Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD

[atherton33]

My first job we had office rooms shared by 2-4 that were usually pretty quiet with a generally closed door policy.

The VP Eng would always say "I always try to remember it costs the company over a hundred dollars for me open one of these doors."

I learned so much from that boss.

[ants_everywhere]

This isn't what ADHD is, and I don't think it's helpful to promote the misuse of medical terms.

Just say "distraction."

[whoknew1122]

ADHD and ADD have been rolled into one diagnosis: ADHD. There's Predominately Inattentive (PI) [which you might see as ADD] and Predominately Hyperactive-Impulsive (HI).

This is my experience with ADHD - PI

[codeulike]

Thats why I use LibreOffice instead

[teekert]

Haha, came here for that comment... So, what would the Libre Office floor plan look like?!

[chris_wot]

LibreOffice commits help me with me ADHD.

[reactordev]

Open Offices as in open space, not Open Office as in Microsoft Office.

[cauch]

Did they account for the "usefulness" of the code produced.

In my company, one problem is that developers produce internal tools that do not correspond to what other employees need. It is even worse when developers are more distant from the users and don't socialize with them.

The "creativity" can increase, it does not mean that it is a good thing if they invent things that are not what people need.

How do they measure that?

[digitalPhonix]

This is the same developer working on the same project for the comparison so I don’t think it needs to be measured?

[eqvinox]

I find it incredibly hard to believe a 2% debugging share in any scenario. Considering this is an ad post for Floustate, I have serious reservations about these numbers.

[chris_wot]

Oh, but if only you really knew what it was like to have ADHD. Try living in a world where you are constantly distracted whilst simultaneously having periods of intense hyperfocus. Add to that a lack of ability to see social cues and having to constantly second guess your behaviour, often well after the fact.

Now tell me you have "second hand ADHD".

[Ancapistani]

Don’t forget the time blindness. Six hours of hyperfocus feels identical in retrospect to me to a five-minute tangent.

[technofiend]

The last thing I did yesterday before leaving for the day was make my employee open a change record for the weekend. Why? Because between in-person and virtual interruptions I literally could not get my work done. Tomorrow, I'll make my employer pay CBRE hundreds of dollars for off-hour cooling so I can sit (hopefully) undisturbed and finish.

Nobody is winning in this scenario; I'm losing weekend time to play catch-up, my employer is spending money on AC that could have been saved if people took "no meeting Fridays" seriously, and "no meetings" needs to include teams, symphony, slack, whatever. Like having an office would be grand, but having solid time to concentrate and work is the real issue.

[polishdude20]

Meetings are still work, do you not have the ability to say "this feature is coming later than expected because last week I was inundated with meetings"?

[elros]

Next year marks 20 years that I started to code for money. I've been working from home for about 5 or 6 years of those.

I'm in my mid 30's so this industry is all I've ever known, but if it ever shifts such that the expectation of being in an office is something I'd have to deal with, I'd literally change careers.

[jameshawkins]

I find that this is a pretty hard comparison to draw from person to person. Everyone everyone’s offices are different, even in an open office concept and everyone’s home environments are different. Kids, significant others, pets, errands, chores… they can all affect distractions at home, just the same as a chatty coworker.

[atemerev]

There is no such thing as "secondhand ADHD", just as like there is no secondhand autism or secondhand broken legs. ADHD is a chronic, genetically determined, serious, incurable and sometimes fatal disease (about 6-8% suicide rates, and a very high probability to end up in prison).

[vovavili]

It's a figure of speech.

[izacus]

The open office interruptions are your job too. Not just churning tickets.

(Not to say that focus time isn't important - but its not one or the other.)

[varispeed]

You have to give it to employers, not only the pay is typically sub par, they also make it extra difficult to do the work.

[A4ET8a8uTh0_v2]

This is an interesting line of thinking. Are you suggesting that all emergent qualities of office life are effectively desired outcome and thus should be treated as part of the job description?

I have my own idea on the matter, but I want to see what you think.

[Waterluvian]

Been working from home for about 9 years and I’m not sure I’d ever be able to go back. It would be such a huge step backwards for actual performance (though I’d probably look a lot busier with all those meetings and syncs and presence)

[simgt]

Looks like we're in adjacent fields. How do you manage to keep the productivity higher than in an office? I've always worked for companies that do hardware and I find it more difficult remotely for fairly obvious reasons.

[lightedman]

This reads similarly to the issues I encounter within my company.

The real issue here is that you're getting distracted by everything. That happens in my production environment, too. The fact that isolation improves your productivity isn't exclusively an effect of being at home. You are not being allowed to organize and keep on track and on task with the distractions, as you so record in your data. When people on the production line in my company get distracted, problems occur. Thus I try to make sure absolutely nothing can go wrong when they start a job up, and leave no reason for others to come around to cause or create a distraction. The only times anyone should be getting distracted or called upon is first article or final inspection, and that's (usually) it. Every other person has set tasks and I'll give them some slack time on the line so they don't have their brains clock out on the monotony of some of the highly-repetitive tasks and thus generate mistakes.

Since I walked into the company 5 years ago, production has increased roughly an order of magnitude. Just let your employees work undistracted and without stupid meetings that do nothing for their productivity, and reap the benefits.

Or you can just succumb to Agile and be non-productive beyond belief. Yea that was the first thing to go when I walked in the door.

[igtztorrero]

I completely agree with author. I am a development manager at a small software company (30 people) and what I have done to regain my productivity is to work focused from 8 to 11 am, in a empty hotel lobby, isolated from distractions, and have meetings with my team in the afternoon, having a contact channel in case of an emergency.

[jmpman]

I come into the office super early. Camp in the focus room. Stay for the minimum number of hours required, and then leave, working the rest of the day from home.

[Nikolas0]

I think open offices are great for socialising with coworkers (which is important at least for remote first companies) and for doing shallow work, but it totally won't work when you want to focus and do deep work.

A solution (given that management and the team at large understands how this situation is a problem) is to combine the open office with some deep work rooms or if there are no rooms, sound proof pods (eg. from Framery)

[raverbashing]

Oh I though they meant OpenOffice™ as in the software

[Waraqa]

The title is misleading. a slight modification could help such as adding 'Your' at the beginning

[jszymborski]

This is why I use LibreOffice: no ADHD

[michalpleban]

Me too!

[em-bee]

clickbait

[csr86]

For me best would be "right room(and tool) for the right job". If I want to program alone, I focus a lot better at home. Running "social_program.exe" in the background in my brain eats a lot of focus in office. Just being aware that there are others nearby is enough.

However, sometimes I need to talk, design or pair-program. For that I enjoy the office.

[mettamage]

Noise cancelling headphones, focused stare, code editors open on all screens.

No one comes near me unless absolutely necessary

[Zigurd]

As a consultant had to work in some insane open office environments, including ones where the sales people are on the phone constantly, well within earshot of the engineering team. I used in ear monitors with aftermarket foam tips. Very effective. I also had the experience of a client CEO, and the director reports, standing behind me, and one more junior person tasked with waving their hand in front of my face to get my attention.

[BirAdam]

So much this. Humans are inherently social animals, and if you look like you’re focused and working, most people will respect that. The headphones are also an immediate signal that you’d prefer to be left alone. In my experience, only people facing a rather serious and pressing problem will interrupt you in that situation, “hey sorry to bother you, but X just went offline without an alert”