Hi everyone,
I am a developer that works in a rather noisy open plan office and I was wondering what other peoples experience of this is. I have a small development team consisting of myself, who does software development for the company, 1 support/crystal person and 1 hardware/software person who looks after the network and pc's.
We are seated in the corner of the open plan office, which can hold 20 people. We are surrounded by 6 admin staff (two behind me and 4 to the left). At the other end of the office (the 'quiet' end, where our server room is) the sales and marketing are situated, who are out of the office a lot of the time. In between that we have 6 hot-desks for the consultants in our company.
Now I am having trouble dealing with the noise and so are the rest of my team. Although there are no noisy printers around us, the noise level of conversation, people speaking loudly on mobile phones, and the admin staff binding documents, is very loud indeed. I cannot hear myself think and it is very difficult to program in this environment (esp. I am learing .NET AND developing solutions at the same time).
Am I being to fussy?, or is it not reasonable to ask the management team to allow us to move where sales and marketing are at the quiet end of the office. We used to be situated there (hence the server room being near by) but we got moved to where we are because the admin staff complained "sales and marketing are too noisy".
Now the admin team, consultants and sales and marketing are making more noise and the situation is slowly getting worse. I would say 3 hours a day are quiet and the rest are noisy.
I do have the choice of working from home, but I also have people management resonsibilities, so I believe I should always be available for them in the office. I can't win!!
Your comments and votes of sympathy please!!
I am a developer that works in a rather noisy open plan office and I was wondering what other peoples experience of this is. I have a small development team consisting of myself, who does software development for the company, 1 support/crystal person and 1 hardware/software person who looks after the network and pc's.
We are seated in the corner of the open plan office, which can hold 20 people. We are surrounded by 6 admin staff (two behind me and 4 to the left). At the other end of the office (the 'quiet' end, where our server room is) the sales and marketing are situated, who are out of the office a lot of the time. In between that we have 6 hot-desks for the consultants in our company.
Now I am having trouble dealing with the noise and so are the rest of my team. Although there are no noisy printers around us, the noise level of conversation, people speaking loudly on mobile phones, and the admin staff binding documents, is very loud indeed. I cannot hear myself think and it is very difficult to program in this environment (esp. I am learing .NET AND developing solutions at the same time).
Am I being to fussy?, or is it not reasonable to ask the management team to allow us to move where sales and marketing are at the quiet end of the office. We used to be situated there (hence the server room being near by) but we got moved to where we are because the admin staff complained "sales and marketing are too noisy".
Now the admin team, consultants and sales and marketing are making more noise and the situation is slowly getting worse. I would say 3 hours a day are quiet and the rest are noisy.
I do have the choice of working from home, but I also have people management resonsibilities, so I believe I should always be available for them in the office. I can't win!!
Your comments and votes of sympathy please!!