The problem is the absolute lack of natural light you encounter inside of offices with high cubicle walls. And when you line the perimeter of the floor with offices, those left inside without offices suffer in darkness. And while programmers, who require more focus and may be more introverted, generally like privacy and walls, other people absolutely despise them and their moods can suffer greatly in these environments. I don't know what the solution is.
The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
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Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
#32Well, as a developer I need to be able to do two things: I need to be able to think, and I need to be able to get information.
Unfortunately, those two are at war with each other. If I can easily and quickly get information from a co-worker, then they can also get it from me. But that easy interruption, which minimizes the disruption to my co-worker's work, also breaks my train of thought.
The private office/cube/open office choice is a tradeoff, balancing communication with deep concentration. What the proper answer is may depend on your team, your project, and maybe even the phase of the moon. However, it does not depend on which book your manager read most recently.
Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
#33Spolsky said many years ago that programmers need private offices to collaborate and be productive. When I started Parse.ly in 2009, we couldn't afford them, but our team was already split geographically, so we just built a fully distributed team, instead. Home offices can make for great private offices, home Internet is fast, and commutes suck. I describe fully distributed teams in this blog post: http://bit.ly/distributed-teams
Now, we have over 20 employees, 13 of them spread throughout the US and Canada (all programmers). I actually just gave a presentation to new employees based here, "Parse.ly's Distributed Team: Open Source meets Open Plan": http://pixelmonkey.org/pub/distributed-teams -- it discusses some of the pro's and con's of our setup.
Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
#34offices are for professionals and academia, cubicles are for technical staff and open [factory] floor is for blue collars and low level clerical (i.e. easily replaceable commodity). That basically reflects the evolution of status of programmers in the society during the last 60 years.
Then why are developers paid so well?
Re: The inexplicable rise of open floor plans in tech companies
#35offices are for professionals and academia, cubicles are for technical staff and open [factory] floor is for blue collars and low level clerical (i.e. easily replaceable commodity). That basically reflects the evolution of status of programmers in the society during the last 60 years.
Then why are developers paid so well?
compare to what? Typical blue collar worker at the heights of their respective industry was able to afford house, car, and may be, after some careful saving, send children to college. Do developers can afford more than that?