Noisy Coworkers And Other Sounds Are Top Distraction in Workplace, Study Says (npr.org) 290
Sounds, especially those made by other humans, have ranked as the top distraction in the workplace, according to design expert Alan Hedge of Cornell. A staggering 74 percent of workers say they face "many" instances of disturbances and distractions from noise. Hedge says the noise is generally coming from another person, though it's much more disturbing when it's a machine that is making it. NPR reports: The popularity of open offices has exacerbated the problem. The University of California's Center for the Built Environment has a study showing workers are happier when they are in enclosed offices and less likely to take sick days. This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds. [...] Rue Dooley, an adviser at the Society for Human Resource Management, says HR professionals often call in, asking how to manage co-worker complaints about various bodily noises.
Open office responsible for flu and colds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Thankfully the people who come to work sick and the office culture that promotes sick people coming to work are blameless.
Re:Open office responsible for flu and colds. (Score:5, Funny)
If Open office is responsible for flu and colds, I'm glad I switched to LibreOffice!
Re:Open office responsible for flu and colds. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Open office responsible for flu and colds. (Score:5, Insightful)
My boss has said - on many occasions - ""Don't come to work if you are sick. Keep your germs at home."
Of course she also will ding you when something doesn't get done on the day you're out sick.
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got to love that cognitive dissonance [wikipedia.org].
tell them that they can keep there job if they don (Score:2)
tell them that they can keep there job if they don't use the letter "E" in saying why they should keep it!
Re:tell them that they can keep there job if they (Score:5, Funny)
I do my job amazingly. In fact, I'm not paid accordingly. You should adjust my pay upward by about a fifth to a third annually.
Thanks.
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/hat tip
That was amazing
Door slams (Score:5, Interesting)
There are people who seem to think that door slams, loud racking sounds of turned door knobs and juicy Ka-chunks of door latches engaging are just fine in a scholarly/academic office environment.
The main floor of our Engineering Library has a door that is going "Rack! Ka-chunk" a couple times a minute from persons passing through to other floors, all day long.
Spent 2 full days in a conference room with colleagues from numerous other institutions working on behalf of a Federal agency in Arlington, VA.
Not one door slam the entire time. Do the Federal agency people know something about concentrating on work that state universities do not?
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I'd advise a night op where you remove said door and hide it in a damp basement, by the time they find it, it will be nothing but a layer of slime on the floor.
Military conditioning to screen distraction (Score:3)
Admittedly there are military environments where frequent, loud, startling sounds serve some operational purpose. An engineer working as a civilian contractor described a restless night spent underneath the catapult deck on the Ranger. Launching and recovering aircraft is part of the military mission in our nation's defense preparedness.
On the other hand, I read on Foxtrot Alpha that keeping things quiet is part of the culture onboard submarines. It is part of the military mission of reducing the pro
The popularity of open offices has exacerbated the (Score:5, Insightful)
When I came to the USA 15 years ago (from the UK), I was amazed at the ubiquity of cube farms everywhere.
As far as I can tell, its actually only management that like cube farms (or presumably more accurately, the $$$$ saved). Nearly all the residents actually would much prefer single offices and the associated peace and quiet that allows you to concentrate and be more productive, yet the myth stubbornly persists that cubes are the "popular choice".
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Re:The popularity of open offices has exacerbated (Score:5, Insightful)
Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
Re:The popularity of open offices has exacerbated (Score:5, Funny)
And this, of course, applies to everyone but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
What kind of environment did the founders have? (Score:2)
The real question that should be asked is what kind of work environment did, say, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, Jack Dorsey etc. have when they did the heavy lifting of originating their software concepts.
My bet would be quiet university dorm rooms or similar. In other words the opposite of the open plan office.
(Things that make you go Hmmm department).
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My bet would be quiet university dorm rooms or similar. In other words the opposite of the open plan office.
When I worked for a moving company as a PC disconnect/reconnect tech in 2011, Mark Zuckerberg's desk was out in the open and looked like any other desk on the floor. I don't recall seeing any private offices.
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Grove's office was an 8 by 9 ft (2.4 by 2.7 m) cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot."
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When "everyone gets the same space", senior managers have a desk for show, and spend all day in a permanently-reserved conference room bigger than their office would have been. (It's not really a scam, even, but all senior managers do is meetings anyway, and at a certain point everyone else comes to you for meetings.)
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Pretty sure he wasn't referring to 2011.
I'm pretty sure I was. ;)
Things may have changed since Facebook moved to Menlo Park.
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I meant when he/they were coming up with the idea and coding the original prototype.
That would have been before the existence of company office (or even company.)
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but management, who naturally "must" have their individual offices.
Which they then congregate outside of to loudly talk with each other, various minions, visitors, etc. Right next to my cube. Or, my favorite: conference call on speakerphone with the door open. Then they get indignant when I close the door for them. Especially if I use superglue to keep it closed.
And using the speakerphone in the cube farm should be a capital offense.
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at least we have 5' desks...
with little (pointless and ugly) dividers. I simply took an edge (which still has a 'corner'-ish desk) and spewed crap onto the desk next to mine before anyone selected it.
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Yup.
It's not so much that the cool tech companies have open offies. It's that they just buy desks and can't afford fancy cubicle furniture.
Is there some benefit to open office seating? Yes. For small groups in their own, partitioned area sure. Small teams workign together can collaborate easily.
Opening the whole office like that? Hell no. There's no real collaboration across 5 rows of desks without shouting and interrupting everyone in between. I've been through the transition from cubes to more open
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Open plan is a complete concentration killer. Thank goodness I can work from home.
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Brazil is a favourite of mine. Been ages since I watched it, though--might have to do something about that sometime soon.
If I didn't take my job seriously, I could deal with the office. I could go there 9-5 every day and go through the motions and likely get away with it indefinitely. And get almost nothing done, because I simply can't think when random people are constantly walking by and/or talking to each other or on the phone. I am simply very much more productive at home.
My wife doesn't often work at h
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Cube farms are going away. The current trend in open floor plans is desks with no partitions at all. HR says it's because millennials like it and all the "cool" tech companies have them. More likely it is cheaper than cubes and it is easier to watch everyone. It is really distracting to catch all the movement in your peripheral vision but its not like anyone in leadership cares what their employees think
I doubt HR has consulted any millennials and I doubt the 'cool' tech companies have large rooms with no partitions at all--though if they do I suppose that explains so, so much about all these data breeches. It's my understanding that physical access makes the task of breaking into a computer system distinctly easier, and a large office where it's child's play to walk in and get access to pretty much any computer you want would make this pretty easy.
It's not even like it'd be terribly hard to be unnoticed
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I'll take a cube form over what I have now...
We just moved to an open plan office from bullpen cubes (~20x20 ft cubes with 4 people per cube).
I worked corporate for 20 years and the vast bulk of that was cube farms or labs.
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Not only are our half height cube walls WAY more expensive than stick and drywall ($1200 per wall, 4 per cube 8 cubes in our area) but we have no privacy. The big issue with a lack of privacy is that 3 of us work with instructors and discuss student grades, etc. Which leads to possible FERPA violations - our dept. secretary and work study students have no business hearing me talk about a students grades with an instructor. And, since I am an adjunct instructor as well as a admin/professional employee, I d
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A cube farm would be a luxury to what we get in Australia; when I started my current role, the norm was half-height walls between everyone, which you could just see over.
Shortly after that, a new manager of a team that we worked closely with decided it would be a wonderful idea to remove those walls so that the teams could work "even more closely together". I made it very clear that if they did that to me, I would not be hanging around.
Sadly, since then, all of those relatively large desks have been replace
Obligatory (Score:3)
Desks! Bloody luxury.
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Grove's office was an 8 by 9 ft (2.4 by 2.7 m) cubicle like the other employees, as he disliked separate "mahogany-paneled corner offices." He states, "I've been living in cubicles since 1978 — and it hasn't hurt a whole lot."[15] Preferring this egalitarian atmosphere, he thereby made his work area accessible to anyone who walked by. There were no reserved parking spaces, and Grove parked wherever there was a space.[14] This atmosphere at work was partly a reflection of his personal life. Some who have known him, such as venture capitalist Arthur Rock, have stated that "he has no airs." Grove has lived modestly without expensive cars or an airplane.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: The popularity of open offices has exacerbated (Score:3)
I've worked in all three common styles: office, open and cube. I'd take a cubicle over the open plan any day of the week. I'd LOVE a cubicle. I had plenty of personal desk space, a place to put my things and hang my coat, and just enough privacy to get work done if I needed to concentrate. Cubicles are amazing.
Offices are better, no doubt. They're everything a cubicle is and more. But the open floor plan is so fucking bad that cubicles seem like luxury by comparison. Given that there are realistically only
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Cubes aren't inherently bad. I have been in offices which use cubes which have been lovely and I have been in offices which use cubes which have been shitty and the difference is very simple: did they choose cubes for flexible plan seating, or did they choose cubes because they couldn't afford walls? If the latter, they use short, cheap cube walls that do little to nothing to block noise and which everyone can trivially "groundhog" over. If the former, then they have 8' tall, sound-deadening cube walls. The
I can relate (Score:2, Interesting)
In my last job there was this retard sales guy who never graduated high school, but would constantly kiss the business owner's puckered butthole, and to make himself sound important he would hover around the office on the phone talking extremely loud (just like the owner of the company)
Usually the most noisy co-workers are the most subversive parasites who have 0 talent and are only trying to someone impress their superiors by their assholishness
Re:I can relate (Score:5, Insightful)
I find that normal speaking volume tends to be inversely proportional to intelligence.
Problem solved (Score:5, Insightful)
"This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds."
The rest of the civilized world has solved this problem, it's called paid sick leave.
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"This does not bode well for some workers facing cold and flu season, when hacking coughs make the rounds."
The rest of the civilized world has solved this problem, it's called paid sick leave.
This is in reference to open office environments. You're more likely to get sick from coworkers if there's no barrier between you. Most businesses in the US already offer paid sick leave. I can't think of a major business that doesn't have it, about the only ones I imagine wouldn't have it would be small businesses/mom & pop shops.
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Most businesses in the US already offer paid sick leave.
A small and set number of days, which is generally treated as short-notice day for doing anything that requires one to be out of office, like waiting for a plumber, having an eye exam, taking the car to service, or otherwise.
Once flu season starts, and employees have already used up their allotted sick days (whether due to actually being sick or not), they have to come in when sick or either be docked pay or risk getting fired.
So late fall and early winter, American companies tend to have a great many sick
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My company doesn't have "sick leave", we have PTO (personal time off). This is a twisted system which means your sick time and vacation time are the same pool. Naturally, this means you screw up your vacation plans if you take sick time, so I just come in to work unless I'm on my death bed.
Incentives matter.
- Necron69
Re: Problem solved (Score:2)
I've never worked at a company here in San Diego that deducted PTO for sick days. You just take the days off as needed. PTO is for planned vacation only, usually.
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Some local governments have laws requiring actual sick leave. Seattle (well, King County) is like that - I get a handful of actual sick days in addition to PTO days, but people who work for the same company in other cities just get the PTO.
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Indeed, my solution to this problem is to come in no matter how sick I am. Sadly, I don't get sick very much so I don't get to share the joy as much as I'd like to.
If I cared enough:
"I make myself sick just to poison you"
- Marilyn Manson
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The rest of the civilized world has solved this problem, it's called paid sick leave.
That's *IF* the sick coworkers take it. I know far too many people that come in sick because, "They don't want to get their spouses and children sick."
So instead, they and their hacking cough come into the office and put 100s of other families at risk. I wonder if this stems from when they were children and their mother told them, "You're not sick enough to stay home."
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What planet are you living in? The US with its regressive medical, vacation, and sick leave policies is in what appears to be an economic death spiral.
Open Office Failure (Score:5, Insightful)
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing. Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run. And if this is how they think they need to see what people are doing, they fail at being managers. It's simple enough to give people tasks with milestones, and monitor their progress. I'm fortunate in that I'm able to work from home periodically. I get much more accomplished there because the only interruptions are from the phone or the doorbell. That said, I don't want to give up the face to face discussions that happen in the break room and hallways at work.
Re:Open Office Failure (Score:4, Insightful)
The popularity of these among upper management is typically because of cost or control reasons. They're much cheaper than closed offices, and management can walk by to see exactly what you're doing.
It's not only that. There is this myth floating around for the past couple decades that "collaboration" is the cool new workplace thing. People read stories about Google or Apple and tales of workers just randomly meeting in some common room and brainstorming the next new cool thing, and managers start drooling and saying, "Yeah -- let's get rid of the office walls. Get rid of the cubes! Break down the barriers, and we'll get better collaboration, which means more creative and efficient work!"
Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Actually, those people who have real, actual offices already have those options -- because they have a door. If you are working intently, you shut your door. If you want to be open for other random communication, you keep your door open.
Typical penny wise & pound foolish mentality. The constant interruptions that occur end up costing them much more in the long run.
True. Studies show that workers in "open plan" offices are less productive, tend to be more distracted, have more health issues and stress, take more sick days, etc., etc. It was a terrible idea, and probably never saved money in the long run.
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Yeah, except that doesn't actually work. It's true that chance encounters with coworkers can be beneficial for brainstorming or bouncing ideas or whatever, but that happens best when you're OPEN TO THAT, which means you're not deeply focused on some specific task at your desk or whatever. More recent studies are showing (surprise!) that workers actually need lack of distractions, and a more isolated environment is often easier for that. The best office approach would be to offer both options -- closed offices for when you're focused on a task... and then open spaces, or tables, or common areas, or whatever when you're less focused and are open for random contact and collaboration.
Yes, and if you want to encourage employees to spend more time being open to those? Nice, inviting breakrooms and lunch rooms (with decent lunch to be had!) will work wonders, especially if you have nice closed offices so employees have time to actually leave their desk to enjoy those things.
This is why you can't use a good keyboard any more (Score:3)
I was asked to take my Unicomp "clicky" keyboard (Unicomp has the license for the original IBM clicky keyboard design) home, and forced to use a crappy Microsoft keyboard because the prima donna in the next cubicle couldn't stand the sound.
This despite the fact that it was a huge, chaotic, open-office with loud-ass game developers, producers, etc. (Sony Playstation development studio.) Though we were in the more-sedate back-end/server development part of the office.
But, OK. It disturbed the prima donna. But was it my fault? Or a stupid office layout?
Really, my worst annoyance there was developers using IM to communicate, when we were in eight cubicles all together, just a few steps from each other. The plus of just walking over to the other developer's cubicle is that you can how busy they are, and decide to talk later, interrupt anyway because it is too important, etc. That is, use actual judgement instead of just casting out an IM and then stewing over it if not immediately answered.
But that would take actual COMMON SENSE.
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To be fair the unicomp is about as loud as a keyboard gets - you could always get a cherry mx brown and have all the tactility with less noise.
Re:This is why you can't use a good keyboard any m (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd be more active and less whiny about it. One day when working late I'd pour epoxy all over the keyboard.
If you replaced it, I'd see what facial indentations it could make.
You seriously use a keyboard like that in an open office? Speaking of prima donna ... I heard there's someone upset by the type of keyboard they're using now.
Bait aside, this is a perfect exampe of the types of distractions you get in open offices. People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
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People often don't realize how insanely annoying they are to others.
The emerging standard in open plan offices is "wear headphones, idiot, it's noisy", with anything short of shouting being dismissed as your problem. Makes sense to me. You can't expect to constrain everyone around you.
What really pisses me off is the lack of dignity (and privacy is a big part of dignity). The older you get (and the more oddball health issues you accumulate), the more this matters - to everyone around, not just you. I'd prefer to know much less than I do about my co-worker's colostomy ba
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You're talking about the secretarial pool. They generally transcribed someone else's work, it didn't really require any thought at all. Data entry is not the same as creative work.
Only one question? (Score:2)
If you asked me if I get distracted in the workplace by noisy co-workers I'd answer yes.
If you asked me if I've ever solved a problem by overhearing a conversation from a noisy coworker, I'd answer CONSTANTLY.
For the occasions where I do need peace and quiet, well Bose QC35s live up to their model number, unfortunately at $350 and given the quality of sound they also live up to their brandname.
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For the occasions where I do need peace and quiet, well Bose QC35s live up to their model number, unfortunately at $350 and given the quality of sound they also live up to their brandname.
I have a set of Bose QuietComfort 15 [amazon.com] headphones, and they do a good job of reducing, but not completely cancelling noise. I will use them whenever I need to really concentrate.
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...If you asked me if I get distracted in the workplace by noisy co-workers I'd answer yes. If you asked me if I've ever solved a problem by overhearing a conversation from a noisy coworker, I'd answer CONSTANTLY....
What if I asked you whether or not you are a nosy co-worker who should concentrate more on your own work and less on the work of others?
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Then you would probably be fired from most engineering jobs, except the paper pushing copy-paste engineers at consultant firms. Problems aren't solved in isolation.
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I interviewed at Analog Devices locally a couple years back. I really liked their setup. The center area was open space with a few cubicles for the drop-in marketing/sales guys, the rest was lab area. Around the perimeter were proper offices for the engineers. Most folks had their doors open, but it was expected that if you needed to focus, have a loud discussion, or talk on a phone conference you would close your office door.
I did not get that job, so I ended up at another good company that sadly has t
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Most folks had their doors open, but it was expected that if you needed to focus, have a loud discussion, or talk on a phone conference you would close your office door.
I work in an open floor plan, but our cube farm has enough sense to provide "quiet rooms" basically single desks and a telephone + internet connection for those times where you either really need to concentrate or really need to tear someone a new one over the phone. It works quite well.
The risk of the typical office layout (IMO) is not people slacking off, but rather people isolating themselves from discussion.
Eating sounds (Score:5, Insightful)
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concentration (Score:3, Funny)
Worker: doing any actual work here is difficult with all the noise..
Boss: well, I manage just fine
Worker: I said actual work
I can mute my phone (Score:2)
but for some reason, I'm not allowed to mute my coworker.
History repeating itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Cube farms were a step up from the open offices of the 50's/60's. Then the hipsters decided that cubes were bad and that open offices were the way to go. But the irony is that they are now discovering what was learnt in the 60's. From Cubicle [wikipedia.org]
Propst concluded from his studies that during the 20th Century the office environment had changed substantially, particularly in relation to the amount of information being processed.[1][2] The amount of information an employee had to analyze, organize, and maintain had increased dramatically. Despite this, the basic layout of the corporate office had remained largely unchanged, with employees sitting behind rows of traditional desks in a large open room, devoid of privacy. Propst's studies suggested that an open environment actually reduced communication between employees, and impeded personal initiative.[1][2] On this, Propst commented "One of the regrettable conditions of present day offices is the tendency to provide a formula kind of sameness for everyone."[1][2] In addition, the employees' bodies were suffering from long hours of sitting in one position. Propst concluded that office workers require both privacy and interaction, depending on which of their many duties they were performing.
It's sad that the wheel keeps being reinvented.
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Many people dislike extremely quiet offices, and they can be bad for cohesiveness. I often overhear relevant stuff and can either note it or offer something valuable. Back when we had a small corner office with the door shut most of the time we were cut off and less efficient.
Personally extreme quiet is off-putting. I have to open a window or put on headphones with some white noise. Lack of sound makes humans more sensitive to sudden noises. People who hate sniffles and doors moving might find it better if
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This site was a lifesaver for me: https://mynoise.net [mynoise.net].
Open offices are designed for spying (Score:2)
It was a disaster because no one got work done, constant chatting and distractions.
My only distraction... (Score:5, Funny)
The sighing... (Score:2)
A jump to the left, and then a step to the right.. (Score:2)
Did a copy of Joel On Software or Peopleware fall thorough a timewarp from 1833?
WPR doesn't care (Score:3)
Flatus (Score:2)
Coworker flatus can be a major distraction.
worst experience (Score:2)
It can always get worse! (Score:2)
Just in case regular cubes aren't bad enough, a new high-level manager joined my company a couple years ago and decided to go with short-walled cubes so everyone can SEE each other and REALLY collaborate. Luckily that plague has not yet descended upon my location, and it looks like it won't. If it did, I'd just work from home 100% of the time. (Luckily my company is pretty good about that.) Besides the noise, I don't want to feel like everyone is staring at me all day long. Did I mention no one else on my t
It is surprising what you can get used to (Score:2)
I use hearing protection (Score:2)
The large orange construction site ones. I think I'll take the company CC and get me noise deadening headphones.
Old Klingon Proverb (Score:4, Funny)
There is an old Klingon proverb.
Silence is golden. Duct tape is silver.
Re:"Bodily noises"? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:"Bodily noises"? (Score:5, Interesting)
How things have changed. In the 90's I went to a startup (sw) and we had offices, all of us. The company we left had switched from offices to cubicles. And in keeping with true PHB mentality, the prior company had taken a poll if we wanted to stay in offices or switch to cubes. They pinky-swear promised they would do what the employees wanted. Of course the employees overwhelmingly voted for offices and when the results came in, the PHB's said we "know" you really wanted cubes, soo they went to cubes.
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It was really exciting and a lot more fun than having my own office.
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Yeah when we were being moved into our "open office environment" crap, we got all the talks about how studies showed it helped people work better (when the info was the exact opposite) and that people "collaborate" more and all. Bullshit, just be honest and say you're doing it because it's a lot cheaper. I can at least respect being told the truth rather than being lied to.
I ended up buying a pair of Parrot Ziks and drown out the outside noise with the music/movie of my choice off my ipad. I need music o
Re:"Bodily noises"? (Score:5, Interesting)
Where I work there's a guy sitting about 2 metres away who grinds his teeth. Constantly. Every single day. Have you ever heard the phrase "familiarity breeds contempt"? This is a perfect example. The sound is not unlike the creaking sound an old wooden chair makes when you sit in it.
Then there's the guy who purposely sneezes as loud as he possibly can for reasons only he knows.
Now, one of them makes noise without realising it and stops when he's asked to (briefly) but the other...
Working every day with either of them is bound to make any sane person pissed off.
Re:"Bodily noises"? (Score:5, Funny)
When I started my first "real" job there was a guy on my intake who after a couple of months got transferred to some esoteric team. When I asked how it was going he said it was OK, apart from the guy who constantly quacked.
I thought he was taking the piss. I went round there a few days later (you couldn't just walk in; it was semi-secure but I found an excuse) and it was totally true.
I caught up with him ten years later. He was still there. I didn't ask whether he got used to it or just strangled the loonbag.
Re:"Bodily noises"? (Score:5, Interesting)
I am one of those people.
Thank you for your understanding.
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Is that you Milton?
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11 is never a reasonable volume.
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It's very likely he's got a family to feed, etc. But if Fragnet is rolling solo, I too vote the Bolivia option, he can always find work. If no jobs are available, he can join some paramilitary group and, well, that's also work but at least it's outdoors.
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Where I work there's a guy sitting about 2 metres away who grinds his teeth. Constantly. Every single day.
Damn you've got good hearing...
No, it's just very loud. People even further away from me can hear it.
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Actually, constantly distracted thumb twiddlers who know how to, say, program, but have given up trying to get real work done cost way more.
Re:Enclosed offices cost more (Score:5, Insightful)
In the bay area, I'd bet heavily that this is not true, even despite the huge cost of land there. A typical worker's desk is about 2 meters wide, and they need a bunch of space behind them to wheel back into, so lets go with 2.4m x 2.0m - this is conveniently the standard "minimum" area a worker should be allowed as defined by the HSE in the UK. Compare that against an office, plenty I've seen have been of the order of 3.5m square for two people sitting in opposite corners. Lets call it 4m square to account for walls and doors etc (probably an overestimation)
So then, we're talking about 4.8 square meters for a worker in open plan, and 8 square meters for a worker in an office. In the bay area, office space leasing costs about $500 per square meter per year, so you're looking at $1,600 per year overhead for putting workers in 2 man offices vs open plan.
A typical bay area engineer salary is of the order of $160,000 a year (plus bonuses etc). For seniors, more than that even. That means you only need to make a worker 1% more efficient by sticking them in an office for it to pay off. The reduction in sick days (if you can cut out 2 sick days a year, you've made them 1% more efficient) alone accounts for that. Add their increased happiness, and productivity, and it's very very likely to be a huge win sticking people in offices.
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That's why things are getting off shored, and at least where I work, the Silly Valley/Bay area teams are slowly getting shutdown.
Re:Enclosed offices cost more (Score:4, Informative)
Correct. However, management loves hearing the accountant (who did the simple calculation of savings per employee * number of employees) who says "hey, we can save $xK/month". But no one listens to that same accountant when he says "hey, we might be losing some money because we have everyone packed in like pigs heading for slaughter."
Re:Individual enclosed offices are best for (Score:4, Informative)
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and then they said work though lunch at your desk.
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Just as long as they drown out the voices in your head, it's all good.