5 ms·

I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. If

by gfodor 9y ago

I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. If you set things up so only explicitly opted-in collaborations occur, then those are the collaborations you will get: people who all agree they should work together on something. This is a subset of the types of interactions that I believe result in great teams. Many collaborations begin when one person overhears another person they had no idea was working on something relevant to them, or that they could give valuable input on. As with anything, there is a balance, and I believe there is no silver bullet to designing good offices. But I question those who think there is, and that siloing humans into isolated offices (a fundamentally unnatural state) as the default is objectively the best option. (And before citing the various studies showing the impact on productivity of doing this, I feel productivity is only one characteristic of what I personally consider to be a good measure of a healthy work environment.)

kakarot 9y ago
That's a great point. Perhaps the sweet spot is a hybrid between the two, with mandated "shared" hours where you fraternize with peers in a lax environment in addition to your time spent hacking away in the office free from distraction. If you really need to get something done, bring your laptop or speak with your supervisor about temporary exemption. Even if "work" is not being produced in the narrow sense, fraternization has undeniable benefits to a company's culture, productivity, and overall cohesiveness.
- gfodor 9y ago
  To me for software engineering I think right now a good local optimum is: - Ensure portability of workstations with no loss of productivity (powerful laptops, devices, etc) - Counteract any dynamics that may inhibit opt-in WFH or remote time. (poor tools, cultural perception that it is not productive to wfh, etc) - Provide in-office tools to opt-in to better isolation (headphones, private 'plug and play' workstations, etc) - Try to develop some form of cadence where remote time is the norm on regular intervals. For us it's Tu/Thurs, but you could imagine lots of configurations. People I believe tend to then backlog work which requires dedicated focus for these days.
valuearb 9y ago
I think it's better to work on making people better collaborators, than to ruin productivity on the off chance someone will hear something important in a conversation not meant for them. For example, I'm working on using Slack more to cc people on questions I have or things I'm doing so they have a chance to help/stop me or at least be aware of what I"m doing. If you want a flexible collaborative environment without it's horrible effects on productivity, you could build Apple like pods surrounding an open area. Those who want to work in open areas would work in the middle. Those who need privacy to concentrate can still leave their sliders open during times they are open to collaborate.
- wpietri 9y ago
  I don't believe that ambient information ruins productivity. At least for me, the problem is noise, not signal. I've spent quite a while working in spaces where the space is devoted to a team. If people are having quiet, focused discussions about what we're all focused on, I rarely find that distracting. The thing that drives me bonkers is when people are having loud, emotional, or off-topic conversations. Then part of my brain wanders off to process it and the rest is compelled to follow. I also think Slack is rarely a good solution to trying to avoid interruption. If I turn it off for a few hours of coding, I'm far too late to participate. And if I leave it on, there are distractions right there on my screen. There's no way to overhear the useful bits and let the rest go; it requires full visual attention to process. The workplaces where I've felt least effective are the ones with big IM cultures.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    100x yes, I think people are often conflating "background conversations" to all be the same thing. I feel bad for people who work in offices where people are so inconsiderate that they start yakking about their kid's baseball game behind some software engineer trying to get some shit done. Or where a topic becomes heated or emotional and they don't take it elsewhere. But rich, constructive conversations that are happening about the work but possibly tangential to the concrete task that that engineer is doing can be immensely valuable in so many ways.
  - 9y ago
pantalaimon 9y ago
> I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. But only if you are not doing any work at that moment. If you are constantly expected to be able to 'overhear' conversations while coding, I don't see how you could get anything done.
- gfodor 9y ago
  The trick is to make it so people have control. That said, I take issue with the claim people often make that all coding requires complete sound and visual isolation from other humans. In my experience there are large swaths of software engineering tasks that involve transforming code that are not negatively affected by ambient noise and conversation, and that are relatively easy to context switch in and out of. I realize this probably is heresy to some people but it is the reality I find for myself. That does not mean there are not also large categories of tasks that require dedicated focus and isolation, but I take issue with the claim that all coding needs to occur in a sound proof chamber. Some concrete examples: - Fixing or writing unit tests - Performing (low risk) operational + maintenance tasks - Refactoring - Design tweaks and improvements - Deployments - Building simple features - Reviewing code I find myself (and I'm sure many others do) doing these types things in an office environment that often has some ambient conversational noise and do not feel it negatively affects my work to the point where I decide to put on headphones. And no, I'm not talking about a case where someone is yelling in my ear or someone is blasting death metal behind me. I'm talking about a normal open office where people are generally respectful of each others' space and conscious of distractions.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    It's great that you don't find conversations distracting, the problem is that others do. The best solution is to offer a work environment that both meets yours and their needs. An open office environment is death to productivity for lots of developers, they don't have the option to shut a door. It simply doesn't and can't work for a large portion of the work force. A single person office environment is more productive for almost everyone. But it doesn't have to be forced on you, for example there is no reason why center areas can't be left open for those that prefer them. But in reality the best way to collaborate is to do it in pieces. You come to my office. I come to yours. We invite the team to a conference room.
YZF 9y ago
Offices do not mean having each person locked in their room never interacting with anyone else. They mean you can close the door and be able to focus on something. In my experience you get a lot more interaction when people have private offices, or at least cubes. It's easy to walk into someone's office and have a discussion. Easier than let's go find a meeting room so we don't disturb everyone. It's also pretty easy to call other people in as needed and have an impromptu meeting without needing to book a room for that and without disturbing others. Not to mention other technologies like e-mail, messaging etc. The most collaborative places I worked in are those where people had offices and the least collaborative ones have open plans. Anecdotal but there you have it. Let's face it, open plan offices are about reducing cost and pretending to be collaborative. It's the "Agile" of offices and I don't mean it in a good way.
- yakult 9y ago
  >It's easy to walk into someone's office and have a discussion. Certainly less easy than joining in on a conversation you overhear while sitting at your desk. What we have here is disgreement over the optimal 'activation energy' for social interactions that produces the best work. This parameter depends on all kinds of factors, e.g. the type of work and work culture. What we need is a workflow that optimizes this parameter for a given office. IOW, somebody needs to come up with a cost function and run gradient descent on it.
  - gfodor 9y ago
    It's a little out there, but I think VR workspaces will potentially provide such a method. Currently the iteration cost is too high. (For example it could involve rearranging desks, tearing down walls, buying equipment, etc.) VR opens the door to a malleable workspace that still comes close to pairty with face to face communications (it is not there today but most likely will be in a few generations.)
    - yakult 9y ago
      For large companies, I can imagine using new branch offices for a/b testing. A while ago I read a comment here about a university that, instead of paving roads to a new campus, just had grass everywhere. A semester later they paved over all the parts where the grass died from all the foot traffic. I wonder if something like that would be workable? Have easily reconfigurable panels and furniture, encourage the staff to arrange it however they like, wait six months, then standardize/remove pain points/make permanent?
dkarl 9y ago
> I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. I used to feel the same way, but after trying to balance focus and eavesdropping, I've come to the conclusion that it is too dependent on circumstances. Sometimes the conversations aren't happening in the right places at the right times. I think this is an unrecognized business problem, probably an unrecognized managerial responsibility. Some developers handle it by cultivating office social relationships with people in various parts of the company, but that's a burden than you can't put on everyone. Not only does it not make sense, but some people will be averse to it or simply not good at it. Rather than put the burden on developers, a good manager should keep the pulse of the rest of the company and keep everyone connected and oriented. Of course a manager can't do a perfect job, but they should do well enough that their engineers won't feel paranoid about not eavesdropping or gossiping enough. > siloing humans into isolated offices (a fundamentally unnatural state) I don't know that it's any more unnatural than asking people to complete demanding individual tasks while other people in their social group have conversations nearby. We're so wired to be social that having conversations nearby virtually compels multitasking, which we're not very good at, which is probably why historically people who have been able to afford the expense of quiet, private workspaces seem to prefer them. "A room of one's own" has become symbolic of the material and social conditions that enable difficult intellectual work.
pasbesoin 9y ago
Respect what people communicate about their needs. Measure the results. Don't prescribe. And, in "our" field, presumably you are dealing with "professionals." Treat them as such. If they say they need a resource (including, peace and quiet to concentrate), provide it. Finally, as others state and I agree, offices do not necessarily mean isolation. If your offices are really soundproofed, impromptu meetings are frictionless with regard to timing and space. Socializing can also take place without people constantly looking over their shoulders to see whether they're being noticed or surveyed. Provide some common spaces --separated from the offices, so that their are no "losers" who are unwillingly stuck in the noisy offices adjacent. And if people want to work in a shared space? If you have the room, provide that, too. Let them work in the common spaces, if they like. Let them do what works for them. Monitor the output. Lose the ego (speaking generally, not to the parent post nor anyone in particular, here). Open the eyes. (And ears, as it were.) P.S. In my case, people were repeatedly pleased and sometimes astounded with my work. But I could never get past "the way we do things" and the separation from Management who kept to themselves the actual authority to make any changes that might vary from "the way we do things." In retrospect, and if my life hadn't deal me a series of crippling blows, early on, I should have become a consultant. Better pay, and the built-in ability to walk away from bad environments. If you need to; sometimes, since you aren't part of the organization, they will just give you what you ask for. Not part of those internal politics.
emodendroket 9y ago
I think it's easy to severely overestimate it; that happens pretty infrequently.

by gfodor 9y ago

kakarot 9y ago

That's a great point. Perhaps the sweet spot is a hybrid between the two, with mandated "shared" hours where you fraternize with peers in a lax environment in addition to your time spent hacking away in the office free from distraction. If you really need to get something done, bring your laptop or speak with your supervisor about temporary exemption. Even if "work" is not being produced in the narrow sense, fraternization has undeniable benefits to a company's culture, productivity, and overall cohesiveness.

gfodor 9y ago
To me for software engineering I think right now a good local optimum is: - Ensure portability of workstations with no loss of productivity (powerful laptops, devices, etc) - Counteract any dynamics that may inhibit opt-in WFH or remote time. (poor tools, cultural perception that it is not productive to wfh, etc) - Provide in-office tools to opt-in to better isolation (headphones, private 'plug and play' workstations, etc) - Try to develop some form of cadence where remote time is the norm on regular intervals. For us it's Tu/Thurs, but you could imagine lots of configurations. People I believe tend to then backlog work which requires dedicated focus for these days.

valuearb 9y ago

I think it's better to work on making people better collaborators, than to ruin productivity on the off chance someone will hear something important in a conversation not meant for them. For example, I'm working on using Slack more to cc people on questions I have or things I'm doing so they have a chance to help/stop me or at least be aware of what I"m doing. If you want a flexible collaborative environment without it's horrible effects on productivity, you could build Apple like pods surrounding an open area. Those who want to work in open areas would work in the middle. Those who need privacy to concentrate can still leave their sliders open during times they are open to collaborate.

wpietri 9y ago
I don't believe that ambient information ruins productivity. At least for me, the problem is noise, not signal. I've spent quite a while working in spaces where the space is devoted to a team. If people are having quiet, focused discussions about what we're all focused on, I rarely find that distracting. The thing that drives me bonkers is when people are having loud, emotional, or off-topic conversations. Then part of my brain wanders off to process it and the rest is compelled to follow. I also think Slack is rarely a good solution to trying to avoid interruption. If I turn it off for a few hours of coding, I'm far too late to participate. And if I leave it on, there are distractions right there on my screen. There's no way to overhear the useful bits and let the rest go; it requires full visual attention to process. The workplaces where I've felt least effective are the ones with big IM cultures.
- gfodor 9y ago
  100x yes, I think people are often conflating "background conversations" to all be the same thing. I feel bad for people who work in offices where people are so inconsiderate that they start yakking about their kid's baseball game behind some software engineer trying to get some shit done. Or where a topic becomes heated or emotional and they don't take it elsewhere. But rich, constructive conversations that are happening about the work but possibly tangential to the concrete task that that engineer is doing can be immensely valuable in so many ways.
- 9y ago

pantalaimon 9y ago

> I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. But only if you are not doing any work at that moment. If you are constantly expected to be able to 'overhear' conversations while coding, I don't see how you could get anything done.

gfodor 9y ago
The trick is to make it so people have control. That said, I take issue with the claim people often make that all coding requires complete sound and visual isolation from other humans. In my experience there are large swaths of software engineering tasks that involve transforming code that are not negatively affected by ambient noise and conversation, and that are relatively easy to context switch in and out of. I realize this probably is heresy to some people but it is the reality I find for myself. That does not mean there are not also large categories of tasks that require dedicated focus and isolation, but I take issue with the claim that all coding needs to occur in a sound proof chamber. Some concrete examples: - Fixing or writing unit tests - Performing (low risk) operational + maintenance tasks - Refactoring - Design tweaks and improvements - Deployments - Building simple features - Reviewing code I find myself (and I'm sure many others do) doing these types things in an office environment that often has some ambient conversational noise and do not feel it negatively affects my work to the point where I decide to put on headphones. And no, I'm not talking about a case where someone is yelling in my ear or someone is blasting death metal behind me. I'm talking about a normal open office where people are generally respectful of each others' space and conscious of distractions.
- valuearb 9y ago
  It's great that you don't find conversations distracting, the problem is that others do. The best solution is to offer a work environment that both meets yours and their needs. An open office environment is death to productivity for lots of developers, they don't have the option to shut a door. It simply doesn't and can't work for a large portion of the work force. A single person office environment is more productive for almost everyone. But it doesn't have to be forced on you, for example there is no reason why center areas can't be left open for those that prefer them. But in reality the best way to collaborate is to do it in pieces. You come to my office. I come to yours. We invite the team to a conference room.

YZF 9y ago

Offices do not mean having each person locked in their room never interacting with anyone else. They mean you can close the door and be able to focus on something. In my experience you get a lot more interaction when people have private offices, or at least cubes. It's easy to walk into someone's office and have a discussion. Easier than let's go find a meeting room so we don't disturb everyone. It's also pretty easy to call other people in as needed and have an impromptu meeting without needing to book a room for that and without disturbing others. Not to mention other technologies like e-mail, messaging etc. The most collaborative places I worked in are those where people had offices and the least collaborative ones have open plans. Anecdotal but there you have it. Let's face it, open plan offices are about reducing cost and pretending to be collaborative. It's the "Agile" of offices and I don't mean it in a good way.

yakult 9y ago
>It's easy to walk into someone's office and have a discussion. Certainly less easy than joining in on a conversation you overhear while sitting at your desk. What we have here is disgreement over the optimal 'activation energy' for social interactions that produces the best work. This parameter depends on all kinds of factors, e.g. the type of work and work culture. What we need is a workflow that optimizes this parameter for a given office. IOW, somebody needs to come up with a cost function and run gradient descent on it.
- gfodor 9y ago
  It's a little out there, but I think VR workspaces will potentially provide such a method. Currently the iteration cost is too high. (For example it could involve rearranging desks, tearing down walls, buying equipment, etc.) VR opens the door to a malleable workspace that still comes close to pairty with face to face communications (it is not there today but most likely will be in a few generations.)
  - yakult 9y ago
    For large companies, I can imagine using new branch offices for a/b testing. A while ago I read a comment here about a university that, instead of paving roads to a new campus, just had grass everywhere. A semester later they paved over all the parts where the grass died from all the foot traffic. I wonder if something like that would be workable? Have easily reconfigurable panels and furniture, encourage the staff to arrange it however they like, wait six months, then standardize/remove pain points/make permanent?

dkarl 9y ago

> I think it's easy to severely underestimate the value of having people overhear conversations and interactions of others beyond their obvious scope of work. I used to feel the same way, but after trying to balance focus and eavesdropping, I've come to the conclusion that it is too dependent on circumstances. Sometimes the conversations aren't happening in the right places at the right times. I think this is an unrecognized business problem, probably an unrecognized managerial responsibility. Some developers handle it by cultivating office social relationships with people in various parts of the company, but that's a burden than you can't put on everyone. Not only does it not make sense, but some people will be averse to it or simply not good at it. Rather than put the burden on developers, a good manager should keep the pulse of the rest of the company and keep everyone connected and oriented. Of course a manager can't do a perfect job, but they should do well enough that their engineers won't feel paranoid about not eavesdropping or gossiping enough. > siloing humans into isolated offices (a fundamentally unnatural state) I don't know that it's any more unnatural than asking people to complete demanding individual tasks while other people in their social group have conversations nearby. We're so wired to be social that having conversations nearby virtually compels multitasking, which we're not very good at, which is probably why historically people who have been able to afford the expense of quiet, private workspaces seem to prefer them. "A room of one's own" has become symbolic of the material and social conditions that enable difficult intellectual work.

pasbesoin 9y ago

Respect what people communicate about their needs. Measure the results. Don't prescribe. And, in "our" field, presumably you are dealing with "professionals." Treat them as such. If they say they need a resource (including, peace and quiet to concentrate), provide it. Finally, as others state and I agree, offices do not necessarily mean isolation. If your offices are really soundproofed, impromptu meetings are frictionless with regard to timing and space. Socializing can also take place without people constantly looking over their shoulders to see whether they're being noticed or surveyed. Provide some common spaces --separated from the offices, so that their are no "losers" who are unwillingly stuck in the noisy offices adjacent. And if people want to work in a shared space? If you have the room, provide that, too. Let them work in the common spaces, if they like. Let them do what works for them. Monitor the output. Lose the ego (speaking generally, not to the parent post nor anyone in particular, here). Open the eyes. (And ears, as it were.) P.S. In my case, people were repeatedly pleased and sometimes astounded with my work. But I could never get past "the way we do things" and the separation from Management who kept to themselves the actual authority to make any changes that might vary from "the way we do things." In retrospect, and if my life hadn't deal me a series of crippling blows, early on, I should have become a consultant. Better pay, and the built-in ability to walk away from bad environments. If you need to; sometimes, since you aren't part of the organization, they will just give you what you ask for. Not part of those internal politics.

emodendroket 9y ago

I think it's easy to severely overestimate it; that happens pretty infrequently.