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> Most of a programmers job is staring at a wall of text and trying to concentrate, anything that distracts has a serious impact on productivity. That is an ex

by baddox 8y ago

> Most of a programmers job is staring at a wall of text and trying to concentrate, anything that distracts has a serious impact on productivity. That is an extreme overgeneralization. For instance, plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders. That’s perfectly normal, and I would argue that in many cases those are the product development teams that will make the best products.

flukus 8y ago
> plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders. Unless all of those people just happen to sit next to each other or they're shouting across the room then an open plan office does nothing to help that anyway, you'll have to organize meetings to collaborate or do it in other formats. For customers and stakeholders you'd be lucky if they worked in the same building at all. Face to face communication is not the only form of collaborations and IMHO it's the worst and least scaleable one for technical fields. And when you're collaborating through a mailing list or something similar (that doesn't involve interrupting each other) that's just another wall of text.
- baddox 8y ago
  Sounds like we’re talking about vastly different sizes of company, or vastly different levels of bureaucracy. If a company wouldn’t seat together people who need to collaborate, I don’t think the choice of office plan is the most important problem to solve.
  - dmitriid 8y ago
    So, you have 15 people who try to work. And 5 people sitting close together, who are loudly collaborating around a white board. You do realise that these people will disrupt the work of the 15 people around them? That's what daily life is in an open office.

by baddox 8y ago

flukus 8y ago

> plenty of programming jobs involve a significant amount of time spent on collaboration and communication with designers, other programmers, customers, and stakeholders. Unless all of those people just happen to sit next to each other or they're shouting across the room then an open plan office does nothing to help that anyway, you'll have to organize meetings to collaborate or do it in other formats. For customers and stakeholders you'd be lucky if they worked in the same building at all. Face to face communication is not the only form of collaborations and IMHO it's the worst and least scaleable one for technical fields. And when you're collaborating through a mailing list or something similar (that doesn't involve interrupting each other) that's just another wall of text.

baddox 8y ago
Sounds like we’re talking about vastly different sizes of company, or vastly different levels of bureaucracy. If a company wouldn’t seat together people who need to collaborate, I don’t think the choice of office plan is the most important problem to solve.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  So, you have 15 people who try to work. And 5 people sitting close together, who are loudly collaborating around a white board. You do realise that these people will disrupt the work of the 15 people around them? That's what daily life is in an open office.