Office distractions

Darren Wright

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A couple of years ago we moved into a new office space and the management decided we needed a more open cubical design. :doh: Well after many complaints about us developers not being able to concentrate due to folks walking around the office. They agreed to add some glass to the top of our cube walls (as to not block the natural light). Well, little do they know, we developers work with the blinds closed and the lights off most of the time.
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Still being the picky bunch of developers we are, any distractions make us flip out. The glass helped, but we've had a lot more activity in our space with folks coming and going lately. Those little 1" to 3" gaps between the glass pretty much bug everyone, so I think I've come up with a solution, some fillers for those gaps. ;)
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Yes Brent, I've got a roll of tape to mark the door on the floor too. :D
 
LOL

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It has always amazed me how little the non creative people know about why we need to get deeply into creative mode when we work, and thus have no idea why we like to work in quiet semi darkness, undisturbed. I too suffered from this most of my career. They moved me from an office with a door to a cubicle with no door and too little space, and then to an "open plan" where we had no desk and just a small kind of file cabinet. We had sofas and over stuffed chairs
and end tables in a large open room and were told to move around and have little informal meetings with others. What a joke! Nothing got accomplished in that place, but the non deep thinkers loved it. It was an all day party place for them.

Sometimes, so much so that I would start my day late, and work into the late evening when everyone else had left for the day, to do the creation part of my work in semi darkness with no disturbances at all. They didn't like me working this schedule, but they let me do it because they needed what I was creating and had no one else who knew how. It was easier for them to let me than to bow to my demands for the right environment to create during the day with the bright lighting, constant phone calls, and people walking in and out of my office all day. I used to design control systems for large scale high speed manufacturing machinery. The tiny off purple ceramic IC that's in your cell phones and PCs was built on some the machines that I worked to create. My last office, after making their lives miserable, was a big cubical in size, but with high walls to the ceiling, a separate ceiling light switch, and a door, but they put a small window in the door (probably to peek in to see if I was really working).

Are they going to let you install these? Maybe some dark shades over the upper glass will help too. Do you have a door and separate light switch?

Good luck. I hope you can get away with it.

Charley
 
Well, My boss stopped by and saw it, loved the look and said, we need more of those. She's contacting the facilities person and having her come over to look at them so either our carpenters here, the cube company, or myself may be making enough for the rest of the cubes. :thumb:
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Charley, we actually do have a light switch for each row, only a couple of the rows ever get turned on. The day light lovers have moved to one side of the room with the blinds open and lights on, our side is the dark side. :)
 
Way back in the day, our company had a couple of floors of an office building in downtown Sanfrancisco. Had a nice office with a view of the bay.

Then rents started going up due to the tech boom and at the same time we were moving a lot of employees to work on site at our clients so we didn't need quite so much room.

The building was going to give us a good deal to downsize a bit so they could rent out some space at higher rents. Well, Whoever was in charge of our facilities planning severely underestimated the number of employees that were going to be working in the office and consequently the amount of space.

So they went to an open workspace type plan with low walls, shared desks, etc..

There is a huge difference in the way programmers work than the client service people. The programmers needed to get into deep modes of concentration that were just impossible to do in that environment.

The client service people had to be on the phone all the time. And some of the client service people had issues with using their 'inside voice'. It was horrible.

Around that time the connectivity from home was getting to the point where it was better than the shared lines in the office, so a lot of us just started working from home. Pretty much stopped going into the office and no one ever said anything.

After that it was a simple hop skip and a jump to move out of the bay area to my isolated desert compound
 
Way back in the day, our company had a couple of floors of an office building in downtown Sanfrancisco. Had a nice office with a view of the bay.

Then rents started going up due to the tech boom and at the same time we were moving a lot of employees to work on site at our clients so we didn't need quite so much room.

The building was going to give us a good deal to downsize a bit so they could rent out some space at higher rents. Well, Whoever was in charge of our facilities planning severely underestimated the number of employees that were going to be working in the office and consequently the amount of space.

So they went to an open workspace type plan with low walls, shared desks, etc..

There is a huge difference in the way programmers work than the client service people. The programmers needed to get into deep modes of concentration that were just impossible to do in that environment.

The client service people had to be on the phone all the time. And some of the client service people had issues with using their 'inside voice'. It was horrible.

Around that time the connectivity from home was getting to the point where it was better than the shared lines in the office, so a lot of us just started working from home. Pretty much stopped going into the office and no one ever said anything.

After that it was a simple hop skip and a jump to move out of the bay area to my isolated desert compound

So you're saying, burn the little inserts and revolt. ;) We've only got a couple of folks that are talkers, we usually just tell them to shut it.
 
So you're saying, burn the little inserts and revolt. ;) We've only got a couple of folks that are talkers, we usually just tell them to shut it.

We had one person, especially, that would have loud, very personal conversations on the phone that literally the entire office could hear. I do not miss that!
 
Needs to be about 6" thicker, go all the way to the ceiling, and have sound deadening foam on the outside. Then it would be close to perfect.

Around that time the connectivity from home was getting to the point where it was better than the shared lines in the office, so a lot of us just started working from home. Pretty much stopped going into the office and no one ever said anything.

After that it was a simple hop skip and a jump to move out of the bay area to my isolated desert compound

Our work doesn't support remote workers... So yeah... luckily I'm now in a small cube farm of only 6 or 7 people so unless there's active construction going on on site its not usually to bad. They put in way to many lights though!
 
So you're saying, burn the little inserts and revolt. ;) We've only got a couple of folks that are talkers, we usually just tell them to shut it.

I would say tell them to get with the program and let you work from home. I bet Brent's company gets twice as much work from him as if he were to have to drive to an office each day and put up with constant interruptions.

I wont get started on what i feel about the whole creative non creative bit. Been a bone of contention my entire life that creative types dont get rewarded half as much as the brawn running around on a field of some sort or knocking balls around with a piece of wood. We still cave people someday hopefully we realize that solutions to our problems are going to take creative types to figure them out.

Just imagine a football player with a contract that says ....well Tom Brady we going to give you stock options this year and they will vest in 3 years and you will be able to collect on them starting year 4. That is if you still playing for us by then.:rofl: Oh and best you win superbowl each year or those stock options are going to be worth zero.
Now thats a starting point for me. Line up boys its training camp and we need you to sign your stock options award. YEAH RIGHT but wouldn't it be nice. ;)
 
Well, the facilities person came by and loved them. :thumb: She wanted an invoice for the ones I have done, so gave her one for $125 (3 bd ft of cherry, 1 can of rattle can lacquer, and 3 hour labor @ $30 per hour), not bad for 8 little rounded over planks with dados. She said she had already been talking to the cube installers about doing some out of aluminum for us, but liked this idea and wanted to know if it was OK to steal one of the pieces for them to quote it. She had asked if I wanted to make them, I told her I'd make the pieces if she felt they were too high on their quote, but she'd have to have someone else finish them (they are using maple with a custom cherry like finish to match the other woodwork around here). She said she'd let me know. I get to keep the ones I have for now too but they will replace them with ones that are of matching wood.
 
Reminds me of another story.

A few years back the facilities graced us with fancy new adjustable desks. You could set them up so that they were the right height for sitting or standing at with the touch of a button. Sounds pretty cool right? Not so fast, the support structure underneath them made it impossible to use a keyboard drawer. For those of us with some carpal tunnel being able to adjust the keyboard angle is pretty critical to not having blue hands. Pleas to the proper channels were not successful "there is no way to mount a keyboard drawer on these desks".

So rarely willing to back down from a challenge like that; a couple pieces of 2x3 screwed to the underside of the desk provided a sufficient stand off that I could mount my old keyboard tray.

The furniture people were grumpy about it "you can't just modify the furniture" to wit I responded "odd because it sure looks like I just did".

I'm still using it :)
 
The furniture people were grumpy about it "you can't just modify the furniture" to wit I responded "odd because it sure looks like I just did".

I'm still using it :)

I have little patience for folks like that. Just because it's not part of the original spec doesn't mean it can't be accomodated! LOL
 
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