3 ms·
> In contrast, if you are 5 people co-located you just stand up and say: “everyone over there - we talk now”. I much prefer working on software teams with othe
by ken 8y ago
> In contrast, if you are 5 people co-located you just stand up and say: “everyone over there - we talk now”.
I much prefer working on software teams with other people in the same office, and yet this is one of the things I hate about it. Just because I'm physically near you doesn't mean there's zero cost to interruptions.
Working remotely is like memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking. Maybe in a perfect world, it wouldn't be needed, as there's a slight performance hit from requiring these abstractions, and in some cases it can be awkward to have to deal with the communication paths this requires, but the benefit from requiring everyone to be honest far outweighs the performance cost. In practice, not every component of the system is always perfect. Email is my syscall interface, and distance is my MMU. Open floor plan offices make as much sense to me as running all your programs in the same memory space.
Remote work works for software because it enforces desirable management styles -- that I can be sure my process won't be pre-empted in 5 minutes because someone brought donuts.
- codemac 8y agoHave you worked on this small of a team before? When the team is actually small (not a small part of some mondo corp), you get a lot of great team dynamics, and it's very easy to know that 'ken doesn't like being interrupted. Working with a small team in the context of an open office w/100 people where 10-20% of the team is actually remote is what I've found to be the most unique intersection of terribleness.
- maxxxxx 8y agototally agree. Small team in a separate room is great. Small in open office or cubes simply sucks.
- ken 8y agoYup. I've worked at a company of 2! The last software team I was on was about 3 or 4 (depending on how you count), in a company of about 10. Nobody in management or sales ever really learned the "doesn't like being interrupted" lesson. In my experience, as soon as a company is big enough to hire non-programmers with physical access to programmers (usually around 4-6), this problem rears its head.
- Moru 8y agoA: "Do you have a minute?" B: "I do, now..." A: "Oh good, could you fix this please?"
- nottorp 8y agoRight, I don't understand why interrupting everyone's work in a local team is acceptable...