Just shut up and let your devs concentrate, advises Joel Spolsky

We should recognise that the same self discipline stopping oneself from checking reddit every 5 seconds is closely related to the ability to retain concentration.

Chitchat in an open room filled with developers and their challenges is different to the drone of a loud machine, or chatter of factory workers whose interests might not overlap with yours. It's a bit like having the internet at your fingers - far too easy to be distracted by interesting chatter.

While pressure helps and you won't sweat the small stuff, at some point you just wanted some peace and quiet and think about the problem

I hate slacking at work. Actually don't count it towards my hours unless it is compile time or reading something useful (biggest trap for me).

Yet what helps me is just removing 1. the interruptions (noise is OK) and ideally 2. the risk of interruptions.

1. helps me concentrate eventually. 2. helps me concentrate almost immediately.

So, no, privacy won't make me slack of and browse HN, that is what I do when I cannot do anything else but want to be in front of my PC anyway.

There lies the problem. If its some unrelated people discussing stuff that doesn't interest us then its just background noise and get filtered out. But in office space it is exactly the opposite. You sit around with people who are doing similar work and most often what they discuss is directly or indirectly related to you/your-work. This is a problem.

Another thing i notice is that concentration is multi stage process. Sometimes when you are between something then its easy to get into the zone. But at times when doing some meta thinking, analysing where your thought process is correct or when trying to get grasp over a difficult problem, where again you have do analyse your thinking, it requires conscious effort to stay focused. If the environment is conducive then it becomes that much easier.

The office I program in now is kinda quiet, but not quite. There's a someone who plays with something that makes a random clicking sound and another person who snorts their phlegm backwards up their nose and another who constantly snacks. This near-silence but with very annoying sounds at random intervals I find very difficult to filter.

On the other hand I can program just fine in a noisy cafe or a building site (which I have done).

If you have a noisy environment, you probably shouldn't hire people with ASD/AD(H)D for example.

Your advice seems to advocate throwing people into the deep end and taking a sink or swim approach. Train people to concentrate until it's something that's familiar and available to them on demand, and then they can do it in the face of distraction.

That you managed to make it work the way you did is great. Some people may have much more trouble than you did in similar circumstances.

"Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame."

From http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

It's a beancounter mentality, possibly understandable in a startup with limited funds for offices, but a false economy in the long run.

Open offices are cheaper. So if you can con your mostly 20-something and 30-something tech staff that it's the best way to go, then you're golden, you save a ton of money and your employees don't even realize they're being ripped off.

As for "serendipity" it's the classic post-hoc fallacy problem. People think "oh, there was that one time" where something good happened in an open office, and they think that means nothing good would happen without open offices. Serendipity happens plenty with offices, but it happens amidst a background of much greater productivity and less annoyance at noisy office mates.

Companies will always invent "happy vocabulary" to justify whatever it is that is in their interest to do.

If they could pack their employees into little cardboard human boxes all separate from each other they would say "Our environment encourages strong focus and solitude."

You can put a positive spin on anything.

Too many people doing software over-inflate their importance to management. The reason why there are few offices at tech companies is simple. Management views software developers as factory workers, and they want to 'see' them working hard for the money that they're spending.

Each office, as well as the standup area and the conference room, have a whiteboard wall.

I would say that the general idea is that developers come together at standups, and typically plan out the day. If two or more developers determine a discussion is needed, they normally schedule right after the standup. Then the developers depart to their offices, and generally put their heads down and work in quiet. Most leave their doors open throughout the day, and close their doors when they have phone calls or small meetings.

The arrangement works well. Adhoc conversations are not discouraged, and occur throughout the day as needed, but the separate offices keep the trivial conversations and disturbances to a minimum.

From a cost perspective, this layout requires considerably more space than an open layout. And separate offices require separate HVAC ducts, and walls and doors are (obviously) additional expenses, too. I'm grateful that our team's contributions were recognized by the company (a non-tech company), such that the expense was considered worth it. it's certainly a cornerstone of my sales pitch for recruiting developers.

It's funny how I never have to stretch timelines or have communication issues with this setup.

+1, would recommend.

This is about the environment often present with any sufficiently large open office. I have been in offices with 26 people in a space probably meant to hold 20. It speaks to a culture of cost cutting over engineer productivity; when even a low amount of tech discussions at a given time end up with 6~ people talking simultaneously constantly. (see comment re: emotional noise being worse than mechanical noise, in a prior sysadmin job I worked in an office next to a transformer room and would go back to that in an instant because if I really needed to focus at least I could shut the door; and the transformer wasn't going to ignore signs of focus like headphones and being heads down to come over tap me on the shoulder and context switch me to something that really doesn't need to be discussed.)

Similarly; not having enough private rooms when they're actually needed for focus work, being placed in rooms with entirely distinct feature teams, and being often shuffled between them.

These are all "non soft skilled" environmental factors that have made working in open offices FAR more unpleasant for me than private offices (By private I include up to 1-2~ other people sharing your literal role)

Let me address your "at a cto role you must handle distraction" comment as well, since while I agree, we are _not_ at the CTO role, and to pretend the nature of our work is even similar is dishonest. Long-term context dependent thought work has an extremely well documented penalty from context switches. The CTO role, as has been described in recent HN threads and elsewhere, is far more of a salesman/face/public mouthpiece than engineer or even a technical role, and these career skills lend themselves to very different traditional environments.

In knowledge work, it's important (for most people) to get into deep focus to solve hard problems. Anecdotally I've seen huge gains by setting aside an 1:30 in the morning to WFH completely disconnected and then another 1:30 in the afternoon to hide away from my open work area. It's incorrect to claim that development of soft skills is at odds with the ability to get into a state of deep work with offices and / or working from home.

As for your question about being hard to focus on some work, yes it definitely is. I'd recommend you look into attention residue. In addition, I'm afraid your perception of your own possible output is probably much less than what you're actually capable of because you've learned to live with constant distraction. If you can't go more than an hour without checking email/texts/talking to coworkers/being interrupted, I'd argue that (as a knowledge worker), you're operating well below your capabilities.

Note that the article quotes Spolsky talking about "developers" - it's possible your job has a slightly different mix of need-to-concentrate versus need-to-communicate compared to a pure developer making software at Microsoft.

If you are at CTO rank, your job is not to program. You may still do that at times, or other things that require quiet time, of course. For that, you need "office hours" or "quiet hours." You simply make yourself unavailable and go somewhere you can have uninterrupted time.

If you are trying to be a developer that gets interrupted all the time as a CTO, you are definitely not doing your job right.

Also I love working from coffee shops. It's like you're alone but you have people around. The smell of tea and coffee have something to do with it.

Has something changed recently? Many devs of Win3/95 era got rich and retired early. So the culture may be different now.

One feature on slack that would help immensely would be an "urgent" signal vs a "if you see this in 2 hours time and respond i'm not that bothered".

I'd like to be able to switch off notifications for one and leave them on for the other.

I think it's more true that not every business can afford private offices for their developers if they locate their business near the trendiest part of downtown.

Perhaps one day per week where the tam grab laptops and work communaly/ close to each other and the rest of the time, have offices whose doors can be closed would be optimal. I do think you need some communal time or people stop ebing able to properly learn about what is going on among other groups.

My commute from an to work was 3 hours each day.

The prog next to me was a Finger drummer + song hummer.

There was construction for a new building 20-30 feet from me (next building), and they were driving pillars into the ground for foundations (Booom Boom all day).

There was no AC during summer.

The washrooms/water would regularly be out of order for several hours ever 1-3 days.

All this happened simultaneously over the course of several months. I did finally quit, and I would not wish these conditions on my worse enemy.

Think about the other people around you. When you are getting phone calls in a private office you are not distracting them from your work - every phone call you get in an open floor plan will be distracting to everyone around you.

I'd love to hear what piece of shit software you think could possibly replace Windows, SQL Server, Exchange and Office in 90% of the world's businesses (small, medium and large).

While I don't do much these days in the MS sphere (other than using VS Code), I think they're far more in touch than most large software companies.