Very good article, and well explained I thought
Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
491–500 of 593 posts
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#492It 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…
Open plan offices took off in larger companies in the mid-2000s, and I think it's a classic example of a cargo cult.
Executive management looked at the handful of hugely successful startups who had open plan offices and thought, "It must be these open plan offices, that's their secret sauce! We just need to copy that and we'll be successful too!"
...ignoring survivor bias, because for every hugely successful startup who did open plan out of necessity, there was a big graveyard of startups who had the same practice and failed.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#493And so the can of worms opens again! No. Not everyone wants or needs a private office with a door. It doesn't always make us more productive. It is not always better to work from home. Open plan offices are not always bad. Most of my day is not spent working on something so complicated or advanced that interuption will screw me over. I am spending most of my day building block towers because I can split most of my wo…
Everyone wants to be in some control of their space and thoughts.
I don't have to work on some advanced grand vision to not like being available all the time. I am also not claiming that I am going to be super productive when I close the door.
It is not my fault not setting DnD it - this is what triggers me - no I don't have to set DnD if someone wants something from me they should make sure it actually IS important, they should make sure they got their stuff right by trying out things and thinking about what they have to do and what tried and what they really want to ask.
Then they can also send me an email, send me IM so I can reply as soon as I get to it.
Coming to me 9:00 when I am still taking my coat off and opening laptop - asking questions well that is not my problem not setting DnD.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#494Earlier 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.
Aka "hands off management", "or absentee boss" or "sink or swim". Love it! Let me float an idea though, I might be dreaming here, but what if there was a better way than just dumping people and resources and hoping for it to work? How about you encourage the team to actively monitor where onboarding takes time, year by year, learn from that, make onboarding materials which encompass institutional knowledge, and make…
you are reading way to much into what i said. nothing what you are suggesting has anything to do with it. we all have work todo and we all need to contribute to training the new hires in some form. this has nothing to do with hands off management. i am not saying: here is the newbie, get them up to speed, but: we hired someone new, and we need to figure out the best approach to get them integrated. for me that includes that they work with everyone on the team for some time. including me if i am still involved in the development myself. i'll do my part of the onboarding and everyone else will do theirs.
being that buddy/mentor is part of your job, and i expect everyone on the team including me to be able to take on that role as the situation demands.
moving the project forward takes quiet and uninterrupted work and focus time
and it takes making sure that all team knowledge is shared with everyone. where do you get the idea that i do nothing? it is my job to allocate resources properly, but it is also my choice how to to do that.
you seem to look at onboarding as a kind of burden that i throw onto you on top of your other work that you'd rather not have to deal with. i see onboarding as part of the process to grow our team, exchange knowledge and experience and enable us to do ever better work.
when i am starting a new team then i onboard/mentor everyone myself, until the team is grown enough and some of the team members have enough experience to share that role. eventually, the team will be large enough to divide up into multiple teams, but i am still the one doing the hiring, and i'll be involved with onboarding until the company grows so large that it no longer makes sense to do that personally. but at that point i'll still make hiring decisions because i feel that hiring the right kind of people is to important to completely delegate.
the attitude that i expect from my team is that everyone is made welcome and we all do our best to get them integrated. onboarding materials can't replace that attitude which i see as necessary for the team to work well together.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fair enough. But I just can't replace real human interaction with remote communication. I just can't. Same way I could never get in a long distance relationship with someone. I need to be in the same room as them and look them in the eye when I'm explaining something to them. I actually like the 2-5 minutes of chit chat in the common kitchen every morning, talking about where my colleague went skiing that weekend. An…
Honest question because I'm curious. What is your definition of an introvert and how do you know you are one?
Since GP has replied, I'll now add: I think of the divide as "extroverts gain energy from group social interactions; introverts lose energy during group social interactions".
IMO, it's not shy vs open, as my wife is on the shy side but clearly extroverted, while I'm more visibly/apparently comfortable but I find it exhausting to be in groups for a long period of time.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#496It 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…
I’ve tried working in the middle of nerf gun fights every afternoon for a year. Let’s just say I enjoy Home Office a lot.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#497People like you are the reason I personally don't want to be in an office. > asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. Basically like having a toddler around. Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. Or I migh…
Please don't cross into personal attack. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful.
Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation in which people are open to learning from one another.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everybody thinks their question is simple and quick, then it takes 30 minutes of time at minimum. I dunno why you are getting so much push back, must be a bunch of managers. Developers need to be left alone.
The push back is because it's extreme and one-sided. If you have some information that unblocks a team member, or another part of the business, say to make a sale, yes you should be interrupted. Your salary comes from somewhere, and your delivery is as a team, not an individual.
It really isn’t though. OP has been pretty clear.
Need help? Send an email or make an appointment and he will respond with help.
How is it your assumption that the team member asking the question can’t possibly be delayed 30-45min for them to be available. Seriously? Are they in an active shooter situation and need to phone a friend or something. Lives on the line?
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#499Silence among silence is emptiness.
Silence among noise is true silence.
Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?
#500Just 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…
You could reach "generals effect" by being a listener to skilled dev's musings - sometimes all one needs to unblock is to tell somebody else about what the problem is and the solution suddenly pops up without any contribution from the listener. So you could form a symbiotic relationship with a skilled dev - you'd learn their tricks and they'd use you as their "unblocker".