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Comment by mattm | Hacker News Reader

It takes at least 15 minutes for people to get back into a productive working state after being interrupted.

If you interrupt an office of 8 and one person has an idea that saves 2 hours, you are only breaking even.

I worked in an open space before and it drove me nuts until I finally left. It was fine when there was just a few of us but as they started adding more people, the number of interruptions started to go up exponentially until some days it seemed like I was being interrupted all the time.

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There's a cynical side in me which makes me wonder if companies that embrace all of open floor plan, fixed working hours (implicit requirement due to practices such as daily 9:30 stand-up meetings), required physical presence are specifically trying to make sure that engineers aren't solving any difficult problems: to make sure the engineers are interchangeable components, as well as that the company adds as little value as possible to their customers (while still wringing profit out of them).

Incidentally, no sane software company that I know off is rigorous about enforcing all three in all circumstances. The places I've seen hailed as successes of upper-case-A Agile, on the other hand, are typically gluing together software other people have written (without modifying the software itself, unlike legitimate open source companies) with very little value being added.

Disclaimer: I have nothing against lower-case-a agile, that is developing software iteratively and ensuring a large suite of tests to allow for rapid refactoring; it's the right tool for many (but not all) problems. Upper-case-A Agile (Scrum, XP, etc...) and "TDD", on the other hand, just smell wrong.

> to make sure the engineers are interchangeable components, as well as that the company adds as little value as possible to their customers (while still wringing profit out of them).

Wow, you actually describe the place I worked pretty accurately according to what I witnessed there.

I hate open plan offices especially when they're shared across multiple work groups, functional areas (e.g. devs sharing with phone ad sales!), or even worse, companies.

I think the happy medium is some flexibility among telecommuting, private offices, group work areas (taking over a conference room, or something less formal), and informal mixing areas. There is no single office environment which is best for all tasks.

I'm at my most productive by telecommuting from home one day a week, and daily from 0600 to 1000 (not always on the main company project); then working in the office, meeting with clients outside, etc. from 1000 to 1800, and then whatever team building, client events, etc. from 1800 to 0000.

It takes at least 15 minutes for people to get back into a productive working state after being interrupted.

In my (somewhat limited) experience, it's actually "up to 15 minutes", depending on what I was doing. If it's something relatively mindless, I'll be back to work in maybe 30 seconds to 2 minutes; if it's more involved I'll go over my notes (some of which I wrote down immediately at the start of the interruption) and pick up about where I was after 5-10 minutes.

If it takes you 15+ minutes to swap back in after an interruption, you're trying to keep entirely too much state only in your head.

Like most things in life, it depends. Just because it didn't work in your case doesn't mean it never works, that it's never a good idea, and that it's always a waste of time. For us, it's turned out to work really well, and we feel like the benefits outweigh the costs. Your mileage will vary.

For some reason, though, this is a subject on which many people feel qualified to make pronouncements about the wisdom of what other people are doing. I have, for example, had a candidate come in for an interview, look at the office layout, lecture me for 15 minutes about how we must be idiots because we're killing our productivity with our open layout, and then leave because he'd refuse to work in a place like that. At least it saved me the other 45 minutes I would have had to spend interviewing the guy.

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