Why do programmers need private offices with doors? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#591

Post by jwoq9118 » Fri, Dec 22, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

ddol wrote: post #169

zeristor wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have the head of sales ringing a bell for a sale every few hours too?

Airbnb was open plan (it still is, I’m just not there anymore). They also have an amazing Food team who would occasionally, randomly, bake treats for us (this is relevant, I promise). There was no sales bell, but there was an outage gong. Any time we had an outage affecting the “Book It” flow and revenue stopped flowing that gong rang out. Hearing the gong meant engineers would abruptly leave meetings or lunch to com…

Love this story! As someone that joined the industry remote, its stuff like this I sometimes worry im missing out on.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#592

Post by CamelRocketFish » Sat, Dec 23, 2023, 2:38 AM UTC

JAlexoid wrote: post #510

JoshTriplett wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a huge fan of mentorship; I benefited from it early in my career, and I strive to offer it to others now. I don't think that requires an open office at all, though. I think mentorship works even better if you're in a quiet environment where you can talk comfortably and not worry about bothering the people around you. That said, I can attribute one positive effect in my career to having worked in an open office.…

Well... I have a counter example of a failure in FOSS, because of remoteness of the responsible department: At IBM working in a satellite office, I wanted to contribute to Jenkins. The fact that any person with the authority to allow me to do that was "behind an office door". Multiple emails back and forth - I ended up ditching the idea of getting the approval and quit IBM. Closed doors should be for focus time, whic…

If you want to collaborate, that’s what setting up a meeting with an agenda is for.

Re: Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

#593

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Sun, Dec 24, 2023, 1:35 AM UTC

jwoq9118 wrote: post #590

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…

May I ask what you think of life in Japan as a foreigner? I’ve heard it can be very isolating.

I wouldn't know. I just visited. Sometimes, two or three times a year, for about twenty years. Always the Tokyo area.

I probably spent three weeks there, max.