Why do programmers need private offices with doors? | Hacker News Reader

Why do programmers need private offices with doors?

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354 pointssigna11572 comments

I worked for a Japanese corporation.

The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room.

These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and there was very little chit-chat.

American open-plan offices, on the other hand, resemble flea markets. Loud, somewhat chaotic, and distracting as hell.

But the Japanese also have a culture that is attuned to open-plan offices. When we would bring them to the US, they would be uncomfortable with cubicles and offices.

I have found that "one-size-fits-all" solutions, don't really work, across cultural boundaries.

I worked for a Japanese corporation where each floor had different rules.

One floor had an open-plan layout where people were open to chitchat, another open-plan floor that expected everyone to be quiet, and there was a floor with reservable cubicles or sound-proofed rooms. In general though, I do agree that the culture is on the quieter side.

I really enjoyed working there because the level of isolation was entirely up to you, depending on your mood.

We kind of have that, but it isn't by floor since its a one-story building, but we are an American small tech company. The engineering department (department I am in) is separated by a long glass wall. In side of there, we are expected to keep it quiet. Now, we are not discouraged from conversation, say I need to tap another engineer's shoulders and discuss some architecture. But it expected to keep it relatively quiet and not distracting. Other side of the glass wall, its a free for all.

Sounds like the Amtrak quiet car for early morning routes. I loved the quiet car.

this is how most university libraries are set up

In the USA, perhaps. An amusing statement really, given the context.

Rakuten was the first and only bigger corp I've worked at (my life has been startups and boutique shops) and so I have had a hard time understanding why people don't like open office floorplans. Thank you for making me realize why I enjoyed it and might not, at another org.

Was it a Japanese office or a foreign office following Japanese customs?

I would say it fits in a third category. It’s a Japanese office that switched to English as its official language and hires a lot of foreign engineering talent. These types of companies are becoming more and more prevalent in Japan.

It is interesting to note that they can integrate the best and worst elements of both aforementioned work cultures.

Your mention of working culture is quite interesting. I am a Mexican and have had the chance to work in "open offices" environments in UK, US and Mexico.

For me, US and UK culture was great for Open Office plan, as people were pretty silent and focused. Our Mexican culture is just crazy for that... we are noisy and chatty people, very "happy", and for that reason you just cannot focus in an open office environment. I enjoyed every time I went to our US office in a previous job, as we could actually sit down and work silently.

In the UK it was similar, but I worked in an international setting. So we had people from China, Iran and other nationalities in the same open office, and it was noisier. But not as noisy as Mexico, as people were not very "integrated" with each other.

I would hate that due to the visual distractions and lack of privacy, but "quiet as a library" is absolutely essential.

It does sound like that office layout (as with most US office layouts) is designed to clearly reinforce the status hierarchy.

> clearly reinforce the status hierarchy

Oh, yeah. Hierarchy is very important, in Japanese business culture.

To emphasize hierarchy, it's common to give cheap office chairs without wrist rest for who aren't at high hierarchy in traditional companies . It's one of the worst way, it harms health.

I did a year as an exchange student in secondary school/senior high school in Japan. We were close to 50 pupils per class room - yet it was much more quiet than my Norwegian classroom with half as many pupils.

Not a praise of the outdated Prussian high school system in Japan - but another illustration that the culture is different.

Is it outdated? How do the results compare?

Which results? Evaluating school systems is an unsolved problem.

Japanese business culture is a standard that I hope we never follow. It results in extreme stress for their workers and one of their leading times for suicide is the yearly hiring/firing/moving people around cycle; Japanese industry is an extremely well oiled machine, but in order to achieve that, people are treated like machine parts.

I think there's a good balance to be struck, but I prefer Western work culture by far.

Leveraging my extensive rapid-paced AI-augmented automation experience*, I have discovered an innovative, self-service solution utilizing a revolutionary, modern material that dynamically shapes itself to fit an external acoustic meatus and turn even the loudest office into a harmonious, quite garden of productivity.**.

* I did manual labor on a factory production line to pay the bills in college

** Put 20 cent earplugs in your ear

"one-size-fits-all" solutions are the prevailing business strategy of investment bankers: Make every company run exactly the same, and save on cost by commoditizing the materials and people.

I have found that North American divisions of Japenese companies will be setup the same way. The managers sit at the front facing into the room. All of their subordinates will be facing towards them.

Toyota sticks out in my mind, only because of the scale of the room. There were hundreds of desks in one large open space, and if you looked up from your desk you could see every last one of them. But I’ve seen it in other smaller Japenese companies as well.

Aah yes this is why I work in an open office yet very confused on why this website hates it so much.

May I ask what you think of life in Japan as a foreigner? I’ve heard it can be very isolating.

I wouldn't know. I just visited. Sometimes, two or three times a year, for about twenty years. Always the Tokyo area.

I probably spent three weeks there, max.

Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had).

Having people around me working on the same project is invaluable for me for

* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

* running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled.

* brainstorming. Same as above

* getting a feeling for what everyone is up to

  Sure I can go read their notes but it's not the same. One happens by osmosis so zero effort, it just happens. The other requires scheduling time

* feeling part of a team, working on the same thing.

  I don't feel connected to me team at all working from home. I feel no more connection to them then when I call my bank and talk to a banker. Nor do I feel any connection to sit at a coffee shop and work around others who are not on the same team.

I get that others have different opinions and/or want to work from home. Me, I was lucky to work on things I wanted to work on with people who wanted to work on them (video games) for most of my career. It was super fun. It would not been even 5% as fun at home by myself.

All of that is fine, the problem is that most places with shared space will have people not working on the same project in that room. Instead everybody is working on different projects, and they may be in Teams meetings and talking and talking about things with zero interest for you, and that can't possibly be productive. Even worse if you're in an office with one guy constantly on the 'phone on customer support or whatnot..

How about when they put the software team right next to the sales team?

This is exactly the problem with open-plan offices: they always do really stupid stuff like this, putting mostly-quiet teams very close to very talkative and noisy teams, with no barrier between them. Then everyone wants to work from home where at least they won't be tormented by listening to the obnoxious sales guy yap on the phone all day and can have their pet keep them company.

Did you have the head of sales ringing a bell for a sale every few hours too?

> asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

All your other points are fine. People are motivated by a mix of external and internal triggers, and you are clearly skewed to the external side.

The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there.

Programming requires deliberate thought gathered slowly into a complex matrix in your head before it finds its way to the pc through your keyboard.

Even though I am an extrovert through and through and strongly identify with the motivational aspects of being in an office, me not giving you an answer until an hour has gone probably means more overall productivity for the project than your instant unblocking at the office.

> The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there.

That’s really not that obvious. Things like this (being able to ask questions) and allowing other people to focus when they need are not incompatible.

It should be pretty easy to infer for most people whether it’s a good time to start a conversation with another person or maybe you should wait for a few minutes/hours/until the lunch break/whatever

Isn't what you say contradictory?

You are saying that devs need to stay "in the flow". But when you are in the flow and suddenly you have something that blocks you because you have a simple question, the best way to stay in the flow is to ask the question and get the answer immediately. If I have to quit my flow, go on slack, ask on slack, wait 10 minutes, then re-explain because the other person did not get it, then re-wait, ... my flow is ruined.

What you are saying is, at the end of the day, when caricaturing a little bit, that you want your flow to be maintained, but you are happy to destroy the flow of others.

If the question is truly simple it can probably be answered by the codebase or the internet. Otherwise the flow is ruined anyway when you stop it to ask someone in person. One has to load the context that was subconscious into the foreground for explanation of why they're asking.

Instead you want to interrupt your own flow as well as that of others to get immediate feedback on simple issues?

Your last sentence is incredible. No, I don't want my own flow to be preserved at the expense of others'. That's why I ask async and do something else while I wait for them to be free. But neither should I be a necessary component of someone else's flow at the expense of my own.

If one requires interrupting 6 other people to maintain flow, it's probably a good idea to start phrasing (hyperbole intentional) it like:

'To keep my own flow, I need to destroy the flow of all my colleagues'

And not:

'My colleagues destroy my flow when they can't babysit me and respond to my questions asap, how dare they'

It's like driving and then going like: 'Gee, all these other drivers are sure in my way, I need them out of the road so I can get places'. Guess what buddy, they also gotta get places, so damn right follow the laws, wait for your turn patiently and you will get there when you get there. Your colleagues also have stuff to do, and the world doesn't revolve only around YOUR flow.

So write down your questions and observations in a coherent list, stop pinging people one question at a time, or search harder in the docs provided that they exist, sometimes that's even better as a learning experience.

I can only second this. I honestly had the best time of my (professional) life when I had a little room with the rest of my team.

Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. It's really highly productive.

For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. I wouldn't want to wear them all the time as even the best ones become uncomfortable after few hours, but that's also not really needed in a small shared room.

> Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you.

This is untrue for even small teams in my experience.

> For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine.

Also not my experience.

That's so different from my work. I work in a team of about 30 people on 1 feature of a very popular app. None of us are working on the same thing at any given time. Most projects have 1 person that works on it or knows how it works. It's sad and isolating. And the company forces this culture by virtue of how promo works.

I worked at a place with a great office layout. A group of a few people working on the same or related things could all have private offices with doors, but it was also easy for people to call out questions to others or gather together to discuss ideas and see what others are up to.

There would be a large room off of a hallway, divided into 8 offices, arranged like this:

  +---------+---------+
  |         |         |
  |         |         |
  +-----+  -+-  +-----+
  |                   |
  |     |       |     |
  +-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |
  |                   |
  +-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |
  |                   |
  +-------|   |-------+

Each office had floor to ceiling walls, with a door and a large window. Need to be left along to do some deep work or deep thinking? Close your door. Want to be more sociable? Open your door. Put nice chairs or small sofas in the common area in the middle so people can hang out there when not doing something that requires being at their computer (e.g., reading printed documentation).

The larger offices at the top can be used for more senior people, or the group manager, or for a lab, or a library, or a break room.

You could extend this to two teams working on different projects but under a common manager or senior engineer by putting them in separate clusters side by side, and merging the adjacent top offices so that the common manager or senior engineer's office is part of both clusters:

  +---------+---------+---------+---------+
  |         |                   |         |
  |         |                   |         |
  +-----+  -+-  +-----+-----+  -+-  +-----+
  |                   |                   |
  |     |       |     |     |       |     |
  +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |           |             |
  |                   |                   |
  +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |     |       |     |
  |                   |                   |
  +-------|   |-------+-------|   |-------+

What we were doing was video games for early consoles, mostly Mattel Intellivision but later also for Atari VCS, and also later for the Commodore VIC-20 computer. That kind of work required a mix of brainstorming and collaboration with periods where you really need to concentrate without being disturbed to figure out how to actually make it work on the hardware (weird processor, weird graphics chip, under 200 bytes of RAM (although later cartridges could have RAM which allowed some games to have more), a couple K ROM, and all programmed in assembly language). That office layout supported that quite well.

I had the privilege of designing a small 4 office space exactly like this for our small bioinformatics developer core. It was beautiful and worked very well. Then the company's legal department decided Legal would benefit more from it and kicked us out. It goes back to how much a company values its developers.

This is the best. Offices with doors, as a semaphore for availability, and a close by common area for collaboration.

If collaboration occurs spontaneously and your door isn’t closed, it’s easy to join in. If it turns out that someone is essential, turn it into an actual design meeting.

The best teams I’ve worked on had this arrangement and developed their own cadence - morning walks for cofeee, water cooler tv show commonalities.

Having the refuge of a known private space made group participation easier - I would seek out and benefit from the social technical in person interactions, as opposed to an open office plan where I would start out with determination of defending my personal mental space at all costs.

This layout seems common for graduate student offices in academic buildings. I was jealous.

I think the key part of that is working on the same thing.

I work in a large company, and team is spread out over multiple cities.

We actually will often to group video calls to have a similar thing to what you describe - being able to ask a quick question, run ideas by other, etc.

However, going to the office I'm just with people who are working on different things, often doing calls which I find distracting...

I'm glad you like it. Let's just all remember that other people feel differently and will be productive in very different circumstances. I don't need to feel very connected to the team, they are just business partners who are trading their time for money. If we can be friendly, that's awesome, but I'd much rather be connected to my family.

Personally, I've experienced open office, fully private office etc. Private office/remote are my favorites, followed by small room with a few people (I also had that in the gaming industry, it wasn't too bad) and, in a distant and humiliating last place, open office.

I always find it surprising that so many people struggle to make effective human connections over chat. I think it must be generational, as I believe these are the connections I and other young people prefer.

Once you have a solid foundation, text chat is almost as easy at maintaining that connection as in person conversation.

Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work.

Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available.

Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.

I've made numerous friends over IRCs, Warcraft 3 chat channels and whatnot and had preferred it over face-to-face (and I still prefer chat over zoom calls!) but as I've gotten older, I started appreciating talking in real life more and more, and now struggle to form connections over chat. I wonder if there are others who are in the same boat.

You cannot compare an open chat, with a strong interest in a particular topic vs you team's Slack channel.

Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement.

Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes.

If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.

I've also never had particular problems making connections over chat (I'm not old and not young); particularly in companies where I've had a chance to meet people in person even once or twice, I've found online communication no problem at all

You'll need a new theory. I've worked with two late millenial/gen-z developers who couldn't hold up a slack conversation to save their lives, so we went to zoom very quickly when they needed anything.

And I struggle to understand how can you make any real connections without seeing and hearing other person. There is so much communication hidden in body language and voice that for me any kind of text communication is just poor substitute. And I am not even extrovert that loves interaction with others (rather the opposite) and still know this intuitively to be true.

Old person here, been using some form of chat since 1984 (The talk command on VMS).

I agree. If I have a personal office I might as well sit at home.

I hate open office space as much as the next person, but small team rooms are great. Can have the walls plastered with post-its, screens, drawing boards etc. If I hear two coworkers discuss something, I can chip in if relevant. Information flow just happens by itself.

When I was junior I shared an office with a senior. I was constantly asking him questions. He pretty much knew everything, I'm not kidding, this guy was amazing. So this arrangement worked out really well for me, but not sure how much he liked having his work interrupted so much. Could be that between the two of us, the benefits averaged out to zero.

This is where headphones can help. Headphones on, don't bother the person or only chat.

That was an unwritten rule the last time I worked in an open space.

I find people don't care and will talk to you with or without headphones on and expect you to take them off.

About half at my last job always had headphones on to be able to concentrate.

This is the way

Demanding an instant answer is often a burden to teammates. If they have spare time to answer they will answer in chat. Be patience and be respectful to working routines of other people.

>Some do, not all do. I do much better in a room with ~6 people that are working on the same project. Much better than working at home. Much better than a private office (which I've had).

I wonder how many of these remaining 5 people have a take similar to me. WFH is where I'm most productive and most happy to work. Doing the kind of work you describe above "with 6 people on one project" is for 90% of the time an exercise in babying the least up to speed team member at the cost of distracting everyone.

I get it, some people just like being around people and doing stuff "together", and some types of work may even benefit from that when stars align(brainstorming etc). Most types of work I do in software don't. Especially now, post covid when WFH became normalised and people who were opposed to it on various grounds were forced to learn how to use it effectively.

>* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

That's what the phone is for, with additional benefit of status from everyone. If I see someone is busy I don't phone them I look for someone else, If I see they are "green" I do and I get my answer instantly without disturbing anyone.

>running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled

Again, same thing. Pick up a phone. If you just want to run something "by everyone". Wait for your daily/weekly team meeting and ask then. Yes, it forces you to write ideas down not to forget them (if they can wait), but it's massively more convenient to everyone else.

> * brainstorming. Same as above

I had many a good brainstorming session online (mostly with voice). What do you need to accomplish it is: - good audio equipment, Internet access and a quiet location for everyone. No calling into a meeting "from my car, while going to the doctor", or "from the office while people are talking in the background", no "crappy headphones etc". All this ruins productivity for everyone. If people are using cameras(which is nice) everyone has to have the bandwidth for it. Also if you have more than 5 people in your meeting, make use of the "raise hand" feature. Then brainstorming can happen very well. Especially while looking at a document/whiteboard together with systems that show you in real time what everyone does.

In fact above a certain number of people (8 maybe) brainstorming sessions seem a lot more effective to me online than in person. Why? Because you have few communication channels. You have the shared whiteboard/document, voice, and chat so while someone is talking you can post a question to the chat without interrupting.

>getting a feeling for what everyone is up to

That's what regular planning meeting is for.

>feeling part of a team, working on the same thing

I suppose that's a personal thing, but I always felt that including during my 7 years of WFH 100%.

Edit: there is only one real disadvantage to WFH, and it's for junior people wanting to learn. It's much harder to gather knowledge by osmosis, just by being in the office if most senior people are WFH. But then as a leader one has to decide what is more important.

Phone? I'd always leave my status as do not disturb then. I don't know when I'm about to enter a state of productivity. Only once in a blue moon do I spin around in my chair quietly asking someone to come bug me because I'm bored/don't have anything fun to work on.

Just want to add that I only became (at least in my opinion) a good programmer by sitting next to a very good and passionate one that I was able to question from time to time and may have interrupted his work some days.

I also probably helped him brainstorm ideas with me and debugging, since he would just say what's on his mind while doing it, and I'd do the same, and sometimes this kind of ping pong debugging/brainstorming together yields way better results than solo work. I really like one time he was trying to see how to open the chrome debugger to debug the chrome debugger, and I just knew how to do it (same shortcut while focussed on open debugger) since I had done it by mistake :D

I am convinced that you get more in a collaborative environment having a few devs sitting next to each other in pairs/small groups that they enjoy being with than anything else. IMO with remote work you get hidden inefficiencies that the company can attempt to fix by just hiring more people in the team (and a culture of let's do less meeting, less face to face, more work) takes over and that 1+1=more than 2 environment I was very excited about is gone..

Can someone who is a fan of remote work tell me how a new grad excited about writing code could find a mentor and really up their game in the remote world with what's becoming "standard" way of doing meetings etc?

A counterargument to what I describe is how successful open source projects have always been remote with passionate people working on them

I am a huge fan of mentorship; I benefited from it early in my career, and I strive to offer it to others now. I don't think that requires an open office at all, though. I think mentorship works even better if you're in a quiet environment where you can talk comfortably and not worry about bothering the people around you.

That said, I can attribute one positive effect in my career to having worked in an open office. Early in my career, I happened to overhear someone on the phone dealing with an Open Source licensing issue (and I genuinely do find Open Source licensing interesting), went over to chat with them afterwards, ended up finding out about the company's Open Source review process, one thing led to another, and not long afterwards I co-ran that process company-wide (for a 100k+ person company), which I really enjoyed and which provided a great deal of visibility into all the work happening in the company.

I don't think "happened to overhear one side of someone's phonecall and strike up a good conversation about it" is a "benefit" I'd say is worth the pain of an open office, but I still want to acknowledge it.

Well... I have a counter example of a failure in FOSS, because of remoteness of the responsible department:

At IBM working in a satellite office, I wanted to contribute to Jenkins. The fact that any person with the authority to allow me to do that was "behind an office door". Multiple emails back and forth - I ended up ditching the idea of getting the approval and quit IBM.

Closed doors should be for focus time, which should not be "all the time". Having small team offices and quiet rooms - can contribute to people's ability to focus. But personal offices is just another door that stops people from collaborating will inevitably stop a lot of valuable collaboration.

If you want to collaborate, that’s what setting up a meeting with an agenda is for.

＞ how a new grad excited about writing code could find a mentor and really up their game in the remote world

Everyone's different, you wanted a mentor next to you, many don't enjoy that relationship. To answer your question, looking at the fresh graduates we take, extremely detailed code reviews, a lot of chat and some pair coding on the overly difficult parts seems to be working good enough for them to reach a decent level within about half a year.

When I onboarded a junior engineer in 2021 I had a one hour scheduled Zoom call every morning for the first three or four months, and we'd Zoom usually at least another hour ad-hoc in the afternoon. He would screen share, I would screen share, and we got a lot of learning and programming done that way. You have to have a culture of people dropping Zoom links at any time and being ready to respond within say, five minutes most of the time. Or at least that's what worked for me.

In the past I've participated in weekly pair coding sessions or group coding sessions, say 2-4 hours on a Friday afternoon. That was with an open source project. The meetings included both maintainers and newer contributors.

Maybe look around for an active open source project you'd like to contribute to, and ask around its community and propose a regular pair/group coding session?

Edit: Crucially, we all took turns "driving", even during a single meeting. Sometimes someone wanted help on a branch, and they started driving and then someone else "took the wheel" for a few minutes then passed it back.

I found our interactions were similar to session-style sports, like skateboarding or bouldering. We all attempted a challenge together and could see how each other approached the problem. As in sports, sometimes even knowing something is possible is all you need.

> I am convinced that you get more in a collaborative environment having a few devs sitting next to each other in pairs/small groups that they enjoy being with than anything else.

Like an open zoom meeting where people unmute themselves only they need to ask something?

With the additional focus-aiding utility provided by services like focusmate?

Similar to people gaming online with audio chat but more disciplined.

Combining home office with virtual open floor communication on demand.

I think pair programming is way better remote, when you can share screens.

The primary means I've seen it happen by is by being part of a team that does pair programming rather than code reviews. In general I've seen it do wonders for team alignment, integration speed, and ramping up new colleagues, junior or otherwise. It does take a concerted effort to learn and do well though. There are best practices, and putting two random programmers behind the same computer does not necessarily mean they'll find and apply those.

I'm curious to see if there's been studies on its efficacy, and whether or not those studies agree with my entirely anecdotal experience.

Mentorship doesn't have to be interactive. My first boss mainly mentored me over email. In fact, my first job largely worked over email and it was a bit of a culture shock when the next one was largely instant message based and also had daily meetings as well. I felt a bit like I had gone back to infant school.

It may be a bit harder now because as programming became more high level, the cadence of development went up. However I think the skill set that you gain when you are force to work at a lower cadence (and spend more time "sharpening the axe") is still valuable.

I think the interruptions in a group setting have huge disastrous effects as nobody really ever gets into a good flow state.

I'm sure it's useful for training and mentorship, but that's frankly not your employer's problem these days. People switch jobs every year, and if you train up staff only their next company is really going to reap the benefits. If learning on the job raises retention then it's only marginal. If anything it makes people "worth more" and they more easily find the next gig that comes with a pay bump

You can easily skill up by:

- watching conference videos on YouTube

- during code review

- go on your lang subreddit or forums and read about how other people skin their cats

What you want is basically unstructured interruption based code review ~ which is nice for the junior but horrible for productivity over all

I highly, highly disagree. Getting advice on the spot is often critical. And rarely will you get good practical advice like "always do a dry build locally from the command line" on the forums.

I can't even count how many times I had to tell other engineers, that they have to run a clean build locally...

Not to mention, that mentorship can be useful just for the processes that are present within the company.

Too much interruption is bad, I agree, but there are some type of skills / mindset that are 100x times simpler to gain by contact with colleagues than by training on your own (even when looking at forums). Especially on the things that you wouldn't not think about improving.

I had the luck of working with a dude who was extremely good at analyzing data, simply by loading json files in sublime text, doing a mix of pretty-printing, multi-cursors changes (with usually 1000+ cursors), regex-foo, playing with buffers and other linux commands. It was a weird set of skills that was truly magic to behold, and not amount of Youtube conference or code review could have replaced that.

There are some coding livestream that can help with that, but it's not as efficient as being in the room as talented peoples.

The most in sync i've ever been with a team was playing end-game raids in MMO's using ventrilo. huddles, meet, and zoom just aint the same. I've never tried discord though.

Discord is funny.

The bad: it's a little too cutesy, a little too "gamer" targeted. It's a little tiresome.

The fantastic: In a call, you get individual volume sliders (and mute buttons) for every single participant. I cannot use Zoom after experiencing this, it's simply intolerable to be at the mercy of the person with the loudest and most obnoxious mike/background noise

I mean if you set aside the mere theming, Discord is everything Slack should be

You got more, maybe the company got more, the senior got less: two jobs, only one pay. Now with remote work, companies really have to carve out budget and time to train people. They don't like that.

> I am convinced that you get more in a collaborative environment having a few devs sitting next to each other in pairs/small groups that they enjoy being with than anything else.

You're confusing collaboration with physicality. Too many people make the mistake of thinking that they need to be sitting next to somebody in order to ask them questions, or have a quick chat, or get them to teach you about a project. Those are all things you should be doing in remote work as well.

Should and do, are two different things.

They consistently happen at greater frequency with proximity.

Three years of wfh with terrible results before we started returning to the office one day a week, has shown me that proximity is a deal breaker for anyone who wants to progress into roles that require mentorship of others.

A DM will never be as compelling as asking someone something in person. People can and will entirely ignore DMs about topics that they would never ignore in person.

You could reach "generals effect" by being a listener to skilled dev's musings - sometimes all one needs to unblock is to tell somebody else about what the problem is and the solution suddenly pops up without any contribution from the listener. So you could form a symbiotic relationship with a skilled dev - you'd learn their tricks and they'd use you as their "unblocker".

Biggest thing is changing cultural dynamics to make maximal efficiency of remote work. Which includes that sometimes, you get a team of people together temporarily in person to really focus and iterate on issues, but we all know the majority of time, this isn't needed for proper collaboration.

As far as excitement and collaboration goes: this is a culture and communication problem. If your company hasn't done a good job of training people to use the proper tools of collaboration they're not doing it right.

Same with mentorship, it should be done as a (possibly rotating) thing by people who are trained to do just that: be good mentors. This is not a burden that should fall on the uninitiated. This should also have concrete expectations for everyone involved. Its a job in and of itself, after all.

All of these things point to cultural company deficits, they're not an inherently immutable thing that is a downside of remote work.

> Which includes that sometimes, you get a team of people together temporarily in person to really focus and iterate on issues, but we all know the majority of time, this isn't needed for proper collaboration.

Some remote workers here dismisses even that, because it disallows them to take residence at the other side of the world from the office. Mileage truly may vary.

I work at a 30 person company in a partitioned office designed for four people, including the CEO, a graphic designer, and a secretary. My role involves focused programming tasks, which are frequently disrupted by the office dynamics.

When the CEO is away, the graphic designer and secretary frequently engage in loud, casual conversations, discussing everything from personal matters to home decor, like curtain colors. They also have a habit of yelling over the office partitions, adding to the disruption. Despite using noise-cancelling headphones, these distractions, including both the conversations and the yelling, consistently hinder my concentration.

Interestingly, the secretary has expressed concern about the perceived level of activity in the office, especially when the CEO is present. The secretary has mentioned to both me and the graphic designer that there might not be enough typing noises, suggesting a worry that the CEO might not think everyone is working hard. This concern about appearances adds another layer to the already challenging office environment.

>This concern about appearances adds another layer to the already challenging office environment.

This sentence sums up the biggest headache of my professional career.

I have never worried about appearances, but instead focused on doing good work.

To my detriment. I know I've missed out on key assignments and at least one promotion at my current employer because I don't sell myself or focus on perception management.

I guess what I'm saying is, this exists everywhere, in every field of work.

Thats one reason I prefer small companies. Less bureaucratic BS, more accountability, etc. Sure there isn't as much room for career growth and other downsides, but much simpler.

>This concern about appearances adds another layer to the already challenging office environment.

I sympathize, but I haven't yet had the pleasure of working with other people without the existence of those kind of friction layers.

At my age I just assume now that it's just part of the human condition -- but maybe it's just me.

Send this to your coworkers :P

https://switchandclick.com/best-loud-mechanical-keyboards/

I like to think that providing a team with private offices and all the old-school perks would help create a working environment where they'd feel more appreciated, and thus end up working better.

If I ever hire a team that isn't remote, that'd be something I'd want to explore. That and giving them assistants. I want to find out what an experienced dev team that doesn't have to bother with any admin or other distractions can do.

Freeing people up as much as possible to just think and build in peace. I like to think that it would make a difference.

This strikes me as very thoughtful, though I imagine I'd end up concerned about whether I was feeding said assistant sufficiently meaningful work...

I would love to have someone else sit in on meetings, but i suspect I'm there in the hope that I'll ask an incisive question to shake a hidden requirement loose.

> That and giving them assistants. I want to find out what an experienced dev team that doesn't have to bother with any admin or other distractions can do.

You can already do that with remote staff. Stuff like planning travels or dealing with reimbursement of expenses is almost always extremely annoying for those who only have to interface with the arcane systems twice a year.

Although I am sympathetic overall, it really isn't about programmers, it's about anyone doing mental-flow work with focus. Open plan is for a different state of mind and product. It can be condusive to some good outcomes, but the cost is the loss of flow.

Writers need flow. People studying need flow. I could imagine techs looking at breast cancer scans need flow. It isn't only programmers who need this.

In the same vein, an office with a door won't help at all if you have higher-ups who expects instant responses to any messaging/e-mail query every five minutes.

Well, if you don't answer instantly, then you are stopping them in their flow.

I've noticed this some times ago and now I cannot unsee it: this all discussion is too often about "what is best for me and my flow even if it ruins other people's flow" rather than discussing a proper solution.

I'm not sure you are talking about the same thing when you say "flow" that I think most of the other people are talking about when they say "flow".

Flow as most are using it here, also known as being "in the zone", is when you achieve a deep state of focus on one particular task, and everything else seems to melt away. You reach maximal energy and enthusiasm for the work. It is where you reach peak productivity and creativity.

Most people cannot just enter this state at will, and when they do achieve it cannot maintain it for more than an hour or two. Getting into this state takes 20 to 30 minutes or more.

When you are in this state it takes very little to knock you out of it. A ringing phone, someone talking to you even if you just tell them to come back in a couple hours, a beep from a messaging app...all of those can knock you out of the zone.

Getting back in after being knocked out takes another 20 to 30 minutes. This means that if you are getting one interruption or distraction every 30 minutes throughout your time at your desk it is unlikely that you will get any time in the zone.

>> In the same vein, an office with a door won't help at all if you have higher-ups who expects instant responses to any messaging/e-mail query every five minutes

> Well, if you don't answer instantly, then you are stopping them in their flow

In the case of a manager interrupting you they probably weren't in the zone. But even if it is someone who was in the zone that is interrupting you them having to stop and message you was probably enough to knock them out of it.

It will almost certainly be more productive for the organization overall for them to work on something else until you naturally exit the zone.

Agreed. Even back when I had my own single office I got interrupts all the time. And I need flow when programming. Every interrupt cleared the cache and I had to spend time building it up again.

I used to work from another time zone for a few years. That was highly efficient. The first half of the working day there were no interrupts and I could go into the flow and be productive. The second half, or more like the last three hours I would have video meetings and back-and-forth emails etc. and just doing "normal" slow programming - not the type needing concentration and flow. People emailing me about stuff would do so when I was sleeping, and when I started working I could start by going through that, plan, start working, and have it ready for them when they got up and began working. It was ideal, in many ways (except that I couldn't physically drop by the office whenever I wanted).

Senior programmer on management side. Personally when I'm coding, yeah, isolated, distraction free environment is my demand. I'm knocking stuff out, achieving flow state. Anything else I feel frustrated that I'm not performing at my peak. I liken it to brain surgery. You wouldn't expect to be well received if you just pop into the OR to discuss getting new scalpels in the middle of an operation.

That being said, it's really the crux of the issue with work from home that the trajectory of the company doesn't really depend on individual workers hitting their maximum output. An individual having the best coding experience is rarely the ideal option for the company. It is far more important that the team moves in a cohesive formation. If the distractions truly cut productivity in half we can double the number of seats. Going too far and too fast without focused guidance results in deadtime and technical debt. It's a tortoise and the hare situation. Would we rather have 10 rabbits moving one brick at a time or 20 turtles strapped together towing a trailer with a full stack of bricks.

It's also not like we haven't tried to make remote work and other options be successful. The reality is that it's something we can pretty effectively A/B test. The results have been fairly consistent across fields and even companies. Physically collaborative environments yield better and faster results.

> If the distractions truly cut productivity in half we can double the number of seats.

Usually salaries cost more than offices.

> Going too far and too fast without focused guidance results in deadtime and technical debt.

Focused guidance requires intentional communication. Not hoping people will overhear the right conversations.

> It's also not like we haven't tried to make remote work and other options be successful. The reality is that it's something we can pretty effectively A/B test. The results have been fairly consistent across fields and even companies. Physically collaborative environments yield better and faster results.

Show the data.

> Usually salaries cost more than offices.

Yes, they do. But productivity is not linear.

> Show the data.

I don't have the data, but the reasons behind agile are exactly that - extremely collaborative environment.

> An individual having the best coding experience is rarely the ideal option for the company

I think a company that wants to keep talent for as long as possible without offering FAANG level salaries should reconsider this position. Hiring is super expensive and risky. If you have good people, you want to keep them. I think offering flexible, meaningful and enjoyable work is a great way to keep people around longer and if it matters to them that they have a space where they can focus, I would give it to them. Creating an environment where they are less happy probably will make them look elsewhere.

That said, I do agree that siloed work comes with a set of issues, but I think there are other solutions to the problem.

I have never heard this and I don't even know how you would measure it. There are so many variables this would affect, not to mention, how do you even measure productivity short and long term? Do you also measure turnover? I don't think we actually know nor do I think results from one place translate over to another. I've done both and both have worked and have had their own set of challenges. My personal take is that hiring good people matters more than whatever setup you have. Remote gives you a bigger pool of people to pick from and is desirable by many, so based on that I think that it can give a very big competitive advantage.

And so the can of worms opens again!

No. Not everyone wants or needs a private office with a door. It doesn't always make us more productive. It is not always better to work from home. Open plan offices are not always bad. Most of my day is not spent working on something so complicated or advanced that interuption will screw me over. I am spending most of my day building block towers because I can split most of my work into small pieces.

On the other hand, if distraction is a problem, as someone else said, it isn't the open plan office which is at fault. It is planning your time; setting DnD when you are actually doing something difficult; it is making sure that people don't randomnly call your best engineers on the phone whenever they have problem but they instead use chat or email as an async method instead.

Everyone wants to be in some control of their space and thoughts.

I don't have to work on some advanced grand vision to not like being available all the time. I am also not claiming that I am going to be super productive when I close the door.

It is not my fault not setting DnD it - this is what triggers me - no I don't have to set DnD if someone wants something from me they should make sure it actually IS important, they should make sure they got their stuff right by trying out things and thinking about what they have to do and what tried and what they really want to ask.

Then they can also send me an email, send me IM so I can reply as soon as I get to it.

Coming to me 9:00 when I am still taking my coat off and opening laptop - asking questions well that is not my problem not setting DnD.

Surprised not to see a link to Joel Spolsky’s (20 year old!) on the bionic office with private space for all programmers : https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ this has been known for decades.

But, why offices at all? All my productivity problems are solved by just working from home.

This. I'm about to build a dev team next year, and my co-founder is kinda disappointed that I want them all completely remote. He's the old-school "let's have a big office where we can all get together" and I'm "let's not and say we did".

I can see way down the line there'll be a problem with Engineering vs The Rest because we'll be remote and they'll be in an office. But tbh there is always a problem with Engineering vs The Rest regardless.

I want my devs to be able to switch Slack off, not answer emails, go for a walk in the park, and stare at the ceiling for hours while properly thinking about what they're building. Too much code is written in haste.

may your project prosper.

You sound like my current employer. Working for them the only worrying thing I ever think about is that I don’t want this gig to end, ever.

Have you guys ever thought about the fact that there are nerds that like so socialize and hate working from home, because it gets f'ing lonely after a while? I want to see people. The corona pandamic where I worked almost 2 years from home drove me into a severe depression.

Yes, I have a theory based on this. I think that roughly 40%-60% of developers prefer remote, the remainder prefer in-office. So if you mandate in-office, roughly half of your developers will be unhappy. If you go full-remote, again, roughly half of your developers will be unhappy. So what do you do? I think you have to pick one and stick with it. Over time, you'll collect people who prefer remote or in-office. It won't be easy, but doing "hybrid" is absolutely the wrong decision, that makes no one happy.

The reason I like the office is mostly for the free food and events. I don't get much more out of my coworkers by being physically close to them. They don't like to be bugged (I don't either, usually). Maybe a little at lunch when I can pick their brains about random crap that doesn't warrant a meeting but not much.

I really believe your number is more like 80%. But yeah, the overall idea stands.

Have you ever thought about the fact many people like to work from home because it leaves more time to socialize with family and friends?

Pandemic restrictions have ended. You could eat lunch with a neighbor who hates working from home also. Or rent shared working space.

On the other hand I have no interest in socializing with my colleagues, and I'm no intravert either. I have plenty of actual friends outside of work, and the nice thing about working from home is that I can catch up with my mates during the workday while still working!

Yes? And people like you have enjoyed an office environment that by default catered to you. It's not those of us who finally found productivity in a controlled, quiet environment that lack empathy, it's you, the group that can't imagine that "normal" might not be universally healthy and that for the first time are finding themselves not the default perspective.

Well, yes. I used to have my own office, for most of my career. Then when we had to move offices there wasn't enough room for that, so now we have smaller or larger rooms with from a few to many people. In general I'm much less efficient when working like that (the only exception is when I, for specific purposes, join up with another person to do work in tandem with something. That can be highly efficient, but it's limited to just those specific cases). So that's one reason I use my home office most of the time. But it is useful to meet up with the others once in a while (and not just by Teams), so after this morning working from home I'm heading to the office for a few hours.

The older i get the more i think, the project management paragdigm should be one of protecting the productive core at all costs from external disruptions.

This includes deriving the actual wanted goals early in the project, planning properly and the violently shield the engineers by keeping external factors like the management microcosm, stakeholders and non-developers busy with busywork, placated with blatant lies and overall away from doing damage. Regarding the engineer team organiziation - they will work something out.

They don't need that car-production-belt whistle and whip.

I read maybe two or three of these articles here on HN, and I am totally convinced that this is true, but my boss is not reading HN and has a different opinion. A shared office is also cheaper for him, so I need more than forwarding a link to an article to convince him.

I would love to hear more about how people actually changed their situation, other than the obvious way of looking for another job.

In my case, eat heavily seasoned high fiber foods. 6 weeks tops.

You can't you vote with your feet unfortunately.

My analogy for some kinds of programming is mental juggling. Good programmers, juggle lots of balls at one time: the problem components, constraints, other problem elements, production issues, reliability issues, all the possible solutions.

A programmer starts with a couple of these, gets them in the air, then adds more and more concepts. When I am good I can juggle lots of them and see how they interoperate.

Once all the balls in the air, whirling around like some sort of planetary system orbiting a sun, they can coalesce into -- an idea, a solution, or something.

If this gets disturbed, all those balls come tumbling down. This is not a 30 second thing, this can be an hours thing. Or more.

Non programmers do not understand this process. I believe.

Wow, this is the best way to describe the flow state to my non technical manager. Thanks.

However, I don’t think she will still able to understand and empathise.

In my whole professional life (last 15y) there was not a single time where I had anything resembling a private space where I could just close the door and work in peace.

The norm here in German startup world seem to be open floors. And if you do have rooms they get crammed full of people.

It's not the end of the world though. A room full of engineers is tolerable, and if they're on your team this is even desirable.

The trouble only comes when the CEO wants to see everyone sweating, so you get stuffed together with Sales or Ops.

Working from home made things a lot easier though. And if the company is big enough it's usually also possible to just book a meeting room if you need to work in silence for a while :-)

> A room full of engineers is tolerable, and if they're on your team this is even desirable.

Until one of the engineers who has no social awareness decides to eat at their desk instead of taking lunch elsewhere, or you just need some silent time and there's just no option for it.

I'm very reluctantly pursuing on-site or hybrid positions as a last ditch (desperate) effort to find some work, and I'm not the slightest bit optimistic about being in a room full of anybody. I used to think an open room full of people was the better choice, but that was when I was young and naive. Serious focus demands control over your senses, and there's a difference between setting up at a bustling cafe and going in every day to sit directly adjacent to the same people with no concept of real private space.

>Until one of the engineers who has no social awareness decides to eat at their desk instead of taking lunch elsewhere

Maybe he's aware, and just doesn't care because the company has already made him miserable by 1) not having an "elsewhere" to take that lunch, and 2) putting his desk right next to the sales team.

Could very well be, in which case that would be even worse.

>no social awareness decides to eat at their desk instead of taking lunch elsewhere

What? How is eating your lunch at your desk a social awareness thing? If it doesn't smell and isn't loud, what's the problem?

It requires social awareness to be conscientious of the fact that it might smell or produce noise. I'd wager that anyone who's worked in an open office and is sensitive to these things could attest to the prevalence of people who underestimate how often they chew with their mouth open, for example.

In one case, an adjacent developer was bringing in hard-boiled eggs and cracking them against the edge of his desk while wearing headphones and chewing with his mouth open, while the smell of the eggs wafted over the 3ft to mine, and then he'd get started on the apples. He'd do this 3-5 times a day, so needless to say I'm not enthusiastic about open offices. I did also awkwardly bring this up directly with him, but it's tricky to navigate a situation in which it's not just the food, but also the mouth sounds and occasional burps. If I did get a break from this specific person, it would just allow the sounds from everyone else eating chips or having conversations to be more prominent. By the time covid roled around, I was already burnt out from trying to compensate from all those things, and the respite I could have got from working at home just arrived too late to save me.

> If it doesn't smell

I guess that's exactly the problem. The only food which doesn't smell is cold food.

>the CEO wants to see everyone sweating

In all seriousness, sweating is the biggest factor for me. My clothes smell so much nicer ever since I began working from home

Current writing something like BLAS from scratch for 2 years. I admit that my house is a better work place than my lab. Writing loops and let compiler to optimize that for you is easy. But thinking in terms of vector, tensor, broadcasting, parallel and then convert everything into bit operations is hard. Seriously I can't do any low level implementation in office environment.

For high level stuff like architecture design and writing application functions, I appreciate pair programming. I think that is more effective and creative than working alone. But still everyone doing their own stuff in a big room is not my kind in this situation.

While I don't really _disagree_ with any of this, I want to raise a point from the other direction - it's possible (and for some of us, absolutely necessary) to build software such that holding a large "structure of thoughts and possibilities" in your head is not required.

I find myself largely incapable of doing so, open-plan office or not, and have compensated by adopting development approaches that break problems down in consistent enough ways (into small enough pieces) that the structures I have to pick up and put down are never all that complex. Which is good, because they fall out of my head just all the time. ADHD, a very poor memory for detail, and a role that has me responsible for juggling many tasks concurrently would _destroy_ my productivity if this article were universal truth.

Don't get me wrong, I _hate_ working in an open-plan office. But the impact it has on my output is not because the interruptions affect my flow, it's because the constant social contact stresses the heck out of me >.<

The article oversimplifies things a little, IMHO.

It's not the open floor plan office that's the main cause of the problem for DnD type work, nor are offices with doors a general solution.

It's all about policy. A separate office with a door doesn't do you any good if every ten minutes someone drops by to knock on it. A private office also doesn't help if you're constantly bombarded with "urgent" messages from various people and are expected to instantly reply.

Most of the issues can be solved by simply implementing reasonable policies. Can't deal with the noise of an open plan office? Provide ANC headphones. Need time to focus? Define binding "focus hours" each day during which no meetings are scheduled, no messages are sent, and people are left alone. Keep the inevitable exceptions to an absolute minimum.

In addition to that, it also helps to have separated spaces (e.g. meeting rooms) available that can be booked for DnD sessions if the need arises.

I always see noise cancelling headphones put forward as a solution to noisy office environments . . . I don't want to wear headphones. I don't want to be cut off in my own bubble. I want to be connected to my environment, and I want it to be a nice place to get my work done.

It's not the solution (plus they have an "aware"-mode that doesn't shut you off completely), it's a possible solution and a rather simple and cheap one at that.

Depending on the circumstances it isn't always possible to provide a work environment that everyone considers to be a "nice place to get work done". Some people don't mind background chatter, others can't concentrate if someone as much as coughs somewhere.

It's also a bit hard to not being being cut off in your own bubble as you put it, while simultaneously wanting to be connected to everyone else. Being in a separate, single desk office is no different from being in a bubble in that sense.

And some people don't want to stop interacting just to cater to you, and some people want you to answer their question immediately so they don't break their flow.

And I have sometimes seen people saying things similar to you, and then being loud or distracting when it was more convenient for them.

I understand your position, but as usual with these discussion, everything seems to always centered about "what I would prefer" rather than trying to understand everyone's needs.

> Can't deal with the noise of an open plan office? Provide ANC headphones.

Company-issued PPE for hazardous offices?

DnD? I can't not read Dungeons and Dragons. Debug and develop?

Do not Disturb.

Once someone scheduled a meeting with me on focus Friday. So uncool. I almost declined.

Favorite office setup as a programmer - was early 2000's.

First key feature - 50% of the exterior building walls was windows, the other 50% had offices.

Second key feature - cubicle design. It was staggered duets of cubes. Great for privacy... and at best made it easy to turn around and talk to 2 other people if needed. Best of all... each cube had a full window instead of your classic wall. And these windows would all allign so that you could see straight out to the outside if you wanted. You had privacy - but still daylight.

Most "cube farms" I see are a sea of interior cubes completely surrounded by wall of exterior offices. That's depressing. Or we see an open office concept where everyone has light but 0 privacy which is hard for concentration.

This particular design that I got to work in circa 2002-2005 was delightful at least for me (and then we moved offices and that design sadly didn't carry over).

I miss well designed cubes.

I worked in an office with 10 other people once.

It worked well, as long as the other people were devs or admins who didn't phone all the time.

The shittiest thing about going back to the office after the long WFH period has absolutely been the normalization of taking calls at your desk in the open office environment. At least before we had the mutual understanding that it's loud as it is and calls are to be taken in meeting rooms or anywhere else really.

When I graduated from college, never have I envisioned once that my optimal workspace is just a laptop, working from home, while spending time with fam, and get some hobbies done at the same time.

>while spending time with fam, and get some hobbies done at the same time

Getting paid to waste time not doing your job is considered work now?

> Getting paid to waste time not doing your job

Pretty much the definition of 90 % of all the meetings. Just putting on bluetooth earpieces and doing the laundry doesn't deduct the value of me hearing another round of very efficient 'cost savings' that they thought about somewhere up the chain or other administrative ideas.

Ever notice how the free range chicken tastes better?

Instead of wasting time browsing news sites playing on your phone or just zoning out during downtime, actually being able to take a break and do something you care about instead is _awesome_

> Getting paid to waste time not doing your job

You mean commuting? Getting commuting hours back each day allows you do to hobbies.

I should mention that listening to heavy metal music very loud is my hobby. This is impossible in a work setting.

We're always doing our jobs, even while we sleep! You can't switch off your brain (well I suppose you could try meditation).

Having worked in both open floor plan and private offices (9 vs 8 years respectively) I’ve come to the conclusion it just doesn’t matter.

What matters is the culture. A culture of “I’m working, only interrupt me only when necessary and keep the chit chat to a minimum, and retreat to a private space for long conversations” is basically the key. That and noise cancelling headphones.

The arch keystone got me thinking. What is a keystone and what makes it different to any other stone in the arch? Surely all the stones in the arch are needed to hold the structure in place. If any stone were to be removed the structure would collapse after all.

Most arch stones are precisely cut. Or at least we pretend they are precise. The keystone is different because it’s an oversized wedge that you slide in at the end to pick up the slack. You can’t cut it precisely because you don’t know how big it needs to be until it’s doing its job. Once in place though, you can trim it down to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.

There’s a metaphor here, I think, for the style of “engineering” we see in software. It’s not a value judgement other than to acknowledge that, with software, it’s ok to be good enough and to iterate. Lots of real world engineering is like that, but keystones may be an exception.

> These two types of work were first identified, to my knowledge, by the programmer and essayist Paul Graham.

The identification of flow state in programming was known well before Graham. Steve McConnell's Rapid Development (1996), https://archive.org/details/rapiddevelopment00mcco/page/506/... , has

"Flow time. During the analysis and design stages, software development is an ephemeral, conceptual activity. Like any conceptual activity, the quality of the work is dependent on the worker's ability to sustain a "flow state" — a relaxed state of total immersion in a problem that facilitates understanding of it and the generation of solutions for it (DeMarco and Lister 1987). Converting brain waves to computer software is a delicate process, and developers work best during the hours they spend in this state of effortless concentration. Developers require 15 minutes or more to enter a state of flow, which can then last many hours, until fatigue or interruption terminates it. If developers are interrupted every 11 minutes, they will likely never enter a flow state and will therefore be unlikely to ever reach their highest levels of productivity."

DeMarco and Lister 1987 is "Peopleware: Productive projects and teams". I can't find a first edition but you can read the relevant part of the second edition at https://archive.org/details/peoplewareproduc00dema_0/page/62... .

As I recall, in one of McConnell's books was a chart showing relative performance effectiveness of closed offices vs cubicles vs open floor plans, which got progressively worse. I can't now find that chart though.

My first job out of college (~2007) had an open office plan. The development team sat right next to all of the sales people making phone calls during the day. When someone made a sale, they would scream loud and then ring a bell (loud cheers then proceeded from the rest of their team).

This happened at least a dozen times/day. We were allowed to wear headphones, but could not listen to anything streaming online. I would record 8 hours of streaming radio the night before and then transfer it to my Ipod nano in the morning. I was usually so sleep-deprived that I didn't have any time to check the recording before work. Once/month, my Internet connection would go down and I would have 8 hours of white noise (those days were a nightmare).

I eventually figured out that I could RDP into my server at home and stream audio from there, and listen to it through the RDP connection. The Internet filters they were using couldn't detect it.

I think what finally made me quit was when I found out management had screen-monitoring software installed on all of our computers and would review it every hour.

A co-worker discovered it by accident and due to my inquisitive nature (which sometimes gets me in trouble), I tried to telnet into the listening port we found on his computer (to see what it was) and it completely crashed their monitoring software (must have been really shitty software). I was hauled in the next day and questioned to see if I did this with malicious intent and he was fired )I guess they were watching him for awhile and were gathering evidence. He had worked with the company for 5 years).

I got out at a good time. The company in question was in the loan industry and it melted down a year later in 2008 and the whole development team was laid off.

I hated this office experience so much, that since the job I had after this, I've only worked remote jobs (and still do) in my home office or office space I personally rent. I don't think I could ever go back.

Open office layouts might work for some jobs like sales or similar, but I always argued that even the desk placement has an impact. For example, I personally prefer to have a wall behind me instead of others walking or standing or chatting behind me. It’s just a big distraction, plus the usual interruptions that you get because you are sitting next to them. Additionally, if you are sensitive to noises and sounds like me, it’s even worse. In one of my jobs, it was like that and - since it was in engineering - the workshop was next to the office and you can imagine all kinds of noises. The worst part is I tried to explain that this environment is the worst for anything beyond just filling forms or doing presentations, but they never changed anything and even remote work was discouraged. I had to leave that eventually

It feels like there's a lot of productivity theory associated with private offices versus open office but I think the issue is rooted deeper than that. This is an organizational decision and it's one where it needs to be made with the organization's core objectives.

However, what it sometimes sounds to me is that there is this hope of a magic combination to crack productivity effectiveness through open offices or closed offices (or any other low level leveraged idea, like return to office vs remote office). The reality is that any configuration can work if the leaders of the organization are cognizant of the ramifications on the different employed individuals and address them accordingly -- but I believe most skip this chapter in leadership training.

> Why do <demographic> need/want <subjective thing>?

I'm starting to consider these sorts of low-effort, divisive titles as click bait these days.

The internet repeats itself a lot. If you want truly novel and thoughtful content you will want to turn to books. Audiobooks are fine, so are obscure technical corners of the web, what you want is the deep and expert content that is not surfaced in the short feedback loops of the internet.

I work remote, so I control who interrupts me. I can turn off Slack notifications, I can close my email, I can put up a calendar entry for 4 hours.

But I still have to do something to control my time. A door isn't enough, because someone will just knock or open it. You have to put in effort and plan ahead to control your workflow.

A lot of people seem to believe that work should be easy. It's actually difficult and complex to work really efficiently. It requires knowledge of how to work efficiently, and then it requires a lot of people to stick to a process, someone to measure it and keep people on track, and continuously changing it to improve. That's a lot more than just "don't interrupt me".

This ignores that in many organizations private offices with doors are status symbols and programmers aren't of the right status to get those. Office politics play an overweight role in way to many places for something like individual preferences to see the light of day.

That said, I have enjoyed the offices where I had an office with a door I could shut the best, as long as there were enough common areas so people could meet without a lot of hassle. I have found office arranged like that a lot less frequently because office space is a cost to be minimized so any space that isn't over used immediately is a waste.

At has been echoed in the article and in the comments, so many people are different. I write and run software in my head long before it gets into a text file. This is very mental work but I could do it at the Super Bowl successfully. I zone out like a pro and can get completely lost in my head with no fear of distractions.

Conversely when I am debugging or doing more creative stuff like systems design work, I love distractions. For some reason the momentary interruptions really help me reapproach the problem from a new angle.

When all else fails a crack open a beer, my very best work has always been done while sipping a cold one.

Working from the office ONLY works when everyone else is working from home and I'm the only one there.

At which point I might as well work from home, and sell the extraneous office space.

Similar issue: My small-ish company used to hand out the emails and phone numbers of its programmers. After enough of them threatened to leave because our customer-facing offices were constantly distracting them from projects, their policy changed entirely. Now there is a Jira firewall, managed by a liaison, and we get to things when we get to them. A distraction-free environment is the only way to get your money's worth from a good programmer.

Not to create too much of a political tangent, but the lack of private offices, or rather the ubiquitous mandatory nature of open offices, and its universal unpopularity with non-managers, is evidence imo that tech could use a union or professional association or guild or something.

Oh sure you can talk about high comp and career mobility. But where does all of the vaunted labor power of software engineers go when they ask for something as simple as a cubicle?

In my opinion, you might have an overly optimistic view of unions. And you might also be ignoring the downsides of unions.

I get that unions were/are necessary for things like mining workers or so, but SWE is quite different. I'd expect a union to be net-negative in our sector.

Systemic problems require systemic solutions. For over a decade now we’ve seen a steady supply of blog articles, studies (e.g. https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/in-open-offices-work...), and choruses of comment threads all agreeing that coders do not like open offices. Yet all of this is empty sentiment because managements don’t seem to care; they might not even notice. Now, a union might not be the solution to this. I already mentioned alternatives. Maybe there should just be more general participation in the ACM/IEEE and give it lobbying power. But the principle is that some sort of collective action seems to be in order, because there’s collective disgruntlement, yet the issue is still unaddressed.

Who makes the decision on office layout? Like specifically, what is the name of the role in a company that does this?

Further, has anyone talked to one of these persons before on changing the office layout to a developer-friendly design?

I've really wanted to do this but I'm not sure who in my company I would talk to about it.

From my personal point of view, expecting a union to force large corporations into modifying their office layout is irrational.

I think it was Fred Brooks, in the classic The Mythical Man Month (all the back in 1975), who noted the importance of not interrupting programmers' trains of thought. One of the general recommendations was to turn off phone ringers, for example. If it takes 15 minutes to get back into a concentration groove, being bothered 4 times an hour is a guarantee of destroyed productiveness or quality or both.

My ideal is somewhere in the middle. I don't necessarily need a private office, but a shared space with a small team. This way, I'm privy to all conversations relevant to me. Knowing what's going on often trumps the productivity gains of a quiet work environment.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.

I know opinions differ. My best experiences have been when sharing a office with one developer, both working on the same project. That way, if we had to discuss something, we would not disturb anyone else, and if not, we both could work in peace. It was easy to see how busy and "deep" the other guy was, and not to interrupt him at the wrong time.

Stack Overflow / Fog Creek famously embraced private offices: https://stackoverflow.blog/2015/01/16/why-we-still-believe-i...

I've definitely seem benefits from working in open plan. Sometimes it's helpful to overhear what others are doing because maybe they're lacking some information or maybe that thing has already been done elsewhere. Does a fresh graduate with no experience really want to be in an environment where everyone is shut in an office?

Equally, sometimes it's better to be quiet. Sometimes, quiet can be at home but sometimes homes are not quiet or uninterrupted.

Flexibility would be great, but I think a private office will always be seen as more prestigious, so those with that facility are unlikely go give it up so sit in a cube / open plan with the team, even where that would actually be beneficial.

À previous employer decided to switch from single to two person cubes with announced objective of enhanced collaboration. This intense developer got mated with a non technical social butterfly. Interruptions verging on harassment.

I called the environment: one developer for the price of two.

This monkey user comic illustrate it very well: https://www.monkeyuser.com/2018/focus/

Some prefer chaotic backgrounds, while others consider the Monastic silence of a monastery truly divine.

For hard problems (months/years), I think it requires cycling through both context states for a time. This is something nootropics proponents often tend not to recognize.

Some hard problems will persist, no matter the amount of resources thrown at the issue. At some point a Plan B becomes C though Z, and its time to prune the project scope to ever hit a launch date.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus

Quickly recognizing when a team has lost is important. =)

Can we be done deriding cubicles now? And how about we put saloon doors on them that enable occupants to communicate "not right now"? And if they're left open it means: "come on in and interru me!" ?

I think it's also important to recognize that companies tend to accumulate people with very little respect for other people's time. Sometimes you need to Pavlov your coworker into writing things down to discuss at a later time, and that you're not mad at them, just busy.

Pomodoro technique also helped me shape my focus state into smaller, less efficient, but more predictable portions. By scheduling interruptions, I figured out it's a lot easier to handle breaking out and into flow stat when you're training that every 25 minutes.

It really depends on individual. Some, especially juniors, needs to have a sentry behind their back because the moment you will look away, they will start doing something else, like watching YouTube videos

Those ones need to be fired, not babysat. Well... If they're hourly anyway. If they're salary and want to take breaks but they get their shit done, they can do what they want.

For me if I get into a topic (like 2-3 hours focus time) then interruptions are OK, I won't drop context until end of the day.

If the interruptions happen early in the morning so I never have the 2-3 hours boot up time, then that day is pretty much a zero from lines of code produced perspective.

Note: if it's some trivial boilerplate code then I can even be productive without booting up and with constant interruptions, this only applies to things I don't know how to do and need to research/think

i'm the same, the morning is the most important time and i hate when people initiate small talk when i want to focus

Has office with door - but 15 Slack channels with notifications on. Plus a twitch stream for some game plus a endless youtube of a "relax/study" channel.

You think nobody sees what's on engineers desktops?

Of course they're all Carmack-level geniuses...

Literally sandwiched between breathless "How Github CoPilot produces 80% of our code" articles from the likes of Shopify and "How laying off a thousand more fixed my stock" from the Spotifys.

Open floor plan is why I am way more productive working from home. Because of that I go into office about once every three months, just so we have in person white-boarding sessions (no actual coding work is possible). Hard wood floors, sales guys talking loud on phones, people buzzing around the office. It's impossible to focus on any non-trivial coding. And no, I'm not going to wear noise cancelling headphones all day.

Not directly related but I noticed that I can be most productive and focus best in a cafe where there is a continuous white noise. Why doesn't this happen in an open office? Also as I see in 40's movies, the newsroom of newspapers were open offices and I can imagine concentrating there. That must be an interesting collection of noises, typwriters, telephone conversations, joking around etc. etc...

"Team" does not appear once in the article. I find open plans to be superior as it makes the team go faster. People can unblock others, people can stop others from wasting time, people can immediately work together to think about a problem. And for times where you want to just pump out code you can put some earbuds / headphones on and use body language to signal that you are in deep focus.

There's no one-size-fits all for people nor problems.

I had great results working in 'team rooms' where people wheeled their cabinets in and out as they joined or left project-oriented teams. But I was young.

The staffies all had separate offices then. And today, I find myself most productive for the company when able to shut myself away and think.

> people can stop others from wasting time

Workers policing other workers . . . the ideal office of the pre-COVID 21st century!

I am referring to stopping someone from investing time into an approach that will not work or is not a good idea. If someone spends a couple days working on something that just gets thrown away, that person wasted that time.

I smell troll

Use of the phrase "pump out code" tells me you don't understand the problem and makes me wonder if you've ever programmed anything nontrivial yourself.

The fact is that there are different sorts of people. Some people know what it's like to do deep, sometimes difficult, independent work on their own. These people have all been ICs in some field. There are also people who have been ICs who have never known such a feeling. And then there are people who have only ever been managers, who also have never known such a feeling.

In defense of the distracting open plan office, I find that I can only really be productive when I am being disrupted semi-regularly. My talkative boss or my noisy coworker are distracting and theoretically take me out of flow, but ai wouldn’t even reach that flow if they weren’t there to make me want to get there (or just provide enough stimulation to sate my hungry brain).

I find working in shared office of up to 2-3 people to be doable. 2-3 people can learn and agree to be quiet most of the time. If you have a meeting, do it in a meeting room, respect each other's privacy, etc.

But it highly depends on who you're getting as an office mate. I've had mostly good experiences, but I've had one very bad experience too.

We don't, we can work from home instead.

I'll talk personally. I'm autistic(like what 75% of programmers?). Interruptions can potentially ruin my day.

If I'm working in an open concept or cube office, there needs to be perfect silence the entire day. If not, I basically can't work.

Nobody should have an open office policy. Anyone who says they have that is either lieing. Either they don't believe in such a policy and hope you don't interrupt, or they really do believe in it - except they are never in the office anyway.

I often go in so that if necessary, I can pop in and code on their computers a bit if my teammates get stuck somewhere. Yes it’s like babysitting but it takes so much longer to walk them through & explaining how to fix it over chat

I think there's something to be said about the benefits of a collaborative environment. Junior Devs may be discouraged to approach senior devs with questions if it feels like they're walled off from one another

If I had an office with a door that I could shut, I would go to it. No offices are like that, unless you are some big wig that, doesn’t code, and hence I am not going to any office any time soon.

God. That website literally has one ads for every few paragraphs.

My favorite work environment is being in a team-sized conference room (3-6 people). Conversations tend to be relevant and I can tune out any that aren't.

I've found open plan works well when it's a quiet environment. but putting programmers together with the sales folks.. probably not a good idea.

Open plan is great for juniors, but not so much for seniors with a ton of responsibilities already, and who now, the juniors look to for mentoring.

Doors, kind of furniture I'm missing lately... With kids at home doors need to be equipped with a lock. And it helps to have ensuite too...

Because my ADHD means that if I don’t have a closed door I will literally never get anything done.

Honestly I've heard this idea rephrased by many different people, but I think it's unexamined. If someone interrupts me from a complex train of thought, after, it only takes a few seconds of minor confusion before I can get back to where I was - and I doubt I'm unique this way.

I think we may mistake the annoying feeling of plummeting, from the lofty domain of engineering complex software into the banal, as a major loss of productivity. The feeling is very annoying. But does it take so long to get back into your dreams of that perfect ci/cd pipeline, or high throughput system? I'm not sure.

Undiagnosed autism and adhd

Silence among silence is emptiness. Silence among noise is true silence.

Private office with doors? I don't need an office at all, I WFH!

For me it’s because my cat won’t stop trying to step on my keyboard.

I ctrl + f the article for porn, that didn't satisfy me

so many screens of text and not one mention of slack, which is the real productivity killer. Something that no amount of doors or offices can protect against.

Slack can be closed or at least crippled by muting every channel.

unfortunately that's not all, my coworkers in all of the last N places have been conditioned to treat you as an evasive hostile psychopath if you don't respond to their DMs within minutes.

Very good article, and well explained I thought

To me, it's not so much offices with doors, but rather some sort of barrier between work and distraction. I don't want to hear about TikToks or food if I'm actually trying to work. An open office layout would work if everyone spoke in hushed tones about work-related stuff, but when it's about stupid shit it's impossible, and "putting on headphones" to ignore everyone is cuck tier and emasculating when other people are giggling and having a great time. Naturally what tends to happen is that no work gets done. Over time what happens is that I stop caring about work entirely and enjoy the office environment exclusively for the shit talk aspect. Whenever I need to get anything done I work from home.

Headphones are my virtual room with door.

I have to pass gas all of the time due to my gut so if you insist on me being in an office setting of any kind... prepare yourself for the worst.

I e actually never seen an office with that setup from startup, to mid and multi nat corps.

Judging by the comments here, nobody is doing pair programming / mob programming?

My team is fully remote and we definitely do pair programming from time to time. Not so much mob programming as much as mob code review on occasion to understand significant code changes and their related decisions.

But not nearly to the degree as my old job pre-pandemic that was roughly 3 days a week all in the office and 2 days a week whatever you wanted.

Pair programming is one of those things you hear about so often, but I've never worked somewhere where it was actually done.

Most devs, myself definitely included, don't wanna sit there with another one while they work on a single problem. We both have our own respective tickets to worry about, who's got time to split entirely dedicating to 1 ticket that isn't yours?

Instead if we hit a major roadblock we'll shoot out a message like "hey dude got a minute?" And hop on a huddle on slack, but I definitely wouldn't call that pair programming the way it's usually implied

Nobody is doing pair programming / mob programming. At best, some people are talking that it might be interesting to do.

There are people who dream that programming looks like "team working programming" stock images[0]. I've no idea why they want this to be true but it wouldn't be the first time people have tried to force others into their bizarre dreams.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=team+working+programming&iar=image...

I don't think pair programming exists in reality. It is talked about a lot.

Pair debugging does exist but only when stuff goes wrong. This is the vain hope that perhaps two people can make up one competent person when the shit has hit the fan.

And quite often pair programming could be done by single programmer and inanimate object.

Still. It does often work, specially if the other person has better knowledge of technology or code in question.

Mob programming is so easier in a call with shared desktops that at the beginning of the pandemics when we were wondering how we would work after people returned I was pushing for we never do it in a conference room again.

I can’t even imagine creating my own ideas while someone in my personal space is talking. At best I can only sanity check his ideas.

You can do pair programming/debugging great remotely with VSCode or Visual Studio live share.

As I read some of the aggressive, cynical and unpleasant responses here to any suggestion there might be some benefits to an open plan arrangement, it's dawning on me that one possible benefit is that it tends to filter out people with attitudes like these.

I prefer open plan setups and am glad that working in trading environments has ensured my career has been spent in them, so my natural reaction to the title here is "erm, not all of them do". I actively enjoy being interrupted to discuss something unrelated to my current task, and often return to that task with a fresh insight afterwards. I enjoy helping my colleagues with things, and doing so helps me build a positive reputation in a way that has helped my career. I enjoy camaraderie and conversations about my colleagues' lives outside work. I would refuse a job in an enclosed office or cubicle unless there were very strong compensating factors.

I don't require others to feel the same way, and I don't think people are wrong or bad if they prefer greater separation from colleagues. Humans are diverse. However, someone who views their colleages, their work-related questions and their attempts at broader conversation with active disdain is unlikely to be someone I want to work with.

There is no “filtering out” when open plans are the de facto standard in an industry and there aren’t alternative workplaces for those who don’t prefer it to go to.

> I enjoy helping my colleagues with things, and doing so helps me build a positive reputation in a way that has helped my career. I enjoy camaraderie and conversations about my colleagues' lives outside work.

This can be achieved with all manner of offices!

> Humans are diverse.

Yes, but there are still distributions of opinions. It seems like there are many thinkpieces on why people don’t like open plans and why they’re bad for productivity, but never any in defense of them. Perhaps you should write one to give voice to that contingent and then we can see how many others have the same opinion.

> I actively enjoy being interrupted to discuss something unrelated to my current task

wat

> Humans are diverse.

So you're an active participant to the company's office politics instead of economic output.

At least you openly admit it.

... is precisely the sort of aggressive, cynical and unpleasant response I'm talking about.

People like you are the reason I personally don't want to be in an office.

> asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

Basically like having a toddler around. Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus. Or I might be projecting, but I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption.

> running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled.

Yes, because who needs order in their time when somebody just wants to ask the group from their opinion, without even bothering to write it down. Also, whoever is sick that day and missing from the office, that's on them, whatever discussion happened, no evidence of it, so sucks to be them I guess.

> I don't feel connected to me team at all working from home

I...am sorry.

Please don't cross into personal attack. We have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful.

Also, please don't post in the flamewar style generally. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want thoughtful, curious conversation in which people are open to learning from one another.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38693114.

> it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus.

This is very one-sided. If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster. There's a balance to be had, of course, but your team's overall delivery is what's important.

> I view it as a type of interruption.

It's not your view. Of course it's an interruption. That doesn't make it bad.

But it's not a dichotomy between 3 hours or instantaneous. It's a dichotomy between instantaneous and when someone has a break in flow to peek at messages, which IME is more like 15-30 minutes (and i think it's probably fair to ask people to peek around that frequently if they normally wouldn't)

> If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours searching through the local intranet for some information, then that makes your team faster.

I'll be blunt here. I have very little interest in how the team I'm part of performs in general. Trying to make one person feel guilty that someone else can't do independent study is very toxic in my opinion, and I usually remove myself from under management that approaches leadership like that.

Asking questions should always be done, in my opinion, _after_ you tried to unblock yourself by RTFM-ing. If people feed you information every time you're stuck, it seldom sticks to your mind as well as going through the motions yourself.

Of course there is a balance needed. But spending once 3 hours to search something might increase familiarity with the resources the intranet provides. So the next question could be answered way faster. Or it could be the occasion to improve the local intranet with some missing cross reference or some comment.

> If you can unblock someone now so they don't spend 3 hours

Past your training period you are responsible for your own productivity. Don't make it the problem of your peers.

I think I would be fine not having you in the office, given your condescending response..

> Basically like having a toddler around.

I changed jobs during lockdown. When I've joined other companies earlier, everyone knew to step in to help the new guy. So people would constantly ask me how I was doing, see if I were struggling and ask to help me, or I could just poke someone in the room.

But getting onboarded remotely during lockdown (in a non-remote-first company), I didn't know who to ask. No one could see me being stuck. I couldn't just ask out in the open room. Writing a message in a chat channel meant it could take ages before I got any help to get going.

Yay to me for at least not "disturbing" people. But the tradeoff here is that the whole team suffers as a team, just so people can have personal productivity. Which I think lessens speed in the long run. We're not code-monkeys picking Jira-tasks and dishing out features. We're working on a project together.

When I read your account of your onboarding at two different companies, I can only see a company with a good culture and another company with a poor culture. If you had onboarded the first company remotely, I bet you would have got check-in messages. Similarly, if you had onboarded the second company on-site, nobody would have cared about how you were doing.

Sounds like the remote company wasn't that good at it, or at least the team you were in.

At the very least they should have assigned someone to be your mentor for coming up to speed.

That way you have someone you can ask (and you're aware you should) and you're not just forgotten about and left to you own devices, which is rarely successful.

> you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus

Surely there must be ways to balance these things?

When you want to ask someone a question it shouldn’t be too hard to infer whether it’s a good time to do that now or you should wait (if it is, well it’s exactly a very hard skill to learn if you put in some effort)

I feel like that's exactly what email or pinging someone in a group chat is for, or at least that's how I prefer it.

If I'm deeply focused on something else, I'll just ignore the notification, if I'm available I'll respond.

Bonus points for just posting it to a team group chat or CC-ing everyone involved so someone else might be able to handle it.

Yes. It is easy to balance these things. Ask the question in an asynchronous medium.

I used to work in an open office and one guy had a light mounted to his cube. When it was red it meant do not disturb. Green meant he was available for whatever.

You need it to be a good time for all 6 people

>Basically like having a toddler around.

Unnecessarily condescending response to the OP, to be honest.

Fair take.

I am not trying to be condescending here, but it's hard to view this behavior as anything but overly disruptive.

https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/

Instead of "just a quick question", the OP could prepare a list of their questions, and ask them all at the allocated time. A scheduled deep dive into the questions the OP has might even be more productive than multiple unscheduled disruptions of others' time.

And in an open office, even if you ask only a single person something, others might hear it too, despite the question not being intended to them.

We are talking about multiple people's brain cycles being dragged out their focus space, we are talking multiple conversations happening next to you, we are talking about click clack of people's keyboards next to you, and people moving going to take a coffee in your peripheral vision. It's a nightmare.

https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres...

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

> Sorry for the negative take here but how it's written it feels like you don't necessarily realize that some people do need deep work, and prioritize your quick satisfaction to other's focus.

I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing.

Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's.

> I simply can't stand incessantly being asked questions, I view it as a type of interruption

Well, you are being interrupted. But you're being paid to be interrupted.

> I'm always confused by people who struggle so much with being able to quickly answer a question and get back to what they were doing.

> Also, here you're prioritising your work over someone else's.

That's what the whole article is about. The struggle is that holding a context in your mind is easily broken by small interruptions. It's not by choice. So the question is how do you reconcile people on both sides working together.

If you make me think about some technical problem other than the one I have halfway solved in my head, anything I didn’t write in code is gone and I need to reinvent it almost from scratch.

When management evaluates my performance, delivering my projects carries much more weight than helping yours (which they might not even be able to measure).

This is a pretty common anti-pattern with how technical ICs view their work. No matter how technical or silo’d you are, your work is always going to be inherently collaborative, and your ability to collaborate with others is a hard bottleneck on everybody else’s ability to extract any value at all from the work you do.

Managing or working with ICs with this perspective is also a lot like having a toddler around.

I support this 100%. Programming and most tech work is pretty solitary. If collaboration needs to happen there's nothing wrong with hopping on a call.

People that state what OP said should go into sales or customer service. Want to talk all day? There's your new job.

This shit about being connected is killing me, people goes to work as part of their social life and are ruining everyone else existence, if people doesn’t have connections therapist is where they should go not coworkers

To be fair, I was a bit overly harsh with the OP, and it's purely due to reactionary reasons, as I've been far too often on the receiving end of a barrage of questions from multiple sides, while trying to meet deadlines. And I don't blame the newcomers, they are simply finding their way in a bad situation, I blame the company.

The funny part here is that the companies expect you to help onboard new employees AND do your other work at the same time, while at the same refusing to give you the time to build on a proper onboarding, with documentation to read, what software to install, etc.

In my current company we assign a "buddy" to the new onboarders, we have a handbook + a (supported and tested) onboarding installation toolkit, and pretty good documentation. The buddy does the handholding via scheduled and ad-hoc sessions, the onboarding material does the rest. During the pandemic we got to test this approach out on people who haven't even visited the office, and we improved it iteratively on every new onboardee. It's surprising how just improving such a small thing makes onboarding so much more pleasant for everybody, and how this, when done well, works both for office AND remote new employees.

I agree that this is the case, though the causes are pathological to the system, not the individual. You have to spend all your time at work, so you depend on it for social stimulus.

It has to be said, if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse.

Open plan might work great for some types of work, but for highly technical and mentally taxing work it's quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing.

There's a reason that many programmers prefer to work from home. Working in a busy office (and that includes open plan offices with even light chatter) is extremely counter productive.

Who would win:

- literally 100s of publications showing how disruptive and destructive to focus it is to be working in an open office work and how much distractions it brings:

https://theconversation.com/returning-to-the-workplace-heres...

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

https://www.businessdit.com/distraction-work-statistics/

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/minds-business/eve...

https://juliety.com/effects-of-distractions-at-work

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/why-open-offi...

- A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend. Backed, of course, by C-level dudes who simply can't bring themselves to believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

Who wins? The CFO and corp real estate people (correctly) saying how much more expensive (and less flexible to changing team size) a building with enough private offices is.

“I can’t back it up with data, I just know I’m right “ of course

Yet people still make arguments based off the conceit that a profit motive means businesses act like rational hive minds.

I have an office with a nice, heavy door. I don't often close it, but just knowing that it's there and that I can close if I want to is a comforting thought. That said, I think if I did always close it, I'd be more productive by a significant margin....

idk who wins, but I'd assume extroverts need a quiet environment to be able to focus as much as anyone else.

The asshats holding the bags of money, obviously

> A bunch of extroverts who just can't wait to tell you what they did over the weekend and a bunch of C-level dudes who can't believe work can be done if they PERSONALLY can't see you at your desk working.

The sight of people in an open office plan is merely an expensive therapy session for these guys

Recent experience at a fairly young startup has shown me that open office culture has also started to breed a very different type of programmer.

People will often be pairing nearly all day long, any claim that you need a moment to focus and think about a problem is met with perplexity, every idea should be shipped to prod asap, while tests exist the idea of performing basic QA/manual testing on your own work is only used in the most extreme cases.

Contemporary startup engineering culture is best described as frenetic. It certainly feels hyper productive (if not extremely exhausting for a more traditional, introverted programmer), but I've started to notice a fairly large amount of that "productivity" is fixing mistakes a more focused programmer would have avoided.

I suspect the long-term impact of open offices my be even more deleterious than it's impact on the focus of individual programmers.

I was raised by the focused type of programmer, and modern startup culture is horrifying to me (and him). I have left that world and now am solo engineer in a non-profit where I'm responsible for a list of results, not a pile of Jira tickets someone made up to look busy.

> .... a fairly large amount of that "productivity" is fixing mistakes a more focused programmer would have avoided

Holy cow this hits home. I've been on a number of teams like this going back years (decades) and ... I just don't get it. Had I been 'allowed' another 30 minutes, or an hour, or a day, on problem X... we'd have avoided weeks of unraveling problems later. But... no - gotta keep pressing on, hitting those pre-defined deadlines at all costs.

As a former programmer and now EM, I agree with this. Open offices definitely felt a lot more productive since everyone was always frantically working and communicating. I think people actually have gotten more done since WFH started, though.

Not just startups. I was once hired as a contractor for a major bank in Toronto who were desperate to ship a product, which was way past its promised delivery date. The AVP got an idea to put all of us in a conference room huddled around a conference table , because obviously us lazy programmers were slacking off in our cubicles and the crappy almost daily changing requirements were not to blame. The entire team began falling sick one by one (pre covid era). This was also where I learnt the hard way that it is possible to get the flu twice in the same flu season. It was a hilarious mess. Curiously enough the AVP got promoted to VP the next year.

And the following year, the whole office switched to open office plan. I think the ability to micro manage people and the power trip for managers explains this logic.

That's a scary depiction of the scene. I haven't experienced things that extreme, but close enough that I don't doubt you.

It might even be a significant part of why software quality isn't where it should be these days.

Open plan worked for me when there was a very clear contract between every stakeholder.

Firstly, everyone had free, good quality, sound blocking headphones. Not just free as in standard equipment on your first day free. There were buckets of the things lying around and if you needed a new set you just grabbed some, no questions asked. VC funded opulence, yay!

Secondly, there was an understanding amongst everyone on the shop floor that “headphones on” meant do not disturb, just as much as a closed office door. Violations were not tolerated but it was a social norm thing not an HR write up thing. Maybe people were getting the latter behind the scenes though?

In return you end up with an office architecture that’s considerably easier to manage at the expense of turning the physical challenge of giving everyone an office into a — potentially intractable for some teams — people management challenge.

If you can't give me my own office with a door, at minimum I want a cube with 6ft walls that have excellent noise dampening (I don't want to be able to clearly hear a normal conversation next door), a large enough work space such that I can stand up and walk over to my own whiteboard, a pair of ultra comfortable noise cancelling headphones, and being able to have some natural daylight coming into the space (but not necessarily direct line of sight to a window from my chair).

I'm fully aware that commercial real estate is expensive and that old office floorplans are not entirely conducive to offering everyone an office with a door. There are certainly compromises that need to be made when renovating the office to give people what they want without simply moving to a brand new building. While I'd prefer my own office, just having a noise-proof cube where I don't have to stare at everyone walking past would be a huge step up from the picnic table style desks where it feels like you're sitting at a library computer desk. There are plenty of ways to track productivity that don't involve a manager being able to stare at everyone working like a sweatshop foreman.

The work was done by IBM in 1975. You need lots of space to keep the noise down and you need offices with doors that close.

Why are we still having this discussion fifty years later?

> quite litterally the worst possible working environment you could be providing

Just for fun, let me try to one-up that: working outside, in a scorching desert, hung upside down, just barely reaching your laptop on the sand, with scorpions crawling over the keyboard.

But thinking about it, even in that situation, I guess I would still prefer not to have to deal with people having unrelated conversations around me.

It is crazy that companies will pay someone $300k a year to sit in an open office and then wonder why the conference rooms are over booked all the time. And then they don’t understand why they don’t want to RTO.

I worked for a guy (who is actually a great guy) who, while excitedly showing me the floor plan for the proposed open plan for our team, exclaimed, "I want to create a vibrant, energetic atmosphere." and asked me what I thought.

All I could think was, "What you see as vibrant is really your employees shooting the shit and not getting any actual work done."

He went with the plan and I found myself staying until 7pm and 8pm most days because I got more work done in those 2-3 hours at the end of the day than I did the other eight because of all the interruptions.

> if you're employing programmers and making them sit in an openplan office you're willingly and knowingly making their job significantly harder, and their day worse.

I think it’s more fair to say that they’re making some of their jobs significantly harder and improving the experience for others. Plenty of jobs aren’t interested in optimizing for anyone’s personal productivity and happiness — they’re optimizing for their business goals.

> There's a reason that many programmers prefer to work from home

I think there’s many reasons this seems to be true (I say seems because the ones who prefer it are very vocal about it and tend to (at best) shout down those who disagree) and maximizing productivity is probably one of those reasons that they’re willing to tell their employers.

Open offices exist for the same reason WFH doesn't work, at least where it won't work.

I have worked in older organizations, and the culture there is that the most productive workers spend relatively more time on their work chairs. That is the only way managers have traditionally known to get work done from their teams.

An open office is a natural way to ensure everyone is working, at least in how those organizations measure productivity.

If these companies move to a closed office, they will have to change how they measure productivity, and their culture may not allow that.

I love that so many people answer this with "well, just get headphones" ... which just seems like an admission of a design mistake to me.

I think the real reason open floorplans are popular is money. It's MUCH cheaper to cram 20 people into 200 square feet than to let 3 people sit in offices (in the same square footage).

Now you know why 50% haven't returned to office spaces like corporate america (and specifically corporate real-estate owners) would have hoped.

The one time I had a heavy dev job (I mostly take sysadmin type roles) in an open floorplan, I ended up buying a motorcycle helmet with built in audio to isolate myself from distractions...it was mostly gregarious sporty (it was a sporting goods company), young people (I was the second oldest at the company at 32).

I was not well-liked at that job and was happy when they let me go.

> Open plan might work great for some types of work […]

I'm curious to know: why types are, or people consider to be, good for open plan?

Generally, office type jobs tends to be one where people need to use their brains to concentrate on something, and open plans tend to be able to create / not block distractions, they would be antithetical to being able to concentrate.

You have pretty noisy and messy environments where technically challenging programming and other taxing work happens successfully (e.g., some trading floor). How much do think the whole issue is self selection into preferred work environments?

I liken open offices to a situation where I'm balancing a pile of plates in both hands and hundreds of other people are in the kitchen and can trip me or shove me at will, causing a mental stack crash.

I’ve tried working in the middle of nerf gun fights every afternoon for a year. Let’s just say I enjoy Home Office a lot.

It's never been a problem for me

Let's not pretend that we are something special, and we need to focus so much more than other creative workers.

For the majority of work of an average programmer in an average corporation, deep focus is highly overrated.

Private rooms are not cheap and it would be hard to justify for junior programmers. And having private space just for middle level folks is bad for morale and learning of junior folks.

But yeah for companies which just employs senior folks this should be the norm.

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