strangetimes

I wonder if this explains why people forced to work in open plan offfices become less sociable? It’s well documented how illnesses travel in open plans.

Great point. Developers are usually very smart folks, and we like to believe that we know everything. There's no substitute for context.

What the heck are "data files"?

50% of office jobs are performed > 50% of the time from the worker's home (or remote location of their choice).

Teach yourself test automation (Selenium, etc.). Shockingly few QAs know even the basics of scripting/programming.

I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...

> I would be impressed with a tool to quickly design a web application in the same way Visual Basic did 25 years ago instead of talking about Bootstrap, Foundation, AngularJS, React, etc.

It's called ASP.NET Web Forms. Version 1 was released in 2002. Demos of it back then were quite impressive.

MarsEdit is the client most people mention as a Mac replacement for Windows Live Writer, but after using WLW for years and then trying MarsEdit, it didn't hold a candle to WLW. It's shocking--WLW is a free tool that hasn't had active development since 2012--but true.

To this day I run a Windows 7 VM in Parallels on my MacBook Air in Coherence mode just so I can write blog posts in Windows Live Writer. I looked for years for a setup that could beat this, and unbelievably, never found it.

> It's hard for a lot of people on here to imagine dealing with 100k+ other coworkers but at a point you oftentimes have to abstract away what makes people human to work in most large corporations.

Working myself for a company of 150K+ employees, I can confirm this is totally true.

I hate a lot of high-level business speak like "resources", but what I've come to realize is that one cannot think of 150K people as individuals. It's too much for the human mind. If you see this as an indictment of large corporations, I wouldn't blame you. Just realize it's a reality of operating inside them.

Maybe they should add some tigers roaming around the office to keep the workers extra alert?

I had the same experience working for a company that did pair programming 100% of the time. Very productive but exhausting, and in my mind, not sustainable.

Location: Grand Rapids, Michigan

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Probably not

Resume: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattblodgett

Email: mattblodgett [at] gmail [dot] com

Blog: http://mattblodgett.com

---

My blog posts this year about the non-technical aspects of software development (in particular office design) have made the front page of Hacker News, received over 200K views, and gotten me interviewed by Wired magazine. I'm looking to transition away from programming and into a role writing more prose than code.

"A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander

https://archive.org/details/APatternLanguage

This was posted on HN a few days ago, which largely discusses how the weather in LA is luring New Yorkers...

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/style/los-angeles-and-its-...

I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.

How about the entire company sits at one continuous "superdesk"?

"The challenge was to create the most collaborative, creative environment possible. The result? A desk that we could all share, literally--4,400 square feet of undulating, unbroken awesomeness to keep people and ideas flowing."

You can't make this shit up.

http://www.inc.com/christine-lagorio/meet-the-barbarian-supe...

My Spotify Premium subscription is worth it just for the fact that I haven't had to touch iTunes in months.

I've run into this before as well, where guys will brag about how much (unpaid) overtime they put in, how early they get to the office in the morning, etc. I feel pity for them, not respect.

> Open-plan began to go into vogue as a backdoor mechanism for age discrimination, due to studies showing that older people were quick to associate them (and visibility from behind) with low status and therefore leave.

Do you remember where you read this? The bit about visibility from behind being associated with low status is especially interesting.

This is the kind of shit that makes me angry. Microsoft should know better. Slick presentations about bullpens being the future of work, like it's self-evident. A generation of software engineers are going to come up with the belief that these sorts of working environments are standard, and then wondering why they're so stressed out and tense all the time.

I agree that absolute silence is a bit stifling. The spot I'm working in currently is very quiet and I actually prefer when the HVAC kicks on and covers up all the little sounds (mouse clicks, chairs creaking, etc.) with a base layer of white noise.

I think you're right in that there's no cheap, quick fix here. With tech companies so flush with cash/funding, can they really not afford to do something? I don't think cheapness can describe what's going on.

You should share the name of your company. Use your attention to humane office space as a competitive advantage when recruiting. See what Joel Spolsky has done with Fog Creek and Stack Exchange.

The author thanks you. Your website (Office Snapshots) is awesome.

The noise isn't the only consideration (though it is a big one). Visual distractions, lack of privacy, the feeling of being watched, people approaching from behind you, etc. The human animal is stressed by these things.

ASP.NET Web Forms?

I always find it funny when management lauds developers for aggressive bug fixing. Do they not realize that the developers introduced those bugs in the first place?

I've noticed this, too, and been baffled by it. My working explanation is that people tend to hire clones of themselves. If the people making the hiring decisions in that online pants company have PhDs, they'll believe they need PhDs to work on that shopping cart.

You joke, but the powers that be installed a TV in our office blaring CNBC just feet away from where developers are trying to work. This was considered an "upgrade" to our space.