4 ms·

A colleague had another problem with hot desks - a visitor would arrive at his floor and ask "Is Bob here?" => "I don't know". Without hot desks, you know where

by vacri 9y ago

A colleague had another problem with hot desks - a visitor would arrive at his floor and ask "Is Bob here?" => "I don't know". Without hot desks, you know where Bob sits and have a good chance of finding him. With hot desks, the visitor now has to work to find Bob, as does the person receiving the visitor.

concede_pluto 9y ago
If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pagerduty rotation. Showing up at my desk is not the best way to do anything.
- hota_mazi 9y ago
  That's adding a lot of paperwork and process for something that should be done in a few minutes. You're excessively reducing productivity if you require each face to face to require a meeting booking.
  - lazerwalker 9y ago
    I think both sides here have a point. One argument: For many kinds of knowledge work, unnecessary unplanned distractions are a huge drain on productivity. Tapping someone on the shoulder is far more damaging than sending them a message they can reply to asynchronously, even if you're defining expected response time in minutes rather than hours. If there's something that really does require face-to-face time, great, plan a meeting. Another argument: face-to-face communication is so much higher bandwidth than voice or text chat that it's worth prioritizing. Tapping someone on the shoulder and hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth. Both of these are totally true! It's really about how an individual, and a team, work together best. To me, the frustration is that most modern team environments tend to implicitly choose the latter value system without it being a conscious choice.
    - concede_pluto 9y ago
      > hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.
JCharante 9y ago
They could take the valve approach The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have http://user—check it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now. http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...
flurdy 9y ago
If permanent desks then having a somewhat recognisable but standardised photo and name on the wall or screen will let some people find the right desk without asking. Though to be honest people still asks as that is what humans do. Even though it interrupts flow of others.

by vacri 9y ago

concede_pluto 9y ago

If a face-to-face conversation is important, one of us will spend two minutes finding a good time and booking a meeting. If it's an emergency, my team has a pagerduty rotation. Showing up at my desk is not the best way to do anything.

hota_mazi 9y ago
That's adding a lot of paperwork and process for something that should be done in a few minutes. You're excessively reducing productivity if you require each face to face to require a meeting booking.
- lazerwalker 9y ago
  I think both sides here have a point. One argument: For many kinds of knowledge work, unnecessary unplanned distractions are a huge drain on productivity. Tapping someone on the shoulder is far more damaging than sending them a message they can reply to asynchronously, even if you're defining expected response time in minutes rather than hours. If there's something that really does require face-to-face time, great, plan a meeting. Another argument: face-to-face communication is so much higher bandwidth than voice or text chat that it's worth prioritizing. Tapping someone on the shoulder and hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth. Both of these are totally true! It's really about how an individual, and a team, work together best. To me, the frustration is that most modern team environments tend to implicitly choose the latter value system without it being a conscious choice.
  - concede_pluto 9y ago
    > hashing something out over two minutes can save an hour of online back-and-forth I should hope so, since the cost of a two-minute conversation is at least one engineer-hour for two people to each get back into the zone and start being useful.

JCharante 9y ago

They could take the valve approach The fact that everyone is always moving around within the company makes people hard to find. That’s why we have http://user—check it out. We know where you are based on where your machine is plugged in, so use this site to see a map of where everyone is right now. http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.p...

flurdy 9y ago

If permanent desks then having a somewhat recognisable but standardised photo and name on the wall or screen will let some people find the right desk without asking. Though to be honest people still asks as that is what humans do. Even though it interrupts flow of others.