Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD

https://floustate.com/blog/open-office-secondhand-adhd

by skrid • 11 months ago

81 78 11 months ago

floustate.com

HL33tibCe7• 11 months ago

“I'm 3x more creative at home than in the office”

I think you mean “productive” (and even that would be arguable).

thinkmassive• 11 months ago

This isn't about being “less productive” in the office. The data reveals something far more disturbing: I literally become a different developer.

slowlyform• 11 months ago

The company is selling a productivity tracking software so of course conflict of interests apply. But it's not hard to see how these interruption drag down your focus.

tbrake• 11 months ago

I think you shouldn't presume to know better than the author what they meant.

BirAdam2• 11 months ago

Creativity is often the result of experience having been applied to time with a problem. If you have no time with a problem due to constant interruptions and distractions, your creative output is likely to diminish.

izacus2• 11 months ago

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.)

varispeed4• 11 months ago

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.

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

Those employers value loyalty and politics more than productivity. If you know that, you will get frustrated les

izacus2• 11 months ago

You can say a lot about software engineering jobs, but "sub par pay" is not one of them. Even in LCOL areas.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 11 months ago

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.

igtztorrero• 11 months ago

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.

raverbashing• 11 months ago

Oh I though they meant OpenOffice™ as in the software

michalpleban• 11 months ago

Me too!

jszymborski• 11 months ago

This is why I use LibreOffice: no ADHD

Waraqa• 11 months ago

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

zahlman• 11 months ago

The original title has "Your" at the start, but it appears to have been removed automatically by HN's title filter.

em-bee• 11 months ago

clickbait

ranger_danger• 11 months ago

This isn't about being “less productive” in the office

proceeds to spend entire article detailing how you're less productive

I literally become a different developer

I don't see how... unless you're conflating productivity with somehow being a different person?

The whole thing is just a thinly-veiled product shill from the company itself IMO. I don't think it takes some proprietary software to tell most of us that distractions make it harder to focus?

safety1st2• 11 months ago

This article had a bit more ChatGPT in it than I needed, especially the second half.

But yeah, the core issue here isn't really the office, it's attention and concentration. I recently read James Clear's Atomic Habits and am now about halfway through Cal Newport's Deep Work.

I think all developers should read these two books in order to gain an understanding of the psychology of concentration. The TLDR is simply that it's hard to stay focused, minor distractions cost you more productivity than you think, and the effect is even cumulative over long periods of time.

There's lots of research on the topic and there are many ways to address the problem. They all fundamentally relate to carving out time for working without distractions, as much and as routinely as possible.

henrebotha• 11 months ago

No idea how you got that from Atomic Habits. Shockingly unscientific book.

darkr• 11 months ago

It's basically a long form linkedin article.

varispeed4• 11 months ago

Someone with ADHD is unlikely going to survive more than a few pages of those books.

I'd say even getting a gist on something like Blinkist is a push.

raincole• 11 months ago

What do you mean? You think people with ADHD are unable to read a book...?

safety1st2• 11 months ago

I mean if you are a programmer, and you've thrown in the towel on reading books, I don't know what to say. You may as well throw in the towel on being a good programmer as well. Has "reading books is a good idea" become an unpopular idea in 2025? I wouldn't be surprised if it has, but I think this is a really bad take

squigz• 11 months ago

Why do you say that? ADHD doesn't make us stupid, you know.

atherton33• 11 months ago

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.

brainzap• 11 months ago

the real problem is two people in the office who have to talk

atemerev• 11 months ago

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• 11 months ago

It's a figure of speech.

chris_wot4• 11 months ago

Not to me.

jameshawkins• 11 months ago

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.

mettamage• 11 months ago

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

No one comes near me unless absolutely necessary

BirAdam2• 11 months ago

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”

Zigurd• 11 months ago

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.

dataflow• 11 months ago

I'm no fan of open plan offices but the generalization from "me" to you" is a huge leap and not warranted by the sample-size-one experiment.

Maybe if you have a ton of distractions at the office, your current tasks frequently need intense focus, and you can actually get work done at home without talking to people directly, then you'd be better at home. That's not true for everybody everywhere all the time. If we're generalizing from one sample, then I for one actually don't have a ton of distractions at my open plan office, and I love to be able to talk to my coworkers once in a while. I don't usually get more work done or even enjoy doing it more at home, except in some rare scenarios. I still dislike the open plan office, but this isn't why. And the alternative I find better is an actual shared room office (where the supposed "threats" are presumably still there?), not being at home.

Waterluvian2• 11 months ago

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• 11 months ago

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.

Waterluvian2• 11 months ago

Yeah, exactly. I do software. In fact, I mainly do software for remote use of robots. So in a way, being remote just brings me closer to my users’ experiences.

eqvinox• 11 months ago

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.

codeulike2• 11 months ago

Thats why I use LibreOffice instead

teekert2• 11 months ago

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

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

A standalone office in your home liberated of the other offices. A libre office

reactordev2• 11 months ago

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

codeulike2• 11 months ago

Then the post title should use the plural

chris_wot4• 11 months ago

LibreOffice commits help me with me ADHD.

lightedman• 11 months ago

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.

geraldwhen2• 11 months ago

What’s the point of this? If you begin to think about how terrible RTO + sitting in a sea of 200 people is, you’ll drive yourself mad.

The people in charge want you to idle chat more and churn out work less. Why fight it.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v22• 11 months ago

Why do anything at all? If I value autonomy, I optimize for it. I will say this though. Our leadership's recent push for RTO ( and they openly said 'market changed' suggesting they think they can get away with it ) made us immediately looking for the doors.

They want to optimize for chatter, they won't have stuff done. And some stuff needs being done.

geraldwhen2• 11 months ago

Nothing needs to get done. You are not your company. If they want to pay you to stare at the wall for 8 hours a day, that’s your job.

idreyn• 11 months ago

This is clearly done by AI and I am disinclined to draw any conclusions from the anecdotes or data here because it all feels "synthesized".

chris_wot4• 11 months ago

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".

Ancapistani2• 11 months ago

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

chris_wot4• 11 months ago

Oh god. Yes, the time blindness is a killer.

nashashmi3• 11 months ago

Those small interruptions are actually a godsend of hunger for working harder and demanding more.

I get bored working alone. A narcissistic individual like me needs someone to compare himself with to feel good, or to feel like there is something to accomplish that I have not achieved yet. I remember in uni we used to learn a lot from each other because of how open the conversation was .

hosteur• 11 months ago

I thought this would be about OpenOffice.

ants_everywhere• 11 months ago

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• 11 months ago

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

whamlastxmas• 11 months ago

That’s not what they mean. ADHD is a legitimate and sometimes debilitating disability that involves significantly more than being distracted, and distraction is not even really the right word for ADHD

elros• 11 months ago

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.

cauch2• 11 months ago

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• 11 months ago

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

cauch2• 11 months ago

Not sure I understand. My point is that "having devs being more creative" does not always mean it is a good thing. If the dev is creating more inventive code that solves what they incorrectly think is the problem while not solving the real problem, then it is a waste of time and money.

I'm sure that, obviously, the dev is convinced that their inventivity is genius and solves the problem. But we need someone else, impartial, to estimate if the amount of code is worth it.

Nikolas0• 11 months ago

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)

jmpman• 11 months ago

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.

abotsis• 11 months ago

I wonder what would happen if you repeated the test while going into the office constantly for a few months. Would you develop better habits to alleviate the distractions?

masfuerte• 11 months ago

What would you suggest? Ignore people? Pack a piece? Cultivate BO?

csr86• 11 months ago

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.

technofiend2• 11 months ago

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• 11 months ago

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"?

technofiend2• 11 months ago

I do not.

Ancapistani2• 11 months ago

I've been tracking my coding for a month using FlouState. In the office, I create new code 18% of the time. At home? 56%.

If I were able to write new code 56% of the time - or 18%, for that matter - nothing would be being my grasp.

Open office is giving you secondhand ADHD

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