Sometimes I wish I could work in an anechoic chamber, alone.
Big open offices can be a fucking pain in the butthole.
Phone ringing here, stupid chatter there, clattering keys and noisy Intel™ stock coolers.
Even 9 hours with over ear headphones, blasting a fresh breeze of technical death metal, can't cover up those distacting noisy cunts.

How do you cope with that?

Are your headphones open or closed back? Get ones with closed back.

In have a nice set of Bowers & Wilkens earbuds. They completely shut out external noise, and sound like a full set of over ear cans. I hate open work places. I want my cubicle back.

I love working from home for that very reason. But distractions still abound. Solar panel salesmen (seriously, how many companies can there be selling the same thing?), easy access to binge watching tv shows, kids wanting to show me memes...

I don't work at open office space like this anymore. If the company is too cheap to provide programmers with rooms where maybe one to four people work, they are too cheap for me to consider them.

I think it's quite interesting that while project management strategies (SCRUM etc) try to put more and more emphasis on inter-team communication and stuff, you appearently find more and more "self-sufficient" coders who want to soldier on in their own little bubble and not be contacted/disturbed by the outside world.

@mksana management gotta manage, right ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ regardless of whether it benefits the people behind the Knopkes and Blinkenlights or not. If only they'd throw that IRL communication shit out of the window and start making a chat where people can actually put everyone else on silent when they don't want to be disturbed, and catch up when they're done...

I have a dream.. but I'm afraid it doesn't align with the management folks 😞

@Condor: I don't subscribe to SCRUM and stuff, at least I mostly found forced events such as the daily standup to be a pretty ridiculous waste of everyones time.

However, when I worked in teams in the past we generally had an open, communicative environment, where the background noise was what kept you in the loop. Ignoring it was easy enough, or so I thought - but I realize not everyone is the same, fair enough.

Currently I work in a team where we have only members of the headphone faction - and we don't have SCRUM or any other methology which creates ritualized communication going on either.

Thus, I feel like I'm not working in a team at all. There's hardly any communication, not about work, not about other stuff. Everybody goes to the coffee machine on his own. These are not my team members, these are strangers who sometimes happen to work on the same stuff I work on. Maybe that's the way it's supposed to be, maybe that's the future, but I liked the old way better. $0.02

@mksana I'm not talking about not talking to each other at all, that's ridiculous and impedes the project. But since we're all clacking away on our keyboards anyway, I feel like an online chat would make a lot more sense ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@mksana the forced daily is just as useless as the team makes it. If you only give relevant information, it will not take much time at all.

I like team work. I'm always almost waiting for someone to come talk to me no matter how concentrated I am working on something. It just makes my day better if I'm not working alone.

Ambient noises in an open office even help me concentrate. But someone talking out loudly close to me definitely does not.