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AccuLynx - we aren't even in a tech hotbed. Just little ol' Beloit, WI. We got to build a brand new office building with offices for all devs. Great place to work, awesome perks. We saw a marked throughput improvement after moving to the new office.
That's precisely why you have offices. Real estate is extremely cheap there compared to tech centers such as SF/ Bay Area.
My team at Parse.ly is fully remote/distributed -- and one of the motivating reasons I formed the team that way was to reproduce the feel of Fog Creek's "bionic office", but in each engineer's home office space. I discussed this a little in my "Notes on Distributed Teams" presentation here: http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams/notes/#open-pla... Here's how my personal home office looks: https://flic.kr/p/v1NZ…
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Incompetent management is always a problem but in remote teams it's even worse. With onsite teams the manager can at least track attendance and can generally see if people are doing some work. With remote teams your only measure is the output of people and that's very hard to judge if you are not competent. I think you also need to hire differently for remote. People need to be self-motivated and self-sufficient.
> I think you also need to hire differently for remote. People need to be self-motivated and self-sufficient. I think this is true, but I think that most hiring managers would prefer to hire for self-motivated and self-sufficient regardless of the role location. But maybe I'm too optimistic.
If the biggest issue I have with a direct report is that they require a bit of attention to keep them focused and productive, then that's a high-quality employee I'll be very happy with.
Do pretty much all programmers in Microsoft get their own office? Is it as simple as that or there's more to it?
And I bet if you bring it up during the process it wont help at all.
My 600-person company, a wholly-owned part of a much, much larger national multi-billion dollar company has single or double private offices, with doors, for the entire staff, new hires, IT, admin, everyone, at our headquarters in SV as well as our smaller, satellite offices. AFAIK, there is no plan to change this. If, however, our current lease isn't renewed and the company moves, all bets are off. I've heard rumors…
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I'm currently in a small office with a small team. They hate talking. They want to do everything by chat or code review. My point? So many factors are at play for a healthy office.
I mean, why is there a need to chat while working? Why not go to the kitchen to chat? Code review seems pointless at a company with a defined code conventions.
I don't mean to disrespect you, but either you are you are very green or are living in a completely different universe of software engineering than I am. It's interesting to hear this viewpoint.
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Remote work is great for so many reasons. Off the top of my head: For the company: * less office space expense * bigger talent pool * low cost benefit * increased documentation * encourages the trend towards outcome based management (as opposed to butts in seats) For the programmer: * more control over their work environment * more control over their time * no "commuting" subsidy for their employers * arbitrage paysc…
I'm pretty sure that larger talent pool is a myth. Not everybody has the discipline to work remotely. Perhaps are able to cast a wider net, but there are a lot more rotten fish. I would expect that a larger talent pool maybe the case for smaller cities
There are 3.87M software devs in the USA in a population of 325 million: https://www.census.gov/popclock/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_engineering_demograph...
Call it a density of 1% across the USA.
San Francisco has a population of 870k, round up to 1M. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
If you assume that SF has a software engineer density 20X what the US does, then they have approx 200,000 engineers available for hire.
Assume that only 25% of software engineers are good for a remote job. That means that you'd have 960k engineers available for hire remotely, almost 5x the pool of SF.
Yes a lot of assumptions above (and there's also a skills matching and discovery issue), but I think that illustrates the size of the talent pool for remote hiring. And that doesn't include software engineers who aren't residents of the USA.
On the general question of open vs. private offices, my views have tempered over time. The first time I worked in an open office, I hated it. But I've come to realize that a lot depends on the layout of the office and that there are better and worse ways to configure one. The first case -- the one I hated -- had a) long rows of desks, b) bright overhead fluorescent lights, c) a lot of noise due to being in a large ro…
a) my desk faces the wall, for fewer visual distractions I'm sitting here feeling stunned that anybody could ever want their desk facing a wall, as the implication (in terms of any "open plan" environment) is that their back is facing, well, nothing. IOW, somebody can walk up behind you unnoticed. Me personally, I hate that with a passion. I'd pay money to have my desk facing out with my back to the wall, just so nob…
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> Too many people for what the building was originally designed for OSHA regulates the ratio of employees to toilets ("water closets"). Check this table [1] and file an OSHA complaint [2] if the requirement isn't met. [1] https://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_tab... [2] https://www.osha.gov/pls/osha7/eComplaintForm.html
I assume those numbers are per employee by gender, right? If my company managed gender equality we'd be right at the limit if all the desks were full. Maybe that's why the facilities guy gets cranky if people take over meeting rooms for contractors or interns? A certain online retailer of books and counterfeit electronics has slightly larger bathrooms and a similar layout in its new buildings, but worse gender equali…
(It's not clear the exact algorithm one should use in counting a mixture of multi- and single-person restrooms, but I would presume it's something like, count all the men that can use your male restrooms, count all the women that can use your female restrooms, and take everyone left over and see if they fit is your unisex restrooms.)