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Comment by grokas | Hacker News Reader

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grokas

"Nearly 50% of people working in open offices are dissatisfied with their sound privacy"

Should be:

Nearly 50% of people working in open offices don't have good over-ear headphones.

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No. Fuck that. I don't normally curse on here, but I think it's warranted.

I own a great pair of over ear, noise cancelling headphones. But I shouldn't have to risk damaging my hearing because management thinks having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers is a good idea.

A million time this. Ear damage accumulates over time. I am sure that excessive headphone usage at work will be number one reason of hearing loss in a few years.

Unless we turn things around.

One doesn't actually have to listen to anything through the headphones. I've used noise cancelling without music in the past.

I also have a set of earbud rubber thingies that have been stoppered with hot glue and a short piece of hollow lolly stick. Those fit better (don't feel itchy after long periods) and provide more isolation than the squishy yellow ear protectors.

Nose canceling headphones don't work for blocking conversations.

Not all, but some achieve very nice results.

E.g. Bose Quiet Comfort 20 are indeed good also for blocking more quiet conversations.

https://www.amazon.com/Bose-QuietComfort-Acoustic-Cancelling...

The only way NC headphones block conversations is because they are also acoustically isolating. That is, they would block conversations even with the NC feature turned off. The headphones you link to look like this: they're basically earplugs with headphones built in. Earplugs block conversations because they physically block sound waves from entering your ears. The same principle works with the big over-the-ear cans. It's not the NC feature that's helping, it's the fact that the headphones themselves are isolating your ears from the outside world.

I own them so I can assure that having them plugged in without NC does not block conversation voices. Turn them on and they are gone or way quieter.

Edit due to downrate: I own or owned multiple over ear medium size NC models and the mentioned in'ear ones win by large.

Hmm, interesting. I wonder if it's because they fit in the ear, rather than sitting outside like more traditional headphones. This would allow them to cancel noise at higher frequencies since the driver-to-eardrum distance is smaller.

Have you used other, more traditional can-type NC headphones? Can you compare?

I edited my previous comment to address your questions.

Agreed - there's a big difference between having it on and off.

How loud do people turn their headphones at work?

That depends obviously, go ask araound. I would say some louder, some less.

> having developers sit in the middle of a bunch of salespeople and project managers

So, about that...

I work in a cube farm, and I love it. But because we're running out of space, they stuck me in the only open cube they had, and so I'm not sitting anywhere near my team or even my department. I'm in network engineering, but the other people on my row are sales engineers (for a product I have nothing to do with), the inside sales department sits on the three rows to my left, and the marketing department sits on the two rows to my right.

As such, I'm now quite familiar with our sales pitches, and I pick up all kinds of juicy gossip from the inside sales team's daily standup. I'm at the point where "Net Promoter Score" no longer sounds like a real phrase (yay, semantic satiation!). I do have to admit that I've taken to listening to music on my headphones... not super loud, but it helps me get in the zone when the inside sales team is firing on all cylinders. I don't mind it too much... they're all fun people to talk to during our downtime, and I've actually become really close with one of the marketing guys, who I probably wouldn't have met if we didn't have space issues.

And it's not going to last much longer. We just took over another suite in our building, we're putting the finishing touches on renovations, and as soon as that's done the whole sales organization is moving there (the move will probably happen next week, or maybe even this Friday), and my department will move to where sales used to be. I'm hoping I'll get to sit in mostly the same place (marketing isn't moving, and I like those people), though I'd love to take over the window cube behind me.

The thing is, since you do different jobs, you can ignore the conversations around you if you need to concentrate.

If you were working in close proximity to people doing a similar job, you wouldn't have that luxury.

In my workplace, it seems rude to have headphones on.

Headphones don't damage your hearing, headphones at high volume damage hearing. If you're using noise cancelling (or just closed ear in most environments), you can listen to your audio at a reasonable volume, if you're listening at high volume to drown out other noise that could be dangerous.

Noise-canceling headphones do not cancel out conversations, so you must listen at high volume to drown out that other noise.

The only thing noise-canceling headphones are really good for is canceling out constant drone, for things such as fan noise and jet engine drone. That's why they're so popular for frequent airplane travelers. They do absolutely nothing if you're in an office surrounded by yapping coworkers (at least nothing more than a comparable set of non-noise-canceling headphones).

In fact, I'll add that if I'm surrounded by a bunch of computers with fan noise, using noise-canceling headphones lets me hear coworkers' conversations even better.

Your right. When you consider it there has been a few million years of iteration of the human ear to attune it to the sound of the human voice. A difficult problem to overcome to say the least.

It's not just that, it has to do with the way noise cancellation circuits work. They work great on constant white-noise-like hums within a certain frequency band; they don't work on transients that cross a wide range of frequencies (as does human voice). They especially don't work well at higher frequencies because of the shorter wavelengths and the distance between the drivers and your eardrums (which can vary), and human voice has a lot of higher-frequency components. If you could stick the drivers right next to your eardrums with custom-fitted in-ear plugs, you could get far better performance, but that's neither economical nor desirable to most people for comfort reasons.

True. I would like to listen to music when I like to, not when I have to. Anyway noise is not everything. It is so easy to be disrupted by people walking around.

I'm continually surprised how the smallest people seem to stomp the loudest up and down the hallway.

Sorry your management sucks?

That only looks at one side of the picture. Sound privacy is partially inbound, yes, and that can be solved with quality headphones. It's also outbound, though. If I'm on a conference call, I'd really rather not have to worry about other people listening to what I say.

Also, not everyone wants to listen to music/podcasts/video/anything while they work. The solution shouldn't be "just isolate your ears!"

Ironically, my only problem with individual offices is that people then seem to think it's ok to not use headphones, and to use speaker phone. The sound isolation between neighbouring offices is rarely good enough to allow this. The way the HVAC system in the Microsoft buildings that I worked in was plumbed, you tended to have great sound isolation from one neighbour and be intimately connected with the other.

Most of the time I'm not actually listening to anything, I just have my cans on as a sound buffer, and they're ready when/if I play something with audio.

To quote a former VP at a former employer, wearing headphones in the open operations center is direct and intentional insubordination and discipline will be applied as such, because the company is spending a lot of money to foster coordination and interoperation between teams. Its interesting that they had the will and the money to enforce architectural changes in the literal sense but not in the internal organization sense, we continued to primarily work against each other, merely closer together.

I take it this a (one, not the only) reason the employer was described as "former"?

The stability described in the article seems to be more visual, not aural. There's constant mental interruption when the mind has to process stuff going on all around you visually, determining if somebody's going to bump in you, vibrations through any shared desk structures, etc.

I once had a foot-tapping chair-twirler on my left and a desk-drummer on my right. Very little work was accomplished until I moved away from them.

Having 2-3 screens completely occupying your field of view helps! Maybe this is one of the key advantages multiple screens provide, besides displaying useful information.

> determining if somebody's going to bump in you

I think the human aspect of that is a huge factor. I've always had a problem being around large crowds (anxiety, dizziness, mental strain). I think my nervous brain is constantly trying to determine how I might interact with the people around me, and when there are so many people I just get overwhelmed. Same thing happened in the (rather large) office I work at. For the first few days I was feeling mental strain only a few hours into the day, but after the office and the people in it became a known quantity I think my brain stopped trying to analyze everything.

Except prolonged exposure to headphones makes you go deaf. I've got enough hearing loss as it is.

Good headphones for such a setup are tightly closed, DJ-style ones. They isolate you from outside noise, so you can listen to e.g. quietly playing piano pieces (don't like Schubert? try Rick Wakeman) and concentrate.

It's not headphones, it's loudness. Just don't crank the volume on your headphones and you'll be fine.

Prolonged exposure to unhealthy volume levels makes you go deaf.

FTFY

Simply taking headphones out of the box they came in doesn't make you go deaf.

I don't like to listen to music when concentrating on anything, with the exception of driving.

I use mine without anything playing about 70% of the time I have them on.

They can block out ambient/office noise pretty well and can help concentration.

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