I used to use construction 'headphones'. They do nothing but dampen outside noise - no music. It's a pretty good solution ... but a solution to a stupid problem because the right solution is more productive working conditions.
> the right solution is more productive working conditions
Absolutely! To me what's most disturbing about "Just use headphones" is it's highly prevalent information-age companies but shows a deep _lack_ of understanding for the need for _focus_ and long periods of uninterrupted concentration essential for creative work.
Its not just information age companies, it seems to me that many people in general are ignorant of the concept that a distraction-free work environment is important. I'm at a company that has been around for 50 years, and they still stuff their engineers two at a time into small "offices" (without doors, with concrete floors). I can hear everything.
I use these with low volume ear buds underneath. Nothing gets through the combination and the music volume can be very low and still easily heard, so hearing ins't affected.
I was thinking this exactly. You could easily use hearing protection equipment like what is typically used in construction. Also, you could sit with your back to the wall instead of to the heavily trafficked area.
However, it raises the question: "Should employees have to solve these problems?". Depending on the office size, a more private setting could be provided for the employees affected.
Wow, I did not think of that. I tried noise canceling headphones and they made me a bit dizzy, but the last time I used construction ear protection I was fine. Thanks, if I ever end up in a cube farm again, I'll have to try that.
I have an office now and temp is my main problem since I am right next to the server room.
Some people will tease you about wearing them, but honestly by the end of most of my stays at Companies I've converted at least 3-4 people to using them.
Like the article states, listening to music reduces your cognitive abilities, I prefer absolute quiet. I find it almost beautiful like a great song to hear nothing but the clarity of my own thoughts.
The "being watched" feeling is the big one for me. I don't mind wearing headphones because I love listening to music and I don't listen to it that loudly, but the sensation of feeling someone's eyes on you (to catch you on the split second you've refreshed reddit or facebook or something) is incredibly profound on the time it takes to zone into zen mode.
Anecdotally funnily enough, the opposite seems to happen for me when I am pair programming: each person keeps the other in focus, but obviously this only works when both people have the same objective. Not really related to "open office" issue, but thought it was relevant.
I've had the same experience with pair programming: when done with someone you get along very well with, and with the same goal in mind, one or the other of you might get stuck but rarely both at the same time. (And on those rare occasions, observing that we were both stuck was a good sign to more quickly treat it as a problem requiring deep thought, rather than staring at a screen for a while.)
I completely agree. Pair programming was mentally exhausting for me (4 sessions per day of 90 minutes), but we were almost constantly productive. When we both got stuck, that's when we would pair swap. It was the best job I've had so far, but it was exhausting. I stayed focused on the task at hand for the entire day. At the end of the day, however, I had absolutely no desire to work on side projects or learn something new. I was spent.
I don't do pair programming at work; when I did pair programming, it was with a friend for various side projects, and we'd do it for a 12+ hour day (broken up by a couple of meals. It was exhausting in a good way: it felt maximally productive, as well as exhilarating.
I had the same experience working for a company that did pair programming 100% of the time. Very productive but exhausting, and in my mind, not sustainable.
I specifically request desks where my back is to a wall for this very reason.
You need breaks during the day. Programming is creative work. Some people can just march on like a machine, but I know my own style is to have an incredibly high output stretch of 3-4 hours, punctuated before and after by lots of email writing, bug reading and goofing off on reddit / hn.
On a side note, I wonder how effective fb/reddit really is for taking pauses..? I would certainly have thoughts about it as an employer, but I know it's considered perfectly normal by most people. I don't mean I'm capable of hour-long stretches of work, far from it. I take lots of pauses, but flipping to a new browser tab doesn't do it for me.
When I consciously think about someone who happens to see my screen at work I can easily brush the thought off and tell myself I don't care. But my subconscious thinks differently because I can feel myself get a little tense when someone comes up to, or walk by, my desk. I get the same feeling whether my screen is showing me doing work or not. It's an annoying feeling.
It would have been a good article to help champion the cause of "don't tell me I have to use headphones to work here", if not for the "music is distracting" point IMHO.
Music is sometimes orienting. A decent steady BPM can keep you going through even boring slogs without getting distracted sometimes.
That all being said, having to listen to music, having to decide on what to listen to, and not being able to achieve quiet when you don't want music, that's a problem.
It's wrong to say you HAVE to listen to music. It's great to listen to when you want to, but having to listen to it all day because you can't stand the noise can be rather oppressive.
I'm personally more or less a fan of open offices, but the noise really is a problem and unfortunate -- I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
In the meantime, I find that using ear-plugging headphones alone with some ear-muffs (for like construction work) over the top of the head, without actual music, is reasonably effective at stopping sound.
> I'm personally more or less a fan of open offices, but the noise really is a problem and unfortunate -- I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
Then what's the point of open offices outside of penny-pinching?
Personally, I just enjoy the feeling of being around other people. I worked in a private office in my first job out of college, and found it a bit lonely. In college, most things got done in libraries or coffee shops or in small gatherings of students or in computer labs, and it worked well. It wasn't like people were completely silent, but there was an understanding you wouldn't be distractingly loud, which isn't a social norm that seems to exist with open offices, for whatever reason.
You say penny-pinching, but not all companies can afford the office space for all their employees from the get-go.
At least where I work, we do get an implicit understanding of when it's quiet time, and when it's discussion time. Unfortunately the understanding isn't always in sync, but we're most of the way there.
> You say penny-pinching, but not all companies can afford the office space for all their employees from the get-go.
With the caveats that is is one situation and we are in Dallas, my company could afford to give everyone a private office in the building we currently occupy for less than the cost of my salary alone. IMO, if you have enough money to pay developers market salaries you have enough to give them their own office if you wanted to. In fact, I would take a pay cut to get one.
Obviously some markets like SF proper and Manhattan are stupid expensive and this likely isn't true there. I'd wager that most of the world i closer to Dallas than SF, though.
"louder conversations" doesn't mean "all conversations".
That said, there are advantages and disadvantages to a high-interaction cube farm, and I'm not convinced the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. In particular, the productivity hit for people less comfortable in such a setting seems higher than the productivity gain for people more comfortable in such a setting. As much as many offices try to put everyone in the same type of environment, I think it would make sense to design floorplans that incorporate both offices and cubes, with different types of employees in different types of work environments.
> I wish the social convention were to treat an open office like a library, and louder conversations happened in private offices.
Most open floorplans I've seen don't have sufficient private space, so moving conversations into offices ends up being impractical for the people working there.
Most open floor plans I've seen are also woefully lacking in noise-absorbing materials. A giant room with drywall and hard floor is a recipe for loud noise. Best case, you have acoustic tiles for ceiling and short-pile carpet, and everything else bounces the noise around. Libraries tend to have layouts that are conducive to noise absorption, with all the shelves of books and the small seating spaces scattered throughout.
That's the one that does me in. Not because headphones cause ongoing damage, but because my ears have been damaged by several rounds of tympanic perforations and ear infections since I was a wee one.
From these I retain (amongst a number of other issues though thankfully almost no loss of hearing) a serious inability to wear any kind of headphones for more than 10~15mn: past that and it starts to feel like I'm getting needles jabbed through the eardrum and scraping around (this is not so exaggerated, the first time it happened I literally threw my cans away from me thinking some sort of biting insect had gone in and I hadn't felt it until it took a bite of my eardrum)
Now to be fair I am in favor of giving employees isolated rooms to work in, however the reality is that at small startups they simply cannot afford that kind of office space. If you're concerned about noise and also the loudness of music playing in headphones, you can always get what construction workers use to block out noise:
Actually, any startup that chooses new open-office workspaces over secondhand cubicles solely for reasons of cost might also want to consider moving to a location with cheaper office space leases. Even $5/sq.ft. is too high for a startup, regardless of the workspace furniture.
I do not buy that for a second. And even if true, why is it my concern that they can't afford it? Why should I have to make up for they're shortcomings?
If a startup can't afford a decent quiet office, they most certainly can't afford all the maintenance that will be caused from creating software in a toxic open-office environment.
I've never seen great code come out of an open-office. It can be good but the inability to focus in these environments usually show up in the resulting code.
> the reality is that at small startups they simply cannot afford that kind of office space
It's funny startups would feel that way yet also believe they must be located in/around San Francisco. If cost was really that big of a concern maybe they should choose to setup shop in a more affordable city (they'd also save money on salaries).
But even in San Francisco the additional costs wouldn't be that much. There was a blog post[1] last year that did the math and companies save about 10% with an open office - the hit to productivity caused by an open office environment is most likely costing them more.
Sometimes, the right kind of distraction is good. Even if having no distractions gives me the opportunity to have acute concentration on the subject, in practice, having the right kinds of distractions really do help me reach peak productivity.
If I don't have music or background noise of some kind, my mind wanders and I never really reach that "acute concentration" point anyways. But I work best with the right kind of music -- or even a TV show that's just interesting enough to be background noise (without capturing all of my attention).
That said, the wrong kinds of distractions truly are too distracting. The study mentioned that music with lyrics is more distracting; I know that my favorite songs (generally 70s classic rock) really do grab my attention away from work sometimes. Music where the words are unintelligible and fade into the sounds or music without words actually works a lot better. Also, obviously a really captivating TV show will definitely hurt productivity.
Music for Programming has some interesting stuff, but personally, I need to systematically avoid anything with lyrics to have a hope of being productive while listening.
Interesting question: How many companies who use open offices style floorplans have executives who still have their own offices?
Maybe this is just another permutation of the out of touch boss problem. Nothing makes it harder to understand the downfalls of an open office than not working in one yourself.
There is another problem here. Most executives are extroverts, so for them being in the environment like that feels right and good. Does not really help with understanding in my experience.
Also might matter that open floor plans make interacting with people convenient, and it's a large part of their job to interact with people. I really only need interaction with people for well under 10% of a normal work day.
What makes perfect sense for their kind of works does not make as much sense for my kind of work.
For me it makes interacting with people even more inconvenient. Now instead of having a conversation with one person, I'm effectively having one with a dozen or more. So everyone's booking entire conference rooms just to talk 1:1—even if the topic is fairly benign or banal, nobody likes eavesdroppers.
Why would you even pick up your phone without leaving the room or trying to find some quiet space? I'm trying to keep my private conversetations outside of my work environment, not because I don't want people to hear things, but because it can annoy/distract people around me.
I couldn't always predict when a call would come in over something and the only "quiet" space available is out in my car. It wasn't always a good option but I would go out there if I had to call someplace about a bill.
I was mostly surrounded by customer phone support people so I doubt I was distracting them.
Yeah but they choose when to be extroverted. They still want a status signifying office for when they don't want to be bothered. Meanwhile, open plan employees are always being bothered.
My last employer was like that. The guy had an office half the size of the open office and he barely used it because he was out doing business and CEO things. It always upset me.
A private office is also an important symbol of status and power for many. And this has little or nothing to do with what the office layout for others (as long as the pecking order is not affected).
We just moved into a new space with a six-person desk (rather nice) in a big bullpen, with two executive offices off the side. One exec gets the corner office, but his door is always open and he's always poking his head out to talk to us. He (like us) has mostly glass walls, and feels like he's in a fishbowl. He used to share his office with an intern, though, and I can hang out in there when I want.
The other two execs (CEO, CFO) hole up in the other office, and close the door, and don't really talk, and basically are just aloof. They also covered up all their glass with random posters and things, presumably because they didn't want people looking at them through the glass. Hey, suits! Developers don't like being in an aquarium either! >:-|
WFH + Open plans are great and should generally be encouraged. The open plan facilitates communications and general discussion. I encourage my team to spend at least 3 days a week at work during our 'core' time (12-5pm/MWF). It gets a bit noisy and productivity drops a bit, but team morale is good and there is a lot of cross pollination of ideas and knowledge. The only difficulty I've had is nearby teams haven't adopted this approach (they don't WFH) so we have to be careful about our volume level when we're in the office.
How do open plan offices facilitate communicating if everyone is wearing headphones with music cracked up all day? And if you're promoting WFH, then pepper should be using something like email or chat, which means that open plan is unnecessary.
And have you actually done any studies to prove that the cross pollination actually harkens, or does anything?
Wearing headphones while in the open space is antithesis to our team. No one does it. Random interruptions at work are expected and even encouraged. I have not done any studies at all except to privately ask the team during 1:1s if they like it, and they do. In this market where engineers are hard to keep, I prioritize morale over productivity.
Open Office plans + private breakout rooms is a good compromise for getting the best of both worlds. You have the open communication and serendipity of the OO + the ability to head over to a quiet space when the work requires it.
Kudos to you for allowing folks to WFH! That's a great thing for improving your employees lives.
I wear earplugs on a regular basis and they are great for drowning out excessive noise. I do remove them off and on, especially if I'm in a meeting with someone or if I have to hop on a call.
If I don't wear them, I tend to get distracted and irritated by various sounds. Now, you can still hear things, but they are dampened which is soothing for me at least.
Wear earplugs and then put your over the ears headphones over them. The sound of your music should still get through (mostly from around the ear, through your skull). I do that with classical music and it makes the music sounds like it's coming from very far. It's very zen. Like sitting in the void while having music come to you from a distant area.
You shouldn't be using earplugs, though - I take it you're talking about something you actually put inside your ear. If you ask your doctor, they'll tell you never to put anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow (I think it's an in-joke in the medical profession ;-)
Those are also a very good alternative to what I do.
I use earplugs with over the ears headphones.
You could instead use over the ears noise protection with little in-ear headphones inside.
The only reason I don't do that is that my headphones are worth $1000+ and I wouldn't want to trade them for earbuds. Otherwise, your idea could very well be superior to mine!
Reusable (and washable) quality earplugs, those that are a bit cone shaped so that they don't get stuck in your ear. The kind you use at a shooting range.
I would warn not to use them all the time. Let those ears breath. I only use them when I need to focus very hard or when it's very noisy.
Actually, earplugs can be very effective when paired with headphones, I would think... I used them while flying in the military (under a flight helmet) to cut out excess noise while still enabling me to hear essential radio chatter.
> If you ask your doctor, they'll tell you never to put anything in your ear that's smaller than your elbow
I'm pretty sure doctors in general are not opposed to the use of earplugs. Doctors don't want you putting things like Q-Tips into your ears, because it's really easy to irritate the ear canal or worse accidentally puncture your ear drum. Ear plugs don't carry much risk (no chance of hitting the ear drum unless you're shoving them in with a stick, and should be gentle enough on the ear canal), and they are a very good idea if you're going to be exposed to loud noises. Good ear plugs can block as much noise as good earmuffs.
Doctors themselves (or their technicians) will put earplugs into your ears if they need to block noise, e.g., for an MRI or a hearing test.
I'm wearing earplugs from time to time (when music distracts me from really compex task for example). But if you think about it - it is so ridiculous. Why do I need to wear industrail grade ear protection in the office environment only to be able to do my job well?
You don't need to do anything. You could just put up with whatever noise distractions your office produces. If you don't want to do this, you can use ear protection to make it easier for you to deal with. But you certainly don't need to.
The rules of thumb about "60% of maximum volume for 60 minutes" and "if you can't hear your surroundings, it's too loud" are nonsense. Dangerous volume settings depend on a headphone's sensitivity, the output device power, the headphone's isolation ability, and the recording. These parameters vary. Wildly.
A well-fitting isolating IEM can slice off 25dB of noise, more than enough to (mostly) eliminate background conversation noise at any location short of a hip restaurant. These IEMs tend to be so sensitive that they become earsplitting at a tiny fraction of the maximum output volume, way less than 60%.
Learn approximate dB levels of various sounds, compare various noise with a meter (even an uncalibrated app will give you a ballpark idea of what you're dealing with), and listen to music at an average 65dB or less (this will obviously vary with dynamic range of your music; occasional 80-85dB peaks won't kill your hearing).
One trip to a dance club or rock concert without earplugs (100-110dB on average in my experience, 120+ has been known to happen) will do more hearing damage in a few minutes than a lot of headphone listening while working. I'm pretty sure the busy street near my home routinely hits a 90dB average at rush hour, solidly in the danger zone compared to reasonable headphone use.
None of that comment seemed unreasonable to me - I've had large over-ear sets of headphones that require me to turn the volume up pretty high. It takes more to drive them, that's why some people own headphone amps.
Compare that to IEM's like the Sennheiser cx 300 - 5% of max volume at my computer might be too loud.
And it would surprise me if headphone usage at reasonable volumes is worse than going to loud concerts, even if you use headphones for long periods of time. If I'm at a concert or a loud bar for an hour or two, my ears feel really fatigued afterwards, everything seems quieter. I've never turned up headphones loud enough to experience that.
TL;DR "The sensitivity of headphones is usually between about 80 and 125 dB/mW and usually measured at 1 kHz." and note that since dB is logarithmic, every 6dB is 2x the energy (human-perceived "doubling of volume" is typically ~10dB; see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%E2%80%93Munson_curves )
Sure. I added some reading material links to my comment. The Rane document has an OSHA safe sound levels table at the end, a good reference. Keep in mind that the dB scale is logarithmic if you want to crunch numbers on device power, headphone sensitivity and impedance, and resulting SPLs.
TL;DR: NIOSH would recommend limiting the 8 hour exposure to less than 85 dBA. At 100 dBA, NIOSH recommends less than 15 minutes of exposure per day. NIOSH also recommends a 3 dBA exchange rate so that every increase by 3 dBA doubles the amount of the noise and halves the recommended amount of exposure time.
15 minutes is 7 doublings away from 32 hours, i.e. constant exposure. So, 100-(7*3)= 79dBA is safe, and 82dBA is safe for long-term exposure, and 85dBA is a limit at which you should have hearing protection.
"There are permanent physical consequences from prolonged headphone use. The effects accrue gradually, and as such people don’t notice that it’s happening."
You don't have to actually drown out the ambient noise; you just have to put enough sound that you control into it such that your brain is lulled into ignoring the totality of sound around you.
"People conflate the positive psychological effects of creating a cocoon of their favorite sounds in an environment of noise they can’t control with positive effects on their productivity."
The effects ARE positive, RELATIVE to the plain noisy environment they're stuck in. When I have an actually quiet workspace, I have no music playing at all, or at best something very, very low and without lyrics.
> You don't have to actually drown out the ambient noise; you just have to put enough sound that you control into it such that your brain is lulled into ignoring the totality of sound around you.
That depends on who is using the headphones. I can't not pay attention to any sound I hear. My brain is very good at filtering discrete signals out of backgrounds.
I cannot concentrate at all when there is music playing. I can barely even hold a conversation when there is music playing. It is the most distracting thing I've ever experienced (barring pain, tiredness, or hunger) and my brain isn't ever lulled into ignoring the music, it's lulled into constantly playing along with it.
At age 32 my hearing is apparently at the level of a 66 year old. I'm not much of a concert attender nor drug user so the only real explanation the doctor could give for my disappointing audiogram was my habit of regularly working with headphones on (I always took care of moderate volume, mind you).
I wasn't expecting this result at all, I actually thought my hearing was perfect but hearing loss starts at the highest frequencies and continues to the lower frequencies exponentially. The route towards "Sorry, what did you say?" doesn't take as long as you might suspect.
Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss. It isn't some scam. Turns out the ipod/iphone revolution came with some external costs.
"If a person takes a subway to go from one place to the other for half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening, and every day has to turn up the volume on his device because there is so much of noise of the train and everything around, and is listening to - let us say 100 db (decibels) for one hour every day, his hearing is going to get irreversibly damaged in a few years, in a couple of years time, for sure."
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Instead of subway, replace that with loud open-plan office and instead of one hour per day, replace that with 8+ hours. I think we need to address hearing damage the same way we started addressing RSI in the office back in the 80s. There are a lot of people who have no idea how much they are damaging their ears.
Focus on noise isolation. Using ER-4P (https://www.etymotic.com/consumer/earphones/er4.html) with triple-flange tips is about the best you can get. Better even than $1000+ customs (exception made for Noble silicon customs).
I have some Etymotic earplugs, which I use at nightclubs, gigs and concerts, but from the way they feel I don't think it would be good for my ears to use them daily.
Assuming you aren't actually pushing them in far enough to press against your eardrums, you're fine.
The physical feeling you get is just pressure on your outer ear canal - it might be uncomfortable (though it shouldn't be, try a different size plug) but it won't lead to hearing loss.
The kind of hearing loss that article is talking about is only caused by exposure to loud noise, and you're only going to be better off wearing earplugs for that.
One problem with $1000 ear plugs (and $1000 speaker cables, etc) is that some of the microphones used to record the music only cost a hundred bucks, and it passed through numerous 10 cent op-amp chips in various studio equipment.
I have noise isolation earbuds and always turn them REALLY low (like 1-3 on the volume scale on the mac). I'm always shocked at how loud people have their headphones.
To my expierience (since 2009), ANC works really great with steady tones such as the constant humming on a passenger plane or the motor sound of a sports plane.
But for voices, walking steps of folks, cars around you: not so much.
Purely anecdotal, but in my opinion in-ear-monitors (like the Sure or Etymotics) are much better at blocking out sounds than an active noise cancelling headphone like the Bose QCs.
Active noise cancelling should only really be needed in very loud environments, like the subway. In an office you should be fine with a well fitting set of closed back on/over-ear headphones.
I have a pair of Denon AH-D340 and I can't hear a damn thing with them on, even with a noisy conversation happening right next to me. I use them at 1/3 volume on my macbook most of the time. They have a lovely flat unhyped response as well, despite being styled after beats by dre.
If your office is as loud as a subway, my heart goes out to you.
Those fancy in ear monitoring ones are probably even better, but I personally find them uncomfortable.
There is a sound to active noise cancellation systems. Not really white noise, but a sort of faint, high-pitched noise.
It's not audible in airplane or other loud environemnts, but I never understood how you can work with that in your ears. Apparently some people doesn't find it irritating. But make sure to try someone else's before you spend hundreds on dollars on one for the office.
Prolonged use of opioids in high doses can cause permanent damage to the inner ear. Rush Limbaugh famously abused oxycontin and that's likely why he had to get cochlear implants.
I know there are some prescription drugs that can reduce hearing, but they're standard drugs like Ibuprofen, if you're old and take lots of them. I think. I've never heard of any illegal drugs having that effect..
As to RSI being psychological... after Googling around a bit I find a handful of (paraphrasing) "RSI may be to some extent influenced by stress", but nothing that it is 'entirely psychological'? Can you cite sources?
Uh, seriously? Right now we have a huge public health issue with young people and hearing loss.
Isn't that the best kind of thing to use in a scam? Much more believable :) Parent didn't say "it's a scam", (s)he said "get a second opinion", which sounds like good advise to me.
Not even dishonest, but biased by an obvious vested interest, which subconsciously leads them to exaggerate the diagnosis. Some people have it as a personality trait to make mountains out of molehills. For any alleged condition, if you get three opinions from three specialists, they will differ even though everyone is honest.
You might actually have the hearing of a 45-year-old at 32, but due to some interpretive latitude and instrumentation error, they can get away with reporting it as a 66-year-old.
That is correct, however, I didn't suggest that the the entire public health problem of hearing loss is only a false perception that is result of wide-spread overdiagnosis, which was the bulk of your counter-argument to my post. (If that were the case, what use would there be in getting a second opinion?)
I wouldn't jump to any hasty conclusions based on being tested once, with one audiologist's piece of equipment. How do you know it didn't have a calibration problem or other malfunction. Bad gain in some analog circuit or whatever, and the measurement is decibels off.
Also, I'd have my ear canals cleaned thoroughly, and stay away from loud noise for a couple of days before the test, and any foods or medications that can affect hearing. If you're on antibiotics for something, don't book a hearing test. You want your real hearing tested.
(I was on ciprofloxacin recently, and things didn't sound right until a day after the last pill. My Sennheiser phones sounded like $5 dollar store earbuds, and I couldn't get a decent tone out of my guitar amplifier rig, though I played with the 32 band equalizer and other controls endlessly.)
Here's where I'm coming from: I wish they would push to make the train a bit quieter. (I'm thankful for having a good network in Chicago) Take a ride to the airport on the blueline in Chicago, fly to London, and when you're on the tube you'll notice a world of difference in the noise level.
It goes from a loud clanking to the hum of the tube.
It's not just the ipod revolution, it was happening in the walkman era, starting about the time sony came out with the little turbo headphones. (which then morphed into the earbuds)
The killer was the balance between bass and treble, the phones were plenty loud enough, they just had no bass response to speak of until the treble was loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. Earbuds today might be a little better, but they're still fighting the physics.
I did damage to my hearing until I bought good headphones (Grado SR60. They were ~60 back in 1992, not much more than that now). They had more bass at 2 than the earbuds had at 9. There were a couple of tracks that demo'd the effect really well, where a drum or bass line just wasn't there in the little earphones.
Now, my hearing drops off above 12khz and below about 35. And it's much harder to hear things when there's other distracting noise going on. I can tell someone's talking, just not what they're saying. This is especially true when someone's yelling from another room over the not terribly loud music in my office. It's also really bad talking to someone on the phone, but I'm not sure how much of that is hearing loss and how much is crappy cell connections.
Also a drummer here...for several years I played in extremely loud bands and went to shows without earplugs. By the time I wised up it was too late. Now I have a terrible time hearing conversations in restaurants or other situations where there is background noise. I imagine in my later years I'll probably need hearing aids.
Earbuds can do that; the audio "sounds" low to you, but you're only perceiving the delta between the device volume and environment noise. That's why I stopped using earbuds; when I would put my hand to my earbuds, the volume would shoot up from isolating the environment noise, and I got an idea of how loud my device actually was.
I recommend noise-cancelling earphones, because they deal with the delta problem for the most part; but you can obviously still run into the problem of setting and forgetting the volume, which is fine for one thing but too loud for something else.
I work in a 4 people office and already feel it's too noisy, too many people walking behind me etc. Maybe other people are smarter than me, but for me it's not a work environment if I should develop software. But my pay is not connected to my performance so I don't have much to complain about.
Use noise-attenuating headphones rather than noise-cancelling headphones. A pair of properly fitted IEMs or a good pair of closed headphones will reduce background noise by ~25dB simply by providing a physical barrier to noise.
The distracting effects of music largely disappear if you listen to repetitive instrumental music - house or ambient music is ideal for this.
If you're concerned about noise-related hearing loss, Canford produce a range of high-quality headphones with integrated limiters. The limiting system was designed by the BBC, to enforce safe noise exposure for employees who use headphones all day.
While I agree that open plan offices are generally a bad idea, I think that OP is rather uninformed about the use of headphones.
To build on your second point, the key is more "instrumental" than "house or ambient", though combining both is indeed ideal. Soma.fm's "Groove Salad" online radio station is a good example of such music.
>If you listen to music with earbuds or headphones at levels that block out normal discourse, you are in effect dealing lethal blows to the hair cells in your ears.
I can not have normal discourse with my headphones on, even if they're off. And these are just a pair of normal over-ear headphones (DT-770's).
I completely agree, especially about the feeling of vulnerability. It's apparently something that not everyone experiences, but there's no way I'm going to wear something that removes my ability to hear someone walking up behind me.
I hope the open office trend dies soon. I've been to some swanky open offices with awesome perks but there are all designed to keep you in the office. I would not trade any of it for my current setup.
I work from my home office and travel to a nearby coworking space to get an occasional dose of water-cooler level of human interaction.
The problem is that it meets managerial needs very well:
* awareness -- you can see who's there, what they're doing, and have kindof a feel of the tempo of the office
* "collaborative" -- managerial work is mostly meetings, it's easy to see conversation/crosstalk as productivity
* less furniture / divided space is probably cost efficient
Add that to the This Is How We Do Things Now(TM) cultural momentum (you don't want to be using cubes like those stale corporations of the 90s, do you?). Then throw in the idea that management doesn't necessarily want employees to be maximally productive; it's better if they're productive enough but pliable and fungible.
Which is why they are so ironic. Most open-offices reduce employee's sense of privacy, motivation and has tons of other negative effects. What began as a money saving scheme ends up costing more to the company, but goes completely unnoticed by those who initiated the change.
A pair of Bose QC25's has been my most objectively productive purchase this last year. I highly recommend anyone in an open plan office to buy some, or something like them - they're expensive but worth every cent.
You're right. However, in most cases a lowly worker bee in an office environment doesn't really have too many options. Several years ago I was in a really bad office noise situation and I went out and bought Bose QC-15 headphones for $300. It was the best $300 I ever spent. I still have them and I still regularly use them in my home office. When they break, I plan to buy another pair.
Well, I agree, but I think that horse has bolted long ago. The article discusses the risk of extended loud listening with headphones, which employees buy themselves (I've never heard of an employer buying headphones).
My point was that as long as you're buying headphones anyway, buy some good noise-cancelling ones, and you'll mitigate a lot of the risks in the article. It does suck that it's on employees to do this, but here we are.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadAbsolutely! To me what's most disturbing about "Just use headphones" is it's highly prevalent information-age companies but shows a deep _lack_ of understanding for the need for _focus_ and long periods of uninterrupted concentration essential for creative work.
However, it raises the question: "Should employees have to solve these problems?". Depending on the office size, a more private setting could be provided for the employees affected.
In many offices, you can't just re-orient your desk or choose to move.
I have an office now and temp is my main problem since I am right next to the server room.
Some people will tease you about wearing them, but honestly by the end of most of my stays at Companies I've converted at least 3-4 people to using them.
Like the article states, listening to music reduces your cognitive abilities, I prefer absolute quiet. I find it almost beautiful like a great song to hear nothing but the clarity of my own thoughts.
The standards of measurement are likely different. Measuring "volume" (sound pressure level) is a very tricky business.
It certainly would be conspicuous.
Anecdotally funnily enough, the opposite seems to happen for me when I am pair programming: each person keeps the other in focus, but obviously this only works when both people have the same objective. Not really related to "open office" issue, but thought it was relevant.
Or maybe I'm just a filthy procrastinator...
You need breaks during the day. Programming is creative work. Some people can just march on like a machine, but I know my own style is to have an incredibly high output stretch of 3-4 hours, punctuated before and after by lots of email writing, bug reading and goofing off on reddit / hn.
So, as someone who was taught from a young age that only one medium at one time was allowed, open plan offices are a pain in the tits for me.
I used to sit next to a bloke who play wonderful music, but it never stopped. Trying to debug anything complex was impossible.
Ultimately the only real way I could get round it was to use these: http://www.koss.com/en/products/headphones/full_size_headpho... This blocked out most of the noise.
To get over the last bit of detail I used a white noise generator: http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/rainNoiseGenerator.php (worth the support fee)
Now, this is still noise, but its constant and easily ignored.
Music is sometimes orienting. A decent steady BPM can keep you going through even boring slogs without getting distracted sometimes.
That all being said, having to listen to music, having to decide on what to listen to, and not being able to achieve quiet when you don't want music, that's a problem.
It's wrong to say you HAVE to listen to music. It's great to listen to when you want to, but having to listen to it all day because you can't stand the noise can be rather oppressive.
In the meantime, I find that using ear-plugging headphones alone with some ear-muffs (for like construction work) over the top of the head, without actual music, is reasonably effective at stopping sound.
Then what's the point of open offices outside of penny-pinching?
At least where I work, we do get an implicit understanding of when it's quiet time, and when it's discussion time. Unfortunately the understanding isn't always in sync, but we're most of the way there.
With the caveats that is is one situation and we are in Dallas, my company could afford to give everyone a private office in the building we currently occupy for less than the cost of my salary alone. IMO, if you have enough money to pay developers market salaries you have enough to give them their own office if you wanted to. In fact, I would take a pay cut to get one.
Obviously some markets like SF proper and Manhattan are stupid expensive and this likely isn't true there. I'd wager that most of the world i closer to Dallas than SF, though.
That said, there are advantages and disadvantages to a high-interaction cube farm, and I'm not convinced the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. In particular, the productivity hit for people less comfortable in such a setting seems higher than the productivity gain for people more comfortable in such a setting. As much as many offices try to put everyone in the same type of environment, I think it would make sense to design floorplans that incorporate both offices and cubes, with different types of employees in different types of work environments.
Most open floorplans I've seen don't have sufficient private space, so moving conversations into offices ends up being impractical for the people working there.
Most open floor plans I've seen are also woefully lacking in noise-absorbing materials. A giant room with drywall and hard floor is a recipe for loud noise. Best case, you have acoustic tiles for ceiling and short-pile carpet, and everything else bounces the noise around. Libraries tend to have layouts that are conducive to noise absorption, with all the shelves of books and the small seating spaces scattered throughout.
That's the one that does me in. Not because headphones cause ongoing damage, but because my ears have been damaged by several rounds of tympanic perforations and ear infections since I was a wee one.
From these I retain (amongst a number of other issues though thankfully almost no loss of hearing) a serious inability to wear any kind of headphones for more than 10~15mn: past that and it starts to feel like I'm getting needles jabbed through the eardrum and scraping around (this is not so exaggerated, the first time it happened I literally threw my cans away from me thinking some sort of biting insect had gone in and I hadn't felt it until it took a bite of my eardrum)
http://www.homedepot.com/p/Howard-Leight-Thunder-T3-Noise-Bl...
They look pretty intense but it's certainly one way to solve the problem.
But I bet small startups could afford to let employees work from home a couple days a week.
Actually, any startup that chooses new open-office workspaces over secondhand cubicles solely for reasons of cost might also want to consider moving to a location with cheaper office space leases. Even $5/sq.ft. is too high for a startup, regardless of the workspace furniture.
I've never seen great code come out of an open-office. It can be good but the inability to focus in these environments usually show up in the resulting code.
It's funny startups would feel that way yet also believe they must be located in/around San Francisco. If cost was really that big of a concern maybe they should choose to setup shop in a more affordable city (they'd also save money on salaries).
But even in San Francisco the additional costs wouldn't be that much. There was a blog post[1] last year that did the math and companies save about 10% with an open office - the hit to productivity caused by an open office environment is most likely costing them more.
[1] http://nathanmarz.com/blog/the-inexplicable-rise-of-open-flo...
Sometimes, the right kind of distraction is good. Even if having no distractions gives me the opportunity to have acute concentration on the subject, in practice, having the right kinds of distractions really do help me reach peak productivity.
If I don't have music or background noise of some kind, my mind wanders and I never really reach that "acute concentration" point anyways. But I work best with the right kind of music -- or even a TV show that's just interesting enough to be background noise (without capturing all of my attention).
That said, the wrong kinds of distractions truly are too distracting. The study mentioned that music with lyrics is more distracting; I know that my favorite songs (generally 70s classic rock) really do grab my attention away from work sometimes. Music where the words are unintelligible and fade into the sounds or music without words actually works a lot better. Also, obviously a really captivating TV show will definitely hurt productivity.
http://musicforprogramming.net/
Dream Chimney's mixes on soundcloud also.
https://soundcloud.com/the-dream-chimney
In general, something classical, ambient, or minimal techno fits the bill.
I could be wrong, but the vast majority of MfP doesn't have lyrics. It's all atmospheric, vague, kinda droning music.
http://musicforprogramming.net/?c=aesthetic
http://asoftmurmur.com
I find ambient noise (at a low, safe volume) to be helpful for concentration.
Maybe this is just another permutation of the out of touch boss problem. Nothing makes it harder to understand the downfalls of an open office than not working in one yourself.
What makes perfect sense for their kind of works does not make as much sense for my kind of work.
I found myself having conversations with family members where I never mentioned words that would give away what I was talking about.
What drive me even crazier is co workers that took an almost insane interest in what I was eating for lunch.
Yeah, it's a fucking big mac... have you never seen one before?
I was mostly surrounded by customer phone support people so I doubt I was distracting them.
I also have nervous kidneys. Hmm.
We just moved into a new space with a six-person desk (rather nice) in a big bullpen, with two executive offices off the side. One exec gets the corner office, but his door is always open and he's always poking his head out to talk to us. He (like us) has mostly glass walls, and feels like he's in a fishbowl. He used to share his office with an intern, though, and I can hang out in there when I want.
The other two execs (CEO, CFO) hole up in the other office, and close the door, and don't really talk, and basically are just aloof. They also covered up all their glass with random posters and things, presumably because they didn't want people looking at them through the glass. Hey, suits! Developers don't like being in an aquarium either! >:-|
sigh.
And have you actually done any studies to prove that the cross pollination actually harkens, or does anything?
Kudos to you for allowing folks to WFH! That's a great thing for improving your employees lives.
If I don't wear them, I tend to get distracted and irritated by various sounds. Now, you can still hear things, but they are dampened which is soothing for me at least.
http://www.amazon.com/Protection-Professional-Folding-Padded...
Judging by how it seems to be the most used in industrial applications.
I use earplugs with over the ears headphones.
You could instead use over the ears noise protection with little in-ear headphones inside.
The only reason I don't do that is that my headphones are worth $1000+ and I wouldn't want to trade them for earbuds. Otherwise, your idea could very well be superior to mine!
I would warn not to use them all the time. Let those ears breath. I only use them when I need to focus very hard or when it's very noisy.
I'm pretty sure doctors in general are not opposed to the use of earplugs. Doctors don't want you putting things like Q-Tips into your ears, because it's really easy to irritate the ear canal or worse accidentally puncture your ear drum. Ear plugs don't carry much risk (no chance of hitting the ear drum unless you're shoving them in with a stick, and should be gentle enough on the ear canal), and they are a very good idea if you're going to be exposed to loud noises. Good ear plugs can block as much noise as good earmuffs.
Doctors themselves (or their technicians) will put earplugs into your ears if they need to block noise, e.g., for an MRI or a hearing test.
A well-fitting isolating IEM can slice off 25dB of noise, more than enough to (mostly) eliminate background conversation noise at any location short of a hip restaurant. These IEMs tend to be so sensitive that they become earsplitting at a tiny fraction of the maximum output volume, way less than 60%.
Learn approximate dB levels of various sounds, compare various noise with a meter (even an uncalibrated app will give you a ballpark idea of what you're dealing with), and listen to music at an average 65dB or less (this will obviously vary with dynamic range of your music; occasional 80-85dB peaks won't kill your hearing).
One trip to a dance club or rock concert without earplugs (100-110dB on average in my experience, 120+ has been known to happen) will do more hearing damage in a few minutes than a lot of headphone listening while working. I'm pretty sure the busy street near my home routinely hits a 90dB average at rush hour, solidly in the danger zone compared to reasonable headphone use.
Edit: To learn more, read the following:
- http://www.rane.com/pdf/old/note100.pdf
- http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/09/more-power.html
Compare that to IEM's like the Sennheiser cx 300 - 5% of max volume at my computer might be too loud.
And it would surprise me if headphone usage at reasonable volumes is worse than going to loud concerts, even if you use headphones for long periods of time. If I'm at a concert or a loud bar for an hour or two, my ears feel really fatigued afterwards, everything seems quieter. I've never turned up headphones loud enough to experience that.
TL;DR "The sensitivity of headphones is usually between about 80 and 125 dB/mW and usually measured at 1 kHz." and note that since dB is logarithmic, every 6dB is 2x the energy (human-perceived "doubling of volume" is typically ~10dB; see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fletcher%E2%80%93Munson_curves )
https://www.osha.gov/SLTC/noisehearingconservation/
TL;DR: NIOSH would recommend limiting the 8 hour exposure to less than 85 dBA. At 100 dBA, NIOSH recommends less than 15 minutes of exposure per day. NIOSH also recommends a 3 dBA exchange rate so that every increase by 3 dBA doubles the amount of the noise and halves the recommended amount of exposure time.
15 minutes is 7 doublings away from 32 hours, i.e. constant exposure. So, 100-(7*3)= 79dBA is safe, and 82dBA is safe for long-term exposure, and 85dBA is a limit at which you should have hearing protection.
You don't have to actually drown out the ambient noise; you just have to put enough sound that you control into it such that your brain is lulled into ignoring the totality of sound around you.
"People conflate the positive psychological effects of creating a cocoon of their favorite sounds in an environment of noise they can’t control with positive effects on their productivity."
The effects ARE positive, RELATIVE to the plain noisy environment they're stuck in. When I have an actually quiet workspace, I have no music playing at all, or at best something very, very low and without lyrics.
That depends on who is using the headphones. I can't not pay attention to any sound I hear. My brain is very good at filtering discrete signals out of backgrounds.
I wasn't expecting this result at all, I actually thought my hearing was perfect but hearing loss starts at the highest frequencies and continues to the lower frequencies exponentially. The route towards "Sorry, what did you say?" doesn't take as long as you might suspect.
It's also possible you didn't ever have great hearing. (Do you have any "before" audiogram to compare against, from when you were a child?)
http://learningenglish.voanews.com/content/one-billion-young...
"If a person takes a subway to go from one place to the other for half an hour in the morning and a half an hour in the evening, and every day has to turn up the volume on his device because there is so much of noise of the train and everything around, and is listening to - let us say 100 db (decibels) for one hour every day, his hearing is going to get irreversibly damaged in a few years, in a couple of years time, for sure."
---
Instead of subway, replace that with loud open-plan office and instead of one hour per day, replace that with 8+ hours. I think we need to address hearing damage the same way we started addressing RSI in the office back in the 80s. There are a lot of people who have no idea how much they are damaging their ears.
I do this now -- pretty worried about my hearing...
http://www.complyfoam.com/
I have some Etymotic earplugs, which I use at nightclubs, gigs and concerts, but from the way they feel I don't think it would be good for my ears to use them daily.
The physical feeling you get is just pressure on your outer ear canal - it might be uncomfortable (though it shouldn't be, try a different size plug) but it won't lead to hearing loss.
The kind of hearing loss that article is talking about is only caused by exposure to loud noise, and you're only going to be better off wearing earplugs for that.
Put another way, judged purely on niose reduction is there much difference between the ER-4P and the rest of the Etymotic product line?
But for voices, walking steps of folks, cars around you: not so much.
I have a pair of Denon AH-D340 and I can't hear a damn thing with them on, even with a noisy conversation happening right next to me. I use them at 1/3 volume on my macbook most of the time. They have a lovely flat unhyped response as well, despite being styled after beats by dre.
If your office is as loud as a subway, my heart goes out to you.
Those fancy in ear monitoring ones are probably even better, but I personally find them uncomfortable.
It's not audible in airplane or other loud environemnts, but I never understood how you can work with that in your ears. Apparently some people doesn't find it irritating. But make sure to try someone else's before you spend hundreds on dollars on one for the office.
As to RSI being psychological... after Googling around a bit I find a handful of (paraphrasing) "RSI may be to some extent influenced by stress", but nothing that it is 'entirely psychological'? Can you cite sources?
Isn't that the best kind of thing to use in a scam? Much more believable :) Parent didn't say "it's a scam", (s)he said "get a second opinion", which sounds like good advise to me.
I don't see how anyone could interpret that in any other way.
You might actually have the hearing of a 45-year-old at 32, but due to some interpretive latitude and instrumentation error, they can get away with reporting it as a 66-year-old.
I wouldn't jump to any hasty conclusions based on being tested once, with one audiologist's piece of equipment. How do you know it didn't have a calibration problem or other malfunction. Bad gain in some analog circuit or whatever, and the measurement is decibels off.
Also, I'd have my ear canals cleaned thoroughly, and stay away from loud noise for a couple of days before the test, and any foods or medications that can affect hearing. If you're on antibiotics for something, don't book a hearing test. You want your real hearing tested.
(I was on ciprofloxacin recently, and things didn't sound right until a day after the last pill. My Sennheiser phones sounded like $5 dollar store earbuds, and I couldn't get a decent tone out of my guitar amplifier rig, though I played with the 32 band equalizer and other controls endlessly.)
It goes from a loud clanking to the hum of the tube.
If you've ever had a rubber bushing wear out in a car's suspension linkage, you know what I'm talking about: thunk, clang, squeak!
The killer was the balance between bass and treble, the phones were plenty loud enough, they just had no bass response to speak of until the treble was loud enough to cause permanent hearing damage. Earbuds today might be a little better, but they're still fighting the physics.
I did damage to my hearing until I bought good headphones (Grado SR60. They were ~60 back in 1992, not much more than that now). They had more bass at 2 than the earbuds had at 9. There were a couple of tracks that demo'd the effect really well, where a drum or bass line just wasn't there in the little earphones.
Now, my hearing drops off above 12khz and below about 35. And it's much harder to hear things when there's other distracting noise going on. I can tell someone's talking, just not what they're saying. This is especially true when someone's yelling from another room over the not terribly loud music in my office. It's also really bad talking to someone on the phone, but I'm not sure how much of that is hearing loss and how much is crappy cell connections.
So take good care of your ears, don't be complacent. (I'm a drummer)
I recommend noise-cancelling earphones, because they deal with the delta problem for the most part; but you can obviously still run into the problem of setting and forgetting the volume, which is fine for one thing but too loud for something else.
The distracting effects of music largely disappear if you listen to repetitive instrumental music - house or ambient music is ideal for this.
If you're concerned about noise-related hearing loss, Canford produce a range of high-quality headphones with integrated limiters. The limiting system was designed by the BBC, to enforce safe noise exposure for employees who use headphones all day.
While I agree that open plan offices are generally a bad idea, I think that OP is rather uninformed about the use of headphones.
I can not have normal discourse with my headphones on, even if they're off. And these are just a pair of normal over-ear headphones (DT-770's).
* awareness -- you can see who's there, what they're doing, and have kindof a feel of the tempo of the office
* "collaborative" -- managerial work is mostly meetings, it's easy to see conversation/crosstalk as productivity
* less furniture / divided space is probably cost efficient
Add that to the This Is How We Do Things Now(TM) cultural momentum (you don't want to be using cubes like those stale corporations of the 90s, do you?). Then throw in the idea that management doesn't necessarily want employees to be maximally productive; it's better if they're productive enough but pliable and fungible.
Open plan might well be with us for a while.
My point was that as long as you're buying headphones anyway, buy some good noise-cancelling ones, and you'll mitigate a lot of the risks in the article. It does suck that it's on employees to do this, but here we are.