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Big monitors, small offices. Give me a room where I can close the door. I'll share it with one other person, but it can't be a tight fit. If you expect me t

by nirvana 14y ago

Big monitors, small offices. Give me a room where I can close the door. I'll share it with one other person, but it can't be a tight fit. If you expect me to work while you're interrupting me every 5 minutes, then you don't really expect me to be productive. Also good- conference rooms for ad hoc meetings. (Maybe for the people who like to work together in a room they can take over a conference room or whatever.... make your layout flexible enough.) One company, when I was hired, asked me to tell them exactly what I wanted computer wise-- I was quite impressed with that. No more being forced to use crappy windows computers, I specified a MacBook Pro, etc. They said "whatever you want, within reason." But I remember... years of fighting to have decent sized monitors. I think two big monitors is good, three might be a bit better. It seems displays these days are shockingly cheap compared to the value they offer over even just one year.

LockeWatts 14y ago
>No more being forced to use crappy windows computers I laughed at this part of your post.
jroseattle 14y ago
Yeah, the office thing has always been a function of available space for us. Some of our folks want complete isolation, others like an open environment. I've always tried to accommodate personal preferences, so I try to pull that from folks as we work together. Sometimes, what somebody wanted last year changes with this year; I try to be accommodating to allow everyone to change around; no need letting the workplace get stale, when simple movement can solve a problem. I always give our engineers their choice of platform -- windows, osx, linux, whatever. I count on them to make sure they have the environment available to develop on. It's up to them to make sure they can work locally. (Shared services like data/caching/etc. are of course handled remotely.) Our last few hires requested 17-inch Macbook Pro laptops, with dual Thunderbolt displays. Done. I do not sit around wondering if the cost of the tool is worth the expense, as it simply doesn't compare to the cost of the time of the engineer involved. Even if anyone might consider the developer is getting the "better end of the deal", I don't care -- I trust my team to produce. I just simply refuse to let hardware get in the way of potential output. BTW: if a developer wants three monitors vs. two...great. Again, I trust my team and I have faith in them to make good business decisions about resources. Somebody tells me they want three monitors, it's a task delegated to our asset team. Done.
- markkanof 14y ago
  You sounds like a very enlightened manager. I particularly like your point about evaluating the situation periodically. People's preferences change over time and it's great that you try to adjust as they do.
- pivo 14y ago
  I'm envious, that's very enlightened. I've mentioned to my current and past bosses the fact that not everyone wants to work in a romper room environment and would actually prefer quiet instead, only to receive incredulous responses. The ability to recognize that your own preferences might not be optimal for everyone else is a surprisingly rare skill.
DanBC 14y ago
One of my summer jobs needed a lot of stapling. Everything I did ended up being stapled to something else. The stapler broke. A nice stapler costs just £10. It will last, with care, ten years. I ask for a stapler. I get given a nasty plastic[1] bit of rubbish. It breaks after half a day. I use my minimum wage to buy myself a stapler. I learn to hate that employer. [1] the plastic was nasty - that translucent coloured plastic popular when iMacs appeared.
IgorPartola 14y ago
I don't get this new obsession with "let's just put everyone in a giant room so they can collaborate". I think it's a cop-out to not get bigger/better laid out offices. Developers need to write code either alone or in pairs. Large places breed interruptions, killing productivity. All these experimental ideas with unassigned offices where anyone uses them when they need to don't work either because people will simply squat on them. If you want your developers to do actual work instead of being distracted, give them individual offices + lots of shared meeting space with whiteboards. This is the gold standard. Anything less (e.g.: n developers per office) will reduce productivity. Here's my formula: productivity = hours_per_week * total_developers * (baseline + (1-baseline)/(avg_developers_per_office^ALPHA)) Where baseline is the minimum fraction (0 to 1) of work a developer can get done even while being distracted at all times, and ALPHA is a constant left to the reader to determine. productivity is measured in useful hours per week for the whole team.
- mattmanser 14y ago
  What's new about it? It's rare these days to get your own office for any job. Open plan somehow took over all the workplaces to all our detriment.
  - brown9-2 14y ago
    I think the relatively recent thing is putting everyone in an open room with nothing really separating you from the person sitting at the long table next to you, as opposed to putting people in cubicles which at least have a tiny suggestion of separation.
- pasbesoin 14y ago
  In my experience (in bigger companies), if you get to know (to a level of trust) the real estate people and then happen to ask them, they'll tell you the decision is top down and cost-driven. 100%. It's all about square feet (meters) / employee. That would be the immediate, upfront cost. A real/realistic assessment of expected employee productivity is hard to find. (Though reference to various external "studies" and "assessments" may be made. "Best practices", "industry standards/norms", etc.) The internal publicity is heavily or entirely about "collaboration" and "facilitation" and "workflow", etc. Whatever. Just ask the people over in real estate (if they trust you).

by nirvana 14y ago

LockeWatts 14y ago

>No more being forced to use crappy windows computers I laughed at this part of your post.

jroseattle 14y ago

Yeah, the office thing has always been a function of available space for us. Some of our folks want complete isolation, others like an open environment. I've always tried to accommodate personal preferences, so I try to pull that from folks as we work together. Sometimes, what somebody wanted last year changes with this year; I try to be accommodating to allow everyone to change around; no need letting the workplace get stale, when simple movement can solve a problem. I always give our engineers their choice of platform -- windows, osx, linux, whatever. I count on them to make sure they have the environment available to develop on. It's up to them to make sure they can work locally. (Shared services like data/caching/etc. are of course handled remotely.) Our last few hires requested 17-inch Macbook Pro laptops, with dual Thunderbolt displays. Done. I do not sit around wondering if the cost of the tool is worth the expense, as it simply doesn't compare to the cost of the time of the engineer involved. Even if anyone might consider the developer is getting the "better end of the deal", I don't care -- I trust my team to produce. I just simply refuse to let hardware get in the way of potential output. BTW: if a developer wants three monitors vs. two...great. Again, I trust my team and I have faith in them to make good business decisions about resources. Somebody tells me they want three monitors, it's a task delegated to our asset team. Done.

markkanof 14y ago
You sounds like a very enlightened manager. I particularly like your point about evaluating the situation periodically. People's preferences change over time and it's great that you try to adjust as they do.
pivo 14y ago
I'm envious, that's very enlightened. I've mentioned to my current and past bosses the fact that not everyone wants to work in a romper room environment and would actually prefer quiet instead, only to receive incredulous responses. The ability to recognize that your own preferences might not be optimal for everyone else is a surprisingly rare skill.

DanBC 14y ago

One of my summer jobs needed a lot of stapling. Everything I did ended up being stapled to something else. The stapler broke. A nice stapler costs just £10. It will last, with care, ten years. I ask for a stapler. I get given a nasty plastic[1] bit of rubbish. It breaks after half a day. I use my minimum wage to buy myself a stapler. I learn to hate that employer. [1] the plastic was nasty - that translucent coloured plastic popular when iMacs appeared.

IgorPartola 14y ago

I don't get this new obsession with "let's just put everyone in a giant room so they can collaborate". I think it's a cop-out to not get bigger/better laid out offices. Developers need to write code either alone or in pairs. Large places breed interruptions, killing productivity. All these experimental ideas with unassigned offices where anyone uses them when they need to don't work either because people will simply squat on them. If you want your developers to do actual work instead of being distracted, give them individual offices + lots of shared meeting space with whiteboards. This is the gold standard. Anything less (e.g.: n developers per office) will reduce productivity. Here's my formula: productivity = hours_per_week * total_developers * (baseline + (1-baseline)/(avg_developers_per_office^ALPHA)) Where baseline is the minimum fraction (0 to 1) of work a developer can get done even while being distracted at all times, and ALPHA is a constant left to the reader to determine. productivity is measured in useful hours per week for the whole team.

mattmanser 14y ago
What's new about it? It's rare these days to get your own office for any job. Open plan somehow took over all the workplaces to all our detriment.
- brown9-2 14y ago
  I think the relatively recent thing is putting everyone in an open room with nothing really separating you from the person sitting at the long table next to you, as opposed to putting people in cubicles which at least have a tiny suggestion of separation.
pasbesoin 14y ago
In my experience (in bigger companies), if you get to know (to a level of trust) the real estate people and then happen to ask them, they'll tell you the decision is top down and cost-driven. 100%. It's all about square feet (meters) / employee. That would be the immediate, upfront cost. A real/realistic assessment of expected employee productivity is hard to find. (Though reference to various external "studies" and "assessments" may be made. "Best practices", "industry standards/norms", etc.) The internal publicity is heavily or entirely about "collaboration" and "facilitation" and "workflow", etc. Whatever. Just ask the people over in real estate (if they trust you).