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I prefer open offices. You get a pretty significant echo chamber effect on articles like this because people who don't like it turn out to comment. Personally,
by thurn 10y ago
I prefer open offices. You get a pretty significant echo chamber effect on articles like this because people who don't like it turn out to comment.
Personally, I have no difficulty with noise (I prefer working in coffee shops to at home), and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable. I totally get why some people don't like it though.
- jowiar 10y ago"Being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers" means "easily break 4 or 5 engineers out of their flow" along with "easily create a distraction for the other 15 engineers within earshot of the easily-started discussion". I'm fine with coffee shops over home (and did the same in college), but coffeeshop noise is "white noise" -- whirring espresso grinders, a blur of conversations between people I don't know about things that aren't going to activate my distraction monkey.
- thurn 10y agoMaybe it depends on the domain. "Flow state" makes sense for something like a startup where single coders are writing huge diffs on their own. I work on a huge codebase where "figuring out what code to write" occupies dramatically more of our time than "writing code".
- vonmoltke 10y agoI think that is a difference. I have never worked in that kind of environment. When I was at a large defense contractor the work was broken down into such small chunks that each engineer was essentially off on their own working on their piece of the system. In fact, that was the way all engineering, not just software engineering, was done there. There might be a point where two or three people would need to discuss an approach, but that wasn't the majority of the time. The company I just finished at works multiple small contracts simultaneously. Because of the small scope it was very common to be the only person working on the code for a particular project, though there was more collaboration than at my previous company. The place I am going seems to be more like what you describe, so it will be interesting to see if my opinions of open office layouts change after that.
- jowiar 10y agoWhat is your definition of "huge diffs"? For me, the process of reading some library documentation, reading existing code, and producing, say, 50-100 lines of quality code to require enough concentration that it's hard to focus in an open environment without losing my train of thought.
- st3v3r 10y ago"and being able to easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers when necessary is extremely valuable" I honestly do not understand this statement. Are you trying to say that if you were in cubes, you couldn't do that? You couldn't ask people to come over and talk something out? And are you stating that your design discussion is more important than whatever they're working on?
- ptomato 10y ago> easily start a design discussion with 4 or 5 engineers or, rephrased, the ability to destroy 3 man-hours of productivity on a whim.
- new_hackers 10y agoHey, you guys check out that new restaurant down the street? Is it any good?
- cousin_it 10y agoThat depends on the person. I like when other people come to my desk and ask me for help on a whim, even when I'm in the middle of something. It doesn't destroy my productivity, and often it even gives me ideas how to make my work more useful. I do respect when other people don't want to be interrupted, though.
- gjolund 10y agoYou do realize that people like you are why we don't like open floor plans right? That "easy conversation" is not scheduled, and now I need to stop what I am doing, listen to you for an hour, and still finish the rest of my tasking on time.
- blub 10y agoBackground noise decreases performance [1]. People claiming they prefer in or don't mind working in noisy conditions are just lying to themselves. [1]: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-brains-background-noise/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-brains-ba...