461–468 of 468 posts
I won't feel good if my manager/co-worker comes to my desk at the time when I was just switching to some music on youtube. It can give a wrong impression of you even when you know you were not doing the wrong thing.
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> When people see their teams working hard around them, they > have little excuse not to follow the suit. > In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly > weak against distractions generated from their own computer I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web. But that is also fairly easily mitigated with…
But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT . A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense…
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So they invented a conference room or office that can't accommodate those with mobility issues? "Someone clear a path for the wheelchair!"
Really? We're that politically correct now that we can't have a joke meeting-room-ballpit to celebrate the opening of a new building without offending someone?
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> There are a number of reasons to use open-plan offices, not all disreputable, as I explained here: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/open-plan-of... . That said, a common reason for it is back-door age discrimination. Wait, what? How do open office plans put women, older folks, and lower-income folks at a disadvantage?
Open-plan offices require you to trust strangers in a way that most people aren't comfortable with. Being visible to someone while working (i.e. doing an activity where your income depends as much on how you are perceived while doing it as on what you actually do) is a form of mandated trust of others. It doesn't come naturally to people whose life experiences involve violations of trust, embarrassing illnesses, or p…
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I work as a fairly senior SWE at Google, coming off 20+ years with private offices (some of that time full-time remote), and I agree with everything you said. I knew it would be hard going into the job. I actually get up at 5am so I can have a few quiet hours at my desk before the rest of the folks show up & it turns into a total zoo.
My question isn't necessarily specific to Google, but is it frowned upon if you bring noise-cancelling headphones? I am a weirdly fluctuating person and some days I work best in total seclusion. Others I need to sit in the middle of a cafe and have the noise and people around me. So my goal is to be as adaptive as possible without harming the day-to-day work life.
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Ever seen what normal people make? It's a pittance in comparison.
That depends on who is your measure for normal in comparison to programmers: Lawyers? Doctors? Waiters? Cleaners? After that is decided we can check whether you or the GP post is more correct.
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I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to? Mainly, I'm curious about how they define productivity. An office full of people performing completely independent tasks is almost certainly less productive than having separate offices; the advantage of open offices comes when everyone's work is interrelated. In an open environment,…
> I've seen the phrase "all the research" thrown around quite a lot in this thread. Would you mind linking to a few studies you refer to? There's a good New Yorker article[1] from last year that references a number of studies. This blog post[2] links to a couple others and addresses costs/alternatives. Also, "a study of over 40,000 survey responses collected over a decade has found that the benefits for workers are q…