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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?

#391

Post by alok99 »

that_guy_iain wrote: post #379
ath3nd wrote: post #37

People like you are the reason I personally don't want to be in an office. > asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. Basically like having a toddler around. Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. Or I migh…

> Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing. Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's. > I simply can't stand incessan…

> I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing.

> Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's.

That's what the whole article is about. The struggle is that holding a context in your mind is easily broken by small interruptions. It's not by choice. So the question is how do you reconcile people on both sides working together.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#392

Post by robertlagrant »

danaris wrote: post #270
robertlagrant wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

This is just assumptions though. Too many? Compared to what? Narrators are just as unreliable as anyone; some will be unreasonably opposed to any questions. Complaints aren't all 100% trustworthy. And complainants can also be un-self aware in that when they were more junior, or new, then they also asked questions. They just maybe had people answer them who were more happy to invest in them.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#393

Post by diyftw »

2devnull wrote: post #298
neilwilson wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work was done by IBM in 1975. You need lots of space to keep the noise down and you need offices with doors that close. Why are we still having this discussion fifty years later?

Because we work in different ways now than we did in 1975? The work people do is also different. And, the people themselves have also changed. A person born in 1980s may be more used to 24/7 noise from tv and devices. A 30 year old worker in 1975 grew up in a quieter home.

That generalization certainly doesn't fit with this 1977 edition human. The loudest 24/7 thing in my house is the compressor on my fridge. Silence (and office doors) are priceless.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#394

Post by shikon7 »

bluGill wrote: post #333
Zelphyr wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a guy (who is actually a great guy) who, while excitedly showing me the floor plan for the proposed open plan for our team, exclaimed, "I want to create a vibrant, energetic atmosphere." and asked me what I thought. All I could think was, "What you see as vibrant is really your employees shooting the shit and not getting any actual work done." He went with the plan and I found myself staying until 7pm an…

> "What you see as vibrant is really your employees shooting the shit and not getting any actual work done." That is better than getting work on the wrong thing done. People who sit in their office and never interact with others tend to work on projects the company thought was canceled months ago.

If that happens, that’s rather the fault of the company and the managers of not communicating the current affairs clearly enough. You shouldn’t need to rely on informal channels to find out what the company considers canceled.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#395

Post by robertlagrant »

mariusor wrote: post #323
em-bee wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

camaraderie in a team is a job requirement for me. without it i'll be out of there in no time. i simply do not want to work with people who can't be bothered to be nice and helpful to each other. i do not want to be just a cog in a machine that grinds out work without any consideration for the project as a whole. it is also needed to allow new team members to get onboarded faster. as a hiring manager i find your atti…

That's perfectly fine. I think the world is large enough so we can coexist in peace. Also I don't dismiss camaraderie that appears spontaneously between coworkers, I was complaining about the company enforced fake camaraderie that gets pushed down everyone's throats with trite team building exercises, company parties, team goals and other methods of hammering people into conformity. > it is also needed to allow new t…

> I was complaining about the company enforced fake camaraderie that gets pushed down everyone's throats with trite team building exercises, company parties, team goals and other methods of hammering people into conformity.

This is nothing to do with what you said before, about not wanting team performance to be important. Unless you're there to do a very specific job, a lot of performance is actually about team performance. If nothing else, the bus factor on people who want to do things solo makes them an automatic liability.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#396

Post by kristjank »

I think it's also important to recognize that companies tend to accumulate people with very little respect for other people's time. Sometimes you need to Pavlov your coworker into writing things down to discuss at a later time, and that you're not mad at them, just busy.

Pomodoro technique also helped me shape my focus state into smaller, less efficient, but more predictable portions. By scheduling interruptions, I figured out it's a lot easier to handle breaking out and into flow stat when you're training that every 25 minutes.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#397

Post by manishsharan »

IKantRead wrote: post #316
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…

Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer. People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and think about a problem is met with perplexity, every idea should be shipped to prod asap, while tests exist the idea of performing basic QA/manual testing on your own work is only…

Not just startups. I was once hired as a contractor for a major bank in Toronto who were desperate to ship a product, which was way past its promised delivery date. The AVP got an idea to put all of us in a conference room huddled around a conference table , because obviously us lazy programmers were slacking off in our cubicles and the crappy almost daily changing requirements were not to blame. The entire team began falling sick one by one (pre covid era). This was also where I learnt the hard way that it is possible to get the flu twice in the same flu season. It was a hilarious mess. Curiously enough the AVP got promoted to VP the next year.

And the following year, the whole office switched to open office plan. I think the ability to micro manage people and the power trip for managers explains this logic.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#398

Post by ath3nd »

wildzzz wrote: post #372
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…

If you can't give me my own office with a door, at minimum I want a cube with 6ft walls that have excellent noise dampening (I don't want to be able to clearly hear a normal conversation next door), a large enough work space such that I can stand up and walk over to my own whiteboard, a pair of ultra comfortable noise cancelling headphones, and being able to have some natural daylight coming into the space (but not n…

> There are plenty of ways to track productivity that don't involve a manager being able to stare at everyone working like a sweatshop foreman.

I have called those kind of managers "glorified taskmasters" in the past, but "sweatshop foreman" is a good enough phrase make me want to add it to my repertoire!

It's insulting to me to treat knowledge workers as cogs in a machine or workers in a factory. Humans are not made to be crammed with other humans in tiny, noisy and poorly ventilated and lit spaces with no natural light.

We are told to "suck it up" but we are not paid the bills when panic attacks, burnout and other health problems start showing up.

As a person who has fought management tooth and nail to give myself and my teams the ability to work remotely and a have a 4 day work week while paid the same as before, I can tell you, it's infinitely better to have time and space, and your productivity, creativity and communication doesn't suffer at all (we measured it, and many others have done as well).

It's all a question of whether your corporate overlords trust you enough.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#399

Post by hibernator149 »

i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #358
JohnFen wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fair enough. But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't. Same way I could never get in a long distance relationship with someone. I need to be in the same room as them and look them in the eye when I'm explaining something to them. I actually like the 2-5 minutes of chit chat in the common kitchen every morning, talking about where my colleague went skiing that weekend. An…

Honest question because I'm curious. What is your definition of an introvert and how do you know you are one?

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#400

Post by robertlagrant »

mariusor wrote: post #339
em-bee wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when i hire someone, their job is to do whatever it takes that is in their capacity to move the project forward. if it takes a larger team, then getting new team members up to speed is part of that. and if that new team member is unfamiliar with the frameworks the team is using then training them on that is part of the job too.

Are you just telling me that you don't want to do your job properly as a hiring manager, which in my opinion would be to get the best people for the job, and that you prefer to pass the buck to your team to train them? I mean, sure, that's fine if this is stipulated from the start, but if you expect someone to solve leet code, do programming homework, and then when they get hired they have to also navigate your extra…

> Are you just telling me that you don't want to do your job properly as a hiring manager, which in my opinion would be to get the best people for the job, and that you prefer to pass the buck to your team to train them?

Not all jobs are simple enough to hire people into with generic skills. People need training. Even if it's just "I think that other team should prioritise this feature for us; who do I ask?" People need to ask questions and bed in over time. If you've just done simple CRUD apps in small orgs you may not have seen this, but that doesn't make it not the case.

> And to top it off, I know managers sometimes fools themselves that the team is invested in the "project moving forward", but that's rarely the case. As an individual I probably don't give a damn about the project, unless we're solving one the big issues of the world. The bullshit CRUD application you work on, or the latest cryptocurrency is just a means to get a paycheck for most of the people, and if you expect anyone to fake enthusiasm for it you're just deluded.

You seem to keep on inventing things no one is saying to respond to. If you have a load of unrelated things to get off your chest that's fine I suppose, but it seems you actually think people are saying this and you're making points in response to them.

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