The collaboration curse

People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley. Career switching from the military to development has been interesting in this regards. The military uses chat, but only when needed—realtime communication is critical and people are distributed geographically. On duty on the carrier keeping track of planes and other issues happening “in country”, chat is great. On the ground in Iraq scheduling airborne assets and keeping track of SF missions, chat is great. But for most things, chat is more of a distraction and slows down the real work.

I understand chat if you are working in operations, but for pure development, it feels like a college dorm, more about the community and less about the work, where people still confuse time at the office with getting your work done. After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t. Building camaraderie is important, but chat probably isn’t the best way. And putting everyones communications in a single channel isn’t helping communication, it’s increasing distraction.

In my ideal dev team, you have chat, use it for one-on-one communication, and for anything that is time sensitive which goes into group channels. Anything that not everyone needs to know or isn’t time sensitive should go in an email or a message or a shoulder tap. Cluttering a few group channels with a ton of individual conversations, meaningless alerts, and random banter is downright juvenile and a detriment to productivity. I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution.

The collaboration excuse is a red herring. I'm sure some of the managers believe it, but it's not really the point.

Office space is leased by the square foot. $/sf/ year. Building a new building is usually budgeted in terms of $/sf. (Aside from some base unavoidable costs, it more or less scales linearly with floor area in terms of square feet.)

The fewer square feet you need, the less your lease is, which immediately and directly decreases your overhead and increases your profit margin.

Open offices fit more people in fewer square feet. There's a specific dollar amount a manager can point to and say "I'm saving that much money".

Maybe the productivity gains of private offices would more than offset the extra cost of needing more space, maybe not. It's not as easily quantifiable. Keep in mind that office leases are often signed for 10+ years and if you're building your own building you're stuck with it for even longer. Plus once you sign a lease you have to pay to build out the office. This can easily cost several million dollars in itself.

If you're a manager making this mutli-million dollar decision, are you going to go with the guaranteed overhead savings of minimizing square footage or are you going to risk millions of dollars on a vague promise of maybe increased productivity? Unless your company has the money to spare I don't see any rational person opting for the latter, much as I would rather have a private office myself.

I've worked in open offices, they made it impossible for me to program, so I spent all day "collaborating" and doing scutwork until everyone went home at 5, then I'd stay til 9 to get the stuff I needed to get done done.

I'd never do that again, if a company puts me in a position where I can't work during work hours I simply won't, will raise concerns and if not resolved leave.

Life is too short to do 70 hour weeks when you are only getting 30 hours work done.

That resonates a lot with me. A few years back my manager in a big-co with a lofty motto would not allow me to work remotely for a week or two to stay closer to my dying parent. As she pointed out, "a lot of innovation happens at the watercooler".

I work in an open office, and would consider myself a knowledge worker. The easiest way to manage it is to work from home, however I also positioned my desk in a corner facing the window (so my back to the room) I also by default put wvery meeting invite to tenative and ubless its absolutely necessary i dont show up.

All that has put me at odds with management to a degree. However, im given all the hard problems and churn out solutions. Based on projects completed, im doing the work of 4 employees at the same level. I should also add that I still answer 5 - 20 questions from coworkers a day, and am the go-to guy to fix many issues (so I dont completely shut myself off). This has put me in a position where my manager has hinted that im going to get promoted if I keep it up.

Of course the company I work for has "non-management management" i.e. you can become a VP without having to manage people. This lets the anti-social hard-core workers still move up in rank and pay.

Sadly, there really is a lot of collaboration cargo culting these days.

But it's interesting because in the large majority of fields the best outcomes really are in some ways collaborative efforts. The lone genius is actually extremely rare.

I'm inclined to say the key to effective collaboration is that it has to be driven entirely by the collaborators, and it is only actively happening for a very small percentage of the time spent on a project.

A cargo culting middle manager might think she's helping by setting up hours of meetings with different people to get their "perspective". Those people probably can add value. But the best way to do it is to let the project lead go to them with questions or asking for feedback when they think it makes sense.

Management can help by fostering a culture where people are willing and eager to talk to their colleagues when they need help, or to get new ideas. To some extent communication tools can help, but there are other much bigger factors: Don't make people feel like they'll be penalized in performance reviews for not knowing things or needing help. Cultivate a sense of shared ownership of projects and outcomes. Give people maxuimum autonomy over their schedules.

I really want to figure out which plan is better. I honestly feel that people with bad experiences with open plan get on here and gripe, and it makes open plan sound horrible. But there are bad experiences with offices too. Like rarely interacting with colleagues outside of scheduled meetings. And there's a natural bias towards one's own productivity vs helping the team.

Maybe it's just because open plan is more the norm nowadays, now we hear all the downsides of that. But it's worth considering it was adopted in response to the downsides of offices and cubes (shudder), not some shortsighted irrational plot to cut costs at the expense of productivity.

One thing I know: If anyone says rarely interacting "sounds great", they shouldn't be trusted. Yes you will absolutely maximize your coding focus. Yes that is an invalid argument. Team collaboration is important too. I suspect that to make either plan work you've got to pair it with a solid culture that shores up its weaknesses: minimize distractions in open plan, fight isolation in offices.

My straw man ideal is an open plan that is relatively quiet, but let's you look at each other and leverage body language and enhanced awareness to gague when it's a good moment to interrupt. That's the only way that a whole class of "quick questions" and "crazy ideas" get fielded that would otherwise not cross the interrupt bar of a door-knock or even an IM-ping. And that stuff can be super valuable esp. to a startup team. And it actually can get those handled quicker!

But I suspect it has to be paired with a culture of minimizing extended subcritical conversations at your desk and taking them over to separate meeting areas that are less disruptive.

At my new job, I've really started pushing back against meetings that seem superfluous. Often times I'll find myself saying the same exact thing at 3 different meetings, and it almost never affects anyone else in the room.

Is it possible that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem? I get the feeling that if cubicles were still in fashion people would be complaining just as loudly about them as others are complaining about open offices. I think a good balance between the two extremes combined with allowing people to work from home on days they need to focus is the best answer we have to this problem today.

We can keep writing these articles and reading them and knowing we are right and get nowhere.

1) Say I'm an engineer with a manager who doesn't get it. How can I empathetically (that is, without spontaneously developing a "political performance problem" on my next review) help my manager improve?

2) Say I'm that manager, and I want to improve but meetings and spreadsheets are all I know. What can I do?

My read on pushing collaboration is that it's a hedge against doing the wrong thing. In startups (say, <100 people and in grow-or-die mode), I think you have to focus on producing revenue on a 3-9 month timeframe. If you have a bunch of people working on their own, a lot of them will do things that are valuable, but won't show value to the company for 2-5 years. That not really OK, unless everybody agrees it's OK.

So, everybody collaborates constantly, so when you do something like run a pen-test before you have a customer with a CISO, there's agreement that it's OK to do it early. Otherwise, you might end up with a bunch of interesting work that doesn't have any coherence, and with only 25 people, that's not enough to sustain a company.

Of course, if everybody is working on the right things, and you have manager drive-bys via Slack/email/daily standups 3 times a day, that's a separate issue. It's the fear of working on the wrong thing that's motivating that pattern.

I'm shocked that SV ingenuity has ended up at such a horrific solution for office environments. The "open" plan hardly delivers any collaboration either, just a continuous stream of distractions or creepy silence with a room full of headphones. Surely we can do better?

There's a cultural aspect to collaboration, and an office layout aspect.

Culturally, collaboration can be great. Getting someone from sales involved in a product meeting could be revolutionary, or getting a product person on a sales call etc. etc.

It's possible to design an open floor plan with plenty of private spaces, but most companies don't do this because the people making the decisions are not introverted enough or their jobs don't involve achieving and maintaining "flow state".

Ideas like pair programming have created the misunderstanding that programming should always be done in a social way. There are many times when a problem demands focused thinking, and the ideal office space offers places to do that.

Fittingly, I'm having trouble focusing on reading this article because the team next to mine is having a conversation. They aren't speaking overly loudly, but there's nothing between me and them so I can hear everything.

I have a pair of these to help: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0000X6L78/

I work in what might as well be an open plan: I share an office with three other people, and the desks are arranged so none of us have our backs to the wall (at least I get a really nice view of a highway out of the deal, though). The whole company is set up like this, with every 3-4 employees grouped into large offices.

It could be worse because I get along with my officemates, but it's easily the worst office arrangement I've been part of. The vulnerability of not having my back to the wall seriously gets to me, and it can get really, really annoying when multiple conversations are taking place at the same time. One of my officemates wears headphones 90% of the time specifically because of this.

Before this job, I've worked in cubes, I've had my own office, and I've shared an office with one other.

Of all those, I preferred sharing an office with one other, with desks arranged so our backs are to the wall. I had some degree of privacy, but I'm not totally isolated from other people.

I agree with the article and many of the comments here. I'd add that there's another thing: a one-size-fits-all design. Open plan offices are very good for workers for whom collaboration is constant; I've seen sales, marketing, some ops, and a few other departments who would constantly interact no matter what kind of office layout they had. For work that requires lots of concentration and little collaboration, though, that layout is counterproductive. Companies should start thinking about role needs and the space required to support maximum productivity, rather than just having a single layout because it's easier/cheaper. How about a ring of private offices for those that need it surrounding a shared collaboration space? I worked at one place like with that layout and it worked very well.

The Harvard Business Review reports "an overlap of only 50% between 'the top collaborative contributors in any organisation and those individuals deemed to be the top performers.'"

That's a pretty high percentage, if you ask me. I wonder what other traits you could identify in the set of top performers that would be equally or more prevalent. The article seems to equivocate more collaboration with more distraction. These two are perhaps related when policy aims to encourage collaboration through shared office space, Slack, and meetings which interrupt deep work. But let's be clear; collaboration is a good thing and we shouldn't act like it's wrong to encourage it, just that perhaps there are better, less distracting ways to do it.

It's one thing to put multiple people on the same task or question and have a focused, active collaboration. This would include things like brainstorming and pair programming.

It's another thing to give people their own tasks but put them in an environment of ambient chatter and real time notifications. This would include things like open floor plans and Slack. (I'm not arguing that these things are bad, just that they're not genuine collaboration.)

It's pretty easy to make an office look and feel like a collaborative space. It's quite a bit harder to find a few tasks that would benefit from real collaboration and invest double or triple the "hourly rate" for that one thing. Then again, maybe it's totally worth the cost?

First of all, forcing collaboration onto people by making them sit together isn't proven to be effective. There is no evidence to show it's in the company's best interests to have an open office environment. Doing it just because Facebook does is cargo cult thinking.

Second of all, it's also against the employees' best interests and pursuit of happiness. Employees should ideally want to choose the sort of office they have, and also be able to work from home whenever they want. Having happy employees leads to the highest productivity and employee retention.

I've worked in many different environments, and I dislike open office the most.

I'm about finished with the book:

http://calnewport.com/books/deep-work/

I have already tuned off my email client, only checking it in the morning and after lunch. Contemplating moving me workstation (computer) into my lab where I can get away from the open (short cubical wall) floor plan.

Of course, I am reading HN now, but only because it's taking quite a while to generate Gerbers for a PCB.

I see a lot of people bitching about meetings.

But what about people that their job is to collaborate an be in meetings. For example, I'm a business analyst, my job is to meet with users and devs. Eliciting requirements don't take me that much time. All my time is spent on being on meeting to understand what users want and review with them what have been done and make sure that's what they want.

That being said, I always try to make the meeting shorter and people thank me for that.

Most of the office where I am moved to being an open floor plan, with managers getting offices. The main area is quite noisy and I'm glad I'm not over there. Headphones would do me no good -- sure, I like to listen to music while developing, sometimes, but I also just like quiet. Probably lean more towards wanting quiet than music.

I find that the asynchronous nature of chat programs can actually help this problem. Email takes too much time because it's overly formal. Meetings, well, don't get me started. But asynchronous chat is a pretty good balance of informal, prompt enough, and not overly intrusive. ymmv.

Huh, the website won't show you any content if you're blocking cookie request notifications. You need to disable your adblock / cookie notification remover to be able to allow the site to use cookies, and only then will it show you the article.

Goes to show how ridiculous this EU law is...

When I see a modern-day, first-grade classroom I shudder and am thankful that when I was a kid in the 1970s we had desks in rows facing the teacher. Today there are no desks and everybody sits in a circle on the floor. Primary education: For extroverts, by extroverts.

But...but... Collaboration makes us agile! /s

I would like to be what appears to be the 1st person on this thread to point out one key idea:

we have these things called "laptops" with "wifi" access technology. Typically you should be able to unplug your power cord, stand up and move your feet to quieter areas.

My mac laptop also has command-Q technology built into all my programs -- including chat and email.

Also I have these things that go over my ears and delivery music.

First hire good people, then just do whatever your team wants and it'll be the most productive/happy solution. This doesn't have to be some universal human rule. Humans are different.

I personally like times collaborating with short sprints alone.

where is this Collaborative overload? Do I live on another planet? These diseases seem to hit only places like Silicon Valley and the like

I think a lot of this depends on the type of personality the person has. I've worked in open offices my entire career (18 years). I've never had trouble zoning out from distractions and concentrating on coding. A good pair of headphones is big help in this regard.

Gee, another open space rant. We never see enough of that.

So let's review what open space helps with.

Open space helps with teams working on creative problems. It helps them by allowing them, as a team, to own their collective space in such a way such that they are constantly socially interacting whether they would prefer that or not. The theory is that a group of people, left alone to work physically beside each other on something non-trivial, will eventually work through obstacles that each of them working individually and trying to email would not. In addition, people work through these problems on a non-verbal level, using body language, obfuscation, and all the other social tools that nature has given us to use when dealing with problems as a group (Insert long discussion here)

In a room with 80 people all sitting at cafeteria tables? That's not it. In an environment where teams don't have and own separate spaces? That's also not it. Working on a grunt project that doesn't requires a lot of creative problem-solving? Probably not for you -- and your job is in danger of being taken over by robots. Not responsible for truly helping a business problem and instead just being told what to do every day? You might as well work anywhere in the world; office setup isn't going to change anything for you.

This is really powerful stuff, and I've seen it make a ton of difference to how teams perform. But like everything else, it's been "re-branded", buzz-worded, adopted-and-extended, and compromised to the point where it's a disaster for a lot of folks. I can't help that. It's still a good idea in many cases. (And, quite frankly, as a developer I'd rather just be left alone to code. I do not care about creative solutions to interesting problems. Unfortunately, the people who pay me? They pay me to work through tough issues, not just try to spend the maximum amount of time in flow.)

So it's really getting hard to have an intelligent discussion about this. All the time I hear my friends say "I hate X!" Then I look at what they're doing? It's not X. I'm not sure whether to agree with them or not. I am reminded of the old joke: "Doctor! It hurts when I do this!" "Well, stop doing that."