201–210 of 409 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The mechanical keyboard people in open offices bother me.
Mechanical keyboards are better for RSI and general comfort. If you don't like them, complain to your manager that you need walled offices.
Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus? Sure some people can work in the noisy space where interruptions abound. The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU. I'd rather have a Cube farm, but better yet, a small tiny phone booth as an office.
Slight tangent:
This isn't even true, context switch time has not scaled (equally) with improvements in processing power (IPC, freq and functional-unit parallelism). A PIII in 1999 spent proportionally less of its operating wall time performing a context switch compared to modern processing. Turns out flushing TLBs and the like is not fast. This is why managing interrupts properly is very important on server class hardware.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was a team lead/solutions architect. > Did your team-members enjoy you turning around and interrupting them? I don't think it's fair to call all conversations "interruptions" and my co-workers were all very conscious of causing any unwanted interruptions. > Is it really that hard to get up and walk to another office so you don't disturb 8 other people with a question they don't care about? It wasn't, and I often di…
> 99% of people had headphones on through all parts of the day. Yes I've found that to be true as well. I myself typically wear expensive noise cancelling headphones all day and blast music, damaging my hearing, in order to drown out distractions. Fuck open offices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now. The overall negative effects of an open floor plan for a significant fraction of engineers (though not all) is self-evident and backed up by reams of data stretching back nearly 40 years: http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work... TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is opt…
Cargo Cult is exactly right. Our organization is selling us this right now. "We're creating a more collaborative atmosphere! Facebook does it, this must be what IT people want." (Any discussion of paying IT staff like FB, though, is "well, we're not an IT company, and besides we're mission driven!") Because they don't think we're mature enough to accept that they want to squeeze more bodies unto a smaller space, for…
(This has nothing to do with FB -- I've hated it everywhere I've worked.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Many large company will do but the large brunt of codetariat working for cash strapped business living and dying according to investors and customers will be keept in the open spaces: they looks cool in photos, convey a reassuring sense of "working bees" and sells well to visiting customers, so I fear the open plan it's here to stay.
HR is driven by data. To kill open floor plans, start citing the floor plan as the primary reason for leaving. If that becomes a theme, IMO open floor plans will become cancer. It just takes time.
This is not my experience.
Maybe you've worked with better companies than I have.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked at Sun Microsystems for a while and their private office layout was really nice. I can't ballpark the exact size but the office could hold 3 gigantic CRT monitors, 2 desk phones, and had space for 2 visitors. I feel that a 2 person private office is quite optimal, since we are talking about teams. It's easier to pair program or discuss and even maintain silence when required. Office designers will have to pa…
Have never worked in a non-open office plan so I can't really conceptualize this but sounds interesting. So if I envision a floor, do you just have rows of 2-person offices with hallways in between?
Requires a decent amount of space to do correctly, though.
Why do CEO's think they're alone in the need for quiet spaces where they can focus? Sure some people can work in the noisy space where interruptions abound. The only thing in my office that works well with interruptions is my CPU. I'd rather have a Cube farm, but better yet, a small tiny phone booth as an office.
Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now. The overall negative effects of an open floor plan for a significant fraction of engineers (though not all) is self-evident and backed up by reams of data stretching back nearly 40 years: http://iansommerville.com/software-engineering-book/web/work... TLDR: 100 square feet of personal space is opt…
This reminds me of the time companies used to try to save money by buying low powered computers. They didn't realize that carbon is more expensive than silicon.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cargo Cult is exactly right. Our organization is selling us this right now. "We're creating a more collaborative atmosphere! Facebook does it, this must be what IT people want." (Any discussion of paying IT staff like FB, though, is "well, we're not an IT company, and besides we're mission driven!") Because they don't think we're mature enough to accept that they want to squeeze more bodies unto a smaller space, for…
I don't think it is a cargo cult. My guess is that the focus is to make these engineers replaceable. And "quiet, introverted, methodical folks" are difficult to replace. Dumbed down open office workers and brogrammers are easily replaceable with another recent graduate some place cheaper.
Systemically keeping their tastes and station "lower" than that is probably part of what's going on, especially with the bigger companies. Developer pay may (sometimes) approach or match upper-middle, professional-class level, but (self-)respect for developers can't be permitted to reach those heights. Better their conditions are kept closer to, say, mid-20th-century secretary pools.
Here is a good blog post on office design that supports deep work: http://strongproject.com/blog/how-cal-newports-deep-work-con...
If I ever get a chance to design an office, it will be something like the above. Small risk of that, however.
At the risk of sounding like I want to dehumanize work (quite the opposite, actually), I'd like to point out that anybody thinking of adding, say, a new milling machine to a machine shop, would look at how much space you need for it and around it to work productively and have quick access to the necessary accessories. Yet, we don't put any analysis at all into what it takes to maximize the productivity of people. And too often, we go for one-size-fits-all solutions. I can imagine a high-functioning dev-ops team really benefiting from the instantaneous communication of having all 8 people on the team sitting within a short chair roll of each other in a common space. For the people who need long blocks of unbroken concentration, that kind of space is not as functional. "Interrupt driven" work and "deep though" work are two different kinds of work, and it should be no surprise that a single space is not optimal for both.