4 ms·

Ultimately, in my experience, it always seems to come down to "how do we keep the non-technical people from meddling with the engineers?" This is as much about

Ultimately, in my experience, it always seems to come down to "how do we keep the non-technical people from meddling with the engineers?" This is as much about org structure as it is office layout

reeses 13y ago
This is one of the lessons from Peopleware. It's not so much noise in the background but noise unrelated to the job duties. Being in a room of developers usually has less impact than having marketing, sales, etc. collocated as well.
EliRivers 13y ago
That's not the only possible problem. I once started at a company that occupied a big building and had few employees; lots of offices, and those that didn't have them had a lot of space. Everyone had a nice big desk at the window (which was floor to ceiling, all the way around); the desk was "U" shaped, so everyone sat facing the window (if they wanted to) and the outer parts of the "U" had tall partitions. You couldn't see over them. It was fantastic for getting work done. I didn't have a desk so much as a bay; a good ten feet or so from my chair to the point at which people might walk past. Then they closed some other sites and moved their people in, and by the end of it we were all jammed into a single huge room (big enough that if there was someone standing at the other end, I couldn't see who it was) with so many desks that there was only one way from any one desk to any other - if I wanted to get to the desk of the guy sitting directly in front of me (who spent the day facing me) I had to walk all the way out to the long corridor and then weave in and out of pods of desks to get to him. He was an FPGA designer, as I recall. He ended up "borrowing" some of the industrial noise-suppressing headphones from the catapult lab in the basement so he could block out the noise of everyone working. Because it could take over a minute to walk to the desk of the person ten feet away from you, people phoned a lot or just had conversations over the top of partitions. A particularly inspiring move was the demand that the tall cupboards some people had (six foot tall ones) that broke up the sightline a bit and created shields be replaced with smaller ones. So that they wouldn't break up the sightlines. I quit that job without having another job to move on to (which, to be honest, I thought was normal and was how I'd always done it, but this time the boss was so surprised he explained that it's not the way people normally do things). I think everyone I worked with there had quit within a year, leaving the lifers to it. Ironically, I once spent some time at one of the offices in France and it was gorgeous. Floors were basically all enclosed offices with one to three people in them. Proper offices with proper walls and doors; none of this moveable partition stuff. With wine at lunch.

Ultimately, in my experience, it always seems to come down to "how do we keep the non-technical people from meddling with the engineers?" This is as much about org structure as it is office layout

reeses 13y ago

This is one of the lessons from Peopleware. It's not so much noise in the background but noise unrelated to the job duties. Being in a room of developers usually has less impact than having marketing, sales, etc. collocated as well.

EliRivers 13y ago

That's not the only possible problem. I once started at a company that occupied a big building and had few employees; lots of offices, and those that didn't have them had a lot of space. Everyone had a nice big desk at the window (which was floor to ceiling, all the way around); the desk was "U" shaped, so everyone sat facing the window (if they wanted to) and the outer parts of the "U" had tall partitions. You couldn't see over them. It was fantastic for getting work done. I didn't have a desk so much as a bay; a good ten feet or so from my chair to the point at which people might walk past. Then they closed some other sites and moved their people in, and by the end of it we were all jammed into a single huge room (big enough that if there was someone standing at the other end, I couldn't see who it was) with so many desks that there was only one way from any one desk to any other - if I wanted to get to the desk of the guy sitting directly in front of me (who spent the day facing me) I had to walk all the way out to the long corridor and then weave in and out of pods of desks to get to him. He was an FPGA designer, as I recall. He ended up "borrowing" some of the industrial noise-suppressing headphones from the catapult lab in the basement so he could block out the noise of everyone working. Because it could take over a minute to walk to the desk of the person ten feet away from you, people phoned a lot or just had conversations over the top of partitions. A particularly inspiring move was the demand that the tall cupboards some people had (six foot tall ones) that broke up the sightline a bit and created shields be replaced with smaller ones. So that they wouldn't break up the sightlines. I quit that job without having another job to move on to (which, to be honest, I thought was normal and was how I'd always done it, but this time the boss was so surprised he explained that it's not the way people normally do things). I think everyone I worked with there had quit within a year, leaving the lifers to it. Ironically, I once spent some time at one of the offices in France and it was gorgeous. Floors were basically all enclosed offices with one to three people in them. Proper offices with proper walls and doors; none of this moveable partition stuff. With wine at lunch.