Why You Should Pay Millennials What They Deserve | Hacker News Reader

Why You Should Pay Millennials What They Deserve

fortune.com

4 pointsJSeymourATL7 comments

>millennials, who value more open, collaborative environments

No. Give me an office that shuts where I can concentrate away from people without the visual and auditory distractions that come with them. This myth needs to die. Give us a collaborative meeting/commons space instead.

Agreed. The Open Office has too many distractions for "focus work" to be possible.

So true. Its only the extroverts who like this environment. Unfortunately they are often the loudest. I hate when I'm in the middle of something and my bored co-worker wants to use me to waste time.

I'd love an office. But i fear it might be too late to go back to private offices. Besides the open floors, open communications ra-ra spiel, i'm sure employers have noticed the cost savings in stuffing everyone together.

And they wonder why productivity is now decreasing, in a reverse from decades long increases - employers aren't willing to give their employees the resources to be productive.

From the perspective of a student who got out of high-school, I got most of my work done in medium-sized group of individuals who actually wanted to work.

Any more than 10 was useless and they began to chit-chat. Much fewer and people tended to make mistakes or forget things. Those 10 or so people could be paired off into 5 groups of 2 for practice of exams, or 3 groups of 3 (with one floater, or one group of 4) for more round-robin type work and collaboration.

There is very much a reason the philosophers of old had a set class size of ~8, and why classrooms encourage "smaller" groups. The workplace should, in theory, value this more. However, in the sense of being "new and hip", I fear they've abandoned productive work to create "ideas".

I appreciate the perspective, but apart from pair programming, programming is a solitary intellectual exercise that requires intense concentration for long periods of time. Now, software development is a team sport, but that coordination and "play time" (sport analogy ho!) needs to take place in a space dedicated to it. Programming shouldn't be forced to take place in the meeting space.

Many other office/industrial pursuits are not like this, but the fact of the matter is that programming is.

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