7 ms·

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah,

by timr 12y ago

Thing I've learned through hard experience: programmers (and yes, I am one) generally over-value individual productivity and under-value communication. So yeah, you can "hold a good conversation" via Skype, but you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person work. Programmers tend to want to squirrel themselves away and work on stuff to maximize their own personal productivity, whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. That means that every individual takes a productivity hit for communication purposes, but that the organizational output is much higher than any individual could achieve. Hence, we get the fruitless debates about working conditions: what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time. There's definitely a fine line between communication and distraction and it's hard to hit the balance (I've worked in some horrible "open-plan" environments too), but in my experience, programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication, especially early in their career.

mgkimsal 12y ago
Companies that want that sort of environment need to structure the entire business process around spontaneous collaboration, not just pay lip service to it. The reason I didn't hit deadline X? 5 "spontaneous collaborations" happened at my desk in 3 days. Wait... I don't get my bonus because we missed the deadline? But... my collaborations helped the marketing dept hit their goal ahead of time, and they did it by coming to my desk and asking me questions. Oh... that'a a different budget? If you want to foster that sort of behavior, make sure all of the aspects of the business line up in support of it, not just the facilities budget because "open plan" is cheaper than private offices with doors.
- manto 12y ago
  This seems fairly anecdotal. Do you believe this is a larger issue that the spontaneous collaboration is causing you to miss deadlines? Ultimately if the marketing goals are met through your efforts why not use this as leverage?
TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal. The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics. >what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time. I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity. No sane manager is going to want to do that without a really good reason. >programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small, relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise. The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work without constant supervision. It's a management issue, not a programmer issue. I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to become the new outsourcing. Because cheap. But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US. If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere? Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is essential to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet? Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.
- discreteevent 12y ago
  The 5% thing in the original article doesn't add up for me at all. The top 5% of the programmers that I have come across are able to do things that the typical YC company doesn't need at all. He talks about someone who would hire 30 of them if they could. Really? What kind of team would that be? Could you keep them motivated doing all the bits and pieces a startup needs to do? Maybe they are building a new OS. (I doubt it) It sounds a bit like people shooting the shit about great footballers or something where you up the ante to large it up ;)
falcolas 12y ago
I feel that TheOtherHobbs covered most of the points really well, but I feel that this point needs a bit more direct discussion: > you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person work. If you value developer productivity at all, that little bit of friction is a _good_ thing. It means that you have to think for a second about the most appropriate forum for that discussion. And if you decide that you do need to talk to someone, the friction isn't really that high. Click on a user, click on the green button with the camera on it, and you're talking. In-person spontaneous collaboration is, in my experience as both a developer and a development manager, highly overrated, and the value is very rarely worth the costs. Those costs include lost productivity, developer stress, bikeshedding, and an implicit culture of hostility to anything that doesn't _look_ like productivity (like thinking). Taking a moment to put on my development manager hat, one of the things I never want to do to my developer employees is interrupt their flow. I go to meetings, so I can give them a brief summary which contains only the information they need to do their job. I work with the customers and listen to 50 minutes of rambling so I can glean the 5 minutes of information my employees need to do their work. I've hired them, and I'm paying them ludicrous amounts of money, to create programs; to create value for the customer. Anything that gets in that way is up to me to address and remove. And based on my experience as both a developer and a manager, those "spontaneous collaboration" interruptions are usually something that needs to be addressed and removed.
- nostrademons 12y ago
  This still doesn't refute the point timr was making: sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code. As a programmer (and an employee), what you're ultimately responsible for is happy customers and solved problems. If your code solves the wrong problem, it has negative value to the organization, as it's just something that all the other programmers will have to trip over later. The value of colocated employees is being able to really quickly recognize and correct for when the code is solving the wrong problem. Whether that outweighs the increased individual productivity from eliminating distractions is very much case-specific, which is perhaps why there's so much heat and so little light on this issue. You'll never capture all the complexities on a web forum.

by timr 12y ago

mgkimsal 12y ago

Companies that want that sort of environment need to structure the entire business process around spontaneous collaboration, not just pay lip service to it. The reason I didn't hit deadline X? 5 "spontaneous collaborations" happened at my desk in 3 days. Wait... I don't get my bonus because we missed the deadline? But... my collaborations helped the marketing dept hit their goal ahead of time, and they did it by coming to my desk and asking me questions. Oh... that'a a different budget? If you want to foster that sort of behavior, make sure all of the aspects of the business line up in support of it, not just the facilities budget because "open plan" is cheaper than private offices with doors.

manto 12y ago
This seems fairly anecdotal. Do you believe this is a larger issue that the spontaneous collaboration is causing you to miss deadlines? Ultimately if the marketing goals are met through your efforts why not use this as leverage?

TheOtherHobbes 12y ago

>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum. It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal. The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics. >what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time. I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity. No sane manager is going to want to do that without a really good reason. >programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small, relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise. The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work without constant supervision. It's a management issue, not a programmer issue. I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to become the new outsourcing. Because cheap. But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US. If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere? Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is essential to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet? Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.

discreteevent 12y ago
The 5% thing in the original article doesn't add up for me at all. The top 5% of the programmers that I have come across are able to do things that the typical YC company doesn't need at all. He talks about someone who would hire 30 of them if they could. Really? What kind of team would that be? Could you keep them motivated doing all the bits and pieces a startup needs to do? Maybe they are building a new OS. (I doubt it) It sounds a bit like people shooting the shit about great footballers or something where you up the ante to large it up ;)

falcolas 12y ago

I feel that TheOtherHobbs covered most of the points really well, but I feel that this point needs a bit more direct discussion: > you still have to plan the call, set up a time, etc. There's friction to spontaneous collaboration, and spontaneous collaboration is what people really care about when they talk about the benefits of in-person work. If you value developer productivity at all, that little bit of friction is a _good_ thing. It means that you have to think for a second about the most appropriate forum for that discussion. And if you decide that you do need to talk to someone, the friction isn't really that high. Click on a user, click on the green button with the camera on it, and you're talking. In-person spontaneous collaboration is, in my experience as both a developer and a development manager, highly overrated, and the value is very rarely worth the costs. Those costs include lost productivity, developer stress, bikeshedding, and an implicit culture of hostility to anything that doesn't _look_ like productivity (like thinking). Taking a moment to put on my development manager hat, one of the things I never want to do to my developer employees is interrupt their flow. I go to meetings, so I can give them a brief summary which contains only the information they need to do their job. I work with the customers and listen to 50 minutes of rambling so I can glean the 5 minutes of information my employees need to do their work. I've hired them, and I'm paying them ludicrous amounts of money, to create programs; to create value for the customer. Anything that gets in that way is up to me to address and remove. And based on my experience as both a developer and a manager, those "spontaneous collaboration" interruptions are usually something that needs to be addressed and removed.

nostrademons 12y ago
This still doesn't refute the point timr was making: sometimes the most productive thing you can do is stop a programmer from writing code. As a programmer (and an employee), what you're ultimately responsible for is happy customers and solved problems. If your code solves the wrong problem, it has negative value to the organization, as it's just something that all the other programmers will have to trip over later. The value of colocated employees is being able to really quickly recognize and correct for when the code is solving the wrong problem. Whether that outweighs the increased individual productivity from eliminating distractions is very much case-specific, which is perhaps why there's so much heat and so little light on this issue. You'll never capture all the complexities on a web forum.