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I agree with the morale and wellness argument. Too many distractions lead to mental thrashing. But -- there's an assertion here that the $30,000 would have bee

I agree with the morale and wellness argument. Too many distractions lead to mental thrashing. But -- there's an assertion here that the $30,000 would have been better used in another way. The concept of agile development encourages these distractions because it encourages changes earlier, rather than later in development, where more resources have been squandered. Microsoft famously found that the cost of a defect grew by an order of magnitude for each stage of development in which it was allowed to fester. Hence, I don't think the author has proven that business-related "distractions" are a net negative. If the distractions are completely unrelated to work, that's another animal altogether. HPEs should only be considered "high-performance" if they are able to deflect distractions when they need to. Otherwise, they are simply highly compensated.

valuearb 9y ago
Many distractions aren't work related. Many of the remaining distractions that are work related aren't necessary. In an open floor plan the product manager can accost an engineer about a business problem, and they can directly solve it sooner in development, saving time and money. But they did so by distracting a half dozen other employees who had little to no interest or anything to contribute to the conversation. At a previous job we insisted on one person offices for developers. The product manager would go to the engineers office, they'd solve the problem quickly and early, and we got the same benefits without distracting another half dozen people. If they needed some more people to help with the decisions, we had conference rooms.