4 ms·

Reminds me of Dan Luu's take: > This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines

Reminds me of Dan Luu's take: > This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff. > But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn't matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren't running roughshod over their competitors?

geebee 8y ago
That's a great point. The top companies are succeeding in spite of a practice developers say they despise. So isn't that evidence they're right, and the devs are wrong? Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers? Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while. So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?
nerfhammer 8y ago
e.g., Google didn't beat Altavista because its employees were 20% more productive with their office time.
jpindar 8y ago
Sweatshops succeed too. At least developers generally quit before we get to the point of wanting to jump off the building.
Felz 8y ago
Personally, I'm fairly certain that this stuff does matter, but that a successful company will inevitably backslide to the corporate mean. The things that initially made it successful will be lost. Anything not an immediate disaster from management's perspective (open offices) will creep in. It might be decades before people realize the company was running off inertia, though.
rimliu 8y ago
Slavery was kind of a success too.
ghaff 8y ago
I suspect the answer is that it doesn't matter all that much at the end of the day. People have different preferences at different stages of their career and larger companies are always going to be distributed to at least some degree. And, to the degree it does matter, 1.) the individual company's/team's context is probably relevant and 2.) companies/teams tend to take actions which at least somewhat mitigate the disadvantages of whatever approach they've chose. So an all-remote company may well have different decision-making processes than a co-located one, probably systematically holds F2F meetings of various times, and so forth. In open floor plans where people mostly work in the office, there's often some flexibility to spend some time off by yourself.
yelloweyes 8y ago
That's a very simplistic and stupid insight. Guess what else generated a lot of money? Slavery.
existencebox 8y ago
I am an employee at Microsoft, who has had both offices and open space teams, and who has chatted with Dan about many of these points. I'd make two statements, both are entirely my own. 1. The impact of these changes often lags the change itself, and status quo takes time to shift. Open spaces were definitely a fad for a while, and a lot of people (broader than MS) certainly started drinking the koolaid, yet it took ~decade for the rollout to really move in force. Conversely, I see far more anti-open-space articles nowadays than a decade ago. On top of this as well, bigCo corporate momentum cannot be underemphesized. IBM is still a behemoth, recent follies and very well-discussed employee-QOL-"hiccups" aside. 2. "success" is not binary. It's especially harder to judge when "product success" is often impacted by so many externalities it becomes very difficult to ask "what really is the impact of X specific factor." It becomes _even harder_ when the entire industry did this shift almost in lockstep, so finding "outliers" that are also viable employers for an individual became less and less an option. In that context, all I can bring is anecdata, and the # of peers I've worked with who dislike open spaces and will make active career choices to avoid them (myself included) seems to be growing.

geebee 8y ago

That's a great point. The top companies are succeeding in spite of a practice developers say they despise. So isn't that evidence they're right, and the devs are wrong? Here's the thing - how many industries rely so deeply on controlling their workforce's right to live and work in the United States? How many industries lobby congress so ferociously and constantly about a shortage of highly skilled workers? Well, yeah, if an industry has the right to decide who is and isn't allowed to live in the United States, in a system where non-family based immigration is difficult and spots are hard to come by, then sure, they can be very successful imposing work conditions that people with personal and economic freedom of mobility would reject in favor of another profession. But if you really want to live in the US and Facebook controls whether you get and keep a work visa, then sure, you'll put up with an open office. And because of the way we allocate green cards (requiring a corporate sponsor, and greatly restricting how many are issued every year, with a long queue), you may have to put up with it for quite a while. So another way to look at it is this: companies say they are in a desperate competition for key workers in critical shortage, and they can't recruit domestically no matter how good an offer they make. They also require working conditions that most developers say they despise. Uh, how about working conditions that most developers don't despise, have you tried that?

nerfhammer 8y ago

e.g., Google didn't beat Altavista because its employees were 20% more productive with their office time.

jpindar 8y ago

Sweatshops succeed too. At least developers generally quit before we get to the point of wanting to jump off the building.

Felz 8y ago

Personally, I'm fairly certain that this stuff does matter, but that a successful company will inevitably backslide to the corporate mean. The things that initially made it successful will be lost. Anything not an immediate disaster from management's perspective (open offices) will creep in. It might be decades before people realize the company was running off inertia, though.

rimliu 8y ago

Slavery was kind of a success too.

ghaff 8y ago

I suspect the answer is that it doesn't matter all that much at the end of the day. People have different preferences at different stages of their career and larger companies are always going to be distributed to at least some degree. And, to the degree it does matter, 1.) the individual company's/team's context is probably relevant and 2.) companies/teams tend to take actions which at least somewhat mitigate the disadvantages of whatever approach they've chose. So an all-remote company may well have different decision-making processes than a co-located one, probably systematically holds F2F meetings of various times, and so forth. In open floor plans where people mostly work in the office, there's often some flexibility to spend some time off by yourself.

yelloweyes 8y ago

That's a very simplistic and stupid insight. Guess what else generated a lot of money? Slavery.

existencebox 8y ago

I am an employee at Microsoft, who has had both offices and open space teams, and who has chatted with Dan about many of these points. I'd make two statements, both are entirely my own. 1. The impact of these changes often lags the change itself, and status quo takes time to shift. Open spaces were definitely a fad for a while, and a lot of people (broader than MS) certainly started drinking the koolaid, yet it took ~decade for the rollout to really move in force. Conversely, I see far more anti-open-space articles nowadays than a decade ago. On top of this as well, bigCo corporate momentum cannot be underemphesized. IBM is still a behemoth, recent follies and very well-discussed employee-QOL-"hiccups" aside. 2. "success" is not binary. It's especially harder to judge when "product success" is often impacted by so many externalities it becomes very difficult to ask "what really is the impact of X specific factor." It becomes _even harder_ when the entire industry did this shift almost in lockstep, so finding "outliers" that are also viable employers for an individual became less and less an option. In that context, all I can bring is anecdata, and the # of peers I've worked with who dislike open spaces and will make active career choices to avoid them (myself included) seems to be growing.