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Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

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Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#261
post #106

It has to be said, if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse. Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing. There's a reason that many programmers prefer to w…

Private rooms are not cheap and it would be hard to justify for junior programmers. And having private space just for middle level folks is bad for morale and learning of junior folks. But yeah for companies which just employs senior folks this should be the norm.

how do you justify the salary of a junior programmer if you can't justify giving them the space they need to perform? isn't this just throwing money away?

note that private office rooms aren't the first or only option, but rather work from home

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#262
post #106

It has to be said, if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse. Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing. There's a reason that many programmers prefer to w…

Let's not pretend that we are something special, and we need to focus so much more than other creative workers. For the majority of work of an average programmer in an average corporation, deep focus is highly overrated.

Those workers deserve environments that promote deep focus, as well.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster. I'll be blunt here. I have very little interest in how the team I'm part of performs in general. Trying to make one person feel guilty that someone else can't do independent study is very toxic in my opinion, and I usually remove myself from under management that ap…

> I'll be blunt here. I have very little interest in how the team I'm part of performs in general. Don't be surprised when others show the same level of empathy towards you, then. It's not about making you feel guilty, it's about making you do you effing job. Unless you're in a very junior position, your job is not to pump out code day in and day out.

I'm not sure what exactly you're reading in my words, but I don't really understand why you think it's my "effing job" to provide training for inexperienced developers. My contract stipulates no such thing, and despite what you seem to assume, I have been in fact hired to find solutions, and write code.

It's a little disconcerting to see someone make such self assured inferences about me, based on a single comment.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#264
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. All your other points are fine. People are motivated by a mix of external and internal triggers, and you are clearly skewed to the external side. The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there. Programming requires delib…

Isn't what you say contradictory? You are saying that devs need to stay "in the flow". But when you are in the flow and suddenly you have something that blocks you because you have a simple question, the best way to stay in the flow is to ask the question and get the answer immediately. If I have to quit my flow, go on slack, ask on slack, wait 10 minutes, then re-explain because the other person did not get it, then…

If the question is truly simple it can probably be answered by the codebase or the internet. Otherwise the flow is ruined anyway when you stop it to ask someone in person. One has to load the context that was subconscious into the foreground for explanation of why they're asking.

Instead you want to interrupt your own flow as well as that of others to get immediate feedback on simple issues?

Your last sentence is incredible. No, I don't want my own flow to be preserved at the expense of others'. That's why I ask async and do something else while I wait for them to be free. But neither should I be a necessary component of someone else's flow at the expense of my own.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#265
post #251
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would win: - literally 100s of publications showing how disruptive and destructive to focus it is to be working in an open office work and how much distractions it brings: https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres... https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/ https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/eve... https:…

idk who wins, but I'd assume extroverts need a quiet environment to be able to focus as much as anyone else.

Not if they have people facing roles. In that case their job IS talking to other people. Sure, they need to prepare, but the higher up they are, the more of that preparation is done by assistants.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I never understand this. Why being so focused on work, to the detriment of building some relationships with the people you work with? Is this a HN/spectrum thing? Or capitalism-simping where people aspire to be robot-workers with no humanity? Why not enjoy your time at work? After all, you're spending 8 hours there a day, and see those people almost as much as your spouse, and probably more than your friends.

The second reason. Companies that are worse at getting people to self-exploit tend to do worse financially, and thus tend to disappear. Of course, if too many people quit or burn out, then the company will go bust, too. The optimum will be just one step short of that. And whenever someone starts a new company, they will look at the existing successful companies for how things are done.

There is no evil master plan. The processes that lead to self-exploitation will sound reasonable and well-intended. (If this wasn't the case, people would refuse to adapt it. Most people don't like exploitation when they see it.)

For example, in most of Europe there is a law that requires employees to record their working hours. This law was created to prevent (unpaid) overtime, and it does that. Now company X implements this by making you write down how many hours each day you worked towards which task. Doing this every day makes you think where you put this one-hour chat you had with a co-worker. It was nice, but which task did it contribute to? (It didn't...?) If you bother to ask, everybody will actually encourage you to have those talks, that it is even in the interest of healthy company culture, and remind you that maybe it's part of the paid break (you didn't forget you have that, did you? it was never anyone's intention that you skip your break). Nobody will be responsible for nudging people towards efficiency. It's all the fault of the individual who feels pressured into efficiency. It was never anyone's intention to prevent you from having those occasional nice chats, and nobody will stop you if you keep doing it.

Still, every day you get to think about how long it took and which task it belongs to, and it feels a bit like lying to just add the time to a random task. This kind of habit can shape your thinking.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#267
My ideal is somewhere in the middle. I don't necessarily need a private office, but a shared space with a small team. This way, I'm privy to all conversations relevant to me. Knowing what's going on often trumps the productivity gains of a quiet work environment.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#268

As I read some of the aggressive, cynical and unpleasant responses here to any suggestion there might be some benefits to an open plan arrangement, it's dawning on me that one possible benefit is that it tends to filter out people with attitudes like these. I prefer open plan setups and am glad that working in trading environments has ensured my career has been spent in them, so my natural reaction to the title here…

So you're an active participant to the company's office politics instead of economic output.

At least you openly admit it.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#269
post #74
post #18

Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had). Having people around me working on the same project is invaluable for me for * asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. * running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on c…

I can only second this. I honestly had the best time of my (professional) life when I had a little room with the rest of my team. Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. It's really highly productive. For the times w…

> Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you.

This is untrue for even small teams in my experience.

> For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine.

Also not my experience.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and if you can't keep up then you should reflect on that. Meetings and discussions are great. Constantly nagging your coworkers because you can't figure out how to do your job on your own is not.

> Constantly nagging your coworkers because you can't figure out how to do your job on your own is not. This is the problem: you've invented this scenario. There is a gaping middle ground between what people are describing and your stereotype of what they "must really mean"?

I think the problem is that too many of us have experienced this scenario, and had it described much in the way that the OP of the thread did.

Too many people are too un-self-aware to recognize that their "just a 5-minute question" is being asked because they have not internalized the knowledge, rather than because it's genuinely something that they haven't had an opportunity to learn—too un-self-aware to recognize that this situation is unnecessarily stressful and it's their fault.

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