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If you're a newbie and need to get up to speed, having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help. And if you can design

If you're a newbie and need to get up to speed, having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help. And if you can design your software so that the team members are replaceable, being able to easily replacing engineers is more important than keeping them happy. IMO it only works on a certain complexity level of software, and up to a particular skill level of engineer. Beyond that, you need more specialized engineers that need more code ownership, and will be replaced less often. They'll cost more too.

concede_pluto 9y ago
> experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes Please don't abuse your peers' goodwill this way. Write down your questions as you go, meet about stuff too abstruse to straighten out over email, and add what you learn to the docs so the next newbie will be less of a burden.
rdtsc 9y ago
> having an experienced person you can ask questions of every 5 to 10 minutes is a big help That is orthogonal (independent) of the office layout. I have been both the person who needed to be brought up to speed and the one who helped others get up to speed and I can't think in either case how an open office layout would have made it better. Just randomly interrupting people every 5 to 10 minutes is not the best approach and that's exactly the what's one of the problems with the open office layout -- they invite those kind of interruptions.