always super bothered me when I was living in an older SFH. some people are okay with that.)
I've talked about building a sleeping box with noise dampening, but... eh, just paying the money for an apartment with proper noise dampening is doable to me.
I totally agree that noise cancelling for office noise is useless, it works mostly for low frequencies but the "annoying" part of sound from speaking is much higher than at least my headphones can block out. Passive blocking can have even better blocking of the more important frequencies imo.
In my experience, noise cancelling headphones can make noise issues worse in some cases because they block ambient/white noises better than they block voices, sirens or other non-repetitive noise. So it just makes the distracting noises that much worse.
correct. the most prominent use case for ancs is during plane trips. but I never use mine for that because I prefer the humming of the engines (literally) over the chatting, whining and music from my copassengers.
I'm with you - noise cancelling headphones and other tricks like white/brown/bineural noise gets tiring after half an hour or so.
Here's my solution: I listen to relaxing hip-hop in a language I don't understand, through a normal pair of Airpods or other non-noise-cancelling headphones. In my case, this is usually MC Solaar - nice calm delivery, rhythms, and music, and in French, which I barely understand. I think this music is better for me than more regular sounds (or noise cancelling) as the variety means that any noises that do make it through, don't really register. Really helps me zone out and concentrate.
I know this sounds really weird (I almost never tell anyone about this IRL!) but it works for me. YMM(definitely)V :)
(Can I also make another observation? Reading about your irritability with flat-mates and colleagues sounds like you're an introvert, who's just not getting any/enough solitary time. If so, this is a bigger fundamental problem that you need to address - headphones and French hip-hop won't help :) Maybe you should focus on finding a way to build regular quiet and solitude into your schedule, for the sake of your relationships, mental state, and well-being?)
For me it's all about how "noisy" the noise is. The less discernible signal the better, because anomalies are what my mind latches on to. I can work without a problem in a big open coffee shop with constant, low-level hum of conversation, but if I'm in a room with exactly one other person who's clacking a keyboard, or talking on the phone, or occasionally munches on some chips, I can't so much as hear myself think.
508 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 327 ms ] threadI think people shackle their identity to their *version, and it can be limiting.
In general I'm fairly skeptical of personality tests, beyond just intro/extro version, for the similar reason that a) I can test vastly different based on my mood and b) people tend to tie their self image to the results and you end up with a tail-wagging-dog situation.
I'm just glad so many managers are cool with responsible use of headphones & noise cancellation approaches these days. Certain tasks simply require more focus.
The type of throat clearing I'm talking about is when someone really just needs a good, deep cough but for whatever reason they won't, and are constantly doing this "Ah-hmmmm" sound. Once doesn't bother me. Every 30 seconds is maddening.
More generally, I think this can be extrapolated to frequently recurring sounds with unpredictable intervals.
A few years ago we had a Salesforce BA on site under a fairly long (1yr+) contract. He matched this 'partial cough' pattern exactly as you described it.
I kept a clicker-counter at my desk and kept stats, and updated HR frequently with the numbers.
They finally saw the light and allowed him to work from home for the remainder of his contract term. My productivity immediately bumped back up 20% …
But all of that goes out the window when someone has developed a habit of obnoxiously and unnecessarily extending their involuntary sounds by activating their vocal chords. It's completely unforgivable to me.
This is why you might like the 'noise' produced by you voluntarily as in e.g. playing a 'busy office noise ambience' from YouTube through your headphones or speakers , while hating the 'real' office noises around you or even the same track played by your coworker.
- moved into an office where a very noisy dot-matrix printer printed out every opening and closing of a door in the building. Nobody ever looked at the printouts. I unplugged it and put it in a dumpster. Nobody ever complained.
- working for an oil company, my boss was sitting next to a big HP plotter that was horribly noisy - he wore industrial-strength hearing protectors all the time, which didn't help if you wanted to phone him. I suggested that moving the plotter would be a good idea (there were lots of places to put it), but as usual with engineering companies, a sensible solution is not top of the list.
- howling air conditioning - that place I left after a couple of weeks.
Bottom line, there is no way you have to put up with noise - stand up for yourselves and just say "no".
I guess so.
Likely because they didn't actually check the context.
https://latterdaysaintmag.com/the-parable-of-chestertons-fen...
While I sort of agree, it's not about a fence but getting as much info as reasonably possible before acting. Next time you change something you don't understand because of curiosity, there may be injuries or deaths.
> This is typical of the dogmatic approach to reasoning that you find in many religious texts
That's pretty much what you've done here; taken the extreme view of what I'm trying to say.
Back on the subject: the dot matrix printer was not the guy's property and it may have been streaming a hardcopy of some server's intrusion log. That would explain why it was there but nobody looked. It's there in case someone ever needed to.
(edit: it's printed door movements, not server stuff. If the doors are opened by badges, it's still movement detection, at least of the most basic, people-y, sort)
Think: someone must have been feeding the printer paper or it would have run out years ago. It's there for a reason. See possibly why in my other comment.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I'm usually critical of SV style creative destruction, but sometimes asking for forgiveness instead of permission really is the only way to get things done. As long as it's a strategy, not the strategy.
Asking someone why the printer does that would have been good. It would have been an opportunity to show initiative to superiors either way. One way you get to remove something everyone hates. Another way you get to find a less intrusive system to solve whatever problem the printouts solve.
It may not have been a problem as they suggest, but not hearing anything is not the same as not causing a problem. I've had people just do things thinking I was making up the issue with what they wanted to do. Of course, it caused the problem, and I didn't know the source until they mockingly said "I did it and you never complained!"
There's a big downside here. If he had asked the purpose of the printer, that would have identified him as the one who disliked it, and the most likely perpetrator if something happened to it.
Also remember the old saying, "it's always better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission". It's true usually. If he had asked to do something about the printer, the likely answer would have been "no", because the superiors didn't want to expend any energy on it and it wasn't bothering them.
Amazing. Good work.
The main issue: Upper management didn't care, they all had their own offices that were removed and much nicer. The rest of us peons were in an open office hell, my team was on an island that anyone could walk around at any time...we were unmoored and near a clangy door, it was very hard to focus.
At one point I sat for months in a radio room, next to a really noise rack. Temperature was often 30 degrees C.
The reason I sat there was because the sound of the fans were much easier to block out than people (without support contracts : ) popping in to ask questions while I where supposed to help people who had support contracts.
I did work short term in an open office where someone suggested it was "rude" of me to wear earphones. Same person chewed with their mouth open while eating crunchy food at their desk all day, within earshot. But.... I'm rude somehow.
I think everyone here wishes you the best of luck.
alias noise='play -n synth brownnoise synth pinknoise mix synth sine amod 0.02 80'
http://sox.sourceforge.net/Main/HomePage
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
https://p5js.org/reference/#/p5.Noise
Maybe it's something you could suggest?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misophonia
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzjWIxXBs_s
This is what I have to do when I hear someone whistling in the office. Also other sounds and behaviours, i.e. the guy sitting next to me started clipping his nails at his desk one morning. I had to go stand outside for an hour before I calmed down.
What I'd suggest:
1. You're going to harp on it. It starts with the annoying sounds, but then you're telling yourself about how rude they are, how gross they are, the injustice of it all.
Yes, here and there you've got a point, but 99% of it is you trying to rationalize your feelings, and then it wants to assign blame because people are the perpetrators of it.
2. Take breaks to stop harping on it. I vape, so that's my excuse, but you don't even need one, you're just taking five minutes every hour or so to stretch your legs. Deliberately do something that occupies your mind and gets your stress levels down.
3. See if you can work from home a day a week, or even a half-day. Take vacation as regularly as possible.
I think it's both made worse by stress and increases stress levels, classic feedback loop, so my approach is to avoid it as much as possible and use other means to get my stress levels down.
You'll have good days and bad days, if you're really down and ready to yell at people, maybe talk to a shrink.
Thankfully, this is a relatively small and flat org that somewhat embraces autonomy. I personally take as many breaks as I can or want because it's still part of work. Likewise working out of a coffee shop is something I'm very comfortable with, so I've started doing that as well. Working from home is less common here, so that'll be a discussion I think.
Also thanks for not mentioning whatever the other one was. The sounds I'm fully stressed about are the ones I mentioned, but others are just revolting in a vaccuum. Like farts, audible burps, coughing without covering.
(the better solution of course is to fully mute these notifications in Slack)
Now I'm wondering if that's genetic and how many other people have the same experience with those sounds.
I don't think it has anything to do with the sensations themselves, just my brain perceiving the stimulus as abrasive / piercing. It causes some kind of psychological pain, and weirdly I did not have this problem until my mid-20s.
https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/01.cir.94.5.878
Nicotine is a stimulant. It improves concentration for individuals with ADHD, for much the same reasons that prescription stimulant drugs do. I picked up nicotine gum, and eventually switched to vaping myself, as a form of self-medication for my ADHD. If it really helps you block out distracting noises and sights from a busy office, that might be part of why.
You know what has really helped my focus? BREAKING THAT ADDICTION. Please, if anyone else is reading the parent I'm replying to and thinking about starting to use nicotine to self-medicate ADHD trust me it is NOT worth it. It's not worth not being able to enjoy a whole movie or show because you need to intake nicotine. It's not worth being trapped in airplanes without being able to vape. It's not worth the chemical dependence, even if you "only" get addicted to the gum or patch. Please hear my appeal to what a terrible idea the parent comment is proposing! Nicotine is the absolute worst drug.
I was never a smoker, and I vape the lightest dose nicotine available (3mg/ml). I have definitely developed a light addiction over the years, but I can go all day without needing my vape. The worst my cravings get are a feeling of "Man, vaping would be really nice right now." I even went on a week-long vacation last year, left my vape at home, and didn't even think about the nicotine I was missing until I got home.
But please! Don't take my anecdotal evidence and think it means you should pick up vaping! I know it's not the best for my health, and you may become far more addicted than I am.
I haven't even gotten into the world of rebuildables or anything like that. I use a basic Smok sub-ohm box (a T-priv), that I'm probably going to upgrade to the latest model in a few months, but I know there's an entire world of vape devices out there I've barely even glimpsed over the horizon, let alone explored. Luckily it's not too hard to talk myself out of fancy new hardware ($$) when my current mod gets the job done.
But flavors? I went and spent around $70 on flavors a couple weeks ago. Sounds crazy, but it's still cheaper than spending $100/month on commercial juices. And now I have a vast array of cool flavors to play with, and design my own recipes from.
Vaping can absolutely become a dangerous hobby.
Anyway, you're right, nicotine is a pain to quit and I wouldn't recommend it obviously. But vaping seems to be even more unhealthy and more distracting.
So, doing the math, as I use 3mg/ml juice, I vape about 720 mg of nicotine a month. If I bought the cheapest Wal-mart generic brand gum, in the 2mg pieces (because to replace my vape, I'd want a low dose per piece), 720 mg of nicotine in gum form would cost $81/month.
That is a huge difference. Even accounting for the fact that my vape device cost me originally $70, it's still cheaper, potentially as soon as the first month, to vape over chewing gum.
The nicotine is slowly absorbed through the oral mucosa. Coating the gum would give you an initial burst of nicotine, but would not have the sustained drip of nicotine that the traditional nic gum does.
I suppose one could melt down gum base, add a vaping nicotine solution, stir it together, let it set and then cut into pieces... but I would worry about the PG or VG that the nicotine is contained in doing something weird to the gum base. And you would have to be careful to stir it quite thoroughly to prevent nicotine "hot spots" in your gum.
Making a homemade lozenge or mint would be much easier, and I believe some people do, in fact, do just that. It would be similar to making hard candies, only at some point you would mix in the nicotine liquid. Since many of the flavorings used in vape juice were originally designed for use in baking and hard candies (and usually have a PG or sometimes VG base), I'm pretty certain the PG or VG of the nicotine won't screw up the texture of the candy.
https://www.wikihow.com/Make-Chewing-Gum
There doesn't seem to be any known interaction with gum base.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3544094/
Lower your voice.
No real sample data from MN or the deep south, as yet.
I grew up as an only child on a fairly pastoral 15 acres, so very different environment compared to most people who have siblings. As an adult, office noise bothers me a lot more than most, especially conversations.
The idea of being productive in a cafe / starbucks is almost absurd to me, like a Monty Python sketch. Although, I sort of feel the same about Open Office plans, which is less funny, especially in the Bay Area.
The thing about offices is that in my experience it's unstructured, so anything that can catch my ear might require my attention, and that takes a lot of focus away from the thing I'm actually trying to do. That is, the psychoacoustic form of the noise makes a difference, at least to me.
Conversely, one of the most distracting things for me is barely hearing people talking. My brain keeps trying to interpret the murmuring as words before it can reject it.
Same! My family loves calling each other on speakerphone. Asking however politely and considerately for them to use a headset or hold the phone is a mortal sin.
Coincidentally, when I moved out on my own, my ability to focus suddenly shot through the roof. Like putting on glasses for the first time when you're nearsighted.
Going back home I don't lose that sense of focus. Until the phone calls start again...
It's a shared cultural thing unique to each company, no need to cast a blanket statement.
Best way to handle this is communicate. Last office mate I had asked if he could bring his in, and since it was something that's never bothered me I was totally fine with it... I brought mine in shortly after ;)
The dampening rings don't help much either.
On the other side of things, the sound of a door closing too strongly will ruin my concentration and put me in a mood.
At university, I shared an office with a student who made so much noise typing that I could only stop and ponder with amazement. This guy typed like the keyboard was a piece of meat, and his hands were basting mops. Somehow, his fingers mashed out whole words and phrases as he dragged his paws across the keys.
I use a mechanical, as the Apple keyboards gave me RSI. My pain has gone away since, and I've not had any complaints about noise. (Much of my office uses mechanical, and most of us do it for our wrists.)
I use some of the quieter switches; I'm not in mechanical for the noise, but for the feel & layout. That said, it's about on-par noise wise with an Apple keyboard, but people think mechanical == noise.
Nobody will be excessively interrupted/distracted by a quiet keyboard. The same is not true for the other direction.
At my last position, open office, a few people on my team complained about other members' loud buckling-spring-like keyboards. Since it was an open office and we were all complaining about noises well beyond some of the keyboards, like sales calls and constant conversations, it was somewhat moot and nothing was really done about it. But it definitely increased animosity within the team, it pays to be especially considerate of your neighbors, particularly ones you need to collaborate with.
The guy I sit next to uses a mechanical Logitech keyboard with their custom switches and I've never heard any complaints about that one, either.
Colleagues next to me eating hard carrots, chips, anything crunchy. Or Chinese expats who slurp their soup and coffee (normal in their culture; rude in mine)... it drove me crazy.
The singing one drove me insane at my last job. An office lady walked around the office, she would loudly and falsely be singing nonsense like: "LALALALA POMPOM PIEWPIEW LALA" (verbatim) and sometimes fragments from pop songs, in her broken English: "I CAN'T GET NO SASIFICTION LALAPOMPOM".
I wanted to murder her. No joke. If I could get away with it, I would have. The anger was physical and deep. Rage and disgust was the feeling, and I felt personally attacked. It felt like a "fight or flee" instinct, where I'd prefer to fight.
Many angry looks thrown at her (not just from me!) didn't make any difference. She must've felt like she was a rock star or something.
On my last day in the office I mentioned her to the rest of the office. Turns out everyone was annoyed by her. Nobody spoke up.
I have misophonia. The hospital close to my home in Amsterdam did a lot of scientific research into it. And nowadays I work from home, fully remote, as a software engineer. Life is good.
For me it's people who talk while eating and who read emails aloud while writing them. So annoying!
I have had to resort to taking noise cancelling headphones to work.
I complained to my employer, who did nothing about it because he thought it was funny.
During this entire process, Bob would talk, saying something like this:
> Bob is starting the FTP program. Bob is typing his name and password. Bob is starting the file transfer. Bob's exiting. Bob is selecting the file and printing it. Bob is selecting two sided printing. Bob has sent the file to the printer. Now Bob is walking to the printer. Bob is picking up the sheets. Bob is looking for a stapler. Bob found it, and is stapling the sheets. Bob is walking to tzs' desk. Bob's handing the printout to tzs.
Just in case you're not using hyperbole, you might consider some visits with a good counselor. I think most people can learn techniques to avoid getting so angry, and the unhappiness that comes with it.
Medicine used: Depakine (valproic acid).
Breathing helps too, but I find it difficult to remember.
That said, I've also been tested for all kinds of problems (yay affordable health care + endless supplies of mental care), and I'm completely normal and not dangerous. I just have misophonia.
They did studies on misophonia and I was part of it during another unrelated rehabilitation (accident related) for which I was treated in the same hospital.
Interestingly, it's not a mental problem, it's physical, see: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-44084-8
I once worked with a guy whose normal breathing made a whistling sound. I was sitting about 20 feet from him and one day I was about to go insane. I immediately bought a pair of Bose QC-15 headphones and it made all the difference in the world.
Currently, there's a lady who sits on the other side of my cubicle wall who wears a charm bracelet. The sound of her charm bracelet hitting and dragging across the desktop all day drives me batty.
I suppose I must have misophonia (first heard about it in this thread). There are times when I wish I were deaf.
I hear ya (pun somewhat intended), I wish there was an off-switch in my ears. I'd miss music and the voices of loved ones, but the peace and quiet would make me infinitely more productive in life.
It was pure madness. Especially because in between he'd talk to me. As if he expected me to listen to him all the time!
The day I moved into my own office and could close the door was the happiest day I had in my whole working life.
5 desk smallish office, we had one coworker who already has a very high natural voice volume and tone, who could not be stopped from having all sorts of personal calls while at the desk.
Boss would do nothing (but was closing his office door not to hear him) since he was a pathological submissive introvert.
We asked politely to at least leave the room. We asked not so politely. We had the office manager come and talk to him, the quiet would last two or three days and then it will all start again.
Calling his spouse, calling his kids and doing homework with them at the phone, calling his parents, mechanic, house renovator and whatnot.
We started counting and averaged around 7 calls a day, which we could not avoid to hear.
In 2018 the total was around 1800 calls.
(1) Typical of this group: mathematician, engineer, scientist, writer (2) project managers, C-class executives, sales, support
It is as unfair to ask a Concentrator to work in a noisy environment as it is unfair to ask a Communicator to work in silence. However, if one puts both in an environment together (which is often the case) the Ccommunicator always "wins" by suppressing the Concentrator's ability to work through the mere act of performing their duties.
Do you know of any empirical studies that support the generalization?
This was part of a presentation I gave in the early 2000s, literally begging my management not to destroy productivity by moving our company from cubicles to an "open floor plan/hot desk" environment. I wanted to boil down the issue to its essence and this dichotomy was the product. As others have pointed out, the real answer is that people work on a continuum, but my point is that if we are going to pursue a change in environments, we should attempt to understand the nature of work and strive for an ideal. Why implement a "solution" that only works for one end of the concentrator/collaborator scale?
In my case, implementation of the hot-desk program proceeded anyway, and I left the company soon after. Life is too short to be treated with such lack of consideration. The company has since laid off 10s of thousands of employees and sold off most of their once-glittering R&D campus buildings, bulldozing others. Only a thin shell of what used to be persists.
I regret that I did not ask a rhetorical question such as the following: "if you had to re-take a college mathematics exam in eight hours, and your continued employment depends on a passing score, where would you go to study? A quiet room, or a busy place like the food court at the shopping mall or a bus terminal?" but I realize the executive Q&A sessions were merely a show trial, not a true inquiry. The decisions were made well in advance.
Do you ever wonder how much better could you perform in a non-distracting environment?
However a TV is entirely different than people being around me. There's noise from various directions, distances, and volumes—not to mention the awareness of people being near which always heightens my awareness of a situation, distracting from what I am trying to focus on.
At work, headphones off, my brain is subconsciously trying to keep me informed about the noise around me in the workplace, so that I can respond if needed (generally I'm not) not helpful, brain. :P
It's the difference between sitting next to a busker in the street for 8hrs per day and listening to recorded music on your phone.. in that it's a _huge_ difference.
One solution for this is to have many easily accessible conference rooms, including one-person rooms for calls, with sufficient soundproofing that you can't hear such calls from the nearest cube outside them.
It's usually older and/or more introverted people who complain about the open-office craze, but there's absolutely no shortage of programmers who will strongly defend it.
Every single time this topic comes up on an online discussion like this, there's plenty of people like him saying the exact same thing. And I have to partially agree with him: most engineers I work with do not have a problem with these offices. It's only a few.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6483953/
Also every survey I can find says that employees don't want open office layouts by a large margin. There's clearly something else going on beyond autistic programmers complaining.
I'm not a fan of open offices either, but I've worked in a bunch of different places over the years, and he's right on many points. There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind, and I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey. I also find that my younger coworkers seem to really enjoy the open layouts. At my current workplace where I work in a closed lab, the complaint is about the lack of windows, not the noise or the lack of privacy. Some people will make comments about certain teams having meetings that are extremely loud, or about how quiet the lab is when those teams are in their meeting, so there does seem to be some desire for a little more quietness, but these same people have no trouble having a fairly noisy conversation while people are trying to work. In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.
They're getting modded down because the argument is: people don't complain to me about open offices, therefore everyone is happy with open office layouts except people with autism.
> There aren't many places left that don't have open offices of some kind
Depends on what you mean by open office. Not many places have dedicated private offices for each developer, but cubicles, small team rooms, temporary private spaces etc... are very common.
>I have not met many people who complained about them. Usually, I'm the biggest complainer. I would take surveys with a grain of salt; of course complainers like me are going to be happy to voice their opinions in surveys like this, while other people probably don't bother taking the survey.
So take surveys with a grain of salt, but not anecdotal evidence? It's much more likely that you're suffering from selection and confirmation bias than it is that every survey I can find online is. We're not talking about online polls open to anyone, but randomized samples. Here's one where they hired an independent research agency that randomly sampled over 4k adults in the US. 66% of the office workers want a closed office layout. That's a huge margin--big enough to overcome any minor issues with the survey. And definitely stronger evidence than 2 people on hacker news saying that people don't complain to them.
https://files.getroom.com/ROOM-2018-Open-Office-Woes-Report....
> In my view, Americans are just loud and extroverted in general, and this extends to the current workers in this field.
You are definitely suffering from confirmation bias here.
Also basically every study that has been done on open office layouts shows that it's detrimental to business and moral.
> The real reason people tend to dislike open plan is screen privacy.
Still going to call citation needed on you tho. I've heard many people complain in person, and this wasn't a big reason I heard. The last place I worked, almost every single person spent a lot of money on noise cancelling headphones.
Like any strongly held belief, you're going to find like-minded people and convince yourself that you're a majority. And, especially, we're unhappy and that means we want to justify our unhappiness, and if we were the majority we'd obviously be justified.
But I think all these things are true at the same time:
1. There is a minority of people who are genuinely miserable in open offices.
2. A sizable group of people dislike specific things (too much chatter, clicking pens, etc.) but they don't think about it much.
3. A plurality are oblivious to the noise and are having fun at work.
4. And open offices decrease everyone's ability to focus and are no better for collaboration than any other design.
5. The raison d'etre of an office is to get work done and silence facilitates that.
So we're a minority, but regardless there's a solid case against open offices.
I'm also strange in other ways. Music does nothing at all for me and I have a really hard time remembering things that are spoken to me (but have an almost photographic memory of anything I read). I suspect I have some sort of auditory defect that all of this is wrapped up in.
gonna have to stop you right there mate
In fact I will flit between those two extremes in any given day based purely on the work I'm doing. eg if I'm doing management administration then I tend to be more chatty because it's lots of small jobs that often require coordinating other people vs when I'm solving engineering problems and I just want a quiet controlled environment.
I.e., it's not always clear what the standard is that everybody is expected to meet, and there's no risk-free way of asking somebody to be quieter.
And so, in addition to anger at the noise itself, we also have a recipe for simmering resentment and impotent rage.
“Have you talked to him about it?” “It’s really not a problem” “Well I could sit you farther away from him, but we don’t have any open desks on this side of the office, do you want to sit on the other side by yourself?” “I didn’t mean that, I’d rather keep my desk.” “Well I don’t know what you expect me to do about it.”
“Well that went downhill fast.” - I did not say out loud.
I got the vibe I wasn’t the first to bring it up, and perhaps others had been less ambivalent towards the interruption.
I like my dead pan delivery of ridiculous statements. I had not considered the ramifications of that one being taken seriously, nor that it might be.
People collaborate less in open plan offices compared to traditional private offices. Yet open plan offices are promoted as strengthening cooperation.
I work in a co-working space with an open office section (fortunately there is a written rule that you must be silent), and surrounded by offices that sit 3 - 6 people. The offices have the same density as the open section - they are just separated by glass walls and a door.
I've used the silicon moldable ones and the plastic ones that go in the earl canal - but they are not very re-usable, and when someone pops over to chat taking them in and out is a chore.
They are a great option for people who have issues with ANC.
There's no "quiet" room. The meeting rooms cost a few hundred and need to be pre-booked. My home environment isn't a quiet refuge either. Beside a busy street, more flatmates than their should be and a room beside the kitchen which is used late in the night.
The only quiet I can wrangle is a few hours at a local library on weekends before the kids come in for the reading and writing sessions.
The noise has gotten bad enough that I'm considering quitting my job and running away to a small town.
Yes, you can use noise cancelling headphones but:
1. They're uncomfortable for long periods
2. They don't really block all the noise and you live in anxiety waiting for that one blaring ringtone to squeeze through
3. I find it difficult to concentrate with them on. It feels like a heavy, constricting object squeezing my temples.
No solutions, just a rant.
EDIT: Thinking about it some more on the transit to work this morning. I believe the constant battering to my senses has made me more irritable. I tend to avoid my flatmates and reply with dismissive grunts and hand waves. Ditto for people in the shared space. Small things upset me even more. A failed build pipeline or a new Jira request will infuriate me. I've been countering this with more breaks from the screen to take walks around the office block.
There are less connection drops, no voice announcements like "noise cancellation activated" just a discrete blip, the transition between modes is quite smooth, and the "pass through mode" aka transparency mode feels like you're not wearing anything. And I do find the ANC quite excellent, there's a much less reduced "ringing" you get from other NC gear (could be due to better algorithms, chip, or the mic on the inside that processes noise inside your ear canal). Overall one of the best purchases I've made.
Is this one of those "we work" type of environments where everything is rented piece meal?
NC headphones aren't designed to block all noise, only repetitive noise, basically white noise. Other noises, like ringtones, actually are louder or easier to hear on many models of NC headphones, as is speech around you. Noise-cancellation's purpose is to attenuate white noise, such as the drone of your office A/C, or your airplane's engines. It's not meant to block anything else, and if your headphones do, it's because they're also acoustically isolating (e.g., they have bin "cans" over your ears physically blocking noise, but that has nothing to do with NC).
Which is why I don't use noise cancelling headphones, instead you need passive blocking of noise, ie: material to dampen the sound from the office.
Sure sucks though.
Of course there’s still distractions every 30 minutes, but at least they’re not noise related.
If you actually have something that jarring out of your control, I would say you have a bigger problem then just "noise".
This seems like a drastic measure - do you require complete silence or is your workplace that noisey?
I wear the WorkTunes, plus ear plugs, plus I play cafe or brown noise through the headphones, plus I sometimes put on music. If that hadn't worked, I was going to go insane from the sound of the keyboard next to me.
Also, as other users have pointed out, noise-canceling just counteracts constant noise like machine hums, and the like. It won't do anything about human speech because it 1.v aries constantly and 2. takes place across a large spectrum of sound. Noise-canceling headphones can adapt but it's always going to lag behind speech or other non-constant sounds like ringtones.
The only recourse there is to use noise-canceling + blast music/pink noise/rain sounds, whatever.
Excessive by most standards but I (almost) have to have this when working in an open office.
The only minor issues is that moist starts to accumulate in the ear after a while, which I guess isn't a big deal.
If there were an alternative, we'd all run with you. There isn't, though. Something to think about when they say there's supposedly a "talent shortage" and they're having trouble "recruiting top performers".
Or you can take a massive pay cut, tank your career, and go live in the middle of nowhere.
Sounds great.
The other big thing is the lack of job opportunities in smaller cities, solvable via working remotely but still relatively uncommon, particularly for new hires.
Working remotely is an option here (if you go this route, look for a 100% remote company though).
It still sucks and I hate working, but it's the least bad path that I could find.
You can easily make 150k in this environment, where a 250k home is 3k sqft in a good neighborhood. I'm making quite a bit more in the management/director track.
Considering the ancestor comment and how the situation seems to weight on that person, I would advise to try and find a better situation, because from personal experience, when you start grinding yourself for a job postitve outcomes become very unlikely.
Meanwhile, I predict the new fad will be airline offices, because who wouldn't want all the fun and adventure of flying at the office? They'll all be sitting in economy class seats and working off tray tables, while the person in front of them leans their seat back and has loud conversations on speakerphone. And it'll be family friendly, too, with every day being "bring your screaming child to work day."
I really want one of those egg shaped sound-blocking chairs for work. I read in a wing-back chair and it's amazing how much sound deadening it provides.
I work in a coworking space. They’re not quite comfortable enough to wear continuously all day. If you take periodic breaks, and remove them when you go to the bathroom, get coffee, take a walk, that’s enough make it so you can keep them in while working at your desk.
Breaks are good so I don’t really count this as a negative.
They even perform well in super noisy coffee shops.
There is also the additional side effect that I have a reasonably large house for the same price that I would have paid for a small room in London.
There’s no right or wrong answer here though. Some people might prefer a shorter commute and I can’t blame them for that. For me, I’d rather have a longer commute but live in a larger house in nicer neighbourhood; somewhere quiet to bring my family up.
The added bonus is most IT jobs these days offer remote working so I don’t have to travel into London five days a week if I didn’t want to. Though sometimes the commute itself can be enjoyable because it’s a good chance to catch up on reading or personal programming projects (etc) since it’s 90 minutes of uninterrupted time away from the family.
This would maybe make the headphone issue more bearable (lightweight - much less uncomfortable for long periods), and the goal isn't to block out all sound, but rather to give your mind something else to focus on from an auditory standpoint. I find, personally, that having a musical anchor makes the task of mentally filtering out the noise much easier; I end up subconsciously following the melody and grooving with the rhythm a bit, but because there's no lyrics, it doesn't pull me out of the task at hand.
Everyone's different, so what works for me might not work for you, but maybe give it a shot for a week and see how effective it is. Worth a try at least.
Therefore you must also adapt.
Therefore it falls to yourself to improve your environment.
This may be a reasonable view for a large company, but they're talking about their experience at a three-person startup. At that scale if there's something that needs to be different you have to step up and change it yourself, and set the culture for the company you're building.
An employee cannot change this, only suggest.
There’s too much light in my eyes, and dark glasses are uncomfortable. Well, have you tried shining another light at your face? Maybe a different color of light would help.
Thank you for that.
There is an analogy to light that actually applies. Imagine a small green LED in your field of vision that flashes now and then. Might be distracting. But now imagine the room is 100x brighter than that small green LED. You might be unable to perceive the LED anymore. (However, if the problem is, as you state, that there is "too much light", then, yeah, adding more light wouldn't help unless you could somehow create destructive interference.)
Whether all this actually works for a specific person is a different matter. I personally hate listening to white noise, so that wouldn't help me. Perhaps other kinds of noise could work.
I sleep to brown noise (have done so for the past 8 years -- so this is not a fad thing for me), and I use a different brown noise with headphones at work to help me concentrate in a noisy office environment.
I use Noisli profiles to generate these noises, but any number of apps will do the job.
I won't claim it works for everyone, but this combination works very well for me.
p.s. Ear plugs at work also work amazingly well. Low tech and effective.
Just an FYI, while this is basically true for neurotypical people, for some people (for example those with ADHD or who might be on the autism spectrum), there's difficulty filtering, so this ends up just adding cognitive load rather than accomplishing a filtering effect.
To use a dumb visual analogy, imagine you tried to hide some carpet stains by putting another rug over it. Some people can partially see through rugs, and so now they have to deal with the rug _and_ the carpet stains.
Of course this stuff is still worth trying out, ultimately a lot of these kinds of things are deeply personal, and it's pretty easy to try.
One of the most popular white noise machines is the Marpac Dohm Classic, which many people (including myself) would vouch for.
https://www.amazon.com/Marpac-Classic-White-Noise-Machine/dp...
It's a fan in a box, with a certain shape so that when the fan is spinning it ends up generating a nice sound.
Thanks for the info
What “theory” is this? Because I’ve tried it (not by choice) in practice, many times, over the decades, and never found it to work at all. I’m genuinely curious why people think it could ever work, when empirically it does not.
Theoretically the brain will adapt to working while hanging 100’ in the air, too. I adapt to height fairly quickly and don’t mind working up in the air. Many people apparently do, and no amount of telling them that it’s “theoretically” possible will make them productive workers there.
It seems patently unfair that modern offices picked the one type of distracting sensory input that happens to be my kryptonite.
I damaged my hearing trying to have enough sound to drown out the triggering sounds around me. (misophonia got a lot worse during working in open office too)
What kills productivity in an office environment is actually signals that cut through that noise. Phones ringing, conversations between coworkers, printers whirling to life, someone opening a cellophane wrapper and chewing on a candy, etc. Most of these things aren't useful, but they're distracting, because your brain is tuned to constantly be on the lookout for new audio signals to shift your focus to. This is probably a survival instinct, as becoming aware of an approaching predator is important to avoid becoming lunch. In an office, the goal isn't thus to add more noise, but to mask the noise, so that it is less distracting.
Music is not "more noise," but more like a big, obvious beacon of focus. You might think of it like a controlled, intentional distraction. It's juuuust enough of an audio signal that your mind can keep its focus in one place, and just barely loud enough that when your coworkers phone rings, it isn't quite so jarring. That tiny, tiny little adjustment in the relative weight of the signals can make all the difference in the world, preventing you from unnecessary context switches throughout your day and helping you to maintain flow while working on a complex task.
It's not perfect, no. Obviously the perfect environment would be 100% in the control of the worker, who could dictate the noise level and comfortable temperature and everything else on a personal level. But, well, the real world isn't perfect, and it can be good to have options. :)
Ive got in-ear noise cancelling headphones and they're amazing. I often come up for air to hear a debate going on not far from me. Because they're noise cancelling I can set the volume lower than I would otherwise.
Edit: I play music I know well so it doesn't distract. My wife uses rain/wave sounds. White noise would work for others.
Noise cancelling AirPods and gentle background sounds may provide a smooth enough waveform to be ignored, while stopping the increase in audio sensitivity, and smooth out “spikes” of surrounding noise.
Perception of sound is not just some cumulative scalar, that view is far too simplistic
They probably believe it because it works for them. Because it works for me.
I suggest listening to one of the following:
1. Music you don't already know because you can't hum along to them and won't get distracted by the lyrics (Spotify radios can be great, though they get repetitive if you listen to them a lot)
2. Classical music is great if not too tired otherwise it puts you to sleep
3. Deep / underground house like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz26ohrCNIY&t=2s great if you're cranking at a quantitative problem or coding
4. Instrumental jazz to me is the midpoint between the intensity of listening to house and the absolute serenity of classical music, but ymmv
(of course it helps if one likes this kind of thing, which I do)
It's still better than the incessant jabbering of phone meetings and other office noise.
Some days, the noise puts me on the verge of another breakdown. And no one in management cares.
Hearing protection always talks about attenuation in terms of dB(A) (A-weighting being a sensible thing to do when measuring perceived sound levels). 30dB(A) is a significant attenuation (logarithmic scale, don't forget). 35dB(A) is quite an improvement over 30dB(A).
For long-term use, ear plugs aren't great. But ear defenders can be had cheaply which will work well; I know of some people who use ear defenders atop in-ear active-noise-cancelling headphones as a double-whammy.
The correct answer is to work/sleep in quiet places, though, but I realise this is fast becoming a luxury.
Note that there is a considerable amount of technique in using earplugs correctly. You don't just shove them toward your ear and hope for the best. Normally, they are rolled tightly, and then inserted fairly deeply into the ear canal, where they then expand. Have someone demonstrate, watch a video on it, or read the instructions very closely.
https://www.3m.com/3M/en_US/company-us/all-3m-products/~/All...
[0] https://www.amazon.com/3M-1100-Foam-Plugs-200-Pair/dp/B008MV... [1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BYAP7I
That might mean a small town, or it might mean a $3000/mo+ studio apartment. How do you get to having enough cash flow to afford that space? Can you nix the hotdesking membership? Worst case, can you bail on the startup and join a megacorp?
How will that help with the noise problem?
There is a fair chance that your core annoyance is something else.
That is, if you somehow got a perfectly sounds proofed workroom of your own, you would after a while realize that you're still irritable, find it difficult to concentrate etc.
Often, we don't want to face our real problems and assign discomfort to some external thing we have no power over. "If only X was gone, I'd be happy". But when X disappears little changes.
People desiring quiet places or isolation to think isn't a particularly new phenomenon, so there's a good chance that this is the core problem.
That said there's a lot of things that can add stress and in isolation this one particular one might not be too bad. But then it becomes an optimization problem, there are many sources of stress that are hard or difficult to solve but the work environment is low hanging fruit and easy to solve so we focus on that.
This is why touring the office is an important part of a job interview, the places with a good environment will be happy to show you around. Fortunately some companies are so clueless they'll even advertise their modern open plan office, you don't even need to apply to those.
I commend you on the achievement of reaching a state of mental nirvana that allows you to concentrate equally in chaotic and quiet environments - very impressive. I would venture to say that the vast majority of the population will never reach this state.
Since he's also permanently annoyed outside work, non work factors fit the data.
On the opposite note, I can perform extremely well in noisey environments if I am enjoying what I am doing - like I am able to just tune it out.
Circumstance and other stressors may be a main factor, or it could just be the noise. I imagine it really depends on the person.
Long story short, a workspace has to cater to multiple different people - shocking, I know.
Consider alternatives. Libraries can be excellent work environments, if quiet. And talk to staff about getting a quiet area -- many libraries are tending increasingly to "conversations allowed", which can be annoying.
I'd find lack of access to my own frequently used materials, notes, papers, etc., to be frustrating, though.
Many academic libraries (ranging from community college, to public or some private colleges and universities) have quiet spaces.
Off-hours / off-season spaces may be findable, though that can get creative.
I'm rarely out without a few pair of high-efficiency earplugs myself. These can block much (though not all) noise quite effectively. You'll want the ones which block speech specifically, not just high-frequency sounds.
I know in some countries there are dedicated study spaces which you can pay to access. That would indeed be nice. Co-working spaces could have served this role except many play up the social aspects and have open office configurations. They do have private office spaces but they are expensive.
This is far better than the whole totally enclosed ear-muffs + disposable ear buds approach (which does work but creates an uncomfortable pressure on your ears):
https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/audiovideo/he...
> Scenario 2: You find yourself at a popular new restaurant, where loud music and reverberant acoustics make it difficult to hold conversations (even if you don’t have hearing loss). Your hearables are monitoring your mental effort, again by tracking your brain waves, determining when you are struggling to hear. They then appropriately adjust the signal-to-noise ratio and directionality of their built-in mics to make it easier for you to understand what people nearby are saying. These hearables can distinguish your friends from the patrons you wish to ignore, based on audio fingerprints that the device previously collected.
Some of these are still in development or super expensive.
In terms of some practical solutions today, there's a brand called IQbuds ($300-$500) which use a similar strategy and can be custom-molded to fit your ears (just like a hearing aid) so they can be worn over a full workday:
https://www.nuheara.com/iqbuds-boost/
Recently.
Like...in the last two hours recently.
looks longingly out the window...terminal makes a noise, snaps back to reality, sighs heavily, continues patching
I'm in an open-office now and use light over-ear headphones (I found the Bose Bluetooth ones good) and listen to white noise (by playing with the frequencies you can usually drown out what's bothering you). Of course my preference would be a quiet space, but this white-noise strategy has worked well for several years now.
Personally I use my trusty Bose over ear noise cancelling headphones when i’m with a customer that has loud open plan offices. I’ve had my Bose headphones for almost a decade now. Today I use them even when I’m at my office which is quiet But because its open plan I still get distracted and we are working on acoustics however most of us are deep thinking engineers and we have a liberal work from home policy so our work environment is good enough to get stuff done.
I would talk to someone you have value to the startup and people don’t even think about this till its too late.
1) Sony XM3 headphones. They are the 2nd most comfortable after the Bose headphones and have the best NC. So far, nothing you haven't done before.
2) High quality foam earplugs. I have the Mack's Ultra Soft plugs, with 32 decibel noise reduction rating. Anything with 27 decibel reduction or above should be good enough though. You may need to alternate between a few brands and variants before you find one that's comfortable enough to go many hours with.
3) Pink Noise. Play it quite softly so that you can barely even hear it at all with the plugs in. It helps to drown out the remaining external noises that come through without registering in your brain as extra noise itself (which is why I play pink noise instead of other suggestions such as calming music). I like this one: https://youtu.be/8SHf6wmX5MU
I combine all 3 for the nosiest areas like studying in a busy cafe, but you won't usually need the whole stack.
I worked in an office where they put speakers in the ceiling to radiate such noise. It was odd because no notice was given and it just happened. For the first week or two, we all thought it was airflow noise from the HVAC system until we noticed speakers in the ceiling.
It was effective, though. It did reduce the apparent noise, though our 15 person office wasn't terribly loud to begin with. An interesting side effect was that conversations, when they did occur, got louder because the noise made low volume conversations difficult to hear.
so, uh, my own solution? requires money, but is probably cheaper than giving up the big city wages (depending on your situation and remote-work opportunities.)
1. giant yellow passive hearing protectors at work with soft music.
Personally, I still kinda suspect that active noise canceling is just placebo. (I'm joking a little here, but passive noise dampening is a thousand times better than active, if you ask me.) Give me passive muffs. You still need some soft music, or your ears will adjust, but getting hearing protection earmuffs with bluetooth means the music can be soft. The other advantage is that nothing says "Don't bother me, I'm working" like giant yellow industrial earmuffs. (I like the '3m worktunes connect' - not exactly audiophile grade, but even with really soft music, it makes the office silent )
MMm. you say you find headphones 'heavy and constricting' - perhaps I should take back my advice. the passive earmuffs are both heavy and constricting. I find it kind of comforting? but if pressure is a problem, you probably won't like them.
2. at home: my own room with a solid door with weather stripping and walls with offset studs and triple pane windows. (weather stripping is super cheap and helps a lot with interior noise. A solid door is rather more expensive, and probably helps more, but as for relief per dollar, weather stripping is hard to beat)
Key here, I think, is that construction is more important than location.
3. I show up and leave work late. I get mornings (well, afternoons) for talking with people, and lots of evening time mostly by myself for actual work.
#2. is obviously pricey, but without it, I'd go insane. Personally, I find newer, well-built apartments to have less noise than older single-pane suburban housing. (but then, I think I have a lower tolerance for traffic noise than most; the neighbor warming up his junker in the morning always super bothered me when I was living in an older SFH. some people are okay with that.)
I've talked about building a sleeping box with noise dampening, but... eh, just paying the money for an apartment with proper noise dampening is doable to me.
Here's my solution: I listen to relaxing hip-hop in a language I don't understand, through a normal pair of Airpods or other non-noise-cancelling headphones. In my case, this is usually MC Solaar - nice calm delivery, rhythms, and music, and in French, which I barely understand. I think this music is better for me than more regular sounds (or noise cancelling) as the variety means that any noises that do make it through, don't really register. Really helps me zone out and concentrate.
I know this sounds really weird (I almost never tell anyone about this IRL!) but it works for me. YMM(definitely)V :)
(Can I also make another observation? Reading about your irritability with flat-mates and colleagues sounds like you're an introvert, who's just not getting any/enough solitary time. If so, this is a bigger fundamental problem that you need to address - headphones and French hip-hop won't help :) Maybe you should focus on finding a way to build regular quiet and solitude into your schedule, for the sake of your relationships, mental state, and well-being?)