4 ms·

I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho

I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a conference room ). The most damaging part of the open format (for me) is that extroverted ops folk would fight fires all day and make tons of noise. It can be helpful to be part of that if you're also fighting fires, but not if you're coding intensely. The open format can also be really helpful for quick communication during a launch. Nevertheless, I found the open format significantly impaired the depth with which I could think through things. That's where the quiet spots helped out a lot. Unfortunately my company had ridiculous overcrowding issues (the fire marshal literally came after us) so quiet spots could be very hard to find (and you might even hurt yourself politically for taking them). It sounds like this office doesn't have a shortage of space, though. Most of my more introverted colleagues were able to adapt (max within about a month).

paulftw 12y ago
"Move fast and break things", there's no time for deep thoughts and too much uncertainty for carefully planned architectures.
- danjayh 12y ago
  Pshh, so yesterday. It's "Move fast with stable infra" now. Even Zuckerberg had to grow up eventually.
JohnBooty 12y ago
> I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it > can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to > work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps > non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps > unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a > conference room ) Yeah this seems typical. And it seems so close to ideal, actually. That shared, collaborative space is very important. There just needs to be enough quiet space for every engineer to grab a "booth" or a "nook" whenever they need to focus and bear down. The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley. It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.
abalone 12y ago
I like your 3-spot system, but JohnBooty is actually describing a 3-spot system too. He's just saying he wants to spend the majority of his time in the "quiet focus" spot rather than the "team collaboration" spot. That's really the issue here: what should your default zone be? I like your suggestion that the default location for your desk should be in the collaborative spot. Cornell studied this a few years back and made an interesting observation: We engineers tend to prioritize our personal productivity over team productivity. Left to our own devices, we prioritize offices for exactly the reasons JohnBooty states. Personal productivity is how we're most directly measured and rewarded. But if we do that, team collaboration plummets. It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our focus zones into collaboration mode than it is the other way. So, I don't know if FB's new office has quiet spots (they should), but defaulting to collaborative seating acts as a good counterbalance to our innate biases.
- JohnBooty 12y ago
  I should have and could have been clearer: I'm actually okay with defaulting to collaborative space. Collaborating with other coders is valuable (and incidentally: fun!) for the reasons you said. There are so many workplaces that don't even have the option of reliably obtaining distraction-free workspace, though, and that's insanely harmful. > So, I don't know if FB's new office has > quiet spots (they should) A lot of offices seem to have lounge-style quiet spots: nooks with comfortable chairs or some such. These are great for some things, not great for others. I've worked at a few companies where grabbing a quiet place to work meant parking yourself in an empty conference room and bracing yourself for the inevitable interruption of some other group of people walking in and using the conference room for its intended purpose. > It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our > focus zones into collaboration mode than it is > the other way. Yes, absolutely yes. Engineers often go off the rails when left entirely to their own devices. Often, they're not even maximizing their personal productivity - they may "go dark", spend time building the wrong thing, or needlessly spin their wheels and waste time solving something that another engineer could have helped them with very quickly. However, I also think those things are also fairly trivially solved by adopting a software development method that fosters collaboration. Scrum is popular for a reason and feels like it's almost always a good start. On top of that team leaders can also block out time for code reviews, show-and-tells, pair programming, etc.
sukilot 12y ago
So you hold meetings in your personal workspace, and you do your individual work in meeting rooms. Clever.

paulftw 12y ago

"Move fast and break things", there's no time for deep thoughts and too much uncertainty for carefully planned architectures.

danjayh 12y ago
Pshh, so yesterday. It's "Move fast with stable infra" now. Even Zuckerberg had to grow up eventually.

JohnBooty 12y ago

> I've worked in an exclusively open format office and it > can be hard at times. Ideally you can find 2-3 spots to > work: your desk near your team, a reliably (tho perhaps > non-reservable) quiet spot for focusing, and an (perhaps > unreliable) quiet spot for super privacy (e.g. a > conference room ) Yeah this seems typical. And it seems so close to ideal, actually. That shared, collaborative space is very important. There just needs to be enough quiet space for every engineer to grab a "booth" or a "nook" whenever they need to focus and bear down. The average mid-level engineer in the U.S. makes something like $80K/year; it's obviously proportionally higher in tech hubs like the valley. It's just heartbreakingly, frustratingly comical to think of a highly-paid engineer losing hours and hours of work every week as they wander around looking for an actual spot in the office to, you know, work.

abalone 12y ago

I like your 3-spot system, but JohnBooty is actually describing a 3-spot system too. He's just saying he wants to spend the majority of his time in the "quiet focus" spot rather than the "team collaboration" spot. That's really the issue here: what should your default zone be? I like your suggestion that the default location for your desk should be in the collaborative spot. Cornell studied this a few years back and made an interesting observation: We engineers tend to prioritize our personal productivity over team productivity. Left to our own devices, we prioritize offices for exactly the reasons JohnBooty states. Personal productivity is how we're most directly measured and rewarded. But if we do that, team collaboration plummets. It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our focus zones into collaboration mode than it is the other way. So, I don't know if FB's new office has quiet spots (they should), but defaulting to collaborative seating acts as a good counterbalance to our innate biases.

JohnBooty 12y ago
I should have and could have been clearer: I'm actually okay with defaulting to collaborative space. Collaborating with other coders is valuable (and incidentally: fun!) for the reasons you said. There are so many workplaces that don't even have the option of reliably obtaining distraction-free workspace, though, and that's insanely harmful. > So, I don't know if FB's new office has > quiet spots (they should) A lot of offices seem to have lounge-style quiet spots: nooks with comfortable chairs or some such. These are great for some things, not great for others. I've worked at a few companies where grabbing a quiet place to work meant parking yourself in an empty conference room and bracing yourself for the inevitable interruption of some other group of people walking in and using the conference room for its intended purpose. > It's a lot harder to pull ourselves out of our > focus zones into collaboration mode than it is > the other way. Yes, absolutely yes. Engineers often go off the rails when left entirely to their own devices. Often, they're not even maximizing their personal productivity - they may "go dark", spend time building the wrong thing, or needlessly spin their wheels and waste time solving something that another engineer could have helped them with very quickly. However, I also think those things are also fairly trivially solved by adopting a software development method that fosters collaboration. Scrum is popular for a reason and feels like it's almost always a good start. On top of that team leaders can also block out time for code reviews, show-and-tells, pair programming, etc.

sukilot 12y ago

So you hold meetings in your personal workspace, and you do your individual work in meeting rooms. Clever.