Office distractions could be costing more than $30k per employee each year | Hacker News Reader

Office distractions could be costing more than $30k per employee each year

hackernoon.com

37 pointsrobteix17 comments

Exec and management types, if you're reading this: Private offices or hub-and-spoke office styles are an unbelievable competitive advantage. I write this as I hear the laughter from an unrelated standup, and the drivel of no fewer than 8 conversations I don't care about. And I'm on hackernews instead of doing my job.

Please let me work in peace.

What's a hub and spoke office style?

Microsoft does this AFAIK and it's where you have many private offices flanking shared meeting spaces. You can actually close your door and focus, then pop-out for an impromptu session with coworkers on a white board.

Central collaborative areas with offshoots of private offices. I've worked in one in the past with a common area and ~4 3 person offices attached, and it was pretty great.

It's a style recommended by the book Deep Work

This has been discussed numerous times here, and I agree with the premise of this article, but some of the prescriptions for solving the problem just seem silly and reek of over-complicating and over-managing the process. Trying to gauge or limit how much time a developer spends on a given solution is problematic because a) you're professing to know the solution before it has been developed, in which case you should have just written it yourself or told the developer the solution, and b) you're just making it worse on the developer by imposing an arbitrary deadline that will only induce stress and result in the solution coming later, not sooner. As a deadline gets closer, the productivity of a developer is proportional to the amount of time remaining. The only exception is if the solution, or the design of the solution, is known and all that is left to do is the typing.

so if we remove "distractions" and work like robots will we get $30k more a year?

People are not robots. If I'm worth $200 an hour for the first 5 hours to an employee, by the 16th straight hour I'm barely in the positive territory. Companies should STFU and pay more, their earnings and cash piles show that money is being made.

If it's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep that money for yourself?

The truth is workplaces that limit distractions are much better places to work, and more enjoyable for employees. I've run organizations that offered one person offices to every developer, and it was a big reason why our turnover was extremely low.

If it's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep that money for yourself?

Irrelevant. How do you know know I'm not already doing that.

My main point, which will valid for as long as humans are are the switch is that you cannot maximize every second.

It's relevant that you think the company doesn't deserve the money it makes. If somehow employees could make that money without all the services and assets of the business, they already would be doing so.

And it's not about maximizing every second. It's about providing the best possible work environment to allow people to be more productive.

Paying people more isn't going to magically make them more productive. These stupid open-office environments are killing productivity, so the first thing employers need to do is get rid of them and build proper offices. After that, pay more to attract better talent. They can save a little money on offices by having an open-plan sector where the loudmouths and extroverts who love open-plan offices can sit if they so choose.

tl;dr:

More clickbait. This blog assumes that employees are earning $110k a year, get interrupted 6 times a day, and each interruption requires 23 minutes to recover from. So each employee spends 2+ hours a day "costing the business".

Despite the interstellar sized logical jumps, the article is weak. Self-selecting high performance workers? Assuming everyone earns $110k? Etc.

I wish I only got interrupted 6 times a day. I usually get interrupted that often by lunchtime. I don't think it takes a full 23 minutes to recover from that, but 5-10 isn't uncommon.

I get about 23 full, uninterrupted minutes in a day.

When I'm in the office, I wonder if my coworkers wait for me to start working just so they can ask me how my day is going or to tell me a joke.

If your best and brightest 10% are losing 30k, it's worth asking if the effects are worse (even if it's only 3k per average employee, assuming there are 80% of them, that's a lot of 3k), and if it's worth it for the benefit the least capable or experienced 10% will get.

And please, don't latch on to the mathematical definition of average. I'm talking about a roughly bell curved distribution of talent.

If you are paid $90k per year, your cost to the company is at least $110K a year, if not more. Company's share of payroll tax on $90k in the US is nearly $7,000, office space at $30-$40/square foot can be $2,000 a year, ten paid days off a year cost nearly $4,000, hundreds of dollars a year more for desks/computer systems.

Then you add medical/dental/401k matching, etc, etc.

If they offer stock options that can be easily tens of thousands more in imputed costs.

I agree with the morale and wellness argument. Too many distractions lead to mental thrashing.

But -- there's an assertion here that the $30,000 would have been better used in another way. The concept of agile development encourages these distractions because it encourages changes earlier, rather than later in development, where more resources have been squandered. Microsoft famously found that the cost of a defect grew by an order of magnitude for each stage of development in which it was allowed to fester.

Hence, I don't think the author has proven that business-related "distractions" are a net negative. If the distractions are completely unrelated to work, that's another animal altogether.

HPEs should only be considered "high-performance" if they are able to deflect distractions when they need to. Otherwise, they are simply highly compensated.

Many distractions aren't work related.

Many of the remaining distractions that are work related aren't necessary.

In an open floor plan the product manager can accost an engineer about a business problem, and they can directly solve it sooner in development, saving time and money. But they did so by distracting a half dozen other employees who had little to no interest or anything to contribute to the conversation.

At a previous job we insisted on one person offices for developers. The product manager would go to the engineers office, they'd solve the problem quickly and early, and we got the same benefits without distracting another half dozen people. If they needed some more people to help with the decisions, we had conference rooms.

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