241–250 of 462 posts
30+ years working in cube farms for major Semiconductor and Operating System companies. (cough shmintel cough cough microshmoft) They ain't going away. Why? Because offices with doors are extremely expensive compared to wide-open spaces.
It isn't going away.
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Except that Waterfall was never really advocated: https://davesquared.net/2008/01/contentious-myth-of-waterfal... It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real.
> It was conceived as a straw man which was being dissed so vigorously that people started believing it was real. So much this. I've been in the industry for about 30 years, and I've never once seen a place that used a methodology that could be called "waterfall" as described by many agile proponents.
It was always a "no true scotsman" issue. If it didn't work, it was because we didn't adhere to it and didn't gather the requirements completely enough. So, sure, waterfall never existed in the sense that it never worked out, but it certainly existed in the sense that it was pursued to the tune of countless man hours and countless dollars.
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I guess I'll be the exception here. I'm in a psudeo-open workspace right now which is pretty much what you're talking about except that we're not in a room, it's what the company calls a "pod" with high walls and a single doorway. I would say 90% of all distractions etc. come from inside the pod. Moving us into our own room would make no difference. It does get pretty loud sometimes in the building, but it's mostly w…
> For some people the idea of chatting someone who's sitting 5 feet away from them is super weird. This is exactly what happens in my employer's "pod rooms." There are 10 of us and inevitably someone will be all, "Jack; Jack!; HEY, JACK!!" and someone else says "he has his headphones on just send him an IM" and the first person replies "ugh!" and then gets up to walk over and stand at Jack's shoulder until Jack takes…
Cities grew too quickly and are now kind of like the startup that never planned for its explosive growth and is struggling to cope trying to keep the wheels from falling off. A paradigm shift is needed, and will come about at some point- I'm just not sure when, and in what form.
Or I'll just move to Montana and do a self-sustainable ranch(hah). I don't necessarily want to be that far out, but looking at the way things are going, wife and I rarely go out anymore anyways due to the overcrowding, so the benefits of having a city is rapidly diminishing.
To wit:
- We've evolved into a world with "Agile", which our paymasters have defined as the equivalent of warehouse/factory/shop floor process. Each engineer is "the same"; thus, swappable;
- In this view of the world, the only valuable thing to do is the tiny little sliver of work in front of you. Spending time on anything related to real engineering is verboten. When you're eventually asked why the application is slow, producing work faster isn't possible, or new features are difficult to implement, your "technical" answers about "the code", "the design", and/or the "architecture" are derided as "lazy work" and "not valuable". We just don't understand "the business";
- Since you're a factory laborer now, and there is no expectation that you must "think" to do this job, the notion that you require privacy is laughable. "The business" does not give the shop floor guys privacy, why should they give it to you? Oh, and how long do you suppose it will be before you must ask permission to use the bathroom? Just like factory workers;
- Since you obviously don't need to "think", after all you just have to crank out that next ticket/card/story, then being interrupted isn't an issue. As the foreman of a factory floor, I can reallocate my "resources" however I see fit. After all, they're all assembling the same "widget", right?
- If you're lucky enough to not be in the physical fish bowl of the modern software engineering shop floor, then you're expected to be tethered to some god awful chat client. Again, what you're doing isn't complicated, right? You don't have to plan. You don't need to design. You don't need to think. That's what all the tools, and frameworks, and geegaws they spend big money on are for! So if you get pinged constantly by 20 different people for 8 hours -- and your work isn't getting done -- there is something wrong with you;
- If you are unlucky enough to be in the fish bowl itself, then being interrupted now includes both the physical and virtual;
- Meetings are what "the business" does and what we do isn't important, obviously. So whatever "top of the stack" issue is critical to them at any given moment in time overrides any worthless thing you might be doing.
The simple truth is that software engineering is a low prestige career in the majority of companies. There are a handful of real software vendors that still, on some level, grasp what it is we do. However, the vast majority gave up decades ago and just decided to treat us like factory workers. Welcome to the software industry in the 21st century.
The other side of this is that a very large percentage of folks in our industry seem to have social anxiety-spectrum issues. Folks without those don't seem to understand how much energy is being burned through just being out in the open and on display for all of your coworkers. It's not something I, personally, have control over. The time I've spent in "open concept" work places, I finish every day frustrated with my…
The concept of "Social anxiety" really doesn't explain it fully IMHO. The concept may even sound like a label of being wimpy, retarded or scared, which is probably not true at all - or can be made true/untrue depending on circumstances! It's more about what kind of loads your brain are optimized for (when feeling "drained" after social exposure for a full day), being exceedingly more sensitive than most, maybe even e…
It's dangerous to presume that you have such a deep and wide perspective that you can instantly diagnose something so thoroughly.
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I've had the opposite experience. I had a job where half the floor plan was cubicals and half was open plan where you had groups of 2-3 people in a sort of cove. I started in the cubicle section. And I hated my job. Every day felt draining to the soul. I felt invisible and isolated and I hated it. I was making no progress in the organization. I'd constantly find excuses to leave my desk just to see another human face…
Extroverts: I feel invisible and isolated and I hate it. Introverts: I feel invisible and isolated and I love it.
Introvert: Anyone could (and has in the past) interrupted my thoughts in similar situations, I need to be ready.
Introvert: What are they saying? Does that involve me or an area I should be concerned about?
Introvert: There's someone within speaking voice 'ear-shot' and/or eye-contact range, lets work on that task together.
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>But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day. Scott Adams nailed it in his book from 15 years ago: >After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness. I th…
There's a missing stage in his description, that we're having issues with right now: in an open office plan, not having enough seats for everyone.
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I just recently went from a personal office to an open plan and find the new situation devoid of merit. Noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones are a must, and phone calls are impossible. Since meeting rooms are minimal, that's an issue too. I've done a handful of meetings in my car.
> phone calls are impossible I've never had any problem making a phone call in an open office.
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> Just to get the alternate view out there too This always comes up in these discussions. Extroverts say they prefer the open office format because they can talk to others. That's nice and all, but shouldn't you be working rather than satisfying your desire to talk to others? (The same goes for workers not in an open office not playing on HN all day.)
Human interaction is more than just blabbering at the water cooler. It could be as little as just seeing people walking in and out, hearing them rinse out their coffee cup, overhearing nuggets about which part of the project is behind or overhearing technical discussions that might give me ideas to try. All these things are challenging to come by when you’re shut in a quiet office. To some people this stuff doesn’t m…
As far as preferences go, though, if you get even a small part of the external stimulus you want, it's already started wearing on us. Perhaps larger companies could try offering quiet floors with lots of barriers vs "social" open-plan floors.