231–240 of 259 posts
The Boston Fitbit office has 12 engineers now. I'll pay attention to how things progress as we grow past the 15 mark. Open plan seating seems to work well for us so far.
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Nailed it. A lot of "collaboration" is not derived from isolated silos of knowledge but when its "shared". People who can't operate in an open environment lack the focus required for such an activity in the first place. I'd rather blame a lack of "integration" into an environment like this on HR than the business owner / layout designer. There is a reason why start-up thought process is injection molded into an offic…
Really what about those of us with conditions like dyslexia which are negatively effected by interruptions far more than the average person? And you might want to Google "flow state" and how that applies to development work.
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I had to wear a tie my first few years of working. It sucked. I see dressing how I want as a sign of power, but I do agree with your overall point. Because I can dress how I want, doesn't mean I should look like a slob or unprofessional. I still wear nice clothes to work, just not corporate drone clothes anymore.
Dressing however you like is a great perk. However in my experience, many companies who say that they let their engineers dress however they like are actually requiring (although not explicitly) that their engineers dress down. If you are the sort of person who enjoys wearing a tie, you may find that doing so as an engineer is untenable at many tech companies. Most people don't bother trying to dress that way so they…
I'm not sure how I would respond if someone said I was not allowed to dress nice. It just seems like a completely foreign concept.
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I had to wear a tie my first few years of working. It sucked. I see dressing how I want as a sign of power, but I do agree with your overall point. Because I can dress how I want, doesn't mean I should look like a slob or unprofessional. I still wear nice clothes to work, just not corporate drone clothes anymore.
Dressing however you like is a great perk. However in my experience, many companies who say that they let their engineers dress however they like are actually requiring (although not explicitly) that their engineers dress down. If you are the sort of person who enjoys wearing a tie, you may find that doing so as an engineer is untenable at many tech companies. Most people don't bother trying to dress that way so they…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dressing however you like is a great perk. However in my experience, many companies who say that they let their engineers dress however they like are actually requiring (although not explicitly) that their engineers dress down. If you are the sort of person who enjoys wearing a tie, you may find that doing so as an engineer is untenable at many tech companies. Most people don't bother trying to dress that way so they…
I haven't worn a tie to my current job, but routinely wear button up shirts and sport coats. The other engineers might joke if I have a job interview, but no one will tell you to not dress that way. I'm not sure how I would respond if someone said I was not allowed to dress nice. It just seems like a completely foreign concept.
Suffers from the same flaw as most critiques of open plan: it focuses on individual productivity while failing to understand how it contributes to team productivity. Cornell did a study of open plan awhile back that you should all read. I posted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7507404 The misunderstanding here is that it's just about serendipitously "overhearing" other conversations. 1. Open plan makes…
Nailed it. A lot of "collaboration" is not derived from isolated silos of knowledge but when its "shared". People who can't operate in an open environment lack the focus required for such an activity in the first place. I'd rather blame a lack of "integration" into an environment like this on HR than the business owner / layout designer. There is a reason why start-up thought process is injection molded into an offic…
It's absurd to expect human beings, especially software engineers--who tend to be quieter, more introverted, and loner-types--to be herded like cattle into a crowded, noisy open-plan office and expect them to have the razor-sharp focus needed for high quality software development.
If you only hire people who thrive in noisy / distracting environments, I won't be surprised if you end up hiring the wrong people for actually getting the job done-because often times, the people who take on the most work, resolve the most difficult problems, and carry the most weight are those people who can't stand working in a place like that.
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Do you have any primers on good open office design? Ideally something more accessible than a full textbook, to start with. It sounds like you're saying that the optimal design is the incredibly dreary Office Space setup. You seem pretty critical of "hipsterism," a lot of which could be more charitably called "caring about aesthetics." Is there no middle ground?
According to Alan J. Perlis, the best book on office design for the layman is Alice in Wonderland .
I'm not sure on the exact numbers, but in San Francisco a programmer probably costs you on average $100K a year in salary. With benefits the total cost is in the neighborhood of $120K. So a programmer is a $10K / month investment. For what it's worth: assuming white-collar employees, the multiplier is typically 50% to 100% depending on your location and how generous you are with perks, rather than 20%. If you only ha…
Can you (or anyone) go into more detail on what the number "$100K yearly salary" includes and doesn't include, in the US? Helpful for those of us not in the US. I.e. what makes up that extra 50%-100%? Our own multiplier (Israel) is usually 30% extra over the stated salary, although the salary here is usually stated as a monthly, not yearly, number.
The biweekly paycheck for someone with a $100k salary would thus be approximately $4,000 gross. It would list a deduction for payroll taxes, a deduction for anticipated federal and state income tax, a deduction for the employee's portion of health insurance, and perhaps some miscellaneous deductions for unemployment insurance premiums, automatic contribution to their retirement account, and what have you. This leaves them with net pay (probably in the $2,700 region or so but it's heavily sensitive to their family situation because that makes a huge difference in how much anticipated income tax is withheld) which is actually transferred to their account.
So all of that is included "within" the $100k yearly salary. What isn't, such that business owners have to model it separately?
1) Payroll taxes are typically divided half between employees and half between employers. For example, there's a ~14% levy on the first ~$100k in salary, for Social Security (primarily a form of compulsory retirement savings which the vast majority of working Americans are legally required to contribute to). ~7% is deducted from each paycheck for this (so ~$280 out of $4,000). An equivalent sum is contributed by the employer, without ever appearing on a paycheck. So the employee's real salary is actually about $107,000 but $7,000 disappears to taxes prior to the point where they're told the salary that they are going to be taxed on.
2) For historical reasons, the United States does not tax many forms of health insurance if provided as a perk to employees. The United States also historically did not have a national health insurance scheme. (We've got Obamacare these days but it doesn't meaningfully interact with the math for Valley engineers.) The combination of these two facts means that virtually all white collar employees expect to have employers fund fairly generous health insurance plans as an employment perk. The pricing for these gets a little weird, but you're in the right ballpark at about $10k to $20k per employee per year.
3) In addition to our national retirement savings program, we have "individual" retirement savings. These programs have substantial tax advantages. These are not compulsory, and can be funded by either an employee, an employer, or both. It is the common practice of most employers of engineers to fund these retirement accounts on a matching basis. The offer is at the company's discretion (up to a legal cap). A common offer is "We will match $2 of your contributions with $1 of our own money, up to a maximum match of 3% of your salary."
4) American engineers are commonly offered perks. Many are comparatively inexpensive when bought at company size -- free gym memberships for all employees, for example. Some are not exactly inexpensive -- free lunches and dinners on the company's premises daily, prepared by gourmet chefs, for example. Americans do not customarily include the implicit cost of perks in salary figures.
5) There's a bunch of business overhead that I haven't accounted for above (desks, prorated rent, computers, etc), but they're substantially the same as in Israel, so I won't belabor the point.
Anyhow: health care, taxes, and perks is what gets you to 50 to 100%.
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I think some of the best and most productive days I have had have been where I have been in the same cramped office as the rest of my team and we were all working on different chunks of the same problem - "Bob - are you using a list or a dictionary to pass the foobars in?" That's great for a single team all working on one thing - but I do not see the open plan office as a series of nicely appointed open plan offices…
> But living in the middle of hundreds of others just teaches us to ignore everyone. This is an important point. For many of us who have worked in startups, "open office plan" really just means "team room". I enjoyed working in open office plans in smaller companies since it basically just meant 5-10 engineers sitting in the same space. Last year I worked for a mid-size company of about ~200 employees, most of whom w…
the reason startups do open plan offices is because no one is concentrating on managing the culture of the startup as it grows. Open plan is then I suspect both cause and symptom.
A campaign for team rooms is needed