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"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces.
by Nate75Sanders 15y ago
"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. "
yes, a thousand times
I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.
It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.
While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.
- nicw 15y agoInversely, I think it's up to each one of us to communicate how we should be interrupted when we're busy. If we don't say "headphones means send me an email" then our co-workers don't know that we're in heads-down-mode and they'll keep walking over.
- Nate75Sanders 15y agoThat's all fine and good, but the types of management that Garann is talking about in this article aren't your "co-workers". They'll interrupt you whenever they feel like it because you belong to them.
- natrius 15y agoIs this actually a useful observation to make? How many people have sociopaths for bosses? Why haven't you left?
- Maven911 15y agoIts more common then you think, and not everyone can afford to leave their job for something as relatively insignificant as this - i.e. its annoying but its tolerable and the bills gotta get paid
- yangez 15y agoIn my experience, face time is very important in an organization and it's not just about productivity. It's very hard to effectively motivate people and align the company's vision if half of your employees aren't even there.
- Nate75Sanders 15y agoIf the kind of people who get paid $150K to write software are having trouble getting motivated, maybe you made a mistake in hiring them, or at least paying them $150K.
- karamazov 15y agoIf I paid you $250k to lay on a couch very quietly, staring into space and not sleeping, for 8 hours a day, how long would you stay motivated? (Note: This is reducto ad absurdum, not a comment on how interesting writing bad software may or may not be.)
- munin 15y agoa lot of people here would probably tell you that if you need face time to motivate people and you are the kind of person who unironically says "align the company's vision", you're probably screwed anyway. I don't know if I personally would go that far, but I can say that after five years of working in an office, exciting ideas communicated succinctly transcend the medium. if you tell your people good things, you can use IRC, twitter, quill and parchment, or smoke signals. it won't matter. they'll be motivated.
- yangez 15y agoPoint taken. Just wanted to bring up the idea that there are other considerations besides just productivity that might affect a company's policies.
- munin 15y agoit's definitely true. but I'm pretty convinced that the most legitimate considerations are ones born out of physical necessity. are you doing archaeological excavation? studying wildlife in a forest? need to do everything in magical shielded rooms with no internet connection "for security purposes"? okay, I probably need to be there for that. oh, you're writing software? for the web? yeah, I can do that anywhere, thanks...
- phillijw 15y agoI love overhead fluorescent lighting. Maybe I'm the only one.
- mjwalshe 15y agoYep indiviual offices work so much better Mc Connel says IBM found a 15% increase in productivity.
- danssig 15y agoI'm surprised it's only 15%. But really, nearly all big companies don't care about this at all. If they need something fast they'll buy it. Everything internal is just about cost, consistency, and predictability.
- mjwalshe 15y agoWell I think he said that was the average and it worked for all levels of developer.