The authors views remind me of The Onion's editorial cartoons.
Well with a name like "Schumpeter" you can tell he's pining for the ultra structured German style where the end game is to get an office with a brass plate with Her Doktor on it.
The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
31–40 of 56 posts
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#32I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing. For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices…
You talk about technological progress and innovation as something contradictory to any sort of predictable process iterating on an existing product.
This isn't always the case. A lot of new innovating ideas are incorporated into existing systems and products. Whether something stands alone by itself or not is a packaging question- not a judge of how innovating something new is. A key new feature in a complex system can solve large long-standing limitations and have huge impact.
Rather than only working on new interesting ideas as side projects, you can incorporate time to experiment with new ideas during a shipping cycle. Prototypes and answer a lot of questions in a short amount of time, and those answers can be incorporated into planning for new features.
Predictable process doesn't have to stifle innovation- and can create a forum for new innovating ideas to be discussed and executed on well.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#33I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing. For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices…
Yes I bet the author came from the German system where if your pigeonholed at 14 or so as a "technician" level at school your social mobility is very restricted.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#34We're open plan at Blekko and it has its plusses and minuses. Rich (our CEO) had the experience of taking an open plan group to a mix of offices and open plan that went very badly as communication dried up. At Google quad cubes were the norm, doubles were the minimum (even for VPs who in theory would need to be talking at times about material things). The benefit is it is easier to communicate, and the downside is th…
Can you describe in more detail what went wrong with the mix of offices and open-plan? That always seemed to me like the obvious compromise: an office for when you want to get away, and shared open space when you want to work together. Were the problems fixable without going fully open-plan? For me, headphones would help but wouldn't be enough. I hate having people moving around behind me. I could have my back to a w…
I wasn't there so I'm not comfortable relating the specifics, his comments about it indicated that people who had offices sort of disconnected from the rest of the population.
Can you say more about the challenges of people moving behind you? I felt similarly but it had more to do with whether or not people would correctly interpret what I was doing / not doing. So for example I'll read something from a different subject to pull my brain out of an endless loop when I am not making progress on a problem. Is that goofing off? Sure it might look that way if you didn't ask but if you did ask you would get the full story. So can people own up to asking? Or do they run with their assumptions?
As a manager I like to know that folks are making progress against the things they are responsible for. Sometimes they have milestones, sometimes not, so I spend some time trying to understand that progress. If there is little progress and a lot of web surfing, that is a useful conversation to have (trying to be more productive). But if someone is spending their days checking in excellent code and leaves TMZ up on their monitor I'm totally fine with that too. It reminds me of an anecdote.
So my daughters had this tendency to do their homework in front of the television. At first glance it looked like more "TV watching" than "studying" and the conversation we had was about results vs consequences. I didn't care one way or the other if they spent time watching television, as long as the priority was to get their work done. The consequences of not getting that work done occurred whether I approved or didn't approve. But I was also quite clear that it was their choice and so there aren't any excuses for poor work if it is done while watching TV, its just the indicator that you can't really do both and expect to do good work. Conversely if you do both and your work is fine, then that is totally fine.
If I can develop a level of trust with someone that they realize what I care about is that they get done what they say they will (and that getting done both a reasonable amount of work and at good quality levels) then they also understand I have no issue with them apparently "goofing off."
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#35My (non-tech) workplace has individual offices for the engineers. Every engineer, even fresh grads, gets an office with a door (though windows are reserved for the senior guys). It sounds like a privilege at first, but with our lack of email it's pretty isolating. We can always get up and walk to each other to talk one-on-one, but sometimes I miss the collegial feel of 3-4 people hashing things out while at their des…
> Every engineer, even fresh grads, gets an office with a door (though windows are reserved for the senior guys). What?! An office of the size for 1 person, without a window? That sounds awful. Is it like a big closet with bright-lighting?[1] How many people on HN would like to work in the room pictured in the below link?: http://jonnyh.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/kar-server-room-pa...
Not everyone has the same preferences. I'd definitely prefer a one-person office without a window to any open office space.
The room in your photo would look a lot better to me just by replacing the overhead fluorescent lighting with some incandescent lamps and putting some art on the walls.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#36> Both companies have pragmatically mixed progressive ideas with more traditional ones such as encouraging internal competition and measuring performance.
Apparently the author and his editors failed to notice that he has already disassembled his straw man before he starts attacking it...
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#37The authors views remind me of The Onion's editorial cartoons.
Well with a name like "Schumpeter" you can tell he's pining for the ultra structured German style where the end game is to get an office with a brass plate with Her Doktor on it.
Actually, the pen-name is probably a reference to Joseph Schumpeter[1], who was an influential Austrian economist.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#38I don't... like the author of this piece. He writes like he doesn't really understand what he is discussing. For instance, he conflates the move to open plan offices, which is seen as increasing communication within teams, but also enables an almost oppressive level of employee monitoring, with googles propensity to space hoppers. These are quite different things, coming from quite different places. Open plan offices…
Most Economist pieces are written by try-hard underpaid 20-somethings desperate to be taken seriously. Keeping that in mind helps to contextualize nonsense like this. It's also why the Economist operates the way they do.
Oh boy, are you right. I have an Economist subscription which I got after foolishly assuming that the quality of Charlemagne and Bagehot are representative of the whole product.
What enrages me most is that the "leader" opinion pieces (at the very front of every issue) are so catastrophically bad. I recently wondered if there might be a positive correlation between how bad a political decision has played out and whether or not it had been demanded by "leader".
As soon as it runs out, I'll get a Guardian subscription instead.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#39It seems like the author is mixing the idea of an open floor workspace with a casual atmosphere at work. I'll be the first to rail against a lot of contemporary Silicon Valley/tech culture, but running your business like 1950s IBM has nothing to do with producing a quality software/hardware product. If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work, and have video game…
If you don't have a public facing job, then does it matter if you wear a t-shirt and jeans to work I think it can. I've had a couple of jobs where I needed to wear a suit to work (or at minimum, dress shirt, tie, and slacks) even though my job was not customer-facing. It had its annoyances but in some ways I think I took everything a little bit more seriously when I was at the office. Probably for the same reasons th…
What works for you doesn't necessarily work for everybody. For example I am completely unable to work from home, so even though most of my career I worked remotely, I prefer to rent an office, even when I have the freedom to stay home.
But not all people have such preferences. I know people that are quite happy and productive while working from home. And personally I come to work in slippers and tee-shirt during the summer, with no effect on my seriousness with which I treat work.
Re: The backlash against running firms like progressive schools has begun
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you describe in more detail what went wrong with the mix of offices and open-plan? That always seemed to me like the obvious compromise: an office for when you want to get away, and shared open space when you want to work together. Were the problems fixable without going fully open-plan? For me, headphones would help but wouldn't be enough. I hate having people moving around behind me. I could have my back to a w…
I wasn't there so I'm not comfortable relating the specifics, his comments about it indicated that people who had offices sort of disconnected from the rest of the population. Can you say more about the challenges of people moving behind you? I felt similarly but it had more to do with whether or not people would correctly interpret what I was doing / not doing. So for example I'll read something from a different sub…
But you don't need an open plan to know if people are making progress, right? Or the ability to know what's displaying on their monitor?