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Comment by kc10 | Hacker News Reader

I personally love working close with my team in an open-setting. That's the reason I go to office every day even though my employer offers WFH.

I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion. If everyone is working from home or in their personal offices, I hate having to get on a call or schedule a meeting to gather everyone to a meeting room for a quick discussion.

Sure, at times it can be distracting - I usually put on my headset if my tasks demand uninterrupted attention. My team also understands this and won't disturb unless necessary.

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> I just prefer turning around and asking a question or have a quick discussion.

I read that as "I love disrupting the productivity of everyone else by interrupting them constantly." I personally hate that. When I'm in the middle of something I don't want other people asking me questions or having "quick discussions." Save that for when I'm between work.

Just use some judgement when asking.

If getting the answer in one minute saves you one hour, it is obviously good for the company to "waste" the other person's time.

You should definitely be careful not to waste the time of your coworkers. Just don't waste your own time either!

If everyone used their judgment this way, in a team of six, there are five others trying to save their own time and punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge.

This has to be fixed by ensuring that the bus factor improves and the knowledge is spread around more. I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

> punishing the person who's worked to build up some knowledge. ... I disagree that the solution is to let everyone interrupt the one who is trying to get stuff done.

In essence we are talking about training new people and so this opinion seems selfish and unethical with respect to one's obligation to the firm.

The senior person should sacrifice some productivity until the new people are up to speed so that eventually the team has 5 senior people instead of one. If the new people are forced to figure out everything on their own, they might be only 5% as productive as they could be for perhaps their first 1-2 years. If the senior person simply gave up 20% of his time in order to answer questions for the first couple months, these 5 new guys likely would be closer to 80% productivity, representing a huge net gain in aggregate.

I only spoke against interruptions - not against spending time spreading knowledge. That, in fact, is in my good books as I already stated in my comment.

I guess I see these as 2 sides of the same coin; if the knowledge was properly spread via training and easy-to-use documentation, the junior developers would not need to interrupt much during the day.

>>> When I'm in the middle of something I don't want other people asking me questions or having "quick discussions."

Yeah, I get that, but most of us work in a team.

I think people need to state what kind of work they do when offering their preferences in these discussion.

Some complicated development tasks require 100% uninterrupted concentration for several minutes at a time. You're sitting there trying to build and maintain an extremely complicated model in your head, involving many complex parts, and their interactions along a time line, introducing permutations of that model to simulate the changes you are considering and simulating the outcome in your head. Then someone asks you something, or asks someone else something, or simply passes in your peripheral vision, and poof it's gone.

There a many tasks that don't require that kind of concentration, and many jobs, even in software development, that never involve those kinds of tasks. But with a setup that encourages 'communication', in the form of forced non-stop interaction, you have effectively made sure that the developers will never reach those heights, and most likely not by conscious decision, but out of ignorance.

Reminds me very much of this comic: http://i.imgur.com/3uyRWGJ.jpg

I used to think that way.

But then I started working with people who write simple and readable code. Now my programming isn't like that at all anymore.

Many complicated development tasks also require a high level of collaboration -- because there's simply too much for one person to be an expert in all of it.

I'd imagine that most highly-paid engineers are effective at both.

Of course it's an enjoyable setting for you.

Your team "won't disturb unless necessary", but you have no problem disturbing them whenever you want to have "a quick discussion".

Not all tasks require uninterrupted attention all the time. Sure, if everyone is working on complex stuff everyone can put on their headsets; no one will disturb others unless required.

I have seen open-setting that are pretty quiet and where you can get more or less work done during regular work hours. The open space where I work today, though, is an absolute nightmare. It's not that I get interrupted for technical questions, I am interrupted for all sort of things: people around me telling jokes, playing basket-ball, laughing, singing, gossiping, reading their news feed out loud...

The thing that baffles me the most is: the person that generates much of the noise is actually quite productive, but destroys all the productivity around him.

Someone from management obviously needs to step in and do something about it. But they are probably afraid of loosing half the workforce in that area of the office, if they did anything serious to prevent this to happen.

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