20 ms·

How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century

170 points by amaks 12y ago

CurtMonash 12y ago
Sometimes I think one of the more important innovations in development technology is the headphone. Open-plan development without great ways to block out noise would be ridiculous.
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  I work in an open-plan office and it's the most miserable thing in the world, even with headphones. After this I will never again accept a job without a private office.
  - curlyquote 12y ago
    Exactly my feelings.
  - keyle 12y ago
    I'm completely with you on that one. Death stares at people having "meetings" without meeting rooms doesn't seem to help either.
  - sliverstorm 12y ago
    I have not been blessed with a private office yet, but fortunately cubes are still dramatically better than open-plan (IMO).
    - jbigelow76 12y ago
      I had a nice compromise at a startup I was at a few years back. Large offices, two developers per, with their dual monitor setups back to back and whiteboards behind each dev. It was a good balance, you could easily collaborate with the rest of the team when necessary and the other dev could stay pretty much heads down (especially with headphones).
    - iolothebard 12y ago
      It's sad that we live in a world where the cube is now the "good" option. If I ever have another company, if I can't afford the office space, I don't need the person. Office space is cheap compared to salary and wasted productivity.
  - snambi 12y ago
    100% agree. Not only that 100% of all my coworkers hate open-plan office. Even managers hate the open-plan office. It is only good for one thing, cheaper. thats all.
    - hliyan 12y ago
      I have to agree. Last year I went from a workplace that had a massive open-plan office to one with small rooms. My general productivity level is about the same, but my problem-solving efficiency has gone way up. I'm convinced that peripheral sensory input breaks your concentration even if it doesn't consciously "bother" you.
  - allegory 12y ago
    This. Life is better now I work from home. It's better to have the kids screaming in the background than people tapping your shoulder and blasting your entire thought process out of the window.
  - disputin 12y ago
    Agreed. Having to wear headphones is unpleasant. I can't work unless I have crap on my head, and I have to listen to music? Ridiculous. Shortly before I left my last position the new manager arranged the seating so that the most communicative people were in the centre, for ease of access, so the majority of the noise was right in the middle of the workspace, constant, and inescapable. Productivity destroyed.
  - RandallBrown 12y ago
    I work in an open plan office where we pair program 100% of the time. I was miserable working by myself in a private office.
    - scuba7183 12y ago
      Pair programming 100% of the time sounds miserable to me
- bbarn 12y ago
  Open floorplan works if the entire "open area" is engaged in a common goal. In that case, headphones can be more of a hindrance than a help. However, in the case where the open floorplan is simply an office cost savings measure that puts mixed goals in a small collocated area, then yes, headphones..
  - existencebox 12y ago
    The latter is so important, I'll risk a vapid comment just to second this. To echo the sentiment of a commenter below, you don't realize how miserable a mixed open office is until you are trying to do work with a standup happening 2 feet away from your head. (Disclaimer; Microsoft employee without a personal office, quite jealous of those with.)
    - bbarn 12y ago
      The place I'm at now is the only job I've had (or place I've contracted with, met with etc.,) that's gotten this right. The whole open floor plan thing, to work well, has to have a reasonably accessible way to escape it when necessary. Open offices can only work, IMO, when there's a breakout room, or in general some sort of closed door room anyone can jump into and get things done or have a 4 person meeting. There's just no escaping the need to have privacy for the point of thinking, or even privacy for the point of talking. Maybe there's a perfect job in a perfect world where everything is open, but in my experience, there's a need to get away from the group once in a while, either alone or with a group.
      - Blackthorn 12y ago
        Even that wouldn't work for me with open offices because I can't simply pick up my giant desktop and move in there to do work -- I'm completely stuck in the open office.
        existencebox 12y ago
        Beat me to it; this is precisely the problem. There are these sort of offices available, but the problem is the cost of the context switching, a distraction being an involuntary context switch.
- m_mueller 12y ago
  There's a type of office that often gets overlooked and IMO is the best of both worlds: The spacious cubicle[1]. I like having my own corner with lots of table space, my own drawer etc. in a semi-closed cubicle. Engaging with someone is still easy - stand up, look how engaged he is in his work (headphones on?) and decide whether it's a good time to talk to him. Nurture a calm environment (good isolating cubicle walls help a lot, put sales people into their own closed offices) and you IMO have the perfect environment for developers. Having nothing but a grey wall and two nice big displays in front of me (preferably metallic so I can put my current thoughts on paper and hang it up with magnets) is a zen-like experience and helps me concentrate a lot. [1]http://images.wisegeek.com/cubicle.jpg http://images.wisegeek.com/cubicle.jpg
  - morgante 12y ago
    Unfortunately the image of cubicles is inextricably tied to soul-crushing corporations (ex. Office Space).
    - deleted 12y ago
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    - m_mueller 12y ago
      Yes, that's unfortunate, because I'd take this over Open Plan any day. I think one reason why Open Plan is so popular in nowadays is that it's way cheaper than good cubicles and managers can 'sell' the cost savings to employees by appearing forward thinking and open minded.
  - keithpeter 12y ago
    Reminds me of the study carrels in a local University library. They were good for getting essays written.
- megaman821 12y ago
  I am always surprised people are so opinionated about open floor plans. Unless we are talking about sirens and crying babies, I can just ignore the background noise and keep working. Although I have been sharing a room with someone or another since I was 3 years old, so filtering out noise might to just a sanity mechanism at this point.
  - recursive 12y ago
    There is at least one person on HN who likes open floor plans. I know this because I'm that person. When I worked in one, I never found myself distracted by conversations, and most often didn't realize they were happening.
    - russgray 12y ago
      I'm fine with them too. I like the hubbub.
      - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
        Open plan is Kryptonite for introverts. We need silence and no distractions. But you'd probably go insane in my working environment, which is in a house surrounded by fields miles from a city with no one else in it, except me. Point is, you should tailor the spaces to the individuals working in them. There is no Generic Industry Standard Employee. Which is why trying to enforce Generic Industry Standard Working Environments is maybe not such an effective way to get cool stuff out the door. As for Agile etc - it's a 20th century methodology, not a 21st century one. I have no idea what 21st century software development is going to look like. Nor does anyone else, because no one has invented it yet.
    - timrichard 12y ago
      I've worked in open plan offices for most of my career, as it's very common in the UK. I believe the last role took the biscuit, though.... Open plan with hotdesking and lockers... Primary coloured lockers, so it looked like a poor man's GooglePlex. Where the meagre budget had run out halfway through. You could never be sure where you would be the next morning, or next to whom (inc. constantly teleconferencing middle managers). There were two banks of desks with dual monitors, supposedly reserved for developers. Sometimes, non-technical personnel would grab them, and not even use the monitors... Just their laptop screens (for Outlook, basically). That was slightly irksome :-)
- quanticle 12y ago
  Let's see if you think this in twenty years, when you need a hearing aid. Headphone use, at any volume, is positively correlated with hearing loss. Hearing damage is cumulative, and the vast majority of hearing loss isn't caused by exposure to very short, very loud sounds, it's caused by exposure to sounds that are just a little bit too loud, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And, almost by definition, if the music is loud enough to drown out ambient noise in an open-plan office, it's loud enough to damage your hearing if you're exposing yourself to it 8 hours a day. I mean, the only way it wouldn't be is if your office were as quiet as a tomb (or a recording studio), and if that were the case you wouldn't need headphones in the first place. I work in an open plan office. I don't wear headphones. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it's distracting. Yes, it's better than losing my hearing.
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    Why not try earplugs? $15 for a year's supply. They are "disposable" but each can easily last for a week or two. http://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Tekk-Protection-Multi-Color-Disposable-Earplugs-80-Pack-92800-80025T/202691611 http://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Tekk-Protection-Multi-Color-Di... I use the 3M brand and can recommend them.
    - nordsieck 12y ago
      I can't stand foam earplugs, but I am an avid user of silicone earplugs. I especially like these guys: http://www.earplugstore.com/ultrafit25.html http://www.earplugstore.com/ultrafit25.html When I'm feeling like I really need quiet I'll throw on a pair of ear muffs on top of that. The only caveat is that you need to be comfortable with silence: the ear plugs will really cut down on background noise (e.g. AC and TV).
    - quanticle 12y ago
      I don't find earplugs comfortable, but you got me thinking and I might buy a set of hearing protection earmuffs (http://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Ultimate-Hearing-Protector/dp/B000PW98WO/ref=sr_1_5?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1407354895&sr=1-5&keywords=hearing+protection http://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Ultimate-Hearing-Protector/d...). As a bonus, I think having a set of bright blue earmuffs on would more of a visible "do not disturb" symbol than earplugs. Thanks for the idea. :)
- greggman 12y ago
  I'm curious your take on some of the research claiming people are more productive and/or more creative at a coffee shop with noise surrounded by people than in a quiet place alone Google for "more productive at coffee shops". That would seem to suggest that maybe private offices aren't quite always best
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    Ambient soft noise from people not interacting with you is hardly the same as trying to concentrate in a room full of people actively watching what you are doing and trying to get your attention.
  - mercer 12y ago
    I feel more productive in coffee shops, but I think a crucial difference between a coffee shop and an open office is that in a coffee shop you are less likely to be interrupted. I suspect whether one can work better with some background 'noise' (sounds and sights) is partly a personality characteristic, but that interruptions are universally disastrous when one tries to be productive.
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- deleted 12y ago
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shmerl 12y ago
Also, lock-in tactic [1] is so much last century, but MS is still quite slow on dropping it. With general decline of Windows domination they'll drop lock-in approach even more, but that's still in the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...
- Locke1689 12y ago
  This seems pretty off-topic. Lock-in software can be developed in a variety of different ways, so development strategy really isn't relevant.
  - shmerl 12y ago
    Why is it off-topic to mention last century practices which are still used by MS? It's pretty much within the broader scope of what this article touches on. No matter what variety it is, MS has to adjust to the new reality, that competition will happen on merit, and not on crooked market capture methodology. I guess downvoters are just upset about MS criticism, rather than consider this being off-topic, since it isn't.
    - ksk 12y ago
      >I guess downvoters are just upset about MS criticism, As long as you're guessing, you can say anything you want. It does not have to be true.
      - shmerl 12y ago
        No one stops downvoters from commenting. If they don't - others would guess what they can possibly mean.
        ksk 12y ago
        >others would guess what they can possibly mean Personally, I would not be so arrogant as to claim I can mind-read. YMMV.
tedks 12y ago
This article has depressingly little about how Microsoft went about changing the culture from a waterfall to agile mindset. The article is also pretty rosy; I'd expect a little more bumps on the way.
- Locke1689 12y ago
  What do you want to know? Culturally, I think it's important to notice that VS is really a bunch of smaller teams put together, and not all of them have the same development strategies or systems. So the biggest motivator here seemed to be a few pioneering teams who thought they had a better way to develop software, and had support from leadership. So the pioneering teams pushed forward and started to put up measurable results. I think after that culture is bound to follow.
  - randomfool 12y ago
    I'm curious if there were any structural changes to the product which needed to be made to support a more agile workflow. For example when I was there, just the branching and RI schedules were massive taxes on everyone. Also there were periods of insane 'gates' to code changes to get something committed- what has been done to allow less ship room and more code changes? Edit: I left Microsoft to escape the VS ship schedule, I have not heard of significant changes from the co-workers I keep in touch with.
  - tedks 12y ago
    I'd most like to know how the developers reacted -- to losing offices, to speeding up dev cycles, to changing up testing. Presumably some of them were supportive, some of them were against it, but what were their reasons, and how did they react to the change? I think it's more likely that the early adopter teams had some measurable result, and then management pushed the change through to other teams. So how did those teams react? The article just paints a very optimistic picture. Something as big as VS, there's a lot of stuff to actually change when you go about changing things. I feel like there's just more to this story.
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kelukelugames 12y ago
I left Microsot recently. Going from desktop development to web development. One of my ex-coworkers told me web and mobile development was a fad. -_-
- CmonDev 12y ago
  Client web development is a fad. Using a document markup language and a scripting language to build apps - what a joke. And what is this "desktop development" you are referring to? When it comes to modern development, desktop is just a subset of the native experiences, all of which could share the same logic (e.g. via Xamarin).
Locke1689 12y ago
(Note, speaking for myself, not Microsoft!) Pretty good article, only some minor inaccuracies. Things I noticed: 1) Private offices are nowhere near gone. Some teams have "gone team room" (TFS), some have not (Roslyn). I've worked in both and personally don't care either way, but there are a number of people who heavily favor one or the other. 2) Visual Studio is technically a team, yes, but there are thousands of devs working on it. I think of my team as Managed Languages (Roslyn), not VS. 3) Development strategy is a continuous process and one we're still currently engaged in. We haven't just decided that this is the new process and we're not changing it again. Oh, and some personal feelings: tooling isn't really mentioned in this article but it may be the most important. TFS and other teams have developed some quite good tools that help with the workflow considerably. If every dev is wasting time messing with bad tools, that's a huge amount of dev time wasted as an organization.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  Tools is so huge! It is one of those sort of "intangible" assets of a large company, what is the quality (and projected future quality) of their tools... Poor tools decisions or tool apathy (for example, not enough funding to the tools teams) can shackle entire divisions of the company.
  - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
    Google is famous for a tooling strategy that has paid off in spades. Reading about their RCS, build, and testing infrastructure is like reading an overly optimistic science fiction novel; it can't be that great right?
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      I take it you've only read about these tools, and not actually had to face them.
      - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
        Yes, but I've heard good things from those that actually use them. Preforce mated to GFS, lightning quick check outs and builds that work lazily, you can make a change to the code base even if you don't own it, and code review requests will be sent out automatically as well as tests run to ensure you didn't break...Google.
credo 12y ago
The title is eye-catching and the writer has a good writing style, but I see a lot of problems with the headline as well as the content - Microsoft's private offices were an innovation in the 80s/90s, cramming large numbers of worker bees into a single large office is a retrogressive step, not a 21st century innovation - The writers focus is on Visual Studio, but a number of other teams had switched to agile much earlier. I worked in Windows Live Mobile in when we switched to "agile" in 2004. This wasn't being dragged into anything, it was a relatively early adoption - Software projects do often get delayed, but not always. I was one of the dev-leads who worked on Office XP in the 90s and though we had a long ~3year, ship cycle, we did ship on the original planned shipped date (RTM 3/2/1) Steven Sinofsky deserved a lot of credit for that.
- snambi 12y ago
  no one likes the open floors. yet, the articles and scrum proponents keep talking as if open floors.
  - mark-r 12y ago
    I suppose somebody, somewhere, prefers them. I'd like to see hard numbers for/against though. I suspect it's more a way to justify a decision someone else has already made for their own reasons.
- greggman 12y ago
  I'm curious about the common belief that private offices are better. Here's an article that suggests private offices might not be better. Do the two ideas fit together or do you just not believe the article (I didn't see any research sited) http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/working-best-at-coffee-shops/237372/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/working-...
  - silverbax88 12y ago
    There's plenty of research that shows that open floor plans always hurt morale and productivity. You're not looking hard enough.
dschiptsov 12y ago
Do not be too much impressed by big names and buzzwords. The [very] successful process of developing the Linux kernel with nothing but git, mailing lists and a small set of simple rules (no meetings, no Scrum, no BS) proved to be good-enough. It is not only Linux kernel, there are hundreds of other "decentralized, no-water-fall" projects, notably FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Xorg, LLVM, Golang, CPython, Ruby, you name it. It is much better to consider the differences between a commercial organization (a corporation) with all that bureaucracy obsessed with keeping its positions and budgets, etc. and a team of enthusiastic professionals with their own "inner" motivations and goals. Corporations are producing products to make profit, while teams of enthusiasts are producing (evolving) tools and services for themselves. The difference is the same as between McDonald's and family/home-made-for-themselves food.) Consider, for example, LLVM/Clang (backed by Apple) as high quality and no-cost alternative to VS. Its used as a primary compiler for OS X, iOS and FreeBSD and optional one for Android NDK. And, look ma, no bureaucrats, no meetings, no Scrum.
- snambi 12y ago
  agree 100%. waterfall and agile/scrum, both are BS.
- scribu 12y ago
  I'm not sure what you're suggesting: that corporations should just adopt the Linux kernel development approach? that all software should be developed as open source? Like you said, a corporation is not the same as a team of enthusiasts, so it seems sensible that what works for the former doesn't work for the later and vice-versa.
  - dschiptsov 12y ago
    I am just trying to switch attention form popular memes to the facts that development of very complex and high-quality software could be done in a very different, no-BS, good-enough way.
- bignaj 12y ago
  LLVM/Clang and Visual Studio are not analogous... LLVM/Clang is a compliler/compiler frontend while Visual Studio is an IDE. You're looking for Visual Studio vs. Eclipse or .NET vs. Mono etc. in each case I think most see the no-cost alternative as quite obviously inferior. This weakens your argument a bit.
BmoreDaniel 12y ago
The fact that specification and documentation are abandoned is pretty sad. Software should be adequately specified and specs should be kept up to date with code. Code is not a spec.
- drtse4 12y ago
  The fact that you were downvoted is extremely sad. Downvoters, good luck understanding how the next crappy project[1] you'll inherit was supposed to work without even a one-line specification describing what the reasoning behind certain choices was! Everything about methodologies should be taken with a grain of salt, what works somewhere, with a specific set of people and for some projects is not guaranteed to work anywhere. And not every aspect linked with "old" methodologies should be viewed as pure evil. Consider that many of the ideas that ended up in the agile manifesto could already be found in Peopleware from the eighties and that no methodology is the last. There was Waterfall, RUP and other clones, with the Agile wave someone defined XP (now dead) and after that Scrum. Now even Scrum is seen as something with too much overhead and people start turning to custom solution that use kanban/kaizen/etc... [1] Referring to a project that has some logic worthy of benig explained, interaction with external components, ecc... not some CRUD.
MrZipf 12y ago
Like it or loathe it, MSFT has always been a learning corporation. Teams are continually exploring different approaches to software development and trying to figure out what works best for their team and org. To their credit, they also publish a fair amount of this research and it looks pretty interesting, e.g. Transition from Centralized to Distributed VCS: A Microsoft Case Study on Reasons, Barriers, and Outcomes, via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/nachin/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/nachin/ Have Agile Techniques been the Silver Bullet for Software Development at Microsoft? via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bmurphy/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bmurphy/ [ $0.02, Scrum or no scrum, for my money having a private office is infinitely better than open plan for getting stuff done. Each to their own, getting harder to find jobs with your own space ]
kethinov 12y ago
Here is a repost of a comment I posted directly to the Ars Technica thread in reply to the author endorsing Agile/Scrum and expressing ambivalence towards telecommuting: "That's 20th century thinking, Peter! Marshall McLuhan would be disappointed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY Spontaneous collaboration can happen just as effectively with a remote staff, but you have to default all your channels of communication to digital ones. Instead of a culture of shoulder taps, use IM. Instead of a culture of hallway conversations, get the entire team on a permanent group chat. Skype is one of the best tools for this, so it's ironic that the company which owns it isn't making the best use of its own tools! ;) The guys over at Basecamp did a great book recently on how to do this remote collaboration stuff right called "Remote: Office Not Required" http://37signals.com/remote http://37signals.com/remote It's a great read. I read it recently while on the plane to a meeting that totally could have been over the internet. The irony was not lost on me. It's also worth noting that Agile/Scrum is not universally well liked anyway. In fact it's incredibly divisive. People who love it seem to really love it and people who hate it seem to really hate it. For example, here's a site parodying the Agile Manifesto, asking the world to adopt something more modern: http://asyncmanifesto.org http://asyncmanifesto.org And here's a much saucier (and perhaps less serious) take on the same idea: http://programming-motherfucker.com http://programming-motherfucker.com TL;DR: Agile/Scrum is a management fad. Collaboration can succeed or fail using any methodology. All the blind praise the media spews for Agile/Scrum is arguably harmful to discussing what is and isn't effective management." Original post: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/?comments=1&post=27347511 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-mi...
- AndrewDucker 12y ago
  "Spontaneous collaboration can happen just as effectively with a remote staff, but you have to default all your channels of communication to digital ones." So, if you handicap your local staff to use only a fraction of their communications capability then your remote ones are just as good? Seriously - I've spent a large amount of time dealing with offshort staff and onshore staff, and staff both in the different buildings, the same building but different rooms, and staff in the same room - and having people sitting right next to each other makes a massive difference to the communication bandwidth. The ability to turn your screen towards a co-worker, say "What do you think of that?" and get a reply three seconds later is _fantastic_ - and simply impossible with remote communications. (Where you can ping them on IM, wait for them to notice the message, start a screen-share, wait for them to accept, and then wave your cursor over the bit of screen you want them to pay attention to. It's effective, but it's nowhere near as fluid as pointing and handwaving.)
jacques_chester 12y ago
I remember reading about changes to development during the Windows 7 project, which I wrote up[1] for a different lay audience. People underestimate Microsoft. It has enormous inertia, but historically enough introspection to recognise strategic errors and reorient. The most famous being accepting that the Internet was not going away, circa 1998. [1] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/10/20/microsoft-rebooted/ http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/10/20/microsoft-rebooted/
forgotAgain 12y ago
Seems to be a lot of words to describe what is basically a company adapting to its place in the market. When Microsoft had a dominant market position it could freeze its customer's in-house strategies by tactically leaking details (real or perhaps not) of its future releases. Extended release intervals did not matter because customers waited. Fast forward to today and it is not dominant in markets where it sees growth potential. Customers will no longer wait. Microsoft is seen seen as a laggard by many adopting new technologies. Extended development time would preclude any chance they have of success so they had to change. The outcome is as yet undetermined.
curiousDog 12y ago
The private offices were one of the best parts of working at Microsoft. Open plans suck and I blame facebook/google for perpetuating this fad ;)

170 points by amaks 12y ago

Sometimes I think one of the more important innovations in development technology is the headphone. Open-plan development without great ways to block out noise would be ridiculous.

Blackthorn 12y ago
I work in an open-plan office and it's the most miserable thing in the world, even with headphones. After this I will never again accept a job without a private office.
- curlyquote 12y ago
  Exactly my feelings.
- keyle 12y ago
  I'm completely with you on that one. Death stares at people having "meetings" without meeting rooms doesn't seem to help either.
- sliverstorm 12y ago
  I have not been blessed with a private office yet, but fortunately cubes are still dramatically better than open-plan (IMO).
  - jbigelow76 12y ago
    I had a nice compromise at a startup I was at a few years back. Large offices, two developers per, with their dual monitor setups back to back and whiteboards behind each dev. It was a good balance, you could easily collaborate with the rest of the team when necessary and the other dev could stay pretty much heads down (especially with headphones).
  - iolothebard 12y ago
    It's sad that we live in a world where the cube is now the "good" option. If I ever have another company, if I can't afford the office space, I don't need the person. Office space is cheap compared to salary and wasted productivity.
- snambi 12y ago
  100% agree. Not only that 100% of all my coworkers hate open-plan office. Even managers hate the open-plan office. It is only good for one thing, cheaper. thats all.
  - hliyan 12y ago
    I have to agree. Last year I went from a workplace that had a massive open-plan office to one with small rooms. My general productivity level is about the same, but my problem-solving efficiency has gone way up. I'm convinced that peripheral sensory input breaks your concentration even if it doesn't consciously "bother" you.
- allegory 12y ago
  This. Life is better now I work from home. It's better to have the kids screaming in the background than people tapping your shoulder and blasting your entire thought process out of the window.
- disputin 12y ago
  Agreed. Having to wear headphones is unpleasant. I can't work unless I have crap on my head, and I have to listen to music? Ridiculous. Shortly before I left my last position the new manager arranged the seating so that the most communicative people were in the centre, for ease of access, so the majority of the noise was right in the middle of the workspace, constant, and inescapable. Productivity destroyed.
- RandallBrown 12y ago
  I work in an open plan office where we pair program 100% of the time. I was miserable working by myself in a private office.
  - scuba7183 12y ago
    Pair programming 100% of the time sounds miserable to me
bbarn 12y ago
Open floorplan works if the entire "open area" is engaged in a common goal. In that case, headphones can be more of a hindrance than a help. However, in the case where the open floorplan is simply an office cost savings measure that puts mixed goals in a small collocated area, then yes, headphones..
- existencebox 12y ago
  The latter is so important, I'll risk a vapid comment just to second this. To echo the sentiment of a commenter below, you don't realize how miserable a mixed open office is until you are trying to do work with a standup happening 2 feet away from your head. (Disclaimer; Microsoft employee without a personal office, quite jealous of those with.)
  - bbarn 12y ago
    The place I'm at now is the only job I've had (or place I've contracted with, met with etc.,) that's gotten this right. The whole open floor plan thing, to work well, has to have a reasonably accessible way to escape it when necessary. Open offices can only work, IMO, when there's a breakout room, or in general some sort of closed door room anyone can jump into and get things done or have a 4 person meeting. There's just no escaping the need to have privacy for the point of thinking, or even privacy for the point of talking. Maybe there's a perfect job in a perfect world where everything is open, but in my experience, there's a need to get away from the group once in a while, either alone or with a group.
    - Blackthorn 12y ago
      Even that wouldn't work for me with open offices because I can't simply pick up my giant desktop and move in there to do work -- I'm completely stuck in the open office.
      - existencebox 12y ago
        Beat me to it; this is precisely the problem. There are these sort of offices available, but the problem is the cost of the context switching, a distraction being an involuntary context switch.
m_mueller 12y ago
There's a type of office that often gets overlooked and IMO is the best of both worlds: The spacious cubicle[1]. I like having my own corner with lots of table space, my own drawer etc. in a semi-closed cubicle. Engaging with someone is still easy - stand up, look how engaged he is in his work (headphones on?) and decide whether it's a good time to talk to him. Nurture a calm environment (good isolating cubicle walls help a lot, put sales people into their own closed offices) and you IMO have the perfect environment for developers. Having nothing but a grey wall and two nice big displays in front of me (preferably metallic so I can put my current thoughts on paper and hang it up with magnets) is a zen-like experience and helps me concentrate a lot. [1]http://images.wisegeek.com/cubicle.jpg http://images.wisegeek.com/cubicle.jpg
- morgante 12y ago
  Unfortunately the image of cubicles is inextricably tied to soul-crushing corporations (ex. Office Space).
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  - m_mueller 12y ago
    Yes, that's unfortunate, because I'd take this over Open Plan any day. I think one reason why Open Plan is so popular in nowadays is that it's way cheaper than good cubicles and managers can 'sell' the cost savings to employees by appearing forward thinking and open minded.
- keithpeter 12y ago
  Reminds me of the study carrels in a local University library. They were good for getting essays written.
megaman821 12y ago
I am always surprised people are so opinionated about open floor plans. Unless we are talking about sirens and crying babies, I can just ignore the background noise and keep working. Although I have been sharing a room with someone or another since I was 3 years old, so filtering out noise might to just a sanity mechanism at this point.
- recursive 12y ago
  There is at least one person on HN who likes open floor plans. I know this because I'm that person. When I worked in one, I never found myself distracted by conversations, and most often didn't realize they were happening.
  - russgray 12y ago
    I'm fine with them too. I like the hubbub.
    - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
      Open plan is Kryptonite for introverts. We need silence and no distractions. But you'd probably go insane in my working environment, which is in a house surrounded by fields miles from a city with no one else in it, except me. Point is, you should tailor the spaces to the individuals working in them. There is no Generic Industry Standard Employee. Which is why trying to enforce Generic Industry Standard Working Environments is maybe not such an effective way to get cool stuff out the door. As for Agile etc - it's a 20th century methodology, not a 21st century one. I have no idea what 21st century software development is going to look like. Nor does anyone else, because no one has invented it yet.
  - timrichard 12y ago
    I've worked in open plan offices for most of my career, as it's very common in the UK. I believe the last role took the biscuit, though.... Open plan with hotdesking and lockers... Primary coloured lockers, so it looked like a poor man's GooglePlex. Where the meagre budget had run out halfway through. You could never be sure where you would be the next morning, or next to whom (inc. constantly teleconferencing middle managers). There were two banks of desks with dual monitors, supposedly reserved for developers. Sometimes, non-technical personnel would grab them, and not even use the monitors... Just their laptop screens (for Outlook, basically). That was slightly irksome :-)
quanticle 12y ago
Let's see if you think this in twenty years, when you need a hearing aid. Headphone use, at any volume, is positively correlated with hearing loss. Hearing damage is cumulative, and the vast majority of hearing loss isn't caused by exposure to very short, very loud sounds, it's caused by exposure to sounds that are just a little bit too loud, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. And, almost by definition, if the music is loud enough to drown out ambient noise in an open-plan office, it's loud enough to damage your hearing if you're exposing yourself to it 8 hours a day. I mean, the only way it wouldn't be is if your office were as quiet as a tomb (or a recording studio), and if that were the case you wouldn't need headphones in the first place. I work in an open plan office. I don't wear headphones. Yes, it's annoying. Yes, it's distracting. Yes, it's better than losing my hearing.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  Why not try earplugs? $15 for a year's supply. They are "disposable" but each can easily last for a week or two. http://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Tekk-Protection-Multi-Color-Disposable-Earplugs-80-Pack-92800-80025T/202691611 http://www.homedepot.com/p/3M-Tekk-Protection-Multi-Color-Di... I use the 3M brand and can recommend them.
  - nordsieck 12y ago
    I can't stand foam earplugs, but I am an avid user of silicone earplugs. I especially like these guys: http://www.earplugstore.com/ultrafit25.html http://www.earplugstore.com/ultrafit25.html When I'm feeling like I really need quiet I'll throw on a pair of ear muffs on top of that. The only caveat is that you need to be comfortable with silence: the ear plugs will really cut down on background noise (e.g. AC and TV).
  - quanticle 12y ago
    I don't find earplugs comfortable, but you got me thinking and I might buy a set of hearing protection earmuffs (http://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Ultimate-Hearing-Protector/dp/B000PW98WO/ref=sr_1_5?s=hi&ie=UTF8&qid=1407354895&sr=1-5&keywords=hearing+protection http://www.amazon.com/3M-Peltor-Ultimate-Hearing-Protector/d...). As a bonus, I think having a set of bright blue earmuffs on would more of a visible "do not disturb" symbol than earplugs. Thanks for the idea. :)
greggman 12y ago
I'm curious your take on some of the research claiming people are more productive and/or more creative at a coffee shop with noise surrounded by people than in a quiet place alone Google for "more productive at coffee shops". That would seem to suggest that maybe private offices aren't quite always best
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Ambient soft noise from people not interacting with you is hardly the same as trying to concentrate in a room full of people actively watching what you are doing and trying to get your attention.
- mercer 12y ago
  I feel more productive in coffee shops, but I think a crucial difference between a coffee shop and an open office is that in a coffee shop you are less likely to be interrupted. I suspect whether one can work better with some background 'noise' (sounds and sights) is partly a personality characteristic, but that interruptions are universally disastrous when one tries to be productive.

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shmerl 12y ago

Also, lock-in tactic [1] is so much last century, but MS is still quite slow on dropping it. With general decline of Windows domination they'll drop lock-in approach even more, but that's still in the future. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_lock-in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft#Vendor_...

Locke1689 12y ago
This seems pretty off-topic. Lock-in software can be developed in a variety of different ways, so development strategy really isn't relevant.
- shmerl 12y ago
  Why is it off-topic to mention last century practices which are still used by MS? It's pretty much within the broader scope of what this article touches on. No matter what variety it is, MS has to adjust to the new reality, that competition will happen on merit, and not on crooked market capture methodology. I guess downvoters are just upset about MS criticism, rather than consider this being off-topic, since it isn't.
  - ksk 12y ago
    >I guess downvoters are just upset about MS criticism, As long as you're guessing, you can say anything you want. It does not have to be true.
    - shmerl 12y ago
      No one stops downvoters from commenting. If they don't - others would guess what they can possibly mean.
      - ksk 12y ago
        >others would guess what they can possibly mean Personally, I would not be so arrogant as to claim I can mind-read. YMMV.

tedks 12y ago

This article has depressingly little about how Microsoft went about changing the culture from a waterfall to agile mindset. The article is also pretty rosy; I'd expect a little more bumps on the way.

Locke1689 12y ago
What do you want to know? Culturally, I think it's important to notice that VS is really a bunch of smaller teams put together, and not all of them have the same development strategies or systems. So the biggest motivator here seemed to be a few pioneering teams who thought they had a better way to develop software, and had support from leadership. So the pioneering teams pushed forward and started to put up measurable results. I think after that culture is bound to follow.
- randomfool 12y ago
  I'm curious if there were any structural changes to the product which needed to be made to support a more agile workflow. For example when I was there, just the branching and RI schedules were massive taxes on everyone. Also there were periods of insane 'gates' to code changes to get something committed- what has been done to allow less ship room and more code changes? Edit: I left Microsoft to escape the VS ship schedule, I have not heard of significant changes from the co-workers I keep in touch with.
- tedks 12y ago
  I'd most like to know how the developers reacted -- to losing offices, to speeding up dev cycles, to changing up testing. Presumably some of them were supportive, some of them were against it, but what were their reasons, and how did they react to the change? I think it's more likely that the early adopter teams had some measurable result, and then management pushed the change through to other teams. So how did those teams react? The article just paints a very optimistic picture. Something as big as VS, there's a lot of stuff to actually change when you go about changing things. I feel like there's just more to this story.

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kelukelugames 12y ago

I left Microsot recently. Going from desktop development to web development. One of my ex-coworkers told me web and mobile development was a fad. -_-

CmonDev 12y ago
Client web development is a fad. Using a document markup language and a scripting language to build apps - what a joke. And what is this "desktop development" you are referring to? When it comes to modern development, desktop is just a subset of the native experiences, all of which could share the same logic (e.g. via Xamarin).

Locke1689 12y ago

(Note, speaking for myself, not Microsoft!) Pretty good article, only some minor inaccuracies. Things I noticed: 1) Private offices are nowhere near gone. Some teams have "gone team room" (TFS), some have not (Roslyn). I've worked in both and personally don't care either way, but there are a number of people who heavily favor one or the other. 2) Visual Studio is technically a team, yes, but there are thousands of devs working on it. I think of my team as Managed Languages (Roslyn), not VS. 3) Development strategy is a continuous process and one we're still currently engaged in. We haven't just decided that this is the new process and we're not changing it again. Oh, and some personal feelings: tooling isn't really mentioned in this article but it may be the most important. TFS and other teams have developed some quite good tools that help with the workflow considerably. If every dev is wasting time messing with bad tools, that's a huge amount of dev time wasted as an organization.

sliverstorm 12y ago
Tools is so huge! It is one of those sort of "intangible" assets of a large company, what is the quality (and projected future quality) of their tools... Poor tools decisions or tool apathy (for example, not enough funding to the tools teams) can shackle entire divisions of the company.
- seanmcdirmid 12y ago
  Google is famous for a tooling strategy that has paid off in spades. Reading about their RCS, build, and testing infrastructure is like reading an overly optimistic science fiction novel; it can't be that great right?
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    I take it you've only read about these tools, and not actually had to face them.
    - seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Yes, but I've heard good things from those that actually use them. Preforce mated to GFS, lightning quick check outs and builds that work lazily, you can make a change to the code base even if you don't own it, and code review requests will be sent out automatically as well as tests run to ensure you didn't break...Google.

credo 12y ago

The title is eye-catching and the writer has a good writing style, but I see a lot of problems with the headline as well as the content - Microsoft's private offices were an innovation in the 80s/90s, cramming large numbers of worker bees into a single large office is a retrogressive step, not a 21st century innovation - The writers focus is on Visual Studio, but a number of other teams had switched to agile much earlier. I worked in Windows Live Mobile in when we switched to "agile" in 2004. This wasn't being dragged into anything, it was a relatively early adoption - Software projects do often get delayed, but not always. I was one of the dev-leads who worked on Office XP in the 90s and though we had a long ~3year, ship cycle, we did ship on the original planned shipped date (RTM 3/2/1) Steven Sinofsky deserved a lot of credit for that.

snambi 12y ago
no one likes the open floors. yet, the articles and scrum proponents keep talking as if open floors.
- mark-r 12y ago
  I suppose somebody, somewhere, prefers them. I'd like to see hard numbers for/against though. I suspect it's more a way to justify a decision someone else has already made for their own reasons.
greggman 12y ago
I'm curious about the common belief that private offices are better. Here's an article that suggests private offices might not be better. Do the two ideas fit together or do you just not believe the article (I didn't see any research sited) http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/working-best-at-coffee-shops/237372/ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/04/working-...
- silverbax88 12y ago
  There's plenty of research that shows that open floor plans always hurt morale and productivity. You're not looking hard enough.

dschiptsov 12y ago

Do not be too much impressed by big names and buzzwords. The [very] successful process of developing the Linux kernel with nothing but git, mailing lists and a small set of simple rules (no meetings, no Scrum, no BS) proved to be good-enough. It is not only Linux kernel, there are hundreds of other "decentralized, no-water-fall" projects, notably FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Xorg, LLVM, Golang, CPython, Ruby, you name it. It is much better to consider the differences between a commercial organization (a corporation) with all that bureaucracy obsessed with keeping its positions and budgets, etc. and a team of enthusiastic professionals with their own "inner" motivations and goals. Corporations are producing products to make profit, while teams of enthusiasts are producing (evolving) tools and services for themselves. The difference is the same as between McDonald's and family/home-made-for-themselves food.) Consider, for example, LLVM/Clang (backed by Apple) as high quality and no-cost alternative to VS. Its used as a primary compiler for OS X, iOS and FreeBSD and optional one for Android NDK. And, look ma, no bureaucrats, no meetings, no Scrum.

snambi 12y ago
agree 100%. waterfall and agile/scrum, both are BS.
scribu 12y ago
I'm not sure what you're suggesting: that corporations should just adopt the Linux kernel development approach? that all software should be developed as open source? Like you said, a corporation is not the same as a team of enthusiasts, so it seems sensible that what works for the former doesn't work for the later and vice-versa.
- dschiptsov 12y ago
  I am just trying to switch attention form popular memes to the facts that development of very complex and high-quality software could be done in a very different, no-BS, good-enough way.
bignaj 12y ago
LLVM/Clang and Visual Studio are not analogous... LLVM/Clang is a compliler/compiler frontend while Visual Studio is an IDE. You're looking for Visual Studio vs. Eclipse or .NET vs. Mono etc. in each case I think most see the no-cost alternative as quite obviously inferior. This weakens your argument a bit.

BmoreDaniel 12y ago

The fact that specification and documentation are abandoned is pretty sad. Software should be adequately specified and specs should be kept up to date with code. Code is not a spec.

drtse4 12y ago
The fact that you were downvoted is extremely sad. Downvoters, good luck understanding how the next crappy project[1] you'll inherit was supposed to work without even a one-line specification describing what the reasoning behind certain choices was! Everything about methodologies should be taken with a grain of salt, what works somewhere, with a specific set of people and for some projects is not guaranteed to work anywhere. And not every aspect linked with "old" methodologies should be viewed as pure evil. Consider that many of the ideas that ended up in the agile manifesto could already be found in Peopleware from the eighties and that no methodology is the last. There was Waterfall, RUP and other clones, with the Agile wave someone defined XP (now dead) and after that Scrum. Now even Scrum is seen as something with too much overhead and people start turning to custom solution that use kanban/kaizen/etc... [1] Referring to a project that has some logic worthy of benig explained, interaction with external components, ecc... not some CRUD.

MrZipf 12y ago

Like it or loathe it, MSFT has always been a learning corporation. Teams are continually exploring different approaches to software development and trying to figure out what works best for their team and org. To their credit, they also publish a fair amount of this research and it looks pretty interesting, e.g. Transition from Centralized to Distributed VCS: A Microsoft Case Study on Reasons, Barriers, and Outcomes, via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/nachin/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/nachin/ Have Agile Techniques been the Silver Bullet for Software Development at Microsoft? via http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bmurphy/ http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/people/bmurphy/ [ $0.02, Scrum or no scrum, for my money having a private office is infinitely better than open plan for getting stuff done. Each to their own, getting harder to find jobs with your own space ]

kethinov 12y ago

Here is a repost of a comment I posted directly to the Ars Technica thread in reply to the author endorsing Agile/Scrum and expressing ambivalence towards telecommuting: "That's 20th century thinking, Peter! Marshall McLuhan would be disappointed! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNhRCRAL6sY Spontaneous collaboration can happen just as effectively with a remote staff, but you have to default all your channels of communication to digital ones. Instead of a culture of shoulder taps, use IM. Instead of a culture of hallway conversations, get the entire team on a permanent group chat. Skype is one of the best tools for this, so it's ironic that the company which owns it isn't making the best use of its own tools! ;) The guys over at Basecamp did a great book recently on how to do this remote collaboration stuff right called "Remote: Office Not Required" http://37signals.com/remote http://37signals.com/remote It's a great read. I read it recently while on the plane to a meeting that totally could have been over the internet. The irony was not lost on me. It's also worth noting that Agile/Scrum is not universally well liked anyway. In fact it's incredibly divisive. People who love it seem to really love it and people who hate it seem to really hate it. For example, here's a site parodying the Agile Manifesto, asking the world to adopt something more modern: http://asyncmanifesto.org http://asyncmanifesto.org And here's a much saucier (and perhaps less serious) take on the same idea: http://programming-motherfucker.com http://programming-motherfucker.com TL;DR: Agile/Scrum is a management fad. Collaboration can succeed or fail using any methodology. All the blind praise the media spews for Agile/Scrum is arguably harmful to discussing what is and isn't effective management." Original post: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-microsoft-dragged-its-development-practices-into-the-21st-century/?comments=1&post=27347511 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/how-mi...

AndrewDucker 12y ago
"Spontaneous collaboration can happen just as effectively with a remote staff, but you have to default all your channels of communication to digital ones." So, if you handicap your local staff to use only a fraction of their communications capability then your remote ones are just as good? Seriously - I've spent a large amount of time dealing with offshort staff and onshore staff, and staff both in the different buildings, the same building but different rooms, and staff in the same room - and having people sitting right next to each other makes a massive difference to the communication bandwidth. The ability to turn your screen towards a co-worker, say "What do you think of that?" and get a reply three seconds later is _fantastic_ - and simply impossible with remote communications. (Where you can ping them on IM, wait for them to notice the message, start a screen-share, wait for them to accept, and then wave your cursor over the bit of screen you want them to pay attention to. It's effective, but it's nowhere near as fluid as pointing and handwaving.)

jacques_chester 12y ago

I remember reading about changes to development during the Windows 7 project, which I wrote up[1] for a different lay audience. People underestimate Microsoft. It has enormous inertia, but historically enough introspection to recognise strategic errors and reorient. The most famous being accepting that the Internet was not going away, circa 1998. [1] http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/10/20/microsoft-rebooted/ http://clubtroppo.com.au/2008/10/20/microsoft-rebooted/

forgotAgain 12y ago

Seems to be a lot of words to describe what is basically a company adapting to its place in the market. When Microsoft had a dominant market position it could freeze its customer's in-house strategies by tactically leaking details (real or perhaps not) of its future releases. Extended release intervals did not matter because customers waited. Fast forward to today and it is not dominant in markets where it sees growth potential. Customers will no longer wait. Microsoft is seen seen as a laggard by many adopting new technologies. Extended development time would preclude any chance they have of success so they had to change. The outcome is as yet undetermined.

curiousDog 12y ago

The private offices were one of the best parts of working at Microsoft. Open plans suck and I blame facebook/google for perpetuating this fad ;)