Comment by equalarrow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by equalarrow | Hacker News Reader

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Hah, nice. I sometimes think that..

A few years back I worked for a prominent design company. Our small group (of 4) had a nice little corner of 1/4 of an entire floor. "Oooh, nice, brick walls and people that look busy" I thought when I first joined. Not even a week later, reality started to set it. It was so ridiculously noisy.

And there were, of course, a few people that contributed to everything. I would sometimes get in around 8, it would be quiet and the usual offenders were actually working. From 10-6, it was like, forget it, noise non-stop. After 6, back to quiet.

This became really frustrating and after asking the offenders to chill, I made a trip to HR to ask wtf? HR was basically like, meh, nothing we can do. I ended up wishing those offenders would quit or worse. It was so bad and they were so loud.

After that I was like, never again an open floor plan. It was the worst thing ever and a total sham for those that want to focus and just get things done. Requiring the people whole want quiet to put headphones on only adds insult to injury.

Too bad quiet just isn't valued anymore..

Sounds a lot like a place I was at for a bit. My observation was that the noisy people killed productivity for the whole place. Not only because no one else could focus enough to get work done, but also because the noisy ones never really did anything (yes, I checked commit logs). Passing cat video links around, playing music through laptop speakers("your headphones broken, bro?"), bro-style fist bumps because they put a sheen on a button, but no real actual coding.

I see a lot of people entering and exiting and their usual reason is taking a break. Emails about jokes and social activities get sent around the office fairly frequently as well. I'm just wondering how do you draw the line between allowing the employee freedom vs just clamping down on shenanigans.

For coders, check commit logs and the like. They can email cat video links to each other all day long for all I care, but if their last commit was last week then we've got a problem. IOW, you don't cut down on the shenanigans, you make sure the work is getting done. As it often turns out, if there's a lot of cat video links there probably isn't a lot of work and vice versa.

Were I appointed to be king, if you're noisy then STFU, full stop, whether you're getting your work done or not. Indoor voices, people, or take it somewhere else.

You don't clamp down anything.

Are those people productive? If yes, you keep them, if not you warn/fire them.

We've had issues in our office where a new employee (actually a co-op was completely incapable of controlling the volume of their voice. People on the entire other side of the office, with earbuds on under their over-the-ear headphones, were having a hard time working. That person ended up leaving, and I ended up sending some frustrated IMs to other people on his team. Eventually, I just moved my desk and the co-op learned to keep his voice down, but for that length of time it was impossible to concentrate for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

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