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CEOs Want Their Offices Back

wsj.com

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Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#391

Post by tonyedgecombe »

EliRivers wrote: post #358
mlindner wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, what's the alternative to Agile? Waterfall? Hell no.

I worked somewhere that did waterfall, hardcore. For everything, requirements came first (sometimes, since moving on, I've even found myself suggesting in meetings that if we don't know what we're meant to be making, the odds of getting it right are pretty slim - obvious yet somehow it needs stating out loud more than it should be). Sometimes literal months were spent on getting them right. Then the design. Full on d…

That would require an exceptional customer, in my experience nobody knows what they want until you put something in front of them.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#392

Post by ziikutv »

eli wrote: post #10
ziikutv wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks. People should just stop using WSJ as source now...

You don't want them linked as a source but you want to read their articles?

Who said I want to read them? Most people will not pay a subscription fee to read the article. So it does little use to that demographic. I am not implying they are not credible source of information. It's just that we will be restricted. That's all. But thanks for the downvote, reminds me that I should have given this reasoning before.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#393

Post by empthought »

mlindner wrote: post #326
bogomipz wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Just like the cargo cult Agile pandemic peaked a few years ago, I suspect we're reaching peak open floor plans right now." Wait, that peaked? That hasn't been my perception. I'm curious where you are seeing that.

Honestly, what's the alternative to Agile? Waterfall? Hell no.

Over 20 years later, this is still a classic: https://www.fastcompany.com/28121/they-write-right-stuff

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#394

Post by varelse »

hinkley wrote: post #372
varelse wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've got one of those "non-regretted depature" notes on my record at Google. So what? Google lost out, not me. Jobs aren't scarce, but talent is. I've never gone for want of employment and Google blind-allocated me into a boring gig I hated. And yes, I'm very anti-social when I'm coding. I wouldn't want to work for a company that considered that a negative trait.

non-regretted departure? Is that something like "Quit my job at Google, middle fingers in the air," or what?

Disagreed (reasonably politely but persistently with lots of data) with upper management about what became a key technology to Google a year after I left. Got told to shut up about that technology or leave. Chose the latter and made a successful career out of being an expert in that technology. Found out later through my contacts that HR slammed the door behind me.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#395

Post by askafriend »

khazhoux wrote: post #227

We have an open floor plan, and it works like this: * Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this. * We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics. * Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less. * If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is t…

This is incredibly accurate and hilarious at the same time. Well done!

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#396

Post by loco5niner »

blablabla123 wrote: post #336
khazhoux wrote: post #227

We have an open floor plan, and it works like this: * Desk area is for getting work done. Everyone agrees on this. * We have "phone rooms" for small discussions. But we limit those usually to 1:1s or discussing office politics. * Try to limit all discussions at the desk area to 5 people or less. * If someone sighs loudly as they put on their headphones when you're having a discussion right behind them, then that is t…

If single offices were the optimum, why aren't we all working from home in single apartments anyway? I think the more open the place, the better. We are social animals. If people choose solitude, it's likely for wrong reasons. (Not saying that there aren't ever reasons for that, (almost) everybody needs some privacy every now and then.) But yeah, all people must also think of others, people who don't do that are like…

Not all of us are social animals, especially not 8 hours a day.

Also, often the problem I'm working on requires focus. For example, how much talking has occurred during ANY math test you have ever taken?

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#397

Post by abritinthebay »

noarchy wrote: post #356
abritinthebay wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs were always measured by velocity. It was just called "deadlines" or milestones in classical waterfall methods. With Scrum (for example) that turns into a much more sane, smaller, easier to predict and adapt with metric. Which is due to smaller units of work and shorter turnaround times. Scrum (and agile in general) isn't magic. It's just sane process improvements. It's also not an all-in-one philosophy. You can…

>Devs were always measured by velocity. It was just called "deadlines" or milestones in classical waterfall methods. I tend to think that the entire concept of waterfall is a great strawman. At some point, "rapid iteration" runs into the cold, hard reality of how companies tend to work. There are definitely still deadlines, even if no one wants to come out and call them that. I don't want to suggest that I'm dismissi…

You say salesmanship I say companies resistive to change ;)

The point of the manifesto and of training is to present the idealized form. All decent Scrum training will point out that, when the rubber meets the road, there are going to be compromises.

The idea is that it's more a frame of mind than a rigid system. If you approach the "cold, hard reality" with that frame of mind you'll still see improvement.

I'll give you a common real world example: having simple timeboxed sprints and daily 10 min standups is all many companies end up doing.

That's a shame but at the same time now that team has better team communication and better tracking of progress.

Will it be as good as it could be? No. Is it as bad as it could be? Also no.

It's a trade off.

The salesmanship that pisses off so many devs is because a truly Agile workplace requires buy in from all levels and know what helps get buy in from management? Certification, training, webinars, and enterprise-y biz-dev seminars.

There's a tendency of developers to think that every part of something that applies to them should be for them, but that's not true. That salesmanship is not aimed at you, it's useful training for you (I'm doing CSD training this summer for example), but that part is aimed at other parts of the company.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#398

Post by MockObject »

EliRivers wrote: post #358
mlindner wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, what's the alternative to Agile? Waterfall? Hell no.

I worked somewhere that did waterfall, hardcore. For everything, requirements came first (sometimes, since moving on, I've even found myself suggesting in meetings that if we don't know what we're meant to be making, the odds of getting it right are pretty slim - obvious yet somehow it needs stating out loud more than it should be). Sometimes literal months were spent on getting them right. Then the design. Full on d…

> implementing the design, coded up in literal programming style

What sort of pseudocode were you using for this?

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#399

Post by mizchief2 »

At a minimum you need to isolate teams that do actually collaborate together in their own private space. In my office we had many conference rooms that were pretty much taken up all day by teams working in them for sprint plannings and whatnot, so we just converted the conference rooms over to their work spaces.

Re: CEOs Want Their Offices Back

#400

Post by Corrado »

tradesmanhelix wrote: post #166

For over a year, our dev team has been begging management to fix our open-office. It's loud, distracting, and negatively impacts our productivity. The team wants 1/2 height cloth cubicles that would provide a limited measure of privacy and personal space while also helping to dampen the noise. Their response: Buy on-desk semi-transparent plastic partitions that just provide another noise-amplifying hard surface... Th…

Our solution was to use flattened cardboard boxes as extra walls in our way-to-small cubes. It looked horrible but it worked. Management didn't seem to mind...
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