Comment by RogerL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RogerL | Hacker News Reader

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What would your reaction be if

1) your child's test were conducted in the lunch hall while lunch was going on.

2) You were expected to take the SATs in a gynasium during a basketball game.

3) when your kids go to the library to study everyone is allowed to run around

4) your kids try to do their homework in front of the tv while talking to their friends on the phone.

I suspect you'd be outraged. We know noise is distracting and affect productivity. I don't understand what is controversial about that claim.

My agenda is that I want to be productive. I kinda feel that if you pay me to do something, I should be able to make my best effort. I know by looking at my svn/git commits just how productive I am. It's very empirical.

Nothing's controversial about your particular claim, what's controversial is whether the overall product produced in an open enviroment better. I suspect it depends on what your putting together and who your working with, hence contradictory studies.

Children's grades are on an individual basis, collaboration is discouraged. It makes sense to seperate them. If kids were instead being graded on the whole school's output on these tests and SATs (customers never seem to care how productive I am, only the team's output), then I think allowing, maybe even forcing them to collaborate by using open eviroment would be best. They might even be encouraged to show up alot more if they got to play basketball or have free lunch. I think this is what management has in mind.

I can see both sides of the argument: when working on my own projects or mostly solo-work projects, I need long stretches of quiet time alone; open enviroments suck for this. When working on a group project, especially one that I am new to, I gain more by being able to overhear people talking about it and being able to quickly unstick myself by asking people questions than I lose in slocc.

I've never tried to work in an office with arcades and foosball so I'll let someone else comment there.

None of those 1-4 exist in any open-office-layout company that I've ever experienced. People playing foosball? They're in a room where the walls keep sound in.

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