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Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

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Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#381

Post by iancmceachern »

i_am_a_peasant wrote: post #299
eadmund wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, there is nothing like being in a room with a team. There is something about the physicality of presence, the way the communication has both lower latency (because it is not intermediated by electronics) and higher bandwidth (because in person even things like the way someone shifts in his shoes or his eyelid quivers is information). I have worked remotely for a significant portion of the past few de…

My new year resolution is to never do remote work at my next job. I wanna be that guy known for being always there , at his job , doing what he's paid to do.

This has seriously diminishing returns.

If a tree falls in the woods, and no one is around to hear it, did it fall?

If your the only one at work, did you work? Are you going to optimize to others view of your work habits or are you going to optimize to outcomes?

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#382

Post by e12e »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #236

I worked for a Japanese corporation. The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room. These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and ther…

I did a year as an exchange student in secondary school/senior high school in Japan. We were close to 50 pupils per class room - yet it was much more quiet than my Norwegian classroom with half as many pupils.

Not a praise of the outdated Prussian high school system in Japan - but another illustration that the culture is different.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#383

Post by oooyay »

JohnFen wrote: post #342
bluGill wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked, the data on offices vs cubes came down as offices being the same price or even slightly cheaper. Cubes and open offices enable communication with people which companies value more than absolute productivity. Sure your best people get less done, but they often enable someone else to get more work down - or that is their claim.

That claim is dubious at best. I'm old enough to remember when devs had actual offices, and the amount of communication (even serendipitous communication) was the same as with any other sort of arrangement.

Second this. To be more concise the groups I was in had a norm where you'd leave your door open if you were down to chat or BS. Cubes take that choice away.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#384

Post by politician »

JohnFen wrote: post #340
IKantRead wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer. People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and think about a problem is met with perplexity, every idea should be shipped to prod asap, while tests exist the idea of performing basic QA/manual testing on your own work is only…

That's a scary depiction of the scene. I haven't experienced things that extreme, but close enough that I don't doubt you. It might even be a significant part of why software quality isn't where it should be these days.

Inside Facebooks' offices in Seattle circa 2019: "Overcrowded pig sty" is an accurate description. The smell was overpowering. Two pairs of bathrooms for an entire floor of developers packed shoulder to shoulder in an open plan hellscape.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#385

Post by iancmceachern »

YetAnotherNick wrote: post #160
esskay wrote: post #106

It has to be said, if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse. Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing. There's a reason that many programmers prefer to w…

Private rooms are not cheap and it would be hard to justify for junior programmers. And having private space just for middle level folks is bad for morale and learning of junior folks. But yeah for companies which just employs senior folks this should be the norm.

Skilled labor isn't cheap.

The buildings were put there to serve the people, not the other way around.

Even if you pay $1k per office per programmer that's still less than 5-10% of the cost of their salary, and would likely yield a performance improvement of greater than 5-10%.

You say you can't afford to, I say you can't afford not to!

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#386

Post by dmoy »

IKantRead wrote: post #316
esskay wrote: post #106

It has to be said, if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse. Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing. There's a reason that many programmers prefer to w…

Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer. People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and think about a problem is met with perplexity, every idea should be shipped to prod asap, while tests exist the idea of performing basic QA/manual testing on your own work is only…

> Contemporary startup engineering culture is best described as frenetic.

Also, like... not really engineering per se

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#387

Post by pseudalopex »

bitzun wrote: post #318
robertlagrant wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. This is very one-sided. If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster. There's a balance to be had, of course, but your team's overall delivery is what's important. > I view it…

But it's not a dichotomy between 3 hours or instantaneous. It's a dichotomy between instantaneous and when someone has a break in flow to peek at messages, which IME is more like 15-30 minutes (and i think it's probably fair to ask people to peek around that frequently if they normally wouldn't)

Paul Graham would disagree.[1]

[1] http://paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#388

Post by alok99 »

wharvle wrote: post #252
scbrg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not when it's normal noises, made by non headphone wearing people. Normally people are conscious about the sounds they make and restrict them a bit. If you're coughing in a group, you try to do it softly, or you leave the room. Things like that. When people wear head phones this kind of subconscious self control seems to be a lot less effective. I'm certainly not the only one to have made this observation.

I sometimes start audibly breathing with headphones on. Something I never do without them. So I won’t wear them around others when I can avoid it. That’s aside from tapping I might not realize is making noise with headphones on, or a particular motion in my chair that’s making it squeak and I don’t know it because headphones, et c.

Loud breathing is one of my biggest concerns when wearing noise-cancelling headphones around others. Partly because I dislike hearing it from others and don't want to subject them to that, and partly because I don't want to sound like a smooth-brain mouth breather.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#389

Post by ath3nd »

pseudalopex wrote: post #335
DoughnutHole wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blaming extroverts/introverts is a red herring - it’s down to the nature of the work. Whether they’re introverts or extroverts a programmer’s job tends to require a lot of solo focus. There’s collaborative aspects of course but it always requires windows of deep work that are deeply frustrated by distraction, introvert or not. Many other areas of work (including much work in upper management) don’t require that focus…

Most programmers understand the aspects of upper management work you described in my experience. And most upper managers choose to work in separate offices.

I wonder why...

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#390

Post by em-bee »

mariusor wrote: post #339
em-bee wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when i hire someone, their job is to do whatever it takes that is in their capacity to move the project forward. if it takes a larger team, then getting new team members up to speed is part of that. and if that new team member is unfamiliar with the frameworks the team is using then training them on that is part of the job too.

Are you just telling me that you don't want to do your job properly as a hiring manager, which in my opinion would be to get the best people for the job, and that you prefer to pass the buck to your team to train them? I mean, sure, that's fine if this is stipulated from the start, but if you expect someone to solve leet code, do programming homework, and then when they get hired they have to also navigate your extra…

the best people for the job are not necessarily those that need no training. there are a lot of things to consider. part of that is that while new hires may need training, they also bring experience and knowledge to the team that others can benefit from. training doesn't only go one way.

you seem to prefer working on your own, neither willing to teach nor learn from others. that's fine if you can find a job as a lone developer, but i don't consider this a suitable attitude for working on a team.

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