Y'know, I've been working in one for 6 months now, and, despite some initial trepidation, I haven't found that to be true at all. Sometimes you do have to put on headphones to cut down on the auditory distraction, but otherwise it's been just fine.
Granted, every office has a different culture. I'm guessing the most distracting offices are the ones where everyone is distracted to begin with. For example, if you're at a startup where everyone works 60-80 hour weeks and is so chronically sleep-deprived that their ability to concentrate for any length of time is shot, then yeah, that's going to be a hellhole.
I'm in an open floor plan space with about one hundred desks in it and it's never particularly distracting to me. I barely ever even have to use headphones to concentrate. People simply don't have loud distracting conversations. It'd be different if I were mixed in with salespeople having phone conversations from their desks all day every day, but we're all engineers. I appreciate being able to easily ask my coworkers a question as it occurs to me immediately.
OK, fair point. I did once get rearranged into an open plan office where all the teams were intermixed for I-still-don't-know-what reason. Half the staff was sales, and yeah, it was impossible to concentrate. Fortunately, we had a liberal work from home policy, so I had a means of escape when I had a deadline approaching. But I still only lasted for a few months after that.
Just to reiterate, I don't think the open plan office was really the fundamental problem. It was the attempt to mix oil and water.
Wearing headphones every day will permanently damage your hearing. If you really want noise, put on headphones. Respectful quiet should be the default.
It's not quite so absolute - it has to do with what kind of headphones, how loud, and for how long. The problem is that people tend to use crappy earbuds, crank the volume, and listen for hours on end.
If you instead use a good pair of over-the-ear headphones so that you can get the sound you want at a low volume and without the assistance of any active noise cancellation, it's not quite the same story. Probably still shouldn't be doing it all day just to be on the safe side, but from what I've been able to find in the literature it look like it's probably fine.
The biggest factor appears to be the level of sound isolation before you play anything, the better the isolation the lower the volume you can comfortably listen at.
I don't use expensive headphones (mostly in-ears as they are more comfortable) but I went through a few different sets til I found some that worked like ear plugs.
>Sometimes you do have to put on headphones to cut down on the auditory distraction
That's exactly the problem. You are plugging inefficiencies that exist for no reason. Listening to music hampers my work because I focus too much on it. I just want a quiet room.
Funny, I work at a company managed by a very enterprisey guy, and he always drag me into useless meetings taking hours of my time for no real results. My point is that I don't feel like the normal corporate world really works more during the day.
Say no? Ask what the agenda is? Meetings are largely about finding consensus and sometimes about social iq. See if formal meetings can be made more informal 5 min conversations.
I'm in the process of turning around this company culture, I just need time, it's been only 2 months I'm here, and we have a product to build at the same time I have to coach the CEO in efficiency and fast execution. The CEO needs time to adapt, he came here because startup seemed cool in his circles, but he was not really prepared for the storm I bring with me. He's a middle-aged man whose last job was head of a power plant at a utility company. So I have to order my battles, right now it's launching some boxes at the customers and see if it sticks.
But yes, I'm pushing back on more and more of those. And also try to move on quicker during the meetings.
I'm not sure it's so directly tied to companies not prioritizing work getting done, in theory. I think what we see today is the result of a mash-up of several things going on at once:
- a ridiculous amount of hours expected of employees, so employers pile on beer fridges and ping pong tables to lessen the blow
- an obsession with "culture," which is such a difficult concept to define and control that the easiest ways to materialize it = beer fridges and ping pong tables and pep talks
- a younger workforce that chooses to seek more "meaning" in work
- generally speaking, inexperienced, improperly trained, and fearful people managers who only know "direct observance" as a management philosophy (this includes all those mostly useless meetings)
- a shitty pattern of 10-12+ hour days as the new norm
This is actually an interesting development that you can start to trace earlier - we've all had jobs where a minor part of the job was not to work, but to look busy, to sell an image of yourself to your superiors.
It's stated in OP's text that one of the roles of the young people is not to work, but to project an image to potential investors: that they're young, full of ideas, full of disruption etc., ready to take over the market (doesn't matter that the market is sometimes undefined), all they need is the investors' money.
I actually don't think it's true at all. It's easy to get work done, but the key part is that it's easier to stay at the office longer - eat lunch in the office, take a break to play ping pong for half an hour, have a beer with your coworkers towards the end of the day... it all results in you spending more and more time in the office, and leaving later in the day. So even if you aren't as efficient as you would be otherwise, the company makes up for it.
I suppose it differs based on your goals at work. As I get older, I seek much less camaraderie/company in the place of work. Ideally, I'd be mostly left to my tasks, complete them in 6-7 hours, then leave so I can pursue my non-work life (the one I value most). Most employers do not want to hear this.
Likewise, I do most of my work between 7 and 10.. after that, the loud crowd arrives for their 'morning' and start discussing loudly about irrelevant things, and the concentration is gone...
Kids come along, you become more choosy about the people that you socialise with, free time disappears in an instant.
You still enjoy your job, but you can no longer justify spending more than 9-5 doing it, so what becomes more important then is to actually be productive during the 9-5
This means quiet, efficient "grown-up" offices.
Except a number of things that are associated with lack of productivity in startup culture have actually been shown to increase productivity, like open floor plans.
open-plan offices are not new.... I've been working in offices for the last 30 years across ~15 different companies (I'm a contractor) and I've never worked in a non-open-plan office.
