Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices. I guess cubicle farms are ugly, and if your co-workers are all annoying nerds being abl

Also, I don't get this thing Americans seem to have for private offices. I guess cubicle farms are ugly, and if your co-workers are all annoying nerds being able to shut a door might be nice, but I've always preferred open, multi-desk offices where you can discuss things with the people around you. Joel has written at length about the need for programmers to have spaces where they cannot be interrupted, and from personal experience I agree wholeheartedly. From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html: Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds). Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff.