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Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

I work in a team. The team of 5-10 people sit in the same office. That way we can talk to each other when needed. Some say that's disturbance, I call it collaborating.

I'm not a code monkey. I don't sit alone in an office all day hammering out code. If that was what expected of me, I would change job.

So, not exactly open floor plan, but not separate offices either. I think that's perfect.

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Some say that's disturbance, I call it collaborating.

Sure, just keep your collaboration out of my concentration. That is, "Alice and Bob collaborating" may just be keeping Joe from getting any work done. It's easy to lose track of the effect of your collaboration in any open environment. Doing it in an office with a closed door eliminates that problem.

I'm not a code monkey. I don't sit alone in an office all day hammering out code.

Having an office does not in any way imply that you're supposed to "sit alone in an office all day hammering out code".

Same. I'm a huge fan of a team having its own 'alcove' or bullpen as we all are usually tackling a problem together or triaging something.

Agreed, as long as managers, business, or generally people who talk a lot weren't stationed there. And other people coming for discussion or just to chat weren't allowed either unless it involved the entire team.

I'm currently in a small office with a small team. They hate talking. They want to do everything by chat or code review.

My point? So many factors are at play for a healthy office.

I mean, why is there a need to chat while working? Why not go to the kitchen to chat?

Code review seems pointless at a company with a defined code conventions.

Code conventions don't cover good algorithm design, good architecture, common implementation patterns, edge case coverage, etc.

"Code review seems pointless at a company with defined code conventions."

I don't mean to disrespect you, but either you are you are very green or are living in a completely different universe of software engineering than I am. It's interesting to hear this viewpoint.

It seems weird to me to use online chat to talk to someone right next to you. I've done it in some situations to avoid disturbing others but it's pretty inefficient compared to face-to-face talking.

The good thing about online chats is you have a history of the conversation to reference later.

This is worth its weight in gold. Add to that the ability to selectively broadcast the conversation to potentially-relevant people without mutilating the concentration of non-interested parties. Add to that the ability to forward that info to new team members years after the conversations have happened and potentially years after the originator of the answer left.

I like that too. I am fine with interruptions that are work related. It's the constant background noise that bothers me in open office.

I read this as "I don't write code all day." I did write code all day, and when I worked in that exact environment, I could not do it. Too many audio distractions and distractions in my peripherals. And I was supposed to be doing difficult programming work? I have always gotten my best work done at home, alone, while you "not a code monkey" types chit chat in the office.

Depends on the work. I do code all day, but the codebase I work on is massive, fairly old (although some parts have been updated) and everyone in the office has their own area of knowledge. What the code does is also complex enough that it requires specific domain knowledge to code properly (I suppose "expert system" is the correct term), so you can't just throw general computer science at every problem. In that type of environment collaboration among developers is vital, I often leave in the evening not because there's nothing to do but because almost everyone else is gone and I've exhausted the bounds of my knowledge. At that point I can bang my head against a problem for 5 hours or ask the local expert the next morning and get my answer in 5 minutes.

But yeah if I was just churning out CRUD apps then I'd probably be more productive on my own.

I use slack for those questions and, very rarely, a phone. Collaboration doesn't need to be in person.

I consider it rude to Slack someone after they've left, unless it's a critical issue. People shouldn't be "on call" for anything that could wait until morning.

Slack has options to snooze notifications until working hours. We slack each other all the time after hours if someone is on call or just working late, but there's no expectation of answering till the next workday. It's nice because you can get things out there without having to remember.

This is why slack has configurable notification levels, depending on message content and the channel its sent to.

No, but I find it's a lot more fluid when it is. Talking with a white board is much more time-efficient than typing aside from exchanging code/logs/etc, and why go through the trouble of video conference/screen share with all the myriad of things that can go wrong when I can just walk over to someone's desk (or have them walk over to mine) and point at the screen/draw on the white board? Even in individual offices I'd still rather walk over or have people walk over to me. Slack and such have the advantage when it comes to location flexibility/distributed workforce, but for effective active collaboration co-location is still king IMO. At the end of the day you're having a human conversation with someone, no point in adding unnecessary layers.

I think too many developers have a "shut up and let me code" mentality that ironically hurts their progress in any collaborative effort.

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