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Before I quit working for other people I used this as a barometer of whether a company was run by idiots or not. IF they had an open plan office, and were apol
by nirvana 15y ago
Before I quit working for other people I used this as a barometer of whether a company was run by idiots or not. IF they had an open plan office, and were apologetic about it, then they might be redeemable. IF they were proud of it, then idiots. Seriously. Sales guys in a big room, they probably benefit from the vibe. Programmers need distractions to be productive? Really?
In fact, the last company I worked at had hired way too young, and they had a bunch of kids who thought that being in your office writing code was somehow "Bad" because you were "siloed away". They liked to hang out all together at one big table, and chat away all day long with their laptops out.
In the time I was there, I don't think they ever realized they were getting nothing done. (I was curious as to whether they were onto something or not, so I tracked the number of stories and features they committed vs. me and my officemate who at 26 was the "old man" of the bunch, though still much younger than me he was old enough to know what flow was.)
Result: the two of us were about 4 times more productive than the 5 of them.
One of those five, though, was the "director of engineering" (20 years old) and was constantly chastising us for spending too much time in our offices.
When it became clear that this was going to affect my evaluation, I chose to exit that company. (They folded about a year later, never having accomplished the short term goal they were working on while I was there.)
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe some people are more productive in groups of 2-3. That's fine. Set up offices for them to work that way.
Just let me have some damn peace and quiet so I can get work done! (and I never seem to have a problem hooking up with other engineers to talk about architecture or what have you to keep us coordinated, though often this is via email or chat... which is much less interrupting than a tap on the shoulder.)
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On further thought-- maybe designers and people whose job is to sling HTML or javascript don't need to have "Flow". Maybe the jobs for these people are light enough that there is no context switching cost or the cost is low. That's not the case for my work or my career. There's often a very large amount of stuff I need to track in my head... because I'm generally solving hard problems on the back end, rather than making UIs or web pages.
- randomdata 15y ago> Programmers need distractions to be productive? Really? Sometimes. I work from home, so I'm mostly distraction free, but sometimes I need distractions to get the motivation flowing again. I think the perfect office would have the opportunity to work under many different environments, depending on your mood. Moderation is, like always, the key.
- simonbrown 15y ago> Maybe the jobs for these people are light enough that there is no context switching cost or the cost is low. Getting a site to work in IE6, or designing a usable UI, is probably hard to do with constant interruptions.
- ricardobeat 15y ago> people whose job is to sling HTML or javascript What was that? Coding HTML or programming in javascript might not be as mentally hard (most of the time), but is just as much work as anything else.
- nirvana 15y agoAnd where exactly did I say it wasn't work? I said that it might not have the same interruptions costs, and I said this as a way of acknowledging the people in this thread who say that they think open plan offices are great. So, what you did, was, you cut out a few words, removing all context, and then pretended like there was no context, and put words in my mouth implying I denigrated a certain type of work. In short, you told a lie. Disagree with me if you like. In fact, the whole point of that addendum was to acknowledge that some will disagree with me. But lying about what I said like that? In an attempt to pretend like I said something offensive so you can be offended? Childish.
- ricardobeat 15y agoWow. I think this conversation ends here.
- MortenK 15y agoNice, baseless condescension there at the end.
- nirvana 15y agoIts a real shame that people will seek any excuse to misrepresent what one says-- as you do-- because they choose to feel offended. If you'll read what I wrote, you'll notice that I was granting a possibility to the people who disagree with me about open plan office spaces-- and there are a number who have done this in this thread-- by saying that maybe for some types of work the interruptions are not as expensive. Rather than accuse me of saying something I didn't say in an attempt to feel superior, and thus bring down the quality of hacker news (as seems to be the trend these days), you could have taken what I said, considered it in context and responded. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe designers need as much flow as programmers do.
- ahoyhere 15y agoYeah, you said their work was "light enough" that distractions don't matter. That was condescension. If you want to backpedal, you actually have to take the pedals and run them backwards. Otherwise it's not effective.
- ahoyhere 15y ago…maybe designers and people whose job is to sling HTML or javascript don't need to have "Flow"… Maybe the jobs for these people are light enough that there is no context switching cost… Typical HN narcissism: it must be trivial if it's not what I'm doing.