Open Office Spaces

Anger
41

Fortunately for me, we don’t have actually open office plans where I’m at. Everyone has an assigned desk. But the cube walls are half height or something and each of us is crammed into less than half of the space of a traditional cube. I can only back my chair about 2 ft from the typing position without hitting the cube wall of the person behind me.

If you need to have a sensitive conversation, you have to book a conference room. We have actual managers and supervisors sitting in these “cubes.”

In an ideal world, all of that might be tolerable. In practice, though, it’s really not. I had to invest in noise cancelling headphones.1 The majority of my “wing” neighbors work very different positions than I do. They’re unboxing, reboxing, and moving equipment constantly. The equipment they’re working on is constantly making noise.

1And, no, the company wouldn’t have paid for my noise cancelling headphones even though they caused the situation. :joy_cat:

If I’m in a teleconference with a group of people, I regularly get the notification that the other participants wish I was unmuted. Even in a regular situation, I don’t get being unmuted when you’re not talking.2 But you really don’t want to hear my background noise and conversations from my neighbors when I’m not talking.

2Why do I have to hear all these people typing and clicking? If you’re going to put the meeting on speaker, can you not put your keyboard close enough to the phone that it literally shakes when you’re abusing the keyboard? Membrane keyboards aren’t meant to be wailed on like that.

Fortunately, my department doesn’t involve people in meetings unless they need to participate in the meeting. Unfortunately, that means people all over the world get to hear the sound of boxes being broken down or what my neighbors are going to do next on their project car whenever I say something on a call.

Even though we limit unnecessary meeting participation, I spend roughly a quarter of every work week in meetings and booking conference rooms requires another department’s approval.

I’m sure this compromise between traditional cubicles and “open office spaces” isn’t worse than open office spaces, but it sure is hellish.

7 Likes
42

I’d say that’s still an open office space. Non-open office spaces have corridors leading to offices with real walls and doors that close – the likes of which started to become vanishingly rare in the late 70s, when companies like Hewlett Packard bragged about their cube farm setup (and they were still thought of as forward thinking).

Most office workers these days have only ever worked in an open office plan. With things like hot desking, they’re getting more open all the time.

8 Likes
43

Hey, look. Real scientific research now confirming that yes, open offices are shit.

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/373/1753/20170239

8 Likes
44

Wow. I would have expected open offices to have a lot of problems, but I would not have expected them to completely subvert the one specific thing that they’re intended to improve to that much of a degree. Yet in retrospect it does make sense. With no relaxation and eyes on us at all times, we are naturally less productive and isolate more.

It’s actually good news though, at least for the increasing number of hybrid companies that have some workers in office and others working remotely. It means that the office workers are using the same communications methods as the remote workers, so the remotes aren’t left out of those critical interactions (since they’re not happening F2F). That was the #1 expected problem with remote work, so the fact that open offices fix an entirely different problem than they were intended to, and do so by completely failing at the one thing they were supposed to do, is kinda cool.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!

6 Likes
45

Coming in late… well I have been busy for awhile.
I am current in a open office situation but it works as we all have 6 monitors and need to be able to yap at each other easily for help, conformation, etc.
It is a bullshit job mostly… The proper escalation management we do when IT things go south is needed and then it is nice to yell out ‘Hey Jason crank up the management bridge, be on it, and send the page out for it’ while you are busy getting the tech bridge going and the general ‘this thing is b0rk3d alert’ written.

But 98% of what we do is be the go between for the call centers and the engineers who support their tools for 2 reasons, the call centers are too busy to keep up pressure on the engineers and the engineers would let 90% of the tickets just sit and rot till the next release in hopes that makes the problem go away.

8 Likes
46

I need to figure out a way to leave this anonymously on the desks of certain key people at work.

6 Likes
47

Really? Me and mine do our best to figure out how to reproduce a problem, and then solve it. But reproducing can be incredibly difficult. And it’s really hard to solve if you can’t reliably trigger the error condition. I like to think that the only things we leave sitting are those that we can’t relliably/accurately debug. And they do irritate us. We want to solve them, but if you can’t actually observe the bug happening, it’s really hard.

7 Likes
48

I have in one case… They need to fix a phone number on the support site or get the local phone system to route right or something like that. If I ping them in IM they just go away or don’t respond. I will have to get their manager in the loop if there isn’t even a ‘hey it will take a few days, here is an ETA’ by Wednesday.

6 Likes
49

Note that adequate ear protection is not available.

8 Likes
50

I HATE open office spaces. We had 3/4 walls at my current job where fortunately I now work from home. Those were tolerable. At another 6 month temp job was the very worst open office space, where we had basically long tables with little dividers about shoulder height between our individual spaces. My boss was this strict Russian lady and she was RIGHT NEXT to me, literally shoulder to shoulder.

All the programmers were in a room called “The Cage” which was the opposite of Feng Shui where the desks ran around the perimeter of this room which had floor to ceiling glass on one wall - so they ALL had their backs to each other. And the people on the glass wall were visible to the entire large room of the tech writers and tech support and sales people.

Then at the center was a little cubicle with 2 desk spaces on each side. So they all had their backs to the programmers behind them. It was the absolute worst environment. EVERYONE had chat messengers on their computers and that is how we all actually talked. I was best friends with one of the lead programmers and no one even knew we were friends because we talked on the chat all day and barely ever in person.

No one uses the phone at my current office unless we really need to do voice calls to hash something out. We use Skype chat by preference. There are a lot of videoconference calls and many managers have back to back videoconference meetings - if you are next to one of them, you are constantly listening to their meetings.

I am SO HAPPY to be working from home now and not having the distractions from the office or the pretense of working when I am not really needing to.

11 Likes
51

I recently moved offices and somehow my new open office is even worse than before. It’s right by the building atrium, kitchen, and big conference rooms. This means that any time there’s an event in the atrium I get all the noise from that, I get the hourly crush of people coming/going from conference rooms and having long and loud chats about shit I don’t care about, and then I get the smells of people cooking their shit in the kitchen.

That’s all in addition to the constant lack of privacy and people feeling like it’s perfectly fine to come and bother me unannounced while I’m trying to get work done. I’ll be sitting at my desk with headphones on deep in thought or “in the zone” and then some chucklehead waves their hands in my face or bangs on my desk to get my attention. Boom. Focus lost and it’ll take me a good 30 or so minutes to get back into the flow again.

I just don’t know how to fix this. I love my job and what I do but fucking hell am I ever tested on a daily basis by this work environment.

10 Likes
52

Take videos and explain/complain to HR? Or is that counterproductive?

It’s amazing how upper management ignores human limitations these days (always has I guess).

4 Likes
53

I have a friend who used to work from home but now has a new job at an office. Eventually she can do part of the time from home, but for now, she is in the office. She is also right near the office kitchen and says it’s like when you at a restaurant and you are right by the kitchen - all the smells and all the hustle and bustle.

8 Likes
54

The push toward open offices comes from up top. I suppose I could get some sort of medical exception from my shrink but more likely than not I’d just be asked to work from home - which carries it’s own set of struggles and problems.

It’s pretty miserable. I’m sensitive to noise and odors so it’s a double whammy.

11 Likes