10 ms·
One of my favorite pieces of research in this space is DeMarco & Lister's "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace." Basically (go read it! it's
by larsberg 12y ago
One of my favorite pieces of research in this space is DeMarco & Lister's "Programmer Performance and the Effects of the Workplace." Basically (go read it! it's short!), they show that the difference between private offices and tiny cube/open floor plans is strongly correlated with being in the top 25% vs. the bottom 25% of developers, which is a difference of around 2.6x.
Not 10x, but also non-trivial for those of us who don't have Facebook-like dollars to throw at filling desks in an ever-larger open floor plans.
- fsk 12y agoMaybe the better programmers have more leverage to negotiate better work conditions, so it isn't a causal effect.
- larsberg 12y agoYes, this is mentioned in the paper, right next to where they talk about the correlation. The most telling part, though, is where they take some of the lower-25% from cubicle farm/open office spaces and put them in private office spaces. Guess what happens?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- fsk 12y agoI see, they give evidence for both factors. 1. Better programmers are more likely to have negotiating leverage. 2. Taking a poor programmer and moving him to a quieter space improves his productivity. I'd still like to see a proper modern scientific study comparing office environments. It's very hard to do correctly, because there are too many variables. Also, there really are 10x programmers. At my current job, the new programmer took a couple of weeks to do something that I thought would take a couple of days. (and I was already familiar with the codebase, so my estimate of how long it would take me to do it was probably accurate) That's only 5x, but he's be deficient in other ways, such as not noticing severe bugs until other people pointed them out.