6 ms·

Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a privat

by nox100 3y ago

Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had). Having people around me working on the same project is invaluable for me for * asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. * running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled. * brainstorming. Same as above * getting a feeling for what everyone is up to Sure I can go read their notes but it's not the same. One happens by osmosis so zero effort, it just happens. The other requires scheduling time * feeling part of a team, working on the same thing. I don't feel connected to me team at all working from home. I feel no more connection to them then when I call my bank and talk to a banker. Nor do I feel any connection to sit at a coffee shop and work around others who are not on the same team. I get that others have different opinions and/or want to work from home. Me, I was lucky to work on things I wanted to work on with people who wanted to work on them (video games) for most of my career. It was super fun. It would not been even 5% as fun at home by myself.

Roark66 3y ago
>Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had). I wonder how many of these remaining 5 people have a take similar to me. WFH is where I'm most productive and most happy to work. Doing the kind of work you describe above "with 6 people on one project" is for 90% of the time an exercise in babying the least up to speed team member at the cost of distracting everyone. I get it, some people just like being around people and doing stuff "together", and some types of work may even benefit from that when stars align(brainstorming etc). Most types of work I do in software don't. Especially now, post covid when WFH became normalised and people who were opposed to it on various grounds were forced to learn how to use it effectively. >* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. That's what the phone is for, with additional benefit of status from everyone. If I see someone is busy I don't phone them I look for someone else, If I see they are "green" I do and I get my answer instantly without disturbing anyone. >running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled Again, same thing. Pick up a phone. If you just want to run something "by everyone". Wait for your daily/weekly team meeting and ask then. Yes, it forces you to write ideas down not to forget them (if they can wait), but it's massively more convenient to everyone else. > * brainstorming. Same as above I had many a good brainstorming session online (mostly with voice). What do you need to accomplish it is: - good audio equipment, Internet access and a quiet location for everyone. No calling into a meeting "from my car, while going to the doctor", or "from the office while people are talking in the background", no "crappy headphones etc". All this ruins productivity for everyone. If people are using cameras(which is nice) everyone has to have the bandwidth for it. Also if you have more than 5 people in your meeting, make use of the "raise hand" feature. Then brainstorming can happen very well. Especially while looking at a document/whiteboard together with systems that show you in real time what everyone does. In fact above a certain number of people (8 maybe) brainstorming sessions seem a lot more effective to me online than in person. Why? Because you have few communication channels. You have the shared whiteboard/document, voice, and chat so while someone is talking you can post a question to the chat without interrupting. >getting a feeling for what everyone is up to That's what regular planning meeting is for. >feeling part of a team, working on the same thing I suppose that's a personal thing, but I always felt that including during my 7 years of WFH 100%. Edit: there is only one real disadvantage to WFH, and it's for junior people wanting to learn. It's much harder to gather knowledge by osmosis, just by being in the office if most senior people are WFH. But then as a leader one has to decide what is more important.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  Phone? I'd always leave my status as do not disturb then. I don't know when I'm about to enter a state of productivity. Only once in a blue moon do I spin around in my chair quietly asking someone to come bug me because I'm bored/don't have anything fun to work on.
Tor3 3y ago
All of that is fine, the problem is that most places with shared space will have people not working on the same project in that room. Instead everybody is working on different projects, and they may be in Teams meetings and talking and talking about things with zero interest for you, and that can't possibly be productive. Even worse if you're in an office with one guy constantly on the 'phone on customer support or whatnot..
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  How about when they put the software team right next to the sales team? This is exactly the problem with open-plan offices: they always do really stupid stuff like this, putting mostly-quiet teams very close to very talkative and noisy teams, with no barrier between them. Then everyone wants to work from home where at least they won't be tormented by listening to the obnoxious sales guy yap on the phone all day and can have their pet keep them company.
  - zeristor 3y ago
    Did you have the head of sales ringing a bell for a sale every few hours too?
    - jusssi 3y ago
      To me, this seems like a positive problem.
      - Aeolun 3y ago
        I think what ends up happening is that you sell a lot of stuff that gets steadily worse over time.
      - funcDropShadow 3y ago
        Of course it is good, if the sales team succeeds. But it is bad if that means that the developers are unable to do their work.
      - 3y ago
olivermuty 3y ago
> asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. All your other points are fine. People are motivated by a mix of external and internal triggers, and you are clearly skewed to the external side. The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there. Programming requires deliberate thought gathered slowly into a complex matrix in your head before it finds its way to the pc through your keyboard. Even though I am an extrovert through and through and strongly identify with the motivational aspects of being in an office, me not giving you an answer until an hour has gone probably means more overall productivity for the project than your instant unblocking at the office.
- cauch 3y ago
  Isn't what you say contradictory? You are saying that devs need to stay "in the flow". But when you are in the flow and suddenly you have something that blocks you because you have a simple question, the best way to stay in the flow is to ask the question and get the answer immediately. If I have to quit my flow, go on slack, ask on slack, wait 10 minutes, then re-explain because the other person did not get it, then re-wait, ... my flow is ruined. What you are saying is, at the end of the day, when caricaturing a little bit, that you want your flow to be maintained, but you are happy to destroy the flow of others.
  - ath3nd 3y ago
    If one requires interrupting 6 other people to maintain flow, it's probably a good idea to start phrasing (hyperbole intentional) it like: 'To keep my own flow, I need to destroy the flow of all my colleagues' And not: 'My colleagues destroy my flow when they can't babysit me and respond to my questions asap, how dare they' It's like driving and then going like: 'Gee, all these other drivers are sure in my way, I need them out of the road so I can get places'. Guess what buddy, they also gotta get places, so damn right follow the laws, wait for your turn patiently and you will get there when you get there. Your colleagues also have stuff to do, and the world doesn't revolve only around YOUR flow. So write down your questions and observations in a coherent list, stop pinging people one question at a time, or search harder in the docs provided that they exist, sometimes that's even better as a learning experience.
matsemann 3y ago
I agree. If I have a personal office I might as well sit at home. I hate open office space as much as the next person, but small team rooms are great. Can have the walls plastered with post-its, screens, drawing boards etc. If I hear two coworkers discuss something, I can chip in if relevant. Information flow just happens by itself.
lnxg33k1 3y ago
[flagged]
- matsemann 3y ago
  I never understand this. Why being so focused on work, to the detriment of building some relationships with the people you work with? Is this a HN/spectrum thing? Or capitalism-simping where people aspire to be robot-workers with no humanity? Why not enjoy your time at work? After all, you're spending 8 hours there a day, and see those people almost as much as your spouse, and probably more than your friends.
  - Matumio 3y ago
    The second reason. Companies that are worse at getting people to self-exploit tend to do worse financially, and thus tend to disappear. Of course, if too many people quit or burn out, then the company will go bust, too. The optimum will be just one step short of that. And whenever someone starts a new company, they will look at the existing successful companies for how things are done. There is no evil master plan. The processes that lead to self-exploitation will sound reasonable and well-intended. (If this wasn't the case, people would refuse to adapt it. Most people don't like exploitation when they see it.) For example, in most of Europe there is a law that requires employees to record their working hours. This law was created to prevent (unpaid) overtime, and it does that. Now company X implements this by making you write down how many hours each day you worked towards which task. Doing this every day makes you think where you put this one-hour chat you had with a co-worker. It was nice, but which task did it contribute to? (It didn't...?) If you bother to ask, everybody will actually encourage you to have those talks, that it is even in the interest of healthy company culture, and remind you that maybe it's part of the paid break (you didn't forget you have that, did you? it was never anyone's intention that you skip your break). Nobody will be responsible for nudging people towards efficiency. It's all the fault of the individual who feels pressured into efficiency. It was never anyone's intention to prevent you from having those occasional nice chats, and nobody will stop you if you keep doing it. Still, every day you get to think about how long it took and which task it belongs to, and it feels a bit like lying to just add the time to a random task. This kind of habit can shape your thinking.
stby 3y ago
I can only second this. I honestly had the best time of my (professional) life when I had a little room with the rest of my team. Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. It's really highly productive. For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. I wouldn't want to wear them all the time as even the best ones become uncomfortable after few hours, but that's also not really needed in a small shared room.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
  That's so different from my work. I work in a team of about 30 people on 1 feature of a very popular app. None of us are working on the same thing at any given time. Most projects have 1 person that works on it or knows how it works. It's sad and isolating. And the company forces this culture by virtue of how promo works.
- pseudalopex 3y ago
  > Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. This is untrue for even small teams in my experience. > For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. Also not my experience.
glimshe 3y ago
I'm glad you like it. Let's just all remember that other people feel differently and will be productive in very different circumstances. I don't need to feel very connected to the team, they are just business partners who are trading their time for money. If we can be friendly, that's awesome, but I'd much rather be connected to my family. Personally, I've experienced open office, fully private office etc. Private office/remote are my favorites, followed by small room with a few people (I also had that in the gaming industry, it wasn't too bad) and, in a distant and humiliating last place, open office.
broast 3y ago
I always find it surprising that so many people struggle to make effective human connections over chat. I think it must be generational, as I believe these are the connections I and other young people prefer.
- h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
  I've also never had particular problems making connections over chat (I'm not old and not young); particularly in companies where I've had a chance to meet people in person even once or twice, I've found online communication no problem at all
- dijit 3y ago
  Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation. Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work. Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available. Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.
- creakingstairs 3y ago
  I've made numerous friends over IRCs, Warcraft 3 chat channels and whatnot and had preferred it over face-to-face (and I still prefer chat over zoom calls!) but as I've gotten older, I started appreciating talking in real life more and more, and now struggle to form connections over chat. I wonder if there are others who are in the same boat.
  - JAlexoid 3y ago
    You cannot compare an open chat, with a strong interest in a particular topic vs you team's Slack channel. Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement. Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes. If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.
achenet 3y ago
I think the key part of that is working on the same thing. I work in a large company, and team is spread out over multiple cities. We actually will often to group video calls to have a similar thing to what you describe - being able to ask a quick question, run ideas by other, etc. However, going to the office I'm just with people who are working on different things, often doing calls which I find distracting...
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
When I was junior I shared an office with a senior. I was constantly asking him questions. He pretty much knew everything, I'm not kidding, this guy was amazing. So this arrangement worked out really well for me, but not sure how much he liked having his work interrupted so much. Could be that between the two of us, the benefits averaged out to zero.
- Towaway69 3y ago
  This is where headphones can help. Headphones on, don't bother the person or only chat. That was an unwritten rule the last time I worked in an open space.
  - nprateem 3y ago
    This is the way
  - rightbyte 3y ago
    About half at my last job always had headphones on to be able to concentrate.
  - mattl 3y ago
    I find people don't care and will talk to you with or without headphones on and expect you to take them off.
tzs 3y ago
I worked at a place with a great office layout. A group of a few people working on the same or related things could all have private offices with doors, but it was also easy for people to call out questions to others or gather together to discuss ideas and see what others are up to. There would be a large room off of a hallway, divided into 8 offices, arranged like this: +---------+---------+ | | | | | | +-----+ -+- +-----+ | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | +-------| |-------+ Each office had floor to ceiling walls, with a door and a large window. Need to be left along to do some deep work or deep thinking? Close your door. Want to be more sociable? Open your door. Put nice chairs or small sofas in the common area in the middle so people can hang out there when not doing something that requires being at their computer (e.g., reading printed documentation). The larger offices at the top can be used for more senior people, or the group manager, or for a lab, or a library, or a break room. You could extend this to two teams working on different projects but under a common manager or senior engineer by putting them in separate clusters side by side, and merging the adjacent top offices so that the common manager or senior engineer's office is part of both clusters: +---------+---------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | | | +-----+ -+- +-----+-----+ -+- +-----+ | | | | | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | | | | | +-------| |-------+-------| |-------+ What we were doing was video games for early consoles, mostly Mattel Intellivision but later also for Atari VCS, and also later for the Commodore VIC-20 computer. That kind of work required a mix of brainstorming and collaboration with periods where you really need to concentrate without being disturbed to figure out how to actually make it work on the hardware (weird processor, weird graphics chip, under 200 bytes of RAM (although later cartridges could have RAM which allowed some games to have more), a couple K ROM, and all programmed in assembly language). That office layout supported that quite well.
- possiblydrunk 3y ago
  I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.
charlieyu1 3y ago
Demanding an instant answer is often a burden to teammates. If they have spare time to answer they will answer in chat. Be patience and be respectful to working routines of other people.

by nox100 3y ago

Roark66 3y ago

>Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had). I wonder how many of these remaining 5 people have a take similar to me. WFH is where I'm most productive and most happy to work. Doing the kind of work you describe above "with 6 people on one project" is for 90% of the time an exercise in babying the least up to speed team member at the cost of distracting everyone. I get it, some people just like being around people and doing stuff "together", and some types of work may even benefit from that when stars align(brainstorming etc). Most types of work I do in software don't. Especially now, post covid when WFH became normalised and people who were opposed to it on various grounds were forced to learn how to use it effectively. >* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. That's what the phone is for, with additional benefit of status from everyone. If I see someone is busy I don't phone them I look for someone else, If I see they are "green" I do and I get my answer instantly without disturbing anyone. >running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled Again, same thing. Pick up a phone. If you just want to run something "by everyone". Wait for your daily/weekly team meeting and ask then. Yes, it forces you to write ideas down not to forget them (if they can wait), but it's massively more convenient to everyone else. > * brainstorming. Same as above I had many a good brainstorming session online (mostly with voice). What do you need to accomplish it is: - good audio equipment, Internet access and a quiet location for everyone. No calling into a meeting "from my car, while going to the doctor", or "from the office while people are talking in the background", no "crappy headphones etc". All this ruins productivity for everyone. If people are using cameras(which is nice) everyone has to have the bandwidth for it. Also if you have more than 5 people in your meeting, make use of the "raise hand" feature. Then brainstorming can happen very well. Especially while looking at a document/whiteboard together with systems that show you in real time what everyone does. In fact above a certain number of people (8 maybe) brainstorming sessions seem a lot more effective to me online than in person. Why? Because you have few communication channels. You have the shared whiteboard/document, voice, and chat so while someone is talking you can post a question to the chat without interrupting. >getting a feeling for what everyone is up to That's what regular planning meeting is for. >feeling part of a team, working on the same thing I suppose that's a personal thing, but I always felt that including during my 7 years of WFH 100%. Edit: there is only one real disadvantage to WFH, and it's for junior people wanting to learn. It's much harder to gather knowledge by osmosis, just by being in the office if most senior people are WFH. But then as a leader one has to decide what is more important.

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
Phone? I'd always leave my status as do not disturb then. I don't know when I'm about to enter a state of productivity. Only once in a blue moon do I spin around in my chair quietly asking someone to come bug me because I'm bored/don't have anything fun to work on.

Tor3 3y ago

All of that is fine, the problem is that most places with shared space will have people not working on the same project in that room. Instead everybody is working on different projects, and they may be in Teams meetings and talking and talking about things with zero interest for you, and that can't possibly be productive. Even worse if you're in an office with one guy constantly on the 'phone on customer support or whatnot..

shiroiuma 3y ago
How about when they put the software team right next to the sales team? This is exactly the problem with open-plan offices: they always do really stupid stuff like this, putting mostly-quiet teams very close to very talkative and noisy teams, with no barrier between them. Then everyone wants to work from home where at least they won't be tormented by listening to the obnoxious sales guy yap on the phone all day and can have their pet keep them company.
- zeristor 3y ago
  Did you have the head of sales ringing a bell for a sale every few hours too?
  - jusssi 3y ago
    To me, this seems like a positive problem.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      I think what ends up happening is that you sell a lot of stuff that gets steadily worse over time.
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      Of course it is good, if the sales team succeeds. But it is bad if that means that the developers are unable to do their work.
    - 3y ago

olivermuty 3y ago

> asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours. All your other points are fine. People are motivated by a mix of external and internal triggers, and you are clearly skewed to the external side. The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there. Programming requires deliberate thought gathered slowly into a complex matrix in your head before it finds its way to the pc through your keyboard. Even though I am an extrovert through and through and strongly identify with the motivational aspects of being in an office, me not giving you an answer until an hour has gone probably means more overall productivity for the project than your instant unblocking at the office.

cauch 3y ago
Isn't what you say contradictory? You are saying that devs need to stay "in the flow". But when you are in the flow and suddenly you have something that blocks you because you have a simple question, the best way to stay in the flow is to ask the question and get the answer immediately. If I have to quit my flow, go on slack, ask on slack, wait 10 minutes, then re-explain because the other person did not get it, then re-wait, ... my flow is ruined. What you are saying is, at the end of the day, when caricaturing a little bit, that you want your flow to be maintained, but you are happy to destroy the flow of others.
- ath3nd 3y ago
  If one requires interrupting 6 other people to maintain flow, it's probably a good idea to start phrasing (hyperbole intentional) it like: 'To keep my own flow, I need to destroy the flow of all my colleagues' And not: 'My colleagues destroy my flow when they can't babysit me and respond to my questions asap, how dare they' It's like driving and then going like: 'Gee, all these other drivers are sure in my way, I need them out of the road so I can get places'. Guess what buddy, they also gotta get places, so damn right follow the laws, wait for your turn patiently and you will get there when you get there. Your colleagues also have stuff to do, and the world doesn't revolve only around YOUR flow. So write down your questions and observations in a coherent list, stop pinging people one question at a time, or search harder in the docs provided that they exist, sometimes that's even better as a learning experience.

matsemann 3y ago

I agree. If I have a personal office I might as well sit at home. I hate open office space as much as the next person, but small team rooms are great. Can have the walls plastered with post-its, screens, drawing boards etc. If I hear two coworkers discuss something, I can chip in if relevant. Information flow just happens by itself.

lnxg33k1 3y ago

[flagged]

matsemann 3y ago
I never understand this. Why being so focused on work, to the detriment of building some relationships with the people you work with? Is this a HN/spectrum thing? Or capitalism-simping where people aspire to be robot-workers with no humanity? Why not enjoy your time at work? After all, you're spending 8 hours there a day, and see those people almost as much as your spouse, and probably more than your friends.
- Matumio 3y ago
  The second reason. Companies that are worse at getting people to self-exploit tend to do worse financially, and thus tend to disappear. Of course, if too many people quit or burn out, then the company will go bust, too. The optimum will be just one step short of that. And whenever someone starts a new company, they will look at the existing successful companies for how things are done. There is no evil master plan. The processes that lead to self-exploitation will sound reasonable and well-intended. (If this wasn't the case, people would refuse to adapt it. Most people don't like exploitation when they see it.) For example, in most of Europe there is a law that requires employees to record their working hours. This law was created to prevent (unpaid) overtime, and it does that. Now company X implements this by making you write down how many hours each day you worked towards which task. Doing this every day makes you think where you put this one-hour chat you had with a co-worker. It was nice, but which task did it contribute to? (It didn't...?) If you bother to ask, everybody will actually encourage you to have those talks, that it is even in the interest of healthy company culture, and remind you that maybe it's part of the paid break (you didn't forget you have that, did you? it was never anyone's intention that you skip your break). Nobody will be responsible for nudging people towards efficiency. It's all the fault of the individual who feels pressured into efficiency. It was never anyone's intention to prevent you from having those occasional nice chats, and nobody will stop you if you keep doing it. Still, every day you get to think about how long it took and which task it belongs to, and it feels a bit like lying to just add the time to a random task. This kind of habit can shape your thinking.

stby 3y ago

I can only second this. I honestly had the best time of my (professional) life when I had a little room with the rest of my team. Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. It's really highly productive. For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. I wouldn't want to wear them all the time as even the best ones become uncomfortable after few hours, but that's also not really needed in a small shared room.

8n4vidtmkvmk 3y ago
That's so different from my work. I work in a team of about 30 people on 1 feature of a very popular app. None of us are working on the same thing at any given time. Most projects have 1 person that works on it or knows how it works. It's sad and isolating. And the company forces this culture by virtue of how promo works.
pseudalopex 3y ago
> Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. This is untrue for even small teams in my experience. > For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. Also not my experience.

glimshe 3y ago

I'm glad you like it. Let's just all remember that other people feel differently and will be productive in very different circumstances. I don't need to feel very connected to the team, they are just business partners who are trading their time for money. If we can be friendly, that's awesome, but I'd much rather be connected to my family. Personally, I've experienced open office, fully private office etc. Private office/remote are my favorites, followed by small room with a few people (I also had that in the gaming industry, it wasn't too bad) and, in a distant and humiliating last place, open office.

broast 3y ago

I always find it surprising that so many people struggle to make effective human connections over chat. I think it must be generational, as I believe these are the connections I and other young people prefer.

h0h0h0h0111 3y ago
I've also never had particular problems making connections over chat (I'm not old and not young); particularly in companies where I've had a chance to meet people in person even once or twice, I've found online communication no problem at all
dijit 3y ago
Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation. Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work. Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available. Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.
creakingstairs 3y ago
I've made numerous friends over IRCs, Warcraft 3 chat channels and whatnot and had preferred it over face-to-face (and I still prefer chat over zoom calls!) but as I've gotten older, I started appreciating talking in real life more and more, and now struggle to form connections over chat. I wonder if there are others who are in the same boat.
- JAlexoid 3y ago
  You cannot compare an open chat, with a strong interest in a particular topic vs you team's Slack channel. Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement. Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes. If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.

achenet 3y ago

I think the key part of that is working on the same thing. I work in a large company, and team is spread out over multiple cities. We actually will often to group video calls to have a similar thing to what you describe - being able to ask a quick question, run ideas by other, etc. However, going to the office I'm just with people who are working on different things, often doing calls which I find distracting...

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

When I was junior I shared an office with a senior. I was constantly asking him questions. He pretty much knew everything, I'm not kidding, this guy was amazing. So this arrangement worked out really well for me, but not sure how much he liked having his work interrupted so much. Could be that between the two of us, the benefits averaged out to zero.

Towaway69 3y ago
This is where headphones can help. Headphones on, don't bother the person or only chat. That was an unwritten rule the last time I worked in an open space.
- nprateem 3y ago
  This is the way
- rightbyte 3y ago
  About half at my last job always had headphones on to be able to concentrate.
- mattl 3y ago
  I find people don't care and will talk to you with or without headphones on and expect you to take them off.

tzs 3y ago

I worked at a place with a great office layout. A group of a few people working on the same or related things could all have private offices with doors, but it was also easy for people to call out questions to others or gather together to discuss ideas and see what others are up to. There would be a large room off of a hallway, divided into 8 offices, arranged like this: +---------+---------+ | | | | | | +-----+ -+- +-----+ | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | +-------| |-------+ Each office had floor to ceiling walls, with a door and a large window. Need to be left along to do some deep work or deep thinking? Close your door. Want to be more sociable? Open your door. Put nice chairs or small sofas in the common area in the middle so people can hang out there when not doing something that requires being at their computer (e.g., reading printed documentation). The larger offices at the top can be used for more senior people, or the group manager, or for a lab, or a library, or a break room. You could extend this to two teams working on different projects but under a common manager or senior engineer by putting them in separate clusters side by side, and merging the adjacent top offices so that the common manager or senior engineer's office is part of both clusters: +---------+---------+---------+---------+ | | | | | | | | +-----+ -+- +-----+-----+ -+- +-----+ | | | | | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | | | +-----+ +-----+-----+ +-----+ | | | | | | | | | | +-------| |-------+-------| |-------+ What we were doing was video games for early consoles, mostly Mattel Intellivision but later also for Atari VCS, and also later for the Commodore VIC-20 computer. That kind of work required a mix of brainstorming and collaboration with periods where you really need to concentrate without being disturbed to figure out how to actually make it work on the hardware (weird processor, weird graphics chip, under 200 bytes of RAM (although later cartridges could have RAM which allowed some games to have more), a couple K ROM, and all programmed in assembly language). That office layout supported that quite well.

possiblydrunk 3y ago
I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

charlieyu1 3y ago

Demanding an instant answer is often a burden to teammates. If they have spare time to answer they will answer in chat. Be patience and be respectful to working routines of other people.