61–70 of 356 posts
Several teams in Apple don't have an open floor plan. They pair two individuals in an office.
Microsoft is slowly switching to open floor plans, but for now a lot of folks have their own offices, or are doubling up at most.
SVC is being redone in open floor plan. Those in Redmond being converted often have PMs and Engineers doubling up in the same office - two total separate use cases. Some roles mitigate this with remote work.
When space got tight, they removed most of the interior partitioning and furniture in the six-packs and crammed more people in. The most I ever saw was ten people stuffed into a six-pack in the building's interior (no windows, ugh), and let's just say that the ventilation was not up to the task of servicing ten bodies and many computers and game consoles. Towards the end of a crunch-time it got pretty ripe.
Facilities never budgets enough power. I think the planners assume "Excel" workers with a desktop computer and a phone, and ("yeah, yeah, okay") grudgingly double that number for engineers, while the actual engineers have a black market going in sufficient power strips to run all the hardware they need. Facilities ran additional power several times while I was working there, and this was just a software group . . .
I always wonder why people don't split the difference, chop up the big company office into 5-10 person mini open plan offices.
Yes I too would love to see this. Noise canceling headphone seem to cancel everything but voices and that is the opposite of what you need.
I use industrial ear muffs over my in-ear headphones. Not very comfortable but they work great. Now I wish my work wouldn't suck so I could actually use all the focus I get this way :)
why not just find remote work positions and set your own environment?
I mostly remote work and love it. But it's not for everybody. It involves: - being able to motivate yourself; - being disciplined; - being autonomous; - being capable to communicate efficiently asynchronously, with time and space constrains on limiting medium; - accepting less social time; - juggling private and pro time/space. Which includes your friends and family. My GF still hasn't get used to the fact that when…
But I believe the real cause is not some personal defficiency but the shitty corporte/factory type of work where politics is a huge part of day to day job, where nobody really wants others to do meaningful, deep work, nobody wants to commit and give clear answers and offer personal responsibility.
That's why devs need to communicate(read interrupt) so much in person with each others; add in "agile" which in 99% of the cases means nobody really knows or is imaginative enough to know how things should progress, what the requirements are, what resources should be available before the project starts.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mostly remote work and love it. But it's not for everybody. It involves: - being able to motivate yourself; - being disciplined; - being autonomous; - being capable to communicate efficiently asynchronously, with time and space constrains on limiting medium; - accepting less social time; - juggling private and pro time/space. Which includes your friends and family. My GF still hasn't get used to the fact that when…
I completely agree with your points. But I believe the real cause is not some personal defficiency but the shitty corporte/factory type of work where politics is a huge part of day to day job, where nobody really wants others to do meaningful, deep work, nobody wants to commit and give clear answers and offer personal responsibility. That's why devs need to communicate(read interrupt) so much in person with each othe…
But the reality is it's not.
We have a lot of shitty things to do, and bosses are part of the machine to make you do those things. Remote bosses have less grip on you.
And I'm lucky enough to like my job. I feel like I have 10x more interesting things to do in my day to day activity that the average Joe. But a lot - a lot of a lot - of people don't.
They're all going this way. I've had to started adding 'well, I can' t do the work here' in front of every 'when can you have this done' response.
Open-plan offices are absolutely maddening, I get pulled out of my thoughts constantly, and there's no effective way to shut it out. Earplugs aren't enough, and with headphones I would have to play music so loudly it would be annoying my colleagues, just in order to cut out the constant noise. We have so-called "focus rooms", but 1) there are far too few of them, and 2) they're supposed to only be used for short phone meetings and such.
I raise this with my manager every time we have a "pit talk", as they're now called. But there is seemingly nothing he can do.
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I use industrial ear muffs over my in-ear headphones. Not very comfortable but they work great. Now I wish my work wouldn't suck so I could actually use all the focus I get this way :)
I’ve found that custom molded in-ear hearing protection combined with industrial ear muffs is the closest I can get to drowning out nearby conversations (including loud ones) without requiring a layer of music on top or bothering with headphones underneath the ear muffs.
I work for Viasat; all of our new-build offices in the past few years have been designed around what we call the neighborhood concept. A neighborhood is a set of individual offices (maybe 60sqft-ish?) with three solid walls, and one glass/wood wall with a sliding door. All the offices open into a central room that can be outfitted in a bunch of different ways. There are neighborhoods of different sizes, and basically…
That's the office concept I've always wanted to build. It would be cool if someone from the company could document it/blog post/etc. -- might be good for recruiting too. (Especially since Viasat does pretty cool stuff -- excited about the new Exede sat expanding coverage...) I was thinking it would make sense to have roller doors or some other way to open the entire side of the office (on both sides -- "neighborhood"…