Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by specialist | Hacker News Reader

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What's with the "collaborative" open offices? Now that we're passed peak Agile, is collaborative the next fad?

It can't be cost. Primo office space is $30-$40/sqft/year. A 100 sqft personal office would cost $4000/year.

I recently interviewed quite a few places. Big fancy modern offices. Common spaces. Foosball tables. And all the devs shoved into a corner, working shoulder to shoulder, desks facing each other. Like slaves on a war galley.

I'm an extreme extrovert. Open offices suck. If you want me to be productive, give me some me space and me time for head's down uninterrupted concentration.

While I'm ranting...

"Agile" (whatever that is) and "collaborative" (ditto) are mutually exclusive. Cite: The Tyranny of Structurelessness essay.

I really want to know where these whackadoodle ideas come from. Then maybe we can do something to mitigate it.

I've assumed management self actualization blather is management's way of asserting their self-importance while screwing labor. Know your place you worthless keyboard monkey.

More charitably, a bestie just went back to school (after 20 years) to wrap up her masters degree. She said the cultural change was jarring. Kids these days all work in groups, collaboration, special snowflakes, etc. Because that's how the "real world" operates.

Is the "collaboration" fantasy an education meme which has infected know-nothing corporate management echelons?

University these days is gross in certain places, especially in anything related to IT - Computer Science, Engineering, Electric Engineering, etc.

There's a stupidly heavy emphasis on group work, with the superficial justification that "it's how the real world works", discounting that, in the real world, if you're in a team but don't actually do the work, you're going to get screwed.

It seems to me, though, that teachers are mostly pushed to do that because it's being done everywhere else, and because IT students have a reputation for being antisocial, so they need to be pushed to work together, in real life, if possible.

It's an entirely wrong approach to the problem.

> discounting that, in the real world, if you're in a team but don't actually do the work, you're going to get screwed.

Ha. I used to think that, then had two separate experiences with completely different management chains where the incompetent guy did just fine.

Wow. My experience was completely different. You mention "these days", so maybe things have changed now, but nothing in my CS degree prepared me for "agile" or "collaborative" or "Scrum" or anything. They weren't even taught at the Uni! All those things didn't come from academia but from real-world practitioners... (who, in my opinion, got a bit overzealous about their practices and thought they applied everywhere, all the time).

If I had followed standard practices from University at my day job, I'd be a "cowboy coder".

No. Nobody thinks that open offices are better for work.

They just think that the cost in productivity is less then the cost of the extra real estate required.

Your estimates of cost are totally incorrect.

When it comes to a difference of 200k vs 300k per fully loaded employee, most managers are going to doubt they are going to get 50% more work out of each employee.

I wish this were true -- it would make the argument for remote work easy.

A non-negligible number of people genuinely do seem to believe that the loss of individual productivity is offset by "team cohesion" or equivalent.

Remote work would make it closer to 0k than either, yet most managers are against it.

"Your estimates of cost are totally incorrect."

Illuminate me.

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