Comment by Matachines | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Matachines | Hacker News Reader

Another thread where most commenters will advocate for remote work and/or private offices. I agree.

Dan Luu recently said this about Peopleware, which advocates for offices and is highly regarded:

> This book seemed convincing when I read it in college. It even had all sorts of studies backing up what they said. No deadlines is better than having deadlines. Offices are better than cubicles. Basically all devs I talk to agree with this stuff.

> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way. Even Microsoft is remodeling buildings from individual offices to open plan layouts. Could it be that all of this stuff just doesn’t matter that much? If it really is that important, how come companies that are true believers, like Fog Creek, aren’t running roughshod over their competitors?

> This book agrees with my biases and I’d love for this book to be right, but the meta evidence makes me want to re-read this with a critical eye and look up primary sources.

--

What's HN opinions?

Maybe these companies are succeeding in spite of these policies instead of because of them.

I also work in an open office environment. What are the most desirable desks for people to get? The ones next to windows or furthest away from foot traffic.

I think a book that cites sources is immediately more trustworthy, to me, than companies following fashionable trends in office design without a critical eye toward impacts on employee performance. Show me one, just one, example of a company moving to open office space only after evaluating performance impact (or, conversely, immediately evaluating the impact after such a change), and that would be something to look at.

But AFAICT, these decisions aren't being made based on facts. They're being made based on gut, fashion, and when it comes right down to it, cold hard cash (open space is cheaper).

Maybe they do all those studies and decide that the hit in productivity is worth the cheaper open space? Maybe individual performance just doesn't matter that much? I'd bet that the bigger the company, the less it matters how effective individuals are and the more it matters how effective teams are.

As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.

I've worked for several big companies (though not Facebook, Google, Apple, or others in that class). None of them showed any interest in analyzing developer productivity, much less looking for ways to increase it. My gut instinct is that developer productivity is hard to measure, real estate costs are easy to measure, so you end up with 500 people in a noisy environment doing the work that 100 could do in a quiet environment.

I also suspect there's a status thing going on. People working on the floor are lower status than people with offices, and I suspect some execs find status signaling more desirable than productivity.

Exactly!

This isn't a problem of one office design or another. It's a problem of misaligned incentives between individual workers and the people making these decisions.

I don't think there's a solution for that.

I think that hard to measure consequences vs easy to measure financial impacts are why so many companies go down the path of mediocrity one small change at a time. "If we make people jump through all of these hoops for software/hardware/whatever we save $X per year." HR, finance, corp IT and facility management in big companies rarely factor in employee happiness because you can't put that as a line item in the budget. Their priorities become aligned with their own interests.

HR is starting to wise up as evidenced by improving benefits packages and various industry publications. And while that's good that's probably a consequence of being held directly accountable for recruiting and retention which doesn't translate readily to other departments. There's still a dramatic disconnect between various departments and what benefits the company as a whole.

As much as I love working from home or an office or whatever, team productivity is better when people who work together share physical space.

Define "team".

I fully believe that a co-located 5-9 person team in an open space can be a good thing.

I also fully believe that a co-located 20-30 person department composed of 4-6 teams, all in a single open space is a complete disaster.

And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space.

To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.

> To me, the perfect solution is neither individual offices nor open plans, but rather 5-9 person team spaces with floor-to-ceiling walls and a door, plus breakout rooms.

This can be a pretty good solution for a well-gelled 5-9 person team. But I don't buy into the mindset that this is always the natural unit of software development. Some problems need larger groups -- that probably don't fit the "gelled team" model as well -- while others are perfectly amenable to one or two people coding away behind closed doors. Why is there so much focus on "teams" at the moment?

>And don't get me started on the travesty that is the new Facebook space.

I have similar observations about their UI. Maybe a consequence of Conway's law, that the office plan is implicitily reflected in the software?

It's kind of a different software that are being developed these days. Software development used to be highly original, analytical and creative, but now it's like endlessly iterative on the same problems and tools. That explains the number of programmers/engineers around. My guess is that the highly selective group of engineers who are still working on the most original problems sit in their own office (preferably their home office, e.g. Linus). For the rest of us, it's more like a factory floor.

In my last job, it started out with all offices to accommodate devices under test and test equipment. It went to large cubes still with enough space for test equipment.

Then all the equipment had to go into the lab, with a network connection. Fine, I pressed little ARM boards into service doing what we had to do near the target. On their dime, without an approved project. They we lost that lab and had to reuse a chem. lab where you had to wear goggles for no good[1] reason.

[1] they closed the building with the offices and good labs. It sat there literally mouldering. It will have to be torn down. That design of building cannot be "stored" with no HVAC.

At some point it's not about cost - you're the bloody Ogallala Sioux and they're "pushing you off the land."

Did I mention I don't work there any more? They are free to six-sigma the remaining nothing into the purest of management oblivion.

> But virtually every successful company is run the opposite way

Because every company is run the opposite way. The subset that comprises the successful ones ends up grouped in with the open-office sadists by default.

Same reasons that C/C++/Java/Javascript beat all the better languages. Pop culture.

C and c++ were close to the only language available some 10-30 years ago. There is still lot of legacy to work on.

Java is superior to everything else. Go and C# only came in much later.

Javascript is the only language supported by browsers.

It's not pop culture, there are real historical and practical reasons for them to be where they are.

It's not that clear cut because finding developers with experience and getting tooling for the non mainstream languages is harder.

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