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Open offices are great, I agree, but there has to be management flexibility in understanding that employees don't have to be at their desk 40 hours. I like be

Open offices are great, I agree, but there has to be management flexibility in understanding that employees don't have to be at their desk 40 hours. I like being at my desk around 11-2 or so to network, but I do all my best concentrated work remotely or later at night. The nice thing about open plans is that they bring people together and create a more cooperative atmosphere, but don't force people to be there 8 hours.

valuearb 9y ago
You do your best work remotely or late at night when you are alone, but feel open offices are great? Open floor plans don’t create a more cooperative work space, people do. Private offices often lead to better cooperation. Your standup and team meetings are in an open area or a conference room. If someone needs help, up you pair up in an office so you aren’t distracting 20 other people. You need to focus on a tough problem? You don’t have to drive home or wait till everyone leaves. You get to solve it right there and then. 90% or more of what I overhear in an open office has nothing to do with my project, it’s the web or Weber team or Game Of Thrones or last nights game. Even the 10% that’s about my project is rarely useful. It’s QA talking to project management about their smoke tests. The myth of open offices being collaborative is so misleading. It’s like saying you can learn new programming skills by reading random blogs. Sure if you read enough web pages, and get past the cat pix and political screeds and cooking recipes you’ll run into some programming blogs eventually. It will still likely be a while before you find a useful one. Why not design our interactions to promote useful, efficient collaboration. Stand ups are exactly that, a short focused meeting to share what you are doing and problems you have. So is Slack. Having shared lunches. Having team planning sessions. All of those can be done without robbing you of your ability to focus and do your best, most difficult work. Open floor plans rob everyone of any opportunity for that, all to have a bunch of devs with headphones cranked so high they can’t hear to “collaborate” and distracted every time someone walks by their desk.
- justonepost 9y ago
  Well, I do great work as long as it's going in the right direction for the team. I pull very well at the oars when I have a quiet place, but I tend to start rowing in the wrong direction on a daily basis if I don't get to see how everyone else is rowing. A lot of it is your seniority. Less senior folks can be more remote.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    I don't understand how being remote or in your own office affects how aligned your work is with the team. Today we have Slack, email, texting, phones, face-time, Skype, conference rooms, etc, etc, etc. Back in the old days everyone stayed on the page just by leaving their office once or twice a day to meet and review priorities, and occasionally go into another engineers office to get/give help on a problem. If you don't understand your teams priorities and what everyone is working on, that has nothing to do with your office layout. It's either an indication of poor project management/leadership, or your own laziness.
    - justonepost 9y ago
      People don't have to log onto slack or email or respond. When you sit near someone it's pretty weird to ignore them. The other thing is that people are necessarily cliquish. Folks in the office will necessarily gang up to keep remote workers on the outside. Man is a political beast..
      - valuearb 9y ago
        The great thing about Slack/email is that you CAN ignore people. If I'm working on a particular difficult problem that requires an hour of uninterrupted thought, getting interrupted a couple times during that hour can easily turn it into 2 hours with lower quality results. Being able to turn on DND in Slack and then responding after that hour is over is a godsend for high quality work and productivity. The awful part of open offices is that people think they can just wave a hand in front of your face to get your attention because it's suddenly important to THEM. If your team "gangs up" on you, that's a management problem that can occur even in an open office. I'm happy to help virtually anyone, as long as they respect my need to be productive and have time to focus. But if you are one of the rare developers who is more work for me than you seem to output, I'll happily ignore you even if you sit right in front of me. If you try to break my concentration, I'll just tell you to solve your own problems. That's a problem our manager will have to deal with whether one of us is remote or not. I'm simply not going to babysit devs who refuse to do the basics of problem solving without having their hands held.

valuearb 9y ago

You do your best work remotely or late at night when you are alone, but feel open offices are great? Open floor plans don’t create a more cooperative work space, people do. Private offices often lead to better cooperation. Your standup and team meetings are in an open area or a conference room. If someone needs help, up you pair up in an office so you aren’t distracting 20 other people. You need to focus on a tough problem? You don’t have to drive home or wait till everyone leaves. You get to solve it right there and then. 90% or more of what I overhear in an open office has nothing to do with my project, it’s the web or Weber team or Game Of Thrones or last nights game. Even the 10% that’s about my project is rarely useful. It’s QA talking to project management about their smoke tests. The myth of open offices being collaborative is so misleading. It’s like saying you can learn new programming skills by reading random blogs. Sure if you read enough web pages, and get past the cat pix and political screeds and cooking recipes you’ll run into some programming blogs eventually. It will still likely be a while before you find a useful one. Why not design our interactions to promote useful, efficient collaboration. Stand ups are exactly that, a short focused meeting to share what you are doing and problems you have. So is Slack. Having shared lunches. Having team planning sessions. All of those can be done without robbing you of your ability to focus and do your best, most difficult work. Open floor plans rob everyone of any opportunity for that, all to have a bunch of devs with headphones cranked so high they can’t hear to “collaborate” and distracted every time someone walks by their desk.

justonepost 9y ago
Well, I do great work as long as it's going in the right direction for the team. I pull very well at the oars when I have a quiet place, but I tend to start rowing in the wrong direction on a daily basis if I don't get to see how everyone else is rowing. A lot of it is your seniority. Less senior folks can be more remote.
- valuearb 9y ago
  I don't understand how being remote or in your own office affects how aligned your work is with the team. Today we have Slack, email, texting, phones, face-time, Skype, conference rooms, etc, etc, etc. Back in the old days everyone stayed on the page just by leaving their office once or twice a day to meet and review priorities, and occasionally go into another engineers office to get/give help on a problem. If you don't understand your teams priorities and what everyone is working on, that has nothing to do with your office layout. It's either an indication of poor project management/leadership, or your own laziness.
  - justonepost 9y ago
    People don't have to log onto slack or email or respond. When you sit near someone it's pretty weird to ignore them. The other thing is that people are necessarily cliquish. Folks in the office will necessarily gang up to keep remote workers on the outside. Man is a political beast..
    - valuearb 9y ago
      The great thing about Slack/email is that you CAN ignore people. If I'm working on a particular difficult problem that requires an hour of uninterrupted thought, getting interrupted a couple times during that hour can easily turn it into 2 hours with lower quality results. Being able to turn on DND in Slack and then responding after that hour is over is a godsend for high quality work and productivity. The awful part of open offices is that people think they can just wave a hand in front of your face to get your attention because it's suddenly important to THEM. If your team "gangs up" on you, that's a management problem that can occur even in an open office. I'm happy to help virtually anyone, as long as they respect my need to be productive and have time to focus. But if you are one of the rare developers who is more work for me than you seem to output, I'll happily ignore you even if you sit right in front of me. If you try to break my concentration, I'll just tell you to solve your own problems. That's a problem our manager will have to deal with whether one of us is remote or not. I'm simply not going to babysit devs who refuse to do the basics of problem solving without having their hands held.