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The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that your daily productivity doesn't matter. The incentive here is to make the company as producti

by jmilloy 11y ago

The one thing that kept blaring out at me to be addressed was that your daily productivity doesn't matter. The incentive here is to make the company as productive as possible over the long term (relative to costs). This is touched upon only slightly here when she considers replaceability. I'm not saying that I think open offices are or are not great. But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. Otherwise, you just sound like most software engineers I've known who love to write gobs and gobs of code at the expense of everything else.

tbrownaw 11y ago
But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it. I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.
- unprepare 11y ago
  I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early employment process. We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums. This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit. Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience. With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix. I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me
pjc50 11y ago
You seem to imply that total productivity isn't the aggregate of individual productivity. Which implies strange things about your metric.
- jmilloy 11y ago
  You're right, it is self-evident to me that group productivity is not the aggregate of individual productivity. We have companies and teams for a reason. Secondly, the goal of a company is rarely to maximize aggregate employee productivity. If you can realize the same profits with fewer LOF, stories delivered, or whatever your employees "produce", why not?
  - pjc50 11y ago
    Economic productivity is usually defined as the value of what is produced. Again, my point was that if you have some measure of productivity P such that decreasing sum(P(employees)) increases P(sum(employees)), your P is not a good measure.
    - jmilloy 11y ago
      It's good to be explicit like this. Probably we agree more than I realized, because what I'm trying to get at is that so many of these blog posts complaining about open offices use the wrong P by focusing on a subset what they produce on a daily basis. In fact, I'm suggesting that the employee is using a different P than the employer, and that it's plausible that the employee is the using the wrong P (whether the employer is or not). Then again, where we might disagree is to what degree the same P can and should be applied to both individual employees and to companies. So often individuals project what they (like to) do onto the team as its primary purpose. "I make widgets, and there are less widgets at the end of the day than there could be, so the company must not be optimized." It might be, or you may overvalue widgets.
babygoat 11y ago
It sounds like you're saying that if you let engineers concentrate at work, they'll start working on the wrong projects.
- jmilloy 11y ago
  I'm only saying that when engineers discuss how they are affected by their work environment, they should keep perspective on the actual value they provide to their employer, which is not equivalent to what and how much they produce on a daily basis.
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Your point assumes that management understands that value better than they do. I think that's a questionable assumption.
    - jmilloy 11y ago
      No, I'm not saying that you should accept someone else's valuation of your contribution. Instead, I am questioning this particular person's valuation because, like those of so many other employees, it is too narrow. If you do not even address the long-term value you provide to the company, then you can't possibly make a reasonable argument that open-offices are a detriment to that long-term value. For the record, I believe they probably are a detriment, so I have an incentive for the discourse and arguments to improve.
  - babygoat 11y ago
    Of course, but engineers are expensive. When is it ever in the employer's interest to get less output from them? Meet with them in person, do code reviews and such as often as you'd like, but once you've defined a problem for them to solve, what possible value could you get by keeping them in a distracting work environment?
    - jmilloy 11y ago
      In the very rare case that there is a clearly defined Problem which has been presented to from Above, which you can work on in isolation, and which you should prioritize to the exclusion of all else, then sure, distracting them will cause the Solution to be delayed. Many engineers like to view this kind of situation as their only responsibility and only avenue for adding value. I'm not sure it's accurate. We have to use a more broad and nuanced perspective on the value we provide when we talk about how that value is affected by our work environment.

by jmilloy 11y ago

tbrownaw 11y ago

But the issue of personal productivity simply has to go away in the discussion for me to take it seriously. And yet, nothing can possibly get done without someone doing it. I see lots of insistence that without open offices people woild spemd so much more time on wrong things that the lost productivity is more than made up for by better focus. I also see no evidence for these claims.

unprepare 11y ago
I see this as businesses pushing off even more of their part of the early employment process. We've seen how requirements for entry level jobs have risen, colleges work with businesses to try and produce workforce ready graduates but are met with ever increasing minimums. This is companies deciding that personal productivity isnt something they need to worry about. If someone is not personally productive, then they aren't a good fit. Why should the business spend resources trying to facilitate a productive environment when they can just hire people who will work in a disruptive environment? Just as, why should a business spend resources training employees when they can demand only employees with very specific experience. With outsourcing, visas, and remote working a company has very little restrictions on the level of employee they can seek and find with little difficulty - especially when you include a weak economy in this whole mix. I dont know, not something i've thought a lot about i could be totally off base, but seems like it could be part of a wider trend to me

pjc50 11y ago

You seem to imply that total productivity isn't the aggregate of individual productivity. Which implies strange things about your metric.

jmilloy 11y ago
You're right, it is self-evident to me that group productivity is not the aggregate of individual productivity. We have companies and teams for a reason. Secondly, the goal of a company is rarely to maximize aggregate employee productivity. If you can realize the same profits with fewer LOF, stories delivered, or whatever your employees "produce", why not?
- pjc50 11y ago
  Economic productivity is usually defined as the value of what is produced. Again, my point was that if you have some measure of productivity P such that decreasing sum(P(employees)) increases P(sum(employees)), your P is not a good measure.
  - jmilloy 11y ago
    It's good to be explicit like this. Probably we agree more than I realized, because what I'm trying to get at is that so many of these blog posts complaining about open offices use the wrong P by focusing on a subset what they produce on a daily basis. In fact, I'm suggesting that the employee is using a different P than the employer, and that it's plausible that the employee is the using the wrong P (whether the employer is or not). Then again, where we might disagree is to what degree the same P can and should be applied to both individual employees and to companies. So often individuals project what they (like to) do onto the team as its primary purpose. "I make widgets, and there are less widgets at the end of the day than there could be, so the company must not be optimized." It might be, or you may overvalue widgets.

babygoat 11y ago

It sounds like you're saying that if you let engineers concentrate at work, they'll start working on the wrong projects.

jmilloy 11y ago
I'm only saying that when engineers discuss how they are affected by their work environment, they should keep perspective on the actual value they provide to their employer, which is not equivalent to what and how much they produce on a daily basis.
- TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
  Your point assumes that management understands that value better than they do. I think that's a questionable assumption.
  - jmilloy 11y ago
    No, I'm not saying that you should accept someone else's valuation of your contribution. Instead, I am questioning this particular person's valuation because, like those of so many other employees, it is too narrow. If you do not even address the long-term value you provide to the company, then you can't possibly make a reasonable argument that open-offices are a detriment to that long-term value. For the record, I believe they probably are a detriment, so I have an incentive for the discourse and arguments to improve.
- babygoat 11y ago
  Of course, but engineers are expensive. When is it ever in the employer's interest to get less output from them? Meet with them in person, do code reviews and such as often as you'd like, but once you've defined a problem for them to solve, what possible value could you get by keeping them in a distracting work environment?
  - jmilloy 11y ago
    In the very rare case that there is a clearly defined Problem which has been presented to from Above, which you can work on in isolation, and which you should prioritize to the exclusion of all else, then sure, distracting them will cause the Solution to be delayed. Many engineers like to view this kind of situation as their only responsibility and only avenue for adding value. I'm not sure it's accurate. We have to use a more broad and nuanced perspective on the value we provide when we talk about how that value is affected by our work environment.