I do embedded work; I have a workstation, and a board about 70x50cm long, cables, and an oscilloscope. So I cant /really/ shift that to a conference room to wait until whomever stop arguying with his mom...

It's not just that tho, even people who move they ass to talk to someone else usualy /stand/ by that someone else, so instead of having a quiet head-to-head, it always become a 'broadcast'.

I know that they could at least have signs saying 'quiet space' and all that, but that would fly in the face of the idea they have that it 'improves communication'. It's blatantly false, I have no friggin' clue what 80% of the people are doing in this office anyway...

I meant the people wanting to talk could go to the conference room and, you know, have their meeting/conference/whatever.

I'm in an open space too, so I definitely feel your pain.

Isn't that ironic? Advocating going to a conference room so you can be alone and concentrate?

I read that as advocating going to a conference room to yell into your skype microphone.

Article describes author going into a conference room for quiet & isolation (also notes people coming in to ask if that's why he's in there).

Yes, but this comment subthread is about rtpg's "Surely there's a conference room" reply to buserror, not about that part of the article.

Actually I meant the guy having his call in the conference room

In the offices where I'm at now though, conference rooms have become the quiet spaces though. Life imitating HN comments I guess ;)

Just having to get up and move is a pain in the ass and loses productivity.

My firm moved me to a shared office for 6 months (finally I got my solo office back last month). They had that policy. "Oh for conference calls just use this admin office we set up." But nobody ever used it.

That's a huge "FUCK YOU" to your employee. The company is cheaping out and then making your job harder by forcing you to relocate.

And it plain just doesn't work. If a guy I'm working with calls with a quick question, what am I supposed to do? Call back?

There's 8 of us in our programmer section; people take Google Hangouts and their phone calls within the section. It takes a few minutes to walk out to a private phone area and the other conference room's door doesn't close properly so you can't block off your noise. So what we do is just wear headphones and try our best to ignore other people's conversations. Which is a problem because all the other office workers are usually so quiet that it's like a library in the office.