The Rise of the New Groupthink

I have a very comfy and full-featured home-office set-up, but still try to get out at least once a week to (ostensibly) work among other hackers.

There are some business advantages to not being cloistered, not the least being people know you exist and may be available for whatever kind of work you do. And it's good to have be around smart geeks who can answer questions or give you a sanity check on ideas.

But the big gain for me is the serendipity. I don't expect to be dreaming up amazing creative thoughts in any sort of communal or committee activity, but the exposure to semi-random ideas and events is important to my own thinking.

Left alone (or alone with the Internet) people may tend to only read what they're familiar with, or approve of, or in some way filter out the things that might challenge their beliefs and expectations. That's fairly natural, but it's bad. You need to take deliberate steps to overcome that.

If you pick your groups well it can help free you from the prison of self-reinforcing thinking.

Thank you to the writer of this. This is actually the reason I only take work that allows me to mainly work remotely. I used to work in an open layout as described and I would be interrupted for every little thing resulting in not much actual work being achieved. Oddly enough the open layout seems to be'the way' for cool startups - maybe in actuality this driven more by the cost savings of having an open layout office versus the alternative. I find it to be a poor setup for having to do anything that requires mental concentration.

This is very interesting, especially in light of certain software development approaches such as XP, where you're told to work in pairs as much as possible. Many people argue that you haven't truly experienced teamwork until you've pair developed for a whole workday together for months at a time. The approach works for several companies, Pivotal Labs comes to mind.

I've personally experienced benefits of that work style, but at the same time I've always wondered if in the process you lose the opportunity to be by yourself and deeply and creatively think about a problem from different angles, without having to share that with anybody while it's still brewing.

On the other hand, you have companies such as MySQL that were almost entirely remote, and still managed to get lots of great technology built, rarely, if ever, working in the same building. That did the trick for them, they were also quite successful.

I think at the end of the day you can have the cake and eat it too. How about this: if you need to do some deep thinking or some heavily creative work, you can do it on your own terms, by yourself, late at night, like the Woz would prescribe. If you need to do some work that you can easily wrap your head around, then working closely together with someone else or a larger team is a likely boost in effectiveness, as it provides you with safeguards and spare pairs of eyes.

Thoughts?

I'm sitting here in one of these "cool startup" offices right now. I absolutely hate it. No place to stack anything, no walls to hang whiteboards, calendars, pictures. No DOOR to close when I just want to get something done.

I have noise everywhere that headphones can't drown out. I have people tapping me on the back constantly because, apparently, having headphones on isn't a big enough signal that I'm trying to shut out the world. Yeah yeah, I know, sit people down and tell them. People forget. Just give me a door I can LOCK and that will work just fine.

I'm a few hours away from commandeering an unused storage room and making it the new Software Lab.