Inside Meta's Push To Solve the Noisy Office (wsj.com) 85
Coming to the campuses of Facebook parent Meta Platforms is a contraption that can block sound, shield workers from their peers and allow for heads-down, uninterrupted work. It's a cubicle. From a report: That is, a noise-canceling cubicle designed using some of the same principles found in soundproof, echo-free anechoic chambers. "The Cube," which the company is beginning to roll out to offices worldwide after months of development, absorbs sound from multiple directions, says John Tenanes, vice president of global real estate and facilities at Meta. "It's like a self-cocoon."
Meta's experiment comes as workplaces are in the midst of a shake-up. Like many other employers, Meta realized early in the pandemic that its open-plan arrangements would need to shift to accommodate a new hybrid era of work. In 2021, it asked 10 groups of architects, design firms and furniture manufacturers-- including MillerKnoll's Herman Miller, KI and others -- to build a new office set-up. They were given guiding principles to follow and eight weeks to do it. [...] The Cube began to take shape, in part, after one of Meta's furniture vendors brought in an early prototype of a movable screen. Engineers quickly gravitated to it, grabbing one or two at a time to essentially barricade themselves at their desks, Dr. Nagy says. Meta and its vendors refined the Cube, and its popularity became even more apparent during testing when workers began personalizing the spaces to effectively reserve them.
Meta's experiment comes as workplaces are in the midst of a shake-up. Like many other employers, Meta realized early in the pandemic that its open-plan arrangements would need to shift to accommodate a new hybrid era of work. In 2021, it asked 10 groups of architects, design firms and furniture manufacturers-- including MillerKnoll's Herman Miller, KI and others -- to build a new office set-up. They were given guiding principles to follow and eight weeks to do it. [...] The Cube began to take shape, in part, after one of Meta's furniture vendors brought in an early prototype of a movable screen. Engineers quickly gravitated to it, grabbing one or two at a time to essentially barricade themselves at their desks, Dr. Nagy says. Meta and its vendors refined the Cube, and its popularity became even more apparent during testing when workers began personalizing the spaces to effectively reserve them.
Soo... (Score:5, Funny)
Sooo... they invented an office?
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Re: Soo... (Score:2)
Perhaps I'm unusual , but I like open plan. It makes it easier to communicate with people nearby and it's just a friendlier enviroment than people being siloed in a cubicle.
Re: Soo... (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps I'm unusual , but I like open plan. It makes it easier to communicate with people nearby and it's just a friendlier enviroment than people being siloed in a cubicle.
I would bet good money your coworkers hate you.
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I would bet good money your coworkers hate you.
The kind of co-worker that made me spend $ on good, really good noise-cancelling headphones. The kind of co-worker that makes me ecstatic that the world at large has now seen wfh, and seen that it is good.
Bet you anything viol8 isn't in IT... or is a manager. Most definitely a manager. Clueless about how other people see / hear the world.
It's ok. It takes all types to make the world go 'round.. even assholes and managers serve a purpose.
Still not clear on what purpose that is..
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Mine, especially ladies, hate me with my loud typings with clicky keyboards. My boss told me to quiet down, so I could type slowly to and less productivity. Give me a model M keyboard to work faster. :P
The cone of silence (Score:4, Insightful)
So they invented the cone of silence as seen on Get Smart?
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That's impossible. If they did, Microsoft is going to sue them.
Nope (Score:1)
Looks like a cubicle with added sound-deadening foam... but still a cubicle.
IOW, they're spending lots of money on big name business bigwig boffins to polish that turd. Because at the end of the day, it's still a cubicle.
Just put up a floor-to-ceiling sound-isolated wall with a door. That would be "an office". And just the thing for people who need peace and quiet to get work done.
As opposed to managers, who need someone (make it some other manager) to shout at to "short cut their communications" and wha
Re: Nope (Score:2)
We buy these types of cubicles all the time for noisy control rooms. We fit noise absorbing panels around the desks and suspend them from the ceiling. Also any noisy panels we will try and block off the noise from. Itâ(TM)s a pretty standard product.
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Yep...what's old is new again!!
Amazing what a door you can close can do for your productivity, you know?
Here's a new one I predict they'll (re)discover.....meeting rooms, a place for people to get together when they actually NEED to.
Re: Soo... (Score:3)
The problem with meeting rooms is that you cant usually get on doing something useful while the Mr Ego Windbag (every office has one) decides it's time to bore everyone with his version of war and peace based very losely on the meeting discussion points.
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Still better than him blockading you at your desk...or distracting a WHOLE office floor talking too loud, etc...
Re: Soo... (Score:3)
If hes at your desk you can make excuses to get up and go elsewhere. Hard to do if you're stuck in a meeting room with him.
Re:Soo... (Score:5, Interesting)
I have no idea what they invented because it's a paywalled WSJ article.
I'm convinced that Slashdot must somehow be getting kickbacks from people who subscribe to view this crap, as no other explanation for the amount of paywalled content on Slashdot makes any sense.
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From the picture at the top of TFA they didn't even invent a cubicle... they invented a bathroom stall lined with Dynamat
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More like a cardboard box from what I'm reading
>Engineers quickly gravitated to it, grabbing one or two at a time to essentially barricade themselves at their desks,
Reminds me of when I worked at Metricom in the 90's (Ricochet wireless modem). Went from a ragtag group of HAM radio guys to Corporate in no time flat. A lot of the engineers got moved out of their offices into cubes (so management could take the offices) One of the engineers was so mad about being in a cube, he essentially built himself a
In order of preference.. (Score:5, Insightful)
In order of preference:
Home > small office with a door > proper cubicle > minimally partitioned cubicle > open floor.
Sadly, open floor was the 2010's plan-du-jour, and it's the pits, the oldest, the most opressive to a worker.
Not all humans get off on being crammed into an open space with all the chatter and phones and radios and leaky open headphones and airpods. Some of us cringe at that, have cringed at that, all the decades we've been alive.
It's pretty telling that one cannot tolerate the open floor / busy office environment when one considers the noise-cancelling headphone to be one of the best achivements of humanity.
I am one of these. I so intensely dislike anything but a proper office or my own home. Always have. It was torture to be exposed to music / talk one doesn't wish to hear. it's ear-rape, and very few people understand how bad it can be.
Closed cans like AKG 271, and active-noise-cancelling headphones FTW.
Fuck the open office. It needed to die in the 1950's and it needs to die even worse now.
Also, Team Rooms (Score:5, Interesting)
How did management respond? By removing cubicles altogether and replacing it with the more noisy and "revolutionary" open office. Careful what you ask for.
One of the options I really like that you didn't include is breaking teams into separate, noise-proof rooms. In those rooms, you can do individual desks or cubes. The room limits noise to a single, related team. So, you can have impromptu discussions with teammates. But, you don't get all the irrelevant chatter that you do when every team is in the same room with the open office or plain cubicles.
In your hierarchy, I'd place the team room between "small office with a door" and "proper cubicle".
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In your hierarchy, I'd place the team room between "small office with a door" and "proper cubicle".
This works if all the workers in the team room are of like mind and all respect the "no leaky headphones or open radios" thing. Otherwise, it can be just as bad as an open floor.
I've had one place that used team rooms. it was marginally better than no partitioning at all. I didn't even think of it as I did my hierarchy. It's not something I've been broadly exposed to.
Maybe I"m just too anti-social. Even a day at school was less of a brain drain than a day at an open-floor office. At least in the class
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If you turn up white noise to the point that it helps with ambient noise, it's actively harmful to your hearing.
I find that sharing a space with even one person is potentially distracting, but having another person in the office with me does help me stay work-focused.
Re:Also, Team Rooms (Score:4, Informative)
My $LASTJOB went to a "team room", where we had 6 desks in a room. They initially proposed cramming us in with all six desks up against each other (so 3 people directly facing 3 other people) for "collaboration!", but at least we managed to veto that. It was still miserable, we all wore headphones (mine were noise cancelling until they broke).
One big problem is that we regularly worked with customers on projects or troubleshooting, but usually not all together (e.g. co-worker A might be working with customer X on the phone, while co-worker B was working with customer Y). It was very noisy, making concentrating on what I was doing very difficult.
Also, it was even worse when multiple co-workers were on a group chat with a customer, because neither Zoom nor Teams (what corporate told us to use) handled cancellation in the same room, so either you got lots of echos (and feedback if not everybody was using headphones), or everybody in the room had to mute except when talking, and then they'd forget to unmute and have to repeat themselves.
But... the real WORST THING EVER in a shared workspace is people eating at their desks. Just gross.
COVID sending us all to work from home was such an improvement... although eventually I quit anyway and switched to a 100% remote WFH job ($LASTJOB kept wanting us to return to the office).
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I agree, I generally prefer the team room setup. It gives me some idea of what's happening outside my own little world and allows for serendipitous eavesdropping, without the distraction of irrelevant noise from a whole cubicle farm. Six people in a room seems about the right balance, and the people should be working on the same project or closely related ones. It's not a great environment for groups where people are on the phone a lot, or with people who like to chit-chat. The absolute worst environment
Re:In order of preference.. (Score:5, Funny)
Home > small office with a door > proper cubicle > minimally partitioned cubicle > unemployment > open floor.
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Username checks out...
If you find an open office oppressive then theres something wrong with you. I find them far more engaging and friendly than sitting like a mushroom in a fucking box not able to speak directly to anyone.
See, here's the thing -- we're all different. Maybe in your mind we're all the same, but we're not -- I'm wired weird, I've always known it. Cacophony is something I loathe. Maybe you get off on it, but I don't.
You go right ahead and seek the environment you like. I'll do same.
Every response you've given in this thread is the same -- we get it, you like mayhem and anarchy, and think open floor offices are fine.
Not me. I knew this even as far back as kindergarten.. 1975.
My hell is
Re: In order of preference.. (Score:1)
Mayhem and anarchy? Lover of hyperbole I see. You didnt seem to worry too much about everyone being different when you said the open plan office should die. Go sit in your cubicle and dont come out for a year no one will miss you,
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That depends on if you're there to think deep thoughts and solve hard problems or if you think it's a social club...
Communication is a sometimes useful thing. If everyone has an office, one on one conversations are still as easy as walking down the hall. If group communication is needed, there's conference rooms or, ideally, a park nearby.
If you WFH, there's phones and video conferencing.
Both of those also accommodate when the best productivity is had sitting quietly.
Open offices completely obliterate the l
It only took *how* long to figure this out??? (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's a *reason* cubicles were invented to block sight and sound of co-workers from causing distractions, especially in high-focus environments like development and programming.
TFS mentions Herman Miller's one of the ones Meta has invited to do this. Herman Miler's the instigator of the original cubicle, only it was a bit better thought out than the watered-down version the world eventually got, and then got to hate (and now wish we had back)
https://www.hermanmiller.com/p... [hermanmiller.com]
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It makes sense only to facilities people who get bonuses for cutting overhead costs. Put the proles at glorified cafeteria tables where everyone knows who had the double-bean burrito for lunch, and who has the most communicable virus, then let them "choose" to work from home, where they pay for their own heat, electricity, networking, floor space, and furniture.
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until the vast preponderance of employees elect to WFH, then the managers are left without cattle to herd, urban infrastructure and businesses start to crumble from the lack of workers in the area and (((commercial real estate))) craters in value.
that said, i work for a pretty small company, and if the commute wasn't 45 minutes I'd probably go into the office vs working from home. Because despite having a home office, staying on task and not falling prey to the infinite distractions that are far more inter
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you aren't thinking of it in terms of a PHB type manager. it's much easier to make sure your hens are laying if you can see them all at once, vs having to patrol from cube to cube, or god forbid check in on people's offices.
the bullshit about "collaboration" and what not is just feelgoods to keep the employees from bitching.
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I am sick and tired of reading these sorts of comments from you aspergers types. You dont like human interaction? Fine , go find a corner to sit in next to the fucking pot plant - you probably have the same amount of personality. Some of us like open plan and being able to talk to people , it's part of being human. A part people like you are lacking.
I an sick and tired of reading these sorts of comments from you normie types. You like human interaction? Fine, go live in a filthy always-loud city where you can rub elbows with all types. Some of us like peace and quiet, and being able to hear nothing but the wind through the trees and the birds sing, with some Beethoven to engage the brain. It's part of being human, -- this solitude -- is something people like you are lacking.
I find your willingness to force your views on others disturbing. Fits your
Re: It only took *how* long to figure this out??? (Score:2)
Forcing my views? Hysterical, much snowflake? If it wasnt for us "normies" who actually like the company of other people you wouldn't have been born. Enjoy your monastic existence loser.
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For majority read probably 1%. There's always some monosyllabic wierdo in every office who sits on his own.
Re: It only took *how* long to figure this out??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then you and a few like minded people are free to go work in a conference room. Why do you feel a need to force everyone else to adjust to your ideal?
Perhaps the real problem is you tried the voluntary open plan and nobody else wanted to sign on?
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The purpose of an open plan office is to cram more bodies into less space at a lower cost. Any other cited "reason" is just attempts to justify it.
Even cubicles were invented to be cheaper than actual separate rooms.
There are also the security risks of open plan offices, the amount of time i've been on a call with someone office based and been able to hear their colleagues talking about other matters.
just set your Linedefs to block sound (Score:2)
just set your Linedefs to block sound
Next META will introduce (Score:2)
The TPS report.
In my day (Score:4, Insightful)
When I started my career, this problem had already been solved:
Offices with floor-to-ceiling walls and real doors for everyone.
I'm not sure why that has become unthinkable today.
Now, get off my lawn.
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When I started my career, this problem had already been solved:
Offices with floor-to-ceiling walls and real doors for everyone.
My first USAF job was Ground Support Equipment mechanic.. as you civvies call it. In the USAF it's called "AGE" The environment was an open floor with red boxes marked out, that box is your work area. One communal boom-box, and arguments about music were common.
My first IT job as a civvie was a shared office. Tolerable.
My second IT job had what we now consider the "classic" cubicle
My third IT job had open floor
And now, we just wfh most of the time.. but here we have minimally-divided open-floor "half-cu
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I'll note that my employer owns this building outright, we don't lease it.. so there's no monetary penalty in not having all the seats with butts in them.
Well, except paying more in property taxes than they have to. Still better than leasing, of course.
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from 2014 to 2019 I worked remote for a company, which in their San Francisco office had an "open floor plan", and the office space featured no drop ceiling in favor of bare concrete and wire / pipe risers. When I would visit that office, the noise and echoing was so terrible that I could only tolerate it for a day or two before I would need to go to the headquarters office in San Mateo where they had half-height cubicle walls and a drop ceiling which helped to deaden the sound, allowing me to hear myself
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My first USAF job was Ground Support Equipment mechanic.. as you civvies call it. In the USAF it's called "AGE" The environment was an open floor with red boxes marked out, that box is your work area.
That's the real open floor. I'd love to see some IT staff given that just to watch their reaction. "That red square on the ground is your area. Check out a laptop from the locker, and make sure you wipe it before you return it when you leave for the day. If you absolutely must have a chair, there's a storeroom on the second floor. Be sure to wipe that down before you return it, too."
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It's pretty simple. You can cram far more people into a smaller floorplan using cubicles, or even "better", an open office. It saves a lot of build-out costs as well, I'd imagine. Plus, the open office looks hip and trendy - certainly nicer than cube farms, which just look oppressive as hell. More socially-inclined types seem to actually like the open office as well, and by nature, they're probably the type to speak out more about their preferences. In fairness to some of my past workplaces, the CEO a
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I'm not sure why that has become unthinkable today.
Money. That's it. Walls are expensive. Phonebooth size cubicles are way cheaper to install and move.
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I'm not sure why that has become unthinkable today.
Money. That's it. Walls are expensive. Phonebooth size cubicles are way cheaper to install and move.
Prestige, too.
I was going to put this on my first reply to the parent your'e replying to, but ooh-shiny'd into something else:
my 2nd IT job started with offices for each and every member of IT, even the helpdesk. This was 2001.
But, by 2007 they'd grown, and our old offices were torn down. Our space had maybe 10 offices? That same space was redone for 4 offices, and given to Finance.
IT got shuffled off to the older side of the building, into cubes. That was a real morale-booster, lemme tell ya.. /s
Financ
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When the last company I worked for took over health insurance for DFW, I got to do the tour of their offices. It was beautiful with no privacy but looked very cool. Even the conference rooms where walls of glass.
One of my guesses if that it helped reduce the HR complaints about harassment in closed offices. The other was that peer pressure would call out anyone not working.
I am really curious what it looks like now that offices have been redesigned with covid distancing and separations in mind.
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Actually - the place was American Airlines but located at DFW
Oh look.. (Score:2)
Meta paid a bunch of firms to re-invent the study carrel.
Anechoic foam tiles... (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
...are expensive, heavy, & difficult to keep clean.
That's why when they use sound deadening foam in offices it's usually covered with fabric. Sometimes it just looks like ordinary stuff, other times it's obviously more like speaker fabric. Still does most of the job, doesn't eat so much dust.
Ok, so hear me out.... (Score:3)
What if we improved the design by making the partition go all the way to the ceiling. Then, we could add a device that allows one wall to be opened and close so people could enter and exit. We could give these advanced cubicles a new name. How about an "office"?
Already solved... (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire world already solved this issue over the last three years. It's called "work from home."
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Ooh, ROUNDED corners! (Score:1)
Apple lawsuit in 3... 2...
hello, would you like to buy solar panels? (Score:1)
Offices = Big Productivity Increase, Save $$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
The following is from "Getting Disciplined About Embedded Software Development: Part 2" by Jack Ganssle.
https://www.embedded.com/getti... [embedded.com]
For my money the most important work on software productivity in the last 20 years is DeMarco and Lister 's Peopleware (1987, Dorset House Publishing, NY). ... For a decade the authors conducted coding wars at a number of different companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems. The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.), the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by a factor of 2.6. Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least 6 months.
They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read “quiet” ) offices and phones with “off” switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money.
Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 260%! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get almost three of you. The winners – those performing almost three times as well as the losers – had the environmental factors:
1st Quartile vs. 4th Quartile
Dedicated workspace: 78 sq feet vs. 46 sq feet
Is it quiet? 57% yes vs. 29% yes
Is it private? 62% yes vs. 19% yes
Can you turn off phone? 52% yes vs. 10% yes
Can you divert your calls? 76% yes 19% yes
Frequent interruptions? 38% yes vs. 76% yes
Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear data showing how ...
ineffective they are.
Read more in the article with a short cost analysis included.
Even if they are off by an order of magnitude, a private office is 10 times cheaper than a cubicle.
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Peopleware should be required reading for all managers and facilities people. It's as true today as the first edition was 35 years ago. And then, they were railing against cubicles--even they didn't think anyone would seriously consider going back to the 1950's arrays of desks, much less arranging them side by side in directly facing rows!
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Now I'm looking forward to reading Peopleware. Thanks for the recommendation.
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For my money the most important work on software productivity in the last 20 years is DeMarco and Lister 's Peopleware (1987, Dorset House Publishing, NY).
And they were just repeating work IBM had done 30 years before, as cited by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month. IBM studied programmer productivity when programming still involved punch cards, and an office with a door was the hands-down winner. Nothing has changed.
Headphones ... or WFH... (Score:2)
No amount of shielding, other than offices for every worker will prevent this.
At the office, people gather around desks for a chat - and they could gather right next to yours.
There's little tight knit groups who like to banter with each other, who socialise together outside work, who will totally gather around a buddies desk.
You can erect all manner of blocking devices, but if the desk right next to yours is where people gather, ain't gonna work.
So, you wear headphones ... or join that tight knit group and
That's a Great Solution for Noise (Score:2)
News at 11! (Score:3)
This isn't news. We've always known this. This only feels like news because we often accept management propaganda as fact, without questioning if it is true.
The propaganda in this case being that open office environments exist to enhance employee interaction and increase collaboration, which is what managers are always telling us when they take away our offices and replace them with open offices. The fact this intended to hide, is that open office environments are popular because they are cheep to set up, and make constant surveillance of workers easier. The proof is that all C-suite executives, and most of their direct reports all have traditional offices or at worst cubicles.
Yet another case of Silicon Valley rediscovering knowledge that is already out there, and treating it as though it were new to the rest of us.
a self correcting problem (Score:2)
all they need to do is keep shoveling money into their VR abortion, and at some point in the near future no one at facebook (Shmeta whatever; renaming a company to avoid bad PR is not something that anyone should play along with) would even need to worry about working, let alone having to go into an office.
A solution looking for a problem. (Score:2)
The problem of the noisy office has been solved a few years ago.
It's called home office. Easy to silence, just don't answer the Teams call.
budget method of noise reduction (Score:2)
Pods! (Score:2)
Tales from the cube farm (Score:1)
I so want to see... (Score:3)
... companies ripping out all the "collaborative" work space they put in 10-15 years ago that killed productivity with non-stop distractions.
No headphones policy (Score:2)
I had the "privilege" of working in a place where the owner introduced a "no headphones allowed" policy because, in his exclusive opinion, "employees looked too detached while he was walking important people or investors around the office". The company went under within months.
https://i.imgflip.com/7bgeeo.j... [imgflip.com]
Not just sound (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people have said this numerous times before but sound is not the only issue in an open-space office. There's also movement - anything that moves in your field of vision, which usually happens in an office all the time, causes visual interruptions and contributes to you losing focus and being less productive.
Plus a tonne of other things like smells of your colleague lunch/snacks, how easy it is for someone to come to your desk and request assistance with an "urgent" issue or the fact that most desks usually don't have anything (wall, partition, etc) behind your back, which makes you feel anxious.
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Many people have said this numerous times before but sound is not the only issue in an open-space office. There's also movement - anything that moves in your field of vision, which usually happens in an office all the time, causes visual interruptions and contributes to you losing focus and being less productive.
Amen. An idiot boss gave me, a coder, a cube on the company's main hallway. We set up a motion-detection test that counted 600+ people passing within 5 feet of my head, daily. I'm amazed I get anything done.
Important Question (Score:2)
Will there be legs?
New concept: concentration and collaboration (Score:2)
I'm suggesting an innovative new idea: A rectangle of material, (could even be environmentally friendly like wood!) on some sort of mechannism that allowed it to swing OPEN and CLOSED. Repeatedly. CLOSED so the worker could concentrate, OPEN
Noisy office? Fire staff (Score:2)
But, what about the Metaverse? (Score:1)
Oh, wait, are you saying that Facebook's own employees refuse to work in its Metaverse and instead prefer to work in real-world offices?
Shocker.
Silence is deadly, though (Score:1)
Long ago I interviewed at a place where each employee had his own private office and was expected to keep his door closed. Total silence. It felt horrid. I deliberately blew the interview because I was afraid they would make me an offer I couldn't refuse.
1990-95 I had a standard cube. 5' high walls, open doorway, bult-ins. Carpeting. You could hear activity, but you could only really hear the people on either side of you. I liked that. Voluntarily social/isolated. The warble of the fax machine was pl