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Comment by sblom | Hacker News Reader

My experience at Microsoft in the late 90s and early 00s jives with his descriptions, mostly. But the essay went out of its way to be cynical and reductive.

He's not making things up, but I don't think his takeaways are worth, well, taking any further.

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Same period of employment for me too and I agree that it mostly matches my experience. Even though I find the article an exaggerated polemic, there are a few things that really resonate with me:

1. Open offices are stupid. For proof just see how many people love working from home where they have far fewer unwanted distractions. Yes there are other reasons to like remote work too, but I bet lack of distracting surroundings is up there.

2. Not having dedicated QA is mega stupid for something like Windows. You can clearly see that in Windows 10.

Other than that, yes I am a bit more accepting of some of the newer stuff, but I get where he's coming from. y'all need to get off my lawn.

If open offices were kept to the same atmosphere as libraries, I don't think there would be such an issue.

But it's truly bizarre that they're not, and companies think that is OK to put people in an environment that is the completely opposite of the environment it should be.

So culturally which style of working do you prefer yourself? Or if it’s not binary, are there parts of how software was written yesterday that you’d like to bring into organizations today, whether mentioned in the article or not?

There's room for both extreme concentration and extreme communication, and most teams need some of each.

I actually snorted at the essay's idea that communication and concentration can't mix. I'm not sure what he thinks email and detailed specs are if not communication. I think the key is that they're batch-mode communication.

I can see value in several hours a day of concentration unbroken by communication, but insisting on a full week straight of unbroken concentration is impractical and possibly counterproductive.

It's not that there was NO communication. He said that he'd go to QA and fix anything that they found. It's just that it was more informal, and you did it when it was time to do it, but not just meetings every day that are required, even when there's nothing really to say, or what couldn't be done in a 15 second or one minute conversation. And you could do it on your own time, so you didn't have to stop right in the middle of some super productive time when you're on a roll. Because that's how it works - some coding time is more productive than other time. You're just into it and everything is just flowing, as he said.

I much prefer the old days. At the risk of the cliche (and I realize all the negative connotations as well), we were cowboys, but I liked it that way.

Of course, that may be what drew me to coding then. Perhaps the new culture attracts a new type of coder that likes process much more.

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