4 ms·

Can you explain how you find it possible to think deeply about complex algorithms and data structures, or to debug code? When I do this I find that I'm essentia

• kerkeslager 9y ago
  For me, I don't know if that's necessarily related to the workspace I'm in. Talking and other sounds around me don't distract me unless someone is actually talking to me--and that's not really different in a private office, because someone can just knock on my door. The general noise of an open workspace doesn't bother me. I get that this is not true for everyone, which is why I'm saying that different people work differently. There is a slight increase in interruptions just because it's slightly easier for someone to speak to you directly in an open workspace. But the flipside, which I gain a lot more from than I lose, is that I can address other people who might know something immediately that would take me a 15 minutes to figure out--that kind of stuff is a big time-saver. I tend to figure out what other people on my team are amenable to this sort of interaction quickly, and respectfully don't interrupt people who aren't. Of course, there are still times when I need to concentrate deeply, and then headphones go in. If that doesn't cause people to weighing the value of my time versus what they'd gain from talking to me, setting polite verbal boundaries usually does. And finally, there are always going to be distractions even if you're working in a private workspace, and all the strategies that work for those distractions work for the distractions of a shared workspace.