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Comment by alexkus | Hacker News Reader

> Criticisms about working space often come down to 'the garden on the other side of the fence would be easier to work in'.

Yep.

There are 150 people on our floor, all open plan. The partitions are only 1m high. It's not a problem. Some people cope fine without even needing headphones. I probably wear headphones 50% of the time. It's relatively quiet but I've learnt to zone out of the background noises.

Likewise I've worked from home, worked in cramped "5 people to 2 desks" conditions, in vast cube farms in the US (with 8ft high cube walls) with 400 people per area. All have their pros and cons. Distractions come in all forms, IM software, street noise, email notifications, people having conversations right next to your desk, other 'phones ringing, etc.

You just learn to adapt to what you've got and cope with it.

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You're assuming everyone is like you. I have worked in every type of office environment and open plan with 50 people was the worst. I couldn't get used to it. It was distracting and anxiety inducing every day. I worked at the company for five years and quit six months after they switched us to open plan.

I dont think it is that open plan offices have to be bad. I have worked in environments where they worked reasonably well. Typically there were a couple things that helped including team (a small area dedicated to a team that worked closely together to solve problems), and an environment or workload that did not include multitasking (call centers are good for this most of the time despite the auditory distractions).

The problem though is that in chaotic environments, open plan offices are disasters waiting to happen, or maybe they are disasters constantly happening. You have no insulation from anything else and so no ability to be productive and take real control.

On the whole the fact is that distractions come in different forms and all forms of distractions have pros and cons. A fully isolated environment is productivity-killing. We need some socialization to be productive. On the other hand, open plan offices very often are too social.

On the whole I prefer working from home. Sure there are distractions, but on the whole, my productivity is best there. I can insulate myself often from the distractions and break time with family members is a wonderful perk.

I think you can try to improve it. However, too often people do use the environment as an excuse - "I couldn't hit the deadline because Geoff was typing too loudly".

There's also an element of the cultural perceptions of offices. "Important people have their own offices. I want to be perceived as important. Therefore, I must have my own office."

People ineed use it as an excuse, but sometimes it's a valid point that's disregarded because others, especially when it's a consensus, don't agree that the environment causes a problem. You end up with people being labelled as "anti-social misfit loners".

> There's also an element of the cultural perceptions of offices. "Important people have their own offices. I want to be perceived as important. Therefore, I must have my own office."

Unfortunately, there is also the corollary: "You can't have your own room because you aren't important enough." Even though several rooms were completely empty. Glad I quit that job.

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