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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?

#341

Post by pseudalopex »

kevinmershon wrote: post #305
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236

I worked for a Japanese corporation. The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room. These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and ther…

Rakuten was the first and only bigger corp I've worked at (my life has been startups and boutique shops) and so I have had a hard time understanding why people don't like open office floorplans. Thank you for making me realize why I enjoyed it and might not, at another org.

Was it a Japanese office or a foreign office following Japanese customs?

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#342

Post by JohnFen »

bluGill wrote: post #329
sokoloff wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper. Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#343

Post by JohnFen »

danaris wrote: post #256
otteromkram wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They have tiny cubes for worker bees [...] Not sure if you're on the same page as this conversation. Open offices don't really have cubicles.

Cube farms aren't really much better for programming work than true open-plan offices. The article is about the split between "office with door" and "not that", not specifically open-plan offices, so talking about cube farms is absolutely valid.

I think cube farms are substantially better than open office plans. I simply cannot function in an open office layout, but I can in a cube farm, albeit at the cost of productivity and the level of thinking I can accomplish.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#346

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

musicale wrote: post #292
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236

I worked for a Japanese corporation. The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room. These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and ther…

I would hate that due to the visual distractions and lack of privacy, but "quiet as a library" is absolutely essential. It does sound like that office layout (as with most US office layouts) is designed to clearly reinforce the status hierarchy.

> clearly reinforce the status hierarchy

Oh, yeah. Hierarchy is very important, in Japanese business culture.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#347

Post by JohnFen »

i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #299
eadmund wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information). I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few de…

My new year resolution is to never do remote work at my next job. I wanna be that guy known for being always there , at his job , doing what he's paid to do.

You can be known for always being there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do, and still work remote. Just be there, at your job, doing what you're paid to do.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#348

Post by seanmcdirmid »

esskay wrote: 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…

It is crazy that companies will pay someone $300k a year to sit in an open office and then wonder why the conference rooms are over booked all the time. And then they don’t understand why they don’t want to RTO.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#349

Post by possiblydrunk »

tzs wrote: post #222
nox100 wrote: 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 worked at a place with a great office layout. A group of a few people working on the same or related things could all have private offices with doors, but it was also easy for people to call out questions to others or gather together to discuss ideas and see what others are up to. There would be a large room off of a hallway, divided into 8 offices, arranged like this: +---------+---------+ | | | | | | +-----+ -+-…

I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#350

Post by lokar »

bluGill wrote: post #329
sokoloff wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper. Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

A lot of the popularity of open plans is driven by rapid hiring. When you are already large (think 2015 google/meta) and growing 50%/year it is very hard to manage the space for teams. Fixed offices make it nearly impossible.
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