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Comment by jonpaul | Hacker News Reader

The photo showing everyone at work looks like it would difficult to concentrate and rife with distraction. Why do companies feel the need to treat their developers like this? I understand that they wanted to get their projects done quickly, but it seems like that would be a tough place to work.

Hopefully the interns were paid well (this is relative) and learned a lot.

-JP

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When I first saw the photograph of the interns' office, I thought that the article was a joke. I really don't understand how anybody could program productively under those conditions.

Crowded offices can be good for climbing a learning curve. The biggest problem most of the interns would face would be setting up their systems, getting the build to work, and figuring out how to integrate stuff into the system.

Lots of communication is good for that.

If they needed to do any deep thinking, I hoped they would have been allowed to work from home for a day.

Crowded offices can be good for climbing a learning curve.

Exactly my experience for my first internship, though it was far from that crowded. We picked up C# and a large framework (and some, a second language) well enough to be productive in a week and a half. (my top-level comment has more details)

Same here. Though I guess it can't be all that much less productive than the 20 devs in a room with the ping pong table + fooseball table + Playstation & bigscreen + DJ Turntables & PA (seriously!) environment that was so good at burning through $50M in six months back in the good old days.

Probably not quite as much fun though.

meh they went to MIT, I'm really not surprised

I'd say from that picture that area is about 4 people to crowded than would be comfortable at all.

It's weird that in the context of outsourcing people are outraged at setups like that but in the context of interns it's fine.

Indeed,

And if we can do all our jobs with interns, the job prospects of the former interns will be what?

Increase the productivity of your money by only renting one room...

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