Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

blobstreaming.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 593 posts

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#421

Post by tharkun__ »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #402
politician wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually really loved the Dexter building. Yes it was all that, but I’m an extrovert and some part of my work day needs have been unmet for 4 years now.

Great! Go work in an office somewhere.

Guess what? I'm not an extrovert and most of my work day needs for about 15 years have been unmet.

Since Covid they are being met.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#422

Post by kridsdale1 »

Clubber wrote: post #229
macNchz wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen this work tolerably well in an open space that’s entirely engineers or similar roles, assuming there are enough conference rooms for people to peel off to for meetings and calls, and you can establish the culture of the main room having a library-esque hush. As soon as people start having multi party conversations in the main space because the conference rooms are booked 100% of the time, or people whose jo…

> “Hey Bob, this is Jason at Intertrode, do you have 5 minutes?” It's funny how Office Space is still relevant almost 25 years later.

Mike Judge ended up with the same problem as South Park and The Onion.

Silicon Valley ended before NFT, AI, and GameStop. All far more ludicrous than anything in fiction.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#423

Post by no_wizard »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #407

Just want to add that I only became (at least in my opinion) a good programmer by sitting next to a very good and passionate one that I was able to question from time to time and may have interrupted his work some days. I also probably helped him brainstorm ideas with me and debugging, since he would just say what's on his mind while doing it, and I'd do the same, and sometimes this kind of ping pong debugging/brains…

Biggest thing is changing cultural dynamics to make maximal efficiency of remote work. Which includes that sometimes, you get a team of people together temporarily in person to really focus and iterate on issues, but we all know the majority of time, this isn't needed for proper collaboration.

As far as excitement and collaboration goes: this is a culture and communication problem. If your company hasn't done a good job of training people to use the proper tools of collaboration they're not doing it right.

Same with mentorship, it should be done as a (possibly rotating) thing by people who are trained to do just that: be good mentors. This is not a burden that should fall on the uninitiated. This should also have concrete expectations for everyone involved. Its a job in and of itself, after all.

All of these things point to cultural company deficits, they're not an inherently immutable thing that is a downside of remote work.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#424

Post by bunderbunder »

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…

The awesome thing about modern programming culture is that rework due to the initial thing you shipped being rushed and shoddy actually looks really good on Tableau. Because you can assign more story points to fixing all the mistakes you made during the last 1-2 days of every sprint.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#425

Post by kridsdale1 »

dylan604 wrote: post #300
kstrauser wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker repeatedly ignored a person’s headphones and would interrupt them anyway. One day I put a bright post-it note on my headphones: “Joe, don’t bother me”. I was in middle of flow, making some huge changes, when I noticed Joe standing next to me, laughing. “Hahaha, someone put a post-it note on your headphones!” I coulda killed him. “In startup land did CFO A stately office plan decree: Through EDM, the coders…

I printed out the infamous quote "Go away, or I will replace you with a small shell script." It was primarily meant for one specific employee known to have the gift of gab. Seeing how my job was to automate the most mundane/error prone tasks, it seemed to be pretty effective. I heard murmurings about how some thought it was rather rude, but I never had to speak to HR about it.

Make them fear the dark wizard’s powers.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#427

Post by kridsdale1 »

sodapopcan wrote: post #326
definitelyauser wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often run into the "just wear headphones" argument and never been a fan of it. Do you code with noise cancellation in a sort of sensory deprivation mode? Or do you listen to music? Listening to music while coding severely reduces my concentration, and I find it in no way to be a substitute for silence.

> Listening to music while coding severely reduces my concentration, and I find it in no way to be a substitute for silence. Me too. I can't work with music in headphones as I inevitably start listening to it. It's weird that many people don't even consider this a possibility when recommending headphones. Well, I guess it's not weird as they just aren't affected by it the same way, but still.

I have found that NR + white noise works well to fully isolate my mind from external stimulus and focus on the code state inside.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#428

Post by kridsdale1 »

dboreham wrote: post #250
definitelyauser wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often run into the "just wear headphones" argument and never been a fan of it. Do you code with noise cancellation in a sort of sensory deprivation mode? Or do you listen to music? Listening to music while coding severely reduces my concentration, and I find it in no way to be a substitute for silence.

Contra-opinion: music significantly improves my concentration, but it has to be instrumental or classical otherwise brain gets distracted processing the lyrics.

Your word-token-hardware is single-threaded.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#429

Post by roland35 »

ike2792 wrote: post #365
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…

As a former programmer and now EM, I agree with this. Open offices definitely felt a lot more productive since everyone was always frantically working and communicating. I think people actually have gotten more done since WFH started, though.

I once heard and now love the phrase "Don't confuse motion with progress".

A lot of us are constantly busy but get nothing important done!

Post reply on HN