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These are all good points. Perhaps the reality is something like physical layout of the office doesn't influence things as much as the team itself. However, som

by city41 16y ago

These are all good points. Perhaps the reality is something like physical layout of the office doesn't influence things as much as the team itself. However, something as simple as physical layout still will affect things at least to a degree.

hga 16y ago
You might want to look further into this. I know that there's a well established rule of thumb that states close collaboration just doesn't tend to happen beyond 30??? feet or a single staircase (i.e. people further apart just don't tend to collaborate). This is of great interest to universities and other places that do research, you should be able to find something, maybe in Peopleware (which if you haven't yet read you want to anyway).
- jtbigwoo 16y ago
  Peopleware strongly advocates for private offices.
  - hga 16y ago
    Indeed. It was, however, written in a very different period of software development and one could argue that it may be less applicable to the the "bolt things together", MVP consumer product/site sort of project that is the greatest?/primary?? focus of HN/YC/today's angels funding. (To emphasize how different, we can be pretty sure that very few if any of the programmers studied had a memory budget even close to what's been in mainstream CPU caches for some years.) For another example, see MIT's termination of SICP/6.001/Scheme with extreme prejudice and replacing it with Python based "bolt together" course(s) (I don't know anything about 6.02, but the initial 6.01 robot project is just that ... which is not to say that it's easy, e.g. it requires the use of differential equations and its labs are very instructor intensive, to the point the department is recruiting upper-classmen to help). MIT believes that things have fundamentally changed....
  - thethirdswitch 16y ago
    True. However they also say: "...enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups." I think there needs to be a balance between private/semi-private team space and individual private space within the team space.

by city41 16y ago

hga 16y ago

You might want to look further into this. I know that there's a well established rule of thumb that states close collaboration just doesn't tend to happen beyond 30??? feet or a single staircase (i.e. people further apart just don't tend to collaborate). This is of great interest to universities and other places that do research, you should be able to find something, maybe in Peopleware (which if you haven't yet read you want to anyway).

jtbigwoo 16y ago
Peopleware strongly advocates for private offices.
- hga 16y ago
  Indeed. It was, however, written in a very different period of software development and one could argue that it may be less applicable to the the "bolt things together", MVP consumer product/site sort of project that is the greatest?/primary?? focus of HN/YC/today's angels funding. (To emphasize how different, we can be pretty sure that very few if any of the programmers studied had a memory budget even close to what's been in mainstream CPU caches for some years.) For another example, see MIT's termination of SICP/6.001/Scheme with extreme prejudice and replacing it with Python based "bolt together" course(s) (I don't know anything about 6.02, but the initial 6.01 robot project is just that ... which is not to say that it's easy, e.g. it requires the use of differential equations and its labs are very instructor intensive, to the point the department is recruiting upper-classmen to help). MIT believes that things have fundamentally changed....
- thethirdswitch 16y ago
  True. However they also say: "...enclosed offices need not be one-person offices. The two- or three- or four-person office makes a lot more sense, particularly if office groupings can be made to align with work groups." I think there needs to be a balance between private/semi-private team space and individual private space within the team space.