471–480 of 483 posts
I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit. My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the oppor…
I worked for a year at IBM's RTP campus. Everyone had their own dimly lit cube with 5-foot walls, no natural daylight, and white noise playing over speakers to drown out conversation. The depressing undertone of the office was part of what pushed me to quit. My team at my present job works in an open setting with 8 people in the room and windows with natural daylight. It's quiet enough to focus but gives us the oppor…
Team sized rooms sound good but what happens with a few more people are added and there is no room to easily expand?
Open offices were developed by people who don't have to really concentrate for their job. They're awful for developers.
In addition open offices: * Are usually cheaper * Look good in photo ops and publicity: "Look how much everyone is working together _all the time_. So much activity happening! We are not like those places with loners and antisocial people hiding in cubicles" * Cubicles were used to be associated with boring, slow bureaucratic offices. Those 4 things conspire to make them more popular. I think it is simpler a function…
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I think there are very different experiences and expectations on what the craft of software engineering is like. Different tasks and organizations require different time budgets for e.g. collaboration and deep work. My coding has very little to with sport-like activity and is more like the task of a lone clocksmith (although we have a team, individuals have quite large chunks of codebase carved for themselves). For s…
As someone who has done lone-wolf development, let me tell you that so many issues go away once you develop a well-functioning team to work on problems collaboratively. My initial reaction is that there seems to be much bigger issues with the way your company is structured. The words you're using ("lone", "carved", "straining on the edge") suggest a stressful situation where each individual carries their own weight..…
The inherent technical complexity of the components is such that sometimes a feature needs days of coding - thus the 'more locksmith, less of a ballgame' analogue. I should have perhaps pulled some other analogue.
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Care to tell us what pair/
http://www.atomicfloyd.com/us/superdarts But be warned, their customer support is terrible if you don't live in Europe.
They cost more than I paid for my top end AudioTechnica's.
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Same for me. My productivity is divided at least by 2, not only because of the noise, but also because of the visual pollution, constantly seeing x or y going around. From my experience, situation is rendered worse when management people are in the mix: then you have to observe the subtle communication tricks of small power politics, which seem to favor those who think loudly. Not to mention non-IT guys are usually i…
Same here, and also my productivity gets divided by 4 whenever I'm aware of people walking or standing behind me. I've been like this since childhood - when I'm doing stuff on computers, I get distracted by the very presence of other people; doubly so, if they're able to see my screen.
When my company moved to an open office plan we, the developers, tried to argue that we needed the ability to concentrate and that this would hinder that. We were told that every job required concentration and that we shouldn't be such prima donnas who think we are special snowflakes. Someday I'm going to get a special snowglobe and shove it down the throat of the sales lady who sits next to me who holds conference c…
Have you seen "Makers vs Managers" ? http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html