3 ms·

Sounds like you haven't been on the other side often enough. Most of a programmer's added value to a company happens in the 4 hours (give or take) that they are

by hajile 9y ago

Sounds like you haven't been on the other side often enough. Most of a programmer's added value to a company happens in the 4 hours (give or take) that they are "zoned in" to what they're doing. As tech lead, when you knock them out of the zone early, you cost your company a lot of money because it's usually going to be a while before things ramp up again. Lots (most?) of developers don't like having their focus interrupted. You assume because they are cordial that they were fine with the interruption. As their team lead and SA, they don't really have a choice. As a side note, we're all idiots fresh out of college. We hear about things that seem good, but don't have the experience to make a proper value judgement. Lots of college kids have group study sessions and think they are great. The reality is that they are great for socializing, but generally terrible for studying. Open offices appeal for the same social reasons (with the same kind if issues). With no real life/work experience, its little wonder that this is preferred.

CorvusCrypto 9y ago
You made me think of something interesting. My 4 hours NEVER happens and I'm in a cube-farm/closed space. Interruptions happen all the damn time. Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote. I have one cool little experience which was an open office that switched to a closed office space during my stay. Productivity went down regardless of the boundaries put in place because now the leads and managers have their offices closed for meetings and therefore engineering staff is next in line to handle emergencies/data requests. Granted this is due to our workflow as well, however the point I'm making isn't that one setup is always better than the other but that it probably depends on multiple things and if you think you're gonna get 4 hours of golden time in a real, moving business then that's very naive or you have been very lucky yourself. I think the reason I liked open offices is because when I needed to rethink an algorithm and analyze it I had at least 3 people that could offer their commentary. And while study groups may not work for reading a book, they damn sure work on designing algorithms when you need to openly discuss the tradeoffs and goals. Just my 0.02 on the whole thing but TL;DR sounds like open offices don't work for some places, but work great for others. EDIT: to add to this, the open office we had was not noisey. There weren't massive conversations happening all the time and it was normally just inside voice levels of noise. I haven't experienced what I am imagining as the restaurant equivalent of an office.
- Joeri 9y ago
  Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote. It really isn't normal to be constantly interrupted. I'm a developer managing 2 other devs and dealing with stakeholders and still manage to go many hours without interruptions. It's all about respect and being organized. Most urgent things only become urgent because somebody dropped the ball. Improve the way people work and organize that work, and the urgencies go away. You do need to retrain some people a bit to be respectful of your time, but mostly it works out because mostly people mean to do right by each other.
  - CorvusCrypto 9y ago
    Could just be the California style. Or finance. Don't really know any other office locales so this could be true.

by hajile 9y ago

CorvusCrypto 9y ago

You made me think of something interesting. My 4 hours NEVER happens and I'm in a cube-farm/closed space. Interruptions happen all the damn time. Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote. I have one cool little experience which was an open office that switched to a closed office space during my stay. Productivity went down regardless of the boundaries put in place because now the leads and managers have their offices closed for meetings and therefore engineering staff is next in line to handle emergencies/data requests. Granted this is due to our workflow as well, however the point I'm making isn't that one setup is always better than the other but that it probably depends on multiple things and if you think you're gonna get 4 hours of golden time in a real, moving business then that's very naive or you have been very lucky yourself. I think the reason I liked open offices is because when I needed to rethink an algorithm and analyze it I had at least 3 people that could offer their commentary. And while study groups may not work for reading a book, they damn sure work on designing algorithms when you need to openly discuss the tradeoffs and goals. Just my 0.02 on the whole thing but TL;DR sounds like open offices don't work for some places, but work great for others. EDIT: to add to this, the open office we had was not noisey. There weren't massive conversations happening all the time and it was normally just inside voice levels of noise. I haven't experienced what I am imagining as the restaurant equivalent of an office.

Joeri 9y ago
Sure we don't like our focus interrupted, but that's what work is. It's dealing with the managers and leads that need to ask you something urgent while managing your deadlines and dealing with noise which is still very much present in a closed-office area unless you are the board members that get to work remote. It really isn't normal to be constantly interrupted. I'm a developer managing 2 other devs and dealing with stakeholders and still manage to go many hours without interruptions. It's all about respect and being organized. Most urgent things only become urgent because somebody dropped the ball. Improve the way people work and organize that work, and the urgencies go away. You do need to retrain some people a bit to be respectful of your time, but mostly it works out because mostly people mean to do right by each other.
- CorvusCrypto 9y ago
  Could just be the California style. Or finance. Don't really know any other office locales so this could be true.