4 ms·

Decided to change job recently, applied for two, went for an interview at the first and they offered me the job. I took it on the spot despite the other place

Decided to change job recently, applied for two, went for an interview at the first and they offered me the job. I took it on the spot despite the other place paying more. One of the reasons I took it on the spot was when asked where I'd prefer to work and I said somewhere quiet he said there are offices upstairs, take whichever one you want. That was the major deciding factor (among others), I know the other place is open plan. I'll take slightly less pay to sit in a quiet office and work over an open office. (Other things I liked about the job where flex time, I buy all hardware I need myself, they pay for conferences, training courses, no phone on the desk (I asked for that and they said no problem), an interesting complex problem (I like enterprise stuff) and they are strongly focused on building out some proper in-house technical skill and replacing their creaking systems, I get technical freedom, I can use whatever I want on the backend and I'll be assembling a team as they bring stuff back in house and final kicker it's 10m walk from where I live so no commute). Since both places pay more than enough for me to live comfortably in north of England I'll happily take the slightly lower pay (in the short term) for the above. I don't think employers still understand how much some developers loathe open offices, it's not a 'prefer' to, it is a 'won't if at all possible'.

jay_kyburz 10y ago
I would be interested to hear what hardware you will buy. What's your ideal hardware? Just a MBP or something more interesting?
- noir_lord 10y ago
  Was offered a tricked out iMac or similar but I'm a linux user through and through so I'll self-build. Current plan is Ryzen 1700(possibly X)/32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, board supports 4 slots so can upgrade if needed) (going to need a lot of virtualisation capability to handle dealing with multiple legacy systems, windows for interop and 8 cores with 16 threads at that price is a hard match from Intel), 500GB SSD with 1TB WD Black and a pair of decent monitors, comes in about half what the tricked out iMac comes in at, RX550 (I don't care about 3D but I want to be able to drive the screens without onboard graphics and ATI will support the RX550 for some time since it's new and the linux drivers are excellent these days for ATI). MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse. I asked the boss and he said "I don't have a clue on hardware, just send me a shopping list link and I'll order it". I think I'm going to like this new place :) Given the budget is top of the line iMac I could have gone to 1800X and 64GB of RAM but why kick the arse out of it and I'm into diminishing returns with either of those. Current systems are 32GB desktops and I rarely wish I had more but I do find the i5-xxxxK's limiting since once you load a couple of vagrant machines, an instance of Windows for Edge testing and Intellij things start to slow down quite quickly, it's not an IPC thing (the cores are fast enough, just not enough of them). I'll move to a standing desk but I'll built that myself since I know exactly what I want (I built my current one) down the line. I did consider a good Thinkpad with doc/screens but since I'll spend 95% of my time in the office the trade off of performance/comfort for the 5% of the time I'll be in a meeting made no sense, basically any cheap thinkpad or similar will do for meetings. I know some people prefer not having to sync between machines and just pick up and go with everything but work is for work, everything else is for not work. I put a fair amount of thought into the hardware, since I'm in-house developer #1 at this place I'll be an army of one for a while, I wanted a machine that was fast enough to be to do multiple things while I work, I want to be be able to run integration and unit tests while continuing to work (at least locally until I tame the main codebase and get it under proper CI). It's a fun engineering challenge because their underlying business is complex and highly bespoke and their existing 'main' system was written over many years in a style that was obsolete when it was written. I'm seriously looking forwards to it and they are nice folks.
  - sq_ 10y ago
    That sounds like a great dev build and a really wonderful job/company/work environment. Hope that everything turns out well for you.
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      Thank you, that's nice (I love HN for that, not much nice left) I hope so too, I'm coming off the back of 4yrs of crushing workloads and a failed (though not for technical reasons, government killed the renewable installer incentives which killed the market for the product) startup so getting to work on interesting technical problems in a much lower stress environment is something I really want!.
  - jay_kyburz 10y ago
    Thanks for the write up. Interesting.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    > MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse. Currently typing on one of these. I hate the loud clicking noise though, especially with co-workers around me. Are there any similar but less noisy versions of it?
    - noir_lord 10y ago
      Not that are specifically the same as the 4000, there is the new microsoft ergo keyboard which is quieter but I don't like the key travel. The 4000 isn't really that loud (I found it was louder with the front edge on as it creates a void space under the keyboard like a speaker) especially compared to the mechanical I was using before. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboards/sculpt-ergonomic-desktop/l5v-00006 https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboar... I know people who've used those and love them, I personally didn't too much like a laptop keyboard the travel feels wrong.
      - chinathrow 10y ago
ensiferum 10y ago
"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most". In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else just suffers.
- mgkimsal 10y ago
  This evergreen topic comes up enough that there will always be multiple sides to this topic. I've gone so far in past threads to imply that other devs were "wrong" about being more productive in open office plans, and got bashed for that. "Don't tell me how I'm more productive", etc. There may never actually be hard data on this, because it's, at core, likely very hard to measure, but I'd love to read some research/findings on this issue more. I'm in a coworking situation now, with a private space, and I'm always more productive in the private space. But I do relieve some stress and get energized by interacting with others in the common area. And in previous jobs, there's of course always times when you need to talk to colleagues about project issues, and that's a requirement. To the folks (devs) who insist that they are "more productive" in open plan offices, I wonder if the rest of the folks in the room with you are equally as productive, or if the productivity is just being shifted from some people in the room to others.
  - mseebach 10y ago
    I think there are at least two different kinds of productivity. One is the kind where you need to progress through a non-trivial body of work with a well-understood end-state. Your primary, if not sole, output is code. This is probably well suited for private offices and remote teams. The other is where you're solving a problem that isn't in the first order a code problem. There are typically humans involved in these kinds of problems. Most instances where the problem is defined as "building the right thing for the customer" where part of the problem is coming up with "the right thing". This works well in open plan offices where multiple people can quickly give input/get feedback. Remote working is probably not a great idea. Most work in early startups is probably in this category, and that also offers a model to explain why open plan offices are so common in not-startups-anymore: these companies are very eager to retain the energy of their early days, and a lot of that energy is tied to the collaboration of the open plan office, even if not necessarily suited to the workloads of the more mature company. Tl;dr: when people speak of being more or less productive under certain conditions, a lot probably hinges on what kind of work they are doing.

jay_kyburz 10y ago

I would be interested to hear what hardware you will buy. What's your ideal hardware? Just a MBP or something more interesting?

noir_lord 10y ago
Was offered a tricked out iMac or similar but I'm a linux user through and through so I'll self-build. Current plan is Ryzen 1700(possibly X)/32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, board supports 4 slots so can upgrade if needed) (going to need a lot of virtualisation capability to handle dealing with multiple legacy systems, windows for interop and 8 cores with 16 threads at that price is a hard match from Intel), 500GB SSD with 1TB WD Black and a pair of decent monitors, comes in about half what the tricked out iMac comes in at, RX550 (I don't care about 3D but I want to be able to drive the screens without onboard graphics and ATI will support the RX550 for some time since it's new and the linux drivers are excellent these days for ATI). MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse. I asked the boss and he said "I don't have a clue on hardware, just send me a shopping list link and I'll order it". I think I'm going to like this new place :) Given the budget is top of the line iMac I could have gone to 1800X and 64GB of RAM but why kick the arse out of it and I'm into diminishing returns with either of those. Current systems are 32GB desktops and I rarely wish I had more but I do find the i5-xxxxK's limiting since once you load a couple of vagrant machines, an instance of Windows for Edge testing and Intellij things start to slow down quite quickly, it's not an IPC thing (the cores are fast enough, just not enough of them). I'll move to a standing desk but I'll built that myself since I know exactly what I want (I built my current one) down the line. I did consider a good Thinkpad with doc/screens but since I'll spend 95% of my time in the office the trade off of performance/comfort for the 5% of the time I'll be in a meeting made no sense, basically any cheap thinkpad or similar will do for meetings. I know some people prefer not having to sync between machines and just pick up and go with everything but work is for work, everything else is for not work. I put a fair amount of thought into the hardware, since I'm in-house developer #1 at this place I'll be an army of one for a while, I wanted a machine that was fast enough to be to do multiple things while I work, I want to be be able to run integration and unit tests while continuing to work (at least locally until I tame the main codebase and get it under proper CI). It's a fun engineering challenge because their underlying business is complex and highly bespoke and their existing 'main' system was written over many years in a style that was obsolete when it was written. I'm seriously looking forwards to it and they are nice folks.
- sq_ 10y ago
  That sounds like a great dev build and a really wonderful job/company/work environment. Hope that everything turns out well for you.
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    Thank you, that's nice (I love HN for that, not much nice left) I hope so too, I'm coming off the back of 4yrs of crushing workloads and a failed (though not for technical reasons, government killed the renewable installer incentives which killed the market for the product) startup so getting to work on interesting technical problems in a much lower stress environment is something I really want!.
- jay_kyburz 10y ago
  Thanks for the write up. Interesting.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  > MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse. Currently typing on one of these. I hate the loud clicking noise though, especially with co-workers around me. Are there any similar but less noisy versions of it?
  - noir_lord 10y ago
    Not that are specifically the same as the 4000, there is the new microsoft ergo keyboard which is quieter but I don't like the key travel. The 4000 isn't really that loud (I found it was louder with the front edge on as it creates a void space under the keyboard like a speaker) especially compared to the mechanical I was using before. [1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboards/sculpt-ergonomic-desktop/l5v-00006 https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboar... I know people who've used those and love them, I personally didn't too much like a laptop keyboard the travel feels wrong.
    - chinathrow 10y ago

ensiferum 10y ago

"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most". In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else just suffers.

mgkimsal 10y ago
This evergreen topic comes up enough that there will always be multiple sides to this topic. I've gone so far in past threads to imply that other devs were "wrong" about being more productive in open office plans, and got bashed for that. "Don't tell me how I'm more productive", etc. There may never actually be hard data on this, because it's, at core, likely very hard to measure, but I'd love to read some research/findings on this issue more. I'm in a coworking situation now, with a private space, and I'm always more productive in the private space. But I do relieve some stress and get energized by interacting with others in the common area. And in previous jobs, there's of course always times when you need to talk to colleagues about project issues, and that's a requirement. To the folks (devs) who insist that they are "more productive" in open plan offices, I wonder if the rest of the folks in the room with you are equally as productive, or if the productivity is just being shifted from some people in the room to others.
- mseebach 10y ago
  I think there are at least two different kinds of productivity. One is the kind where you need to progress through a non-trivial body of work with a well-understood end-state. Your primary, if not sole, output is code. This is probably well suited for private offices and remote teams. The other is where you're solving a problem that isn't in the first order a code problem. There are typically humans involved in these kinds of problems. Most instances where the problem is defined as "building the right thing for the customer" where part of the problem is coming up with "the right thing". This works well in open plan offices where multiple people can quickly give input/get feedback. Remote working is probably not a great idea. Most work in early startups is probably in this category, and that also offers a model to explain why open plan offices are so common in not-startups-anymore: these companies are very eager to retain the energy of their early days, and a lot of that energy is tied to the collaboration of the open plan office, even if not necessarily suited to the workloads of the more mature company. Tl;dr: when people speak of being more or less productive under certain conditions, a lot probably hinges on what kind of work they are doing.