But that's also a really annoying part of it. I don't want to have to put on headphones all the time.

This is the setup that pro Starcraft tournaments use so that players can't hear the announcers and crowd.

(I don't have a problem with ambient conversation at, say, Starbucks, but I find myself very distracted by people talking about work stuff in the same room as me.)

They also squeezed my head which was uncomfortable after 8 - 10 hours.

Lastly, people kept trying to talk to me, which meant I had to pull them off and put them on and pull them off and put them on which was a little maddening.

The two headsets were 1) voice chat with your team 2) large 'surround sound' headphones that really signaled direction.

More recent tournaments they seem to have integrated ear defenders with headphones with Mic's on. (Previously they had 3 headsets, the ear buds for sound, the defenders then their sponsors headsets around their necks for the mic.)

Current workplace has a no-headphones rule, exactly because of that.

Many people were donning headphones as soon as they arrived in the office and not taking them off until home time, simply to avoid having to interact with anyone else.

So now no-one can avail of shorter periods of non-interruption, but I understand why they banned them.

In-ear earphones seem to be tolerated, so long as they are removed when someone comes to talk.

Either way its something to tap to find out what's going on.

Instead I use earplugs.

edit: unlike any other earbuds I have tried, they are engineered to survive the inevitable wax-plugging. Just replace the filter & you're back in business.

It's a real thing. This summer, because my room would get hot at night, I had to leave a fan on. At first, I couldn't sleep with the noise. But now that it's getting colder, I've tried leaving it off, and guess what. Ha. Now I need the noise.

The role I was going for was as a technical consultant to improve the quality of the work - go figure

I was way more productive when there were just two of us in the same office. That was when the organisation was just starting out.

Milton: Uh, they said I could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven while I'm collating….

Peter: But, no, no, no. I know you're allowed to, I was just thinking, like a personal favor, y'know?

Milton: I, I told Bill that if Sandra's going to listen to her headphones while she' working, I can listen to the radio while I'm collating...

(Initially I just asked him to turn it down, and I don't recall the exact response, but it was probably approximately, "No.")

A little bit off topic, but I too have experienced this, and I have to say, it's awful for productivity, team building, and team assimilation. As a new hire, I would send my mentor a question and it might be ten minutes to fifty minutes before I would get a reply. By then, I'd all but forgotten what I was asking about in the first place, since I had moved on because of not knowing how long I'd have to wait. That led to wasted time and an overall loss of focus.

No matter the environment, text-based and asynchronous communication just aren't very effective compared to spoken communication, even when considering the interrupted party momentarily losing their flow.

I have worked at offices where this norm did not exist. I would strongly challenge your assertion in that case. My productivity definitely was adversely affected. What I think a lot of people lose sight of is that interruptions are additive. If you get interrupted once or twice, that's fine. You can recover and get on with whatever you're working on. But if the interruptions are a regular feature (especially when they're for little things that take two to five minutes to solve, but require you to drop all your current context) it takes longer and longer to recover. At some point (usually around lunchtime in my case) I'd just give up and hop on IRC or Hacker News, knowing that it was unlikely I'd get much work done that day.

It got to the point where I'd come in at 6:30am and leave at 3:30pm just so that I could have a few hours of uninterrupted coding time at the beginning of the day. And this was in an office where it was just other developers I had to deal with. I would probably last less than a week in an office that I had to share with non-developers (especially sales, who have to be constantly on the phone).

I go in the morning and everything is ready to go and so am I, but then attempting to load my brain with whatever I am working on, getting a question every 5 minutes or so makes it seem like a running a marathon and the cognitive load is such that I would rather just dedicate the time and work on it at home.

Today a coworker was IM'ing me and I then I realized that he was sitting literally 18" from me behind a partition so I just starting talking out loud to him. Seemed to unsettle him. Collaborate damn it!

Do they want to hear you talking to him? I sure wouldn't want people talking while I'm trying to concentrate.

"Collaboration" doesn't have to mean annoying your coworkers. If you need to do things aloud, that's fine--I sometimes find it better too--but it's vastly better go somewhere private for it.

Via email (or text based communication), then the result is clear, and I can refer back to it afterwards. Also meetings with non-technical users tend to go around in circles where they discuss trivial details that are pretty irrelevant.

Try doing that to your wife on work-from-home days at your own peril.

If my experience / observation is any guide, the result is utterly epic shitfit.

It depends on both the way you do that, and the way people talk to each other there (aka the culture).

At my last job (less applicable now as I WFH), it was acceptable practice to give a "hold on" to everyone you'd run into on a daily basis. Maybe not the CEO, but the VP of Engineering would wait a sec if you needed to get something done Right There.

This is a weaird problem to me. At my last job, we had the "ask async first" thing--but, yeah, if they're not responding and it's urgent, then of course you go ask them, that's just obvious. But the point is that this behavior should be rare because it's not "momentarily" losing their flow, it's often losing it for ten to fifteen minutes. A two-second IM is less likely to make them lose it than you walking over, so start there.

The best new hire layout I've had was purposely being assigned to share an office with my mentor. Since we were in a physical office, I wasn't afraid to ask any questions, even the dumb-sounding ones that otherwise would be overheard by everyone within ten feet in an open plan.

The collaboration stuff is marketing nonsense managers tell themselves to try and ease the cognitive dissonance of lying about it.

But for people who have to concentrate (like software developers) it's a productivity killer. Joel Spolsky used to touch on this occasionally - he claims all sorts of research shows the most productive arrangement is to put everyone in his own office with a door.

Where I work that will never happen, because there are corporate-wide rules about who gets an office and who doesn't. You have to be a director to get your own office, which is two levels above non-managers. They're so anal about it one time I worked on a floor with no directors and they left all the offices unoccupied. They crowded everyone into cubes and even doubled one up when they ran out of (cubicle) space.

Saving money on office space is money saved. People being distracted and doing poor work is money lost. I wonder how it sums up.

Productivity loss is hard to measure, and even when it's blatantly obvious, it's easy to shift the blame.

For sound? I can just put on headphones.

With sufficiently high walls (about 6'), carpeting, and acoustic ceilings, you'll actually cut noise quite a bit. Lower and sound travels in straight lines.

One of my gigs had a "pod" style cubical layout with 6' high walls, glass in the upper 2' or so, arranged in groups of four (see diagrams below). It's still one of the best workspace designs I've seen, period.

https://plus.google.com/photos/104092656004159577193/albums/...

In a previous job, we had an open office layout with a handful of small conference rooms. The rooms were always being fought over -- resulting in the institution of a byzantine booking system involving Outlook calendars and admin permissions, with the office manager as bottleneck to booking a room.

As a client-facing person (i.e., someone who needed to be on the phone a lot), I hated it. More often than not, I found myself walking around downstairs, in the building lobby, or out on a balcony somewhere when trying to conduct business. I got sick of fighting over conference rooms, and sicker still of trying to evict squatters from rooms that I'd booked for urgent meetings or calls. And if I ever needed a quiet place to go concentrate on something, that was pretty much out of the question for most of the day. I ended up taking a lot of work home with me every night, simply because I couldn't get it done at the office.

I enjoyed some great chit-chat with coworkers, and I probably saw more YouTube videos and memes in that office than I have anywhere else. Productivity kind of sucked, though.

No, they're universally bad. No door, no privacy and a constant stream of chatter from other people. Yuck.

Many companies grow from open offices as startups but then they have to change they way they do the open office if they want to preserve the "open office". my 2c.