Why It’s So Hard to Actually Work in Shared Offices
thewalrus.ca
thewalrus.ca
We have 3 desks in a large open plan office with a kitchen area. It's about 10 feet from my desk. Most of the time it's just me from our company as the other devs work from home or work out the main office.
My experience of working in this shared space:
* It's noisy. I mean really noisy, noise cancelling headphones are a must. Like I said the kitchen area is near my desk, and people would routinely bang the cupboard doors. I sort of fixed this by putting felt and rubber on the doors to stop the loud banging, but I shouldn't have had to do this.
* People are noisy, people whistle, walk around talking loudly on their phones. Some people I'm sure talk loudly on purpose just to try and look like they are important in front of strangers. One guy makes random trumpet noises with his mouth...
* No one talks to anyone from other companies, to the point of awkwardness. I often see two people in the kitchen area from different companies and it can be a bit like a comedy sketch as they try to get their kitchening done without acknowledging the other person exists. Absurd, why don't people talk to each other. Especially people you see every day!
* When you are remotely working and the only person from your company you have no one to talk to and this is quite isolating and depressing. Especially worse if you end up in a room with 10 others and they are all from the same company. Then they start looking at you like you are in their space.
* The kitchen area, despite being an office staffed with supposed professionals, is always a mess. How does this happen?
Our office space is also open to a throughfare to conference rooms and such, so you randomly get random people walking through the office, again noisily.
But working here I at least don't have all the distractions of working from home.
Haha yeah. It helps to have a few women around, but especially when there are lots of male IT coworkers present this is definitely a thing.
The thinking is, men prefer taking risks, while women prefer to limit risks. In cooperation, men can push women to see the benefit of a risk (and in turn she gains more experience of risk), and women can push men to hold off of risks that might be detrimental. Women are good at synchronizing group thought, in that they make a space for others to talk and they generate talking points by asking important questions, while men generally like taking the floor. So for the man who does not take the floor of his own accord, women are more likely to create a space where he can talk.
Personally, in an environment like WeWork, I can see men and women having more conversations and opening up the place a little.
1. https://www.td.org/insights/women-and-men-working-together-m...
One was very aggressive, always having loud arguments on the phone and slamming doors as she left the building.
Another one seemed to think that because she and her partner were renting 2 desks this made her twice as a important as anyone else? She was playing music one day so I asked her to turn it down. She never spoke to me again and made me feel very uncomfortable whenever our paths crossed.
Of course this isn't representative of all women but, just saying, being female isn't a guarantee of good behaviour.
Can you share what part of the US/world you are in? I'm curious if this is cultural.
(The other nights I had room service - that's the best situation, I can actually relax)
That said, I'm happy to Make grunting noises and guesticulatr at milk bottles to the occasional stranger in a shared office kitchen. I guess part of the problem is it takes me a long time to remember a person's face - when watching tv I rely a lot on context. My wife often says "no that's not xxx, he's got the wrong colour hair". I've been known to get skin colour and sex wrong too, but most of the time context works. Took me about 2 seasons to remember the names of the 6 main characters in "friends".
When making tea, there's no context to build on. At university I wrote down names of people on my floor in halls, which mostly helped. At school I'd learnt the names of everyone in the class by the middle of the second year, and by year 6 knew about 80% of the c. 120 people in the year group. My children's friends are mostly a blur but I can get 4 or 5 of them with a little confidence - that's after 16 months.
In person conversations are far too draining, especially without context, and when there's nothing to gain what's the point?
It's a common space, so it's nobody's. Especially in an environment like that, a collection of separated individuals
I don’t see why it should be different anywhere else. Some people just aren’t good at being responsible.
That said, I've worked in an office where the company took a nagging/shaming/signs/emails approach instead of upping the cleaning budget as the team grew, which was frustrating and ineffective. Encouraging people to clean up after themselves is good, but if it's not immediately effective the rest of us shouldn't have to live in filth while we try to get the worst offenders in line.
They look like trailer park post tornado except for right after the help has been there.
In an office with a dozen or more people there's a pretty high chance there's at least one person who is lazy, "too important" and/or "too busy" to clean up after themselves.
> a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
At the WeWork I'm at, it's a mix. You can be friendly and talk to other people if you try. If you don't try it's not going to happen.
As far as productivity, I'm a full 50%+ more productive at the coworking space vs being at home. And compared to a coffee shop, it's about the same price and a lot more convenient to have the dedicated desk and guaranteed seat!
Having worked in a number of shared workspaces: while this does seem to be the natural state of things, breaking the barrier is fairly easy. In every workspace I've worked at, I've gotten to know almost everyone there by talking to them in the kitchen, and once people see me doing it, they start doing it. You're not obligated to change the culture of your workspace, but if you don't like it, it doesn't even take much effort to change it. And there are big career benefits to this: I've met a number of my clients this way.
Don't overthink it, it's just a conversation and the worst that happens is you return to the awkward silence that was there before.
Followed by:
"So what are you working on?"
And so on...
This happens by default, but isn't hard to change. I suspect this is why the likes of wework are startups while most are just buildings. Not sure it works in every location, but it certainly works in some. I know someone in a south Tel Aviv wework who refuses to move apartments because she likes her local wework, and refuses to change to another one 20k away.
* Some days noisy, some days very quiet. I have great headphones, but find myself more productive than when I worked at home. People are noisy, but generally the 'hum' is a sensible level, and it's only really irritating if someone is on Skype and conversing without headphones in (I'm not sure why that's more annoying that overhearing a face to face conversation, but it definitely is).
* Conversation is what you make it. I'm on first name terms with lots of people here, it's easy to make small talk, exchange a name, then intro someone to someone else. Before long, most regular faces know most regular faces.
* The one thing I missed most working at home was water-cooler chat. I go out of my way now to offer tea / coffee, ask about people's lives, whatever - I can have headphones on for 95% of the day, but that 5% is important. I didn't know anyone here before I joined.
* Our kitchen area is tidy 90% of the time. People are pretty good about cleaning up after themselves, the WW staff are generally very good, and if something is awful, asking it to be sorted is usually pretty painless.
I think generally I'm very pro WW. There are some annoyances; it's usually people drinking and drink-chatting too early. But I don't begrudge it and the building is big enough to go work somewhere quiet. Definitely far more productive than WFH.
My guess (and personal experience) is that it's because the frequency response of the speakers is so tinny and thin compared to what you'd expect a regular face-to-face conversation to be, your brain keeps being distracted by it? Same with people "listening to" music by keeping headphones on their desk on full blast...
That's because the brain is trying to fill in the missing part of the conversation, no matter what we want.
See: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hearing-just-one-h...
* Very quite DD area. Some guys talk over the phone even though it's frowned upon. That's an annoyance.
* Conversation is possible even in the quiet zone. I made quite a few acquaintances.
* The hot desk area is noisy as hell, most of the days. There's also WW background music. It just feels like a pub.
* The entire WW area, including toilets is super tidy and I mean tidy like a hospital OT.
Overall pro WW.
I gave up talking to people after a while. Nobody seemed particularly interested in socializing in the common areas which in retrospect I understand and I got some abrasive reactions from just trying to start conversation. Perhaps they were forced to work there and would have preferred to WFH.
In my experience of coworking spaces, it is the same one/two people that ruin the space for everybody else. What is missing from co-working spaces is some kind of housekeeping rules and enforcement (in lieu of mutual respect).
What’s missing is simple walls. Four walls with a door. What’s missing is privacy and silence, which we have apparently collectively decided is not necessary for all tech work.
Last week I was in Kenya for business purposes setting up a new office, again far more productive sat on my own in the apps room plugging various things in, than sat with the PM and some other engineers in another part of the office.
"American office workers have barely looked up while their work quarters have been degraded from sensible to silly. Not so long ago, they worked in two- and three-person offices with walls, doors, and windows. (You remember walls, doors, and windows, don’t you?) In such space, one could work in quiet or conduct meetings with colleagues without disrupting neighbors.
Then, without warning, open-plan seating was upon us like a plague upon the land. The advocates of the new format produced not one shred of evidence that effectiveness would not be impaired. They really couldn’t. Meaningful measurement of productivity is a complex and elusive thing."Ugh, you clearly don't get some people.
It's probably one of the reasons why they have the coworking space to begin with: they don't want to interact with people! Ain't nothing wrong with that!
They want to get their shit done and go home and do other shit.
Also, if they're halfway competent at their business, why do they need to know what everyone else is doing?
I've done the coworking thing for a while, and the social interaction/collaboration thing literally doesn't come close to working the way you think it would.
If you're hoping for some serendipitous interaction where you magically find that big project or cool new collaborator or etc. you'll be sorely disappointed. Because, many people at coworking spaces have literally been there since it first opened which can be years.
I was at one with a tax attorney. I'm not going to like collab on anything with the tax attorney. Seemed like a nice guy, but I'm a developer and he has no money to spend on software so...
Now multiply that story by nearly everyone in the coworking space and you'll see it quickly becomes...a place to do work and that's it. Which is awesome and exactly what we needed!
Have you ever had roommates ? I've never had a clean kitchen and roommates, and never had a dirty kitchen and no roommate (and by my own actions as well !).
This also worked at one electronics manufacturer I worked at. We'd all spend some time on Friday afternoons cleaning. It was so much easier to find things when they were put where they belong at least once a week.
This is gold.
This is a pet peeve of mine. What the hell, people? I feel like in a lot of "cool" spaces, people working there are just kids that expect their mom to take care of their space, so they don't care about dishes or cups lying around. Hey, you don't have to do all chores, but at least move your stuff to the dishwasher or sink! Geez.
What kind of home do you have where all you have described is less distracting? Perhaps you ought to move!
Are you staffing a professional cleaner?
Expecting software engineers to be good at keeping a kitchen tidy is about as rational as expecting your marketing people to be good at maintaining your servers.
I mean, sure, there's a basic level of consideration, and even when I'm at work (where we have a pretty excellent cleaning staff) if you drop something on the floor, you are expected to pick it up so that nobody else steps in it and tracks it all over the place, and people do.
But... you can tell that the place would get grungy pretty fast if we didn't have the professional cleaners about. Cleaning is a skill like any other,and some of us are better at it than others... and some of us have higher standards than others.
The right way to deal with this in a commercial space is to pay a professional to deal with it, imo.
In the company I work for, you can take the lunch from the lunchroom to your desk. For a week now, at the team next to ours, there's a pile of trays, plates and soup bowls. It seems that whoever is taking the lunch to their desk, can't be bothered to bring the plates back. Not even next day.
The office looked like the lobby of a hipster hotel.
Over the next few weeks, we showed up each day and tapped away on MacBook Airs to the sounds of Portuguese house music and old-school hip hop piped in through speakers. (“Rap is urban, and so is WeWork,” the company explains online. “But more profoundly, the common themes of rap are in tune with the company’s mission.”) While we created, cleaning crews in WeWork T-shirts quietly restocked the citrus water and wiped up our spilled drinks.
If this is the future of tech work, then I guess I'd better find another career--perhaps gardening or wood-working?
... Don’t let Jony catch wind of this, he'll use it as fodder to abolish MacBook Pros and their ungainly fan noises
Of course, this only worked because the work I was doing during those times also required very little coordination and communication with other people. I'm introverted enough that if I have my own space but need to get out of it to talk to someone, I'll find myself procrastinating doing that.
Having a shared open plan office makes it harder for me to focus, but easier for me to interact with people. I'm not sure if that's a net win for my productivity or not.
The best people on a project should be on the least important parts. The second best people lead the important projects, and thus grow to the best. In the mean time the best people are on something that isn't that important anyway, so if someone has a question there is no reason not to interrupt them and ask. This also leaves your best people free for when marketing has another "great idea" so they can ask before promising the impossible (and in some cases they can get something now instead of waiting for the entire project cycle)
Exactly. I can't imagine working in an environment like that.
You don't want to hear me playing Smooth by Neil Cicierega[1], and I don't want to hear you playing rap.
A work environment is not the place to be playing music for everyone around you. Constant generic music is the worst part of retail, and that's saying something.
If your goal is to foster creativity and productivity, but all I hear is thump-thump-thump drilling into my head, I'm not going to be either. Even when it's music I love (or music I love working to) I'll still pause it when I'm trying to really understand what's going on in a complex system.
Is the implication that I said that?
Otherwise agreed, silence is great. I find my concentration varies throughout the day, and when I'm most focused I prefer silence. When I'm least focused, music helps bump me up to a productive level. And in the middle, it can go either way.
I enjoy being able to wind down and have beers the last couple of hours on a friday (in companies that have allowed it). I organise my workload so there is nothing difficult to do then anyway.
Such brash optimism and such little appreciation for the pleasures of life beyond winning.
Luckily the companies I've worked at have all been non-drinker friendly as well as drinker friendly. There's always a non-alcoholic option and they've usually tried to make sure people knock off a little early so that anyone with kids etc can join in before they have to leave.
I don't think that companies are under any obligation to avoid having traditions like Friday beers altogether, but, if you're looking to be inclusive, you should probably strive to ensure that there are also plenty of social activities where there is no alcohol present.
This gave us an opportunity to meet with all the other teams / departments.
Sure, I would rather be at my local microbrewery drinking stout with my friends rather than drink cheap pilsner at work but it has its benefits. There is no way I would have been as close to those people if not for this paid social time.
It also helps the work. Very often people would vent about their projects and other coworkers would listen and come up with quick solutions to their issues. "Oh yeah, X software is a pain in the ass. Did you try doing Z? I had to work with that software at my previous job and doing Z always helped!".
Even in those cultures, I've never ever seen an employer allowing anyone to drink during the rest of the week. Now that would be obscene.
One of the worst aspects IMHO of the US working culture is the blurring of the working/personal divide. Because the consequence is the semi-permanent working state of mind.
Don't get me wrong, I like to get along with my colleagues. But they're that, colleagues, not friends. These events only perpetuate the working vibe and merge it with the after-working-hours.
...paternalistically manage our social lives
...tone-deafly intrude on them
...desperately be a part of them
...co-opt something cool and make it corporate
...do the adult equivalent of turning children's unstructured play time into a scheduled, paid-for playdate/lessons/"extracurriculars"
I'll pick and choose my friends and invite them to beers myself. In a bar. Away from the company offices. So we can talk shit about the management and people we don't like! What fun is life without the hating? (Well whatever, I just betrayed myself as a Gen Xer by being so forthright and gauche as to admit that I recreationally hate on people.)
My employer is not my friend. My friends, I will defend if they're in trouble for the next 40 years. My employer, I will ditch at the very first sign they're in trouble, or making trouble for me. Therefore I think maintaining a separation of "work life" from the private realm is appropriate. Of course, the more your "work is your life," and/or the more the company is actually yours, this applies less. But even in that case I would still recommend a healthy (hygienic) separation of concerns just like with any software system.
Heh, at my last job we always went out to a pub for some burgers and beer on Fridays. 75% of the conversation revolved around exactly this. I found it an important way to decompress and let off steam.
Not that it makes it alright that anyone has to do that, but I keep that in mind so I don’t lose perspective.
I find it hard to believe that any company would allow daytime drinking.
If it ever became a problem or someone got shitfaced I'm sure we'd see restrictions put into place quite quickly.
Allow? In some cultures a beer or glass of wine at lunch is perfectly normal. There is also a big difference between having a beer and downing a 6-pack.
I personally would avoid a beer at lunch because it makes me tired, but I wouldn't think much of it if someone had a beer with their lunch.
(Unless it's friday evening and your are working hard while everyone else is at the special beer break.)
I find this standpoint unacceptable in environments that manage PHI PII or anything else involving people's privacy or financials.
I get your point about the "I'm mature and experienced enough to know when a beer is appropriate" angle. Maybe I'm old fashioned but my dedication to my work goes beyond things like test coverage it goes into the details of how I conduct myself talk and dress when I'm the clock.
I dont want to drive over a bridge or fly on a plane designed by people who dont take a similar level of seriousness to being on the clock.
Not to mention beer tastes better when youre not in front of your flatcreen staring at code. Something to be said for being present in the moment.
I agree with you, and I work with people who think similarly. No one is drinking during the day or getting drunk at work even though there is beer in the refrigerator. I was responding directly to the parent comment about seeing people drunk at work. That's completely unacceptable.
> I dont want to drive over a bridge or fly on a plane designed by people who dont take a similar level of seriousness to being on the clock.
I would be much more worried about lack of sleep leading to issues[1] than if someone had an occasional beer at the end of the day.
[1] https://www.huffingtonpost.com/lissette-calveiro/studies-sho...
It's like Love Psych. Great idea, great execution, but not something I can listen to very often.
I do like how it brings out the message the Village People intended though. You have to really try to hear what they're saying in the original.
> Constant generic music is the worst part of retail, and that's saying something.
And getting away from the front-of-house area saturated by muzak doesn't promise much relief, because in the employees-only areas of any blue-collar workplace it's a near-certainty you'll find an FM boombox playing absolutely the worst top-40 station within range. There was a NYT article from a few months ago saying 'employers are starting to play music for their staff, what do we think of this?', basically an enormous shibboleth announcing that none of the people involved had ever worked for minimum wage in their lives.
Do you know how loud "Butterfly Kisses" — apparently the #1 through #40 top song during the time I was doing this — has to be cranked to make it audible over a web-fed offset printer and cutter? I do.
Well... there went my evening... a youtube playlist and a wikipedia article later... plus a rewatch of Potter Puppet Pals...
That's one oddly talented dude.
I can see the benefits for small teams/companies but at that point why not just commute from home and save the money?
Better to be a programmer in a woodworking shop than woodworker in a WeWork.
https://medium.com/@samuelclay/everything-you-need-to-build-...
Anything that lets me do more with software beyond building web apps is always fun.
However, it's not the cheapest hobby. I've spent thousands setting up a proper shop. But it has been fun. And if I wanted to I could easily make the money back building custom pieces of furniture for other people.
The only people I see at coffee shops not using Macs are day traders and people playing video games.
I'm at a WeWork now and I'm far more productive than the time I spent working in a quiet home. I speak to people here who love it, I speak to people here who hate it. One of the best things about being in 'tech' is unless you're terrible, you can probably find somewhere to work that better fits how you like to work :-)
Do any of the bigger tech companies offer quiet space? As in somewhere you can work without all the 'cool'? Seems like it would be quite a selling point for some.
* Shared gardening start up. * Shared space for wood-working start up (ok, these already exist).
If developed properly, both are great acquisition targets for WeWork.
I guess, at least as relates to the tech industry, given the treatment of women, this isn't far off?
What do you call it when real life looks like satire? Maybe Silicon Valley will pick up on this.
But I'm old enough to remember when private offices were still common, and there was a lot of negative writing about those too. As someone about to enter the software industry, I was very concerned that I'd be lonely and depressed from working alone in front of a screen all day.
I think the truth behind all this is that the people writing this negative writing are all mismatched with the offices they're in. If you put a bunch of introverts in a shared office, they're going to be distracted and stressed. And if you stick a bunch of extroverts in private offices, they're going to be lonely and depressed.
The answer for employers is to create mixed workspaces that are conducive to both forms of work, and make explicit the fact that nobody should be pressured to work in one space or another.
The answer for individuals is to know yourself and where you work best, and work at jobs that will allow you to work in a work environment that works for you.
Complaining about shared workspaces or private workspaces is counterproductive--it's just trying to force the kind of workspace that works for you onto a diverse industry that doesn't necessarily work the same as you.
Personally, I get a lot done in shared offices. I can relate to a lot of what the author complains about, but a lot of the problems he brings up are problems with startup culture, not with shared workspaces. We extroverts aren't idiots, we know that stuff like "the common themes of rap are in tune with the company’s mission" is ridiculous.
don’t just shout your preferences at everyone else, it turns these threads into useless repetitive noise.
- You're mixing up the difference between personal preferences of an individual and emergent results of groups of people.
- The fact that you prefer something doesn't mean it's best for general productivity (or even your productivity for that matter).There seems a lot of reluctance to give the worker bees privacy. I don’t know if it’s a status thing or a “how do I know whether they’re goofing off on HN” thing. Maybe it amounts to the same issue.
We're not the one's shouting our preferences at everyone else; we're the ones having the preferences of others thrust upon us.
If all the introverts are doing is complaining about open offices and demanding private offices, they're turning this into a zero-sum game where in order for introverts to win, extroverts have to lose. Not only is that not a good result, but it's not likely to work, since it's not going to get any support from extroverts.
Mixed private/shared workspaces are a solution to this problem that benefit everyone.
> They are the ones that need to come to the middle and meet the rest of us.
Does it occur to you that I'm an extrovert trying to do exactly that?
I've seen one attempt at this and I think it was basically an extraverts attempt at making introverts happy. It was basically "we made these 3 'private' office things that you can use when you need to". This doesn't help me at all. Can I use these 90% of the time I'm at work? If not, what's the point?
I think the unfortunate thing that makes this virtually impossible in this day and age are two things:
1. It seems to be vastly more expensive for introvert-friendly spaces where square footage is expensive. Stacking people on top of each other is more economical. 2. Introvert-friendly workspaces are generally seen as "uncool" and unable to attract young and cheap talent.
Sucks being an introvert in tech right now. I'm either working in a noisy space, forced to wear headphones and listen to music all day long or working from home where there are other distractions. I just want to see a workspace that has SOME kind of attempt at catering to introverts. Have yet to see one though...
Teams who want to work in an open space can forego the offices and get a nice open space instead.
Did you give this feedback to anyone who could do anything about it?
> 1. It seems to be vastly more expensive for introvert-friendly spaces where square footage is expensive. Stacking people on top of each other is more economical.
That's true, but the benefits of having a workspace that's effective for your workers' needs would seem to outweigh the cost, I would think.
> 2. Introvert-friendly workspaces are generally seen as "uncool" and unable to attract young and cheap talent.
Sure, but places that are more concerned about being cool to attract young and cheap talent are generally crappy in lots of ways. If a place is staffed entirely with folks fresh out of college, that's a better reason not to work there than any office layout.
I may have a skewed view on things because I work in a techy college town.
I've actually had some friends who got offices but their job was miserable (defense contractor). I may have just had bad luck but from my experience, finding a good place to work without a completely open office environment is tough.
I've shared an office with a teammate before, and it was very productive. It was a great mix of heads-down work and the ability to discuss issues/design as needed.
OTOH, someone I know started a coworking space a few miles away from my home. I popped in there a couple of times to check it out and decided it was very much not for me. Too much "collaboration" and background noise for me personally, though some thrive on that. The clincher for me was one time there was supposed to be a presentation that sounded interesting, and well after it was supposed to start someone announced that it had been canceled last minute. "Well, I'll do a little work then," I thought. Then they announced that since the presentation wasn't happening they'd be playing talks from YouTube. Great, no work after all, big screen video and blaring audio of something I can watch myself at any time, because why? I dunno. Just not for me.
(Note: I've actually spent a good deal of time in a WeWork.)
Though when I was in a portacabin next to the hanger where they tested executive jets it could get a bit loud :-)
I once worked for a $web_company in a cubeless open office with hard flooring and lots of glass. It was so bad you could hear a fart in the bathroom from the kitchen. Developers routinely recommended brands of noise cancelling headphones. In the sysadmin pool we were virtually un-addressable unless you talked to us on IRC. The office was just too damned loud.
and thats not all, things dropped on the floor never survived. they didnt just break, they went off like a bomb. I remember a tech-support coworker dropped her novelty coffee mug and someone thought it was gunfire.
We hired a sound control company to fix most of the problems when an executive was overheard in his office addressing our devops lead by a homophobic slur.
In my experience shared-table or open-plan offices didn't work when I was at a company, but they work pretty well in a coworking space. One aspect of this is the lack of a power dynamic: you're not sharing an open-plan office with your manager. You can also leave (or threaten to leave) a coworking space if it doesn't work for you. Members have more power over their environment if they can organize. WeWork is a huge chain now, so maybe this works better at smaller coworking spaces that have less corporate inertia.
I’m not crazy about shared office, cafe tables. They have to be library style heavy, solid to dampen heavy typing, pencl tapping, regular jostling.
Our local university libraries are pretty good, when I still had wifi access.
My laptop camping secret is hospitals. Free wifi, pretty good cheap food, clean bathrooms.
I've also found a few local companies which have their own cafes, which are still open to the public.
I'd probably pay $5/hr to laptop camp. I generally "pay rent" where ever I'm camping with tips, treats, and coffee. I'd rather just pay outright. A cafe, event space, or study zone that allocates hours for quiet time will clean up. I imagine all the vacant 2nd and 3rd story retail getting repurposed. Maybe even mall vacancies, kinda like the board game retailers & hosters are now doing.
Software developers on average write only about ten lines a day. The reason the process is so slow is that for each new line of code, you are trying to accomplish a task, and their are a great many different specific ways to do it.
However, you can't pick just any way of doing it. That's because any line of code will impact on dozens of different things in the program, and generally in bad ways. So you have to figure out a line of code that will accomplish the specific thing you are trying to do, but without having any bad consequences for the rest of the program.
This is a complicated puzzle, and to solve it you have to have the whole program, or at least a lot of it, in your mind all at once.
But few if any programmers are smart enough to keep it all in their mind all the time, so for each new line of code they have to sit and think about the program, look up lots of specifics about it, and then get it all organized in their minds. That takes a whole lot of focused attention. Any interruption causes all this to disappear from the programer's mind, and they have to start all over again.
Now I am not a programmer myself, so I may not have this all right. Maybe someone could improve it. Also, it would be helpful to have an analogy for something similar the manager does.
That is far too low of an estimate for any productive programmer. Perhaps when trying to solve some sort of insanely complex bug perhaps?
Depends on job though, of course.
I'd say that's something to avoid whenever possible.
But that's just pushing the metaphor back a level: in order to know how to design your codebase so that it's well-organized and extensible, you have to have a pretty good understanding of what it does, what it needs to do, and how it does it.
For me... once I get into the zone on that, all the noise in the world can't distract me. But conversations by my desk, other people's music, drive-bys by the boss, all those things make it harder to get into the zone. (Though, for me, this means it's way easier to work around strangers in a truly shared space than around co-workers who I'm more likely to talk to.)
On the other hand: Foosball, ping pong, video games -- all those are obviously distractions. They're there to make it easier to take a break without checking out and going home for the day, but I've seen many people (shared office or no) fall into the trap of letting the job be the distraction from the play.
There's also the risk of design paralysis. Where you focus so much on perfect program design that adding a new feature or making a change is offset by excessive, obsessive time spent making sure it fits the design absolutely perfectly. Some programmers think more about the aesthetics and organization of their code than the actual function. They may make large refactors with every minor change or spend hours thinking about the design when just implementing their first intuition would be way more efficient for both their present and future selves.
So, in some cases it may actually take more time to make a change to a well-designed codebase vs. someone who's just plugging things in as they go and refactoring later when they need to. But I would agree the opposite problem of poor design is far more common and that it's usually much faster to make changes to a well-designed application.
I've tried explaining this to manager and business type of people. I've even shown them articles and papers about this topic. All I've ever gotten is mocking and scoffs about how we aren't special snowflakes and how every job requires thinking and concentration. Maybe they are right. I've never been a manager or business person. But it seems to me they spend an awful lot more time talking and creating powerpoints than they do thinking.
As far as I can tell, that's how they do their thinking!
What I would say, to anyone old enough to have lived through the HD->SSD transition, is: "Quiet offices are an SSD for programmers' brains."
It's short, it's simple, it's repeatable, it's understandable. I think it's more or less true, and it's hard to argue against SSDs. We buy our programmers SSDs for their computers, so why wouldn't we want them for their brains, too?
"And some architects, like Lisa Heschong, see this as problematic — “you will never achieve a static environment where 100 percent of the people are happy,” she says. “There is a huge amount of individual variation in what people experience and what they prefer,” based on factors like age, sex and the kind of climate we are used to. All of this runs against the idea of targeting a single static indoor temperature."
And
"Brager says we could save enormous amounts of energy by letting the temperatures in buildings fluctuate over a wider range, and giving people more tools to heat and cool themselves. To accomplish this, Brager advocates a take a combination of high and low tech approaches. A window that you can open right by your desk is a great personal cooling device. A sweater is a pretty good personal heating device. But Brager and her team are also developing low energy desk fans, foot-warmers, and chairs that can heat or cool."
I for one am very happy to have my own office with windows that open and an individual thermostat. That's not to say that I would say no to a self heating and cooling office chair...
$500/month is a lot of money for a chair at a noisy table. On the other hand, $500/month is easier to stomach if it comes with the feeling of being successful.
Granted, this place doesn't have beer on tap, but it has free-flowing coffee, and that's all I really need.
You be you, so pay WeWork's prices if the value fits you, but if you're considering joining shared workplaces for the first time, note that you can probably find a much better deal.
Would anyone like to rent a private office in walking distance of beautiful Hampton Beach, NH? (Price negotiable.)
Here in flyover country, you can rent an entire suite of multiple private offices in a strip of class B office-park units, including utilities, for less than what WeWork is apparently asking for just one private office. And that's without the insane brand-connected features like having beer kegs at work.
Out here, a foosball table in the office is a red flag. People working on laptops on couches is a red flag. An untidy kitchenette is a red flag. Conducting an interview at a noisy restaurant is a double-red flag. (TSB. I was eating there with my family.) An open office plan is a red flag, unless it is clear that situation is aspirationally temporary, as the company is trying for ramen-profitability. People drinking beer at work is a triple-red flag.
I have been in plenty of small-business service company or business incubator offices (for me, plenty = 2), and they looked just like regular large company offices, except the employees all worked for different companies and had the actual keys to their own lockable office. In one of them, instead of a data center in the secure area in the back of the building, there was a bio-chem lab. Neither were hard to work in, even in the rent-by-the-desk bullpen, because it was quiet. The tenants were mainly working from home and using the rented office only for customer contact, interviews, and the mailing address.
How about that little gem of a closer?
I go into a co-working space once or twice a week, and wfh the rest of the time. When I'm there, I enjoy being around people who can relate to what I'm doing (even if it's just as simple as a knowing nod when I comment on a tough bug I'm troubleshooting). And if I need to focus, headphones easily place me in my own acoustic palace.
I totally get that everyone is different, and thrives in different environments ... but don't crap on this type of shared experience as if it's universally hated by everyone, because it's not.
That is a too important distinction to be left on a small parenthesis without relevance.
Yes, part time shared/open offices are good. I would still argue that real offices let you create a better interactive environment than those, but they are perfectly ok for the amount of time you must go out and talk to somebody.
Just don't expect anybody to create anything when forced to work on one of those full time.
But back to the point I was trying to make, this works _for me_; and I acknowledge that it doesn't work for others. I was only trying to balance the discussion such that it's not assumed that everyone despises open office plans, because it's not universal.
Yeah, that used to work for me until I started getting ringing in my ears from headphone use.
There's a funny thing that happens: the private offices are always occupied and apparently work is getting done in them. The cubicles are a step down, with those workers stepping out occasionally for some fresh air away from the office. The open areas are only ever occupied by new employees or not at all. Nobody wants to work in them. And it's true that my workplace is full of introverts (basically exclusively). But it's telling, to me, that the offices are the most productive places.
Not really. That was my experience at a WeWork space in London. It was not quiet (glass walls), it was hard to focus, social events starting at 4pm (who finishes work at that time?), and if you end up being close to the common spaces, near the kitchen… well, I suggest you get a good pair of sound cancelling headphones.
But everything else you say is correct. Headphones are a must in a shared office.
10-6 for youngsters, then to the bar to beat the rush home.
I also ran a tech coworking space for a couple of years. I shut it down. I will be happy to share what I learned if anyone is interested.
What actually happened:
* we did attract a few startups, and we helped them launch
* many people were so early in the process, they had no use for cloud credits (or on-site infrastructure)
* we did a series of free events (with pizza and beer), and those attracted a lot of people - but did not convert to memberships
* we were hoping to get some interest and support from the state (CT) at least in terms of visibility and potential grants for members - but that didn't happen, as the State only wanted to invest in their official incubator in Stamford (which they sank a lot of money into, and ended up evicting the people who ran it [2])
* most trials didn't convert
* several more coworking spaces opened in the area, so people began hopping around
* attracted a few dreamers, who were constantly in pitching mode - and had no desire to actually sit down and build something (also usually the ones with money problems)
Overall, this was a great learning experience.
[1] a writeup someone did in on us back in 2013: https://www.smallbizdaily.com/so-youre-thinking-of-starting-...
[2] the State-funded "competitor": https://www.stamfordadvocate.com/local/article/Old-Town-Hall...
I think my main mistake was trying to be an accelerator as opposed to simple shared space for rent. We couldn't find a way to make it work financially, considering the amount of time and energy it was demanding.
I also underestimated the lack of interest in innovation and startups here in CT.
Sounds like some shady circumstances around the state-sponsored incubator, on the other hand...
I think the truth is that office space is very expensive in Sillicon valley startups. Thus to lower the operating costs shared space is used but it is not fully productive and has lots of distractions for workers.
Google is probably a company that has actual productivity data about working in private work spaces vs shared work spaces.
I realize this comment isn't really productive and doesn't really contribute to the conversation but am I curious if anyone else hates that term.
- it has a high valuation - nobody there really works - everyone there is a stupid startup that won't pan out - WeWork is a scam
In the past, I've worked at fortune 50 companies in private office, at startups in open office, rented space personally at various coworking spaces, and currently rent a hot desk in a WeWork in Brooklyn.
Where I work, on any given weekday the shared workspace of about 45 desks is 60% full with people working silently or talking very quietly. It is a great environment for technical work. The music doesn't play in the shared work space but it does in the common eating area / kitchen where people frequently do work and talk to one another.
I think this "trash the new unicorn" mentality is fun to write about but in my experience, WeWork really is better.
One example of something they do extraordinarily well is that their phone booths actually work and give real privacy. The internet is always perfect. Things like that matter when you want to be productive. There is paper shredding service. The mugs are always clean. The snack bar is cheap and always stocked.
There are also network effects. I frequently have meetings in Manhattan spread throughout the day. No matter what part of town I'm in, I almost always can rent a desk at a location nearby for free (or for $25 if I've done it a lot that month).
This is just my experience but IMO WeWork is definitely worth it. I pay $350/mo. Maybe it's not for everyone but I am happy giving them my money for what I get in return.
It's not about "trashing the unicorn" (eg, Dropbox has managed to keep negative press to a minimum). It's that there's yet to be anything substantive that examines what people are doing that isn't "a stupid start up that won't pan out" that justify paying $350/mo for a desk, when a coffee shop will do.
The prejudice is not that that your "stupid start up that won't pan out" won't, err, pan out, but that eventually the entire industry will collapse and we'll all have to go back to doing serious work at serious jobs. No more getting paid to make a dating app for people with dogs with a floppy left ear.
Despite evidence to the contrary, WeWorks isn't selling office space, they're selling convenience and a lifestyle (two things people are willing to pay a premium for). If you've got an niche business with revenue that lets you afford $350/mo, and you're getting value out of WeWorks, good for you! Keep that niche your secret though.
Meanwhile, potential clients walk into the common area, hear the indie rock and think we're this super high-end, hip, "urban" company filled with creative young people. The reality is that we only step out into the kitchen and ping pong tables when we get bored. We have the option to retreat to our sanctuary any time. It's incredible. Tell me a better solution! There is none!
But as this backlash indicates, the hot desks are the big scam -- essentially younger, non-salaried individuals who are essentially paying for the privilege of providing atmosphere and brand for us, the private suite tenants.
Wework gets the valuation, i'm guessing, because in addition to the typical rental income from the private offices (albeit, these aren't long term leases, but with scale, they don't have to worry about that), they are collecting $500/mo from the hot desks in the lobby area, an area that would normally sit empty. Wow! what a business model. Bravo Wework.
Sounds like a scene from Brave New World. Is everyone on soma?
All of them have private offices for rent, which curtails the noise issue. All have meeting rooms to book. Most have phone cubby-holes.
My experience has also been that you can socialize as little or as much as you'd like, it's up to you. You can attend events, or not. You can drink, or not.
That said, there are large cultural differences between the younger, startup-scenester spots and the more diverse small-business ones. The latter usually skew older and include non-tech businesses like attorneys and realtors. I prefer these and have enjoyed the "cross-pollination" of ideas and focus on turning a profit.
Also, if you are a freelancer or a tech founder that wants to work on his own thing, what is the alternative? Working on a coffee shop brings pretty much the same noise problems + no guarantee of power supply/fast Wifi. Working from home all the time can get lonely. Renting an office? Too expensive...so co-working spaces fill a nice niche.
For me it is the incessent people-noise. Loud-laughers, sounds of chewing, constant self-talk, etc. If it was just light-industrial noise, it wouldn't be so bad.
That struck me as hilarious. Hat tip to the author.
1) I have more meaningful conversations with my team, more organic thought and creativity occurs, and we grow closer as a team.
2) I get less work done because the distractions are much greater.
WeWork basically parodies itself.
I don't doubt that you are more productive in a different environment, but it's a pretty big leap to assume that every engineer is going to be productive in the same environment. Different people work different ways, and the answer is to find a workspace that suits you, not try to apply the work environment that works for you to the entire industry.
"...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
This article talks about some of the other research on the health effects and other effects on productivity:
https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...
>...and the answer is to find a workspace that suits you, not try to apply the work environment that works for you to the entire industry.
Unfortunately, the trend seems to be to apply the open office design to all environments which is hurting people. The best environments I have seen are when there are individual offices with plenty of open areas and conference rooms for people to meet.
Okay, but general studies that lump everyone together as if everyone works the same doesn't really address the point that people have different work styles.
> The best environments I have seen are when there are individual offices with plenty of open areas and conference rooms for people to meet.
A mixed shared/private workspace is exactly what I've proposed elsewhere in the thread.
There is a slight increase in interruptions just because it's slightly easier for someone to speak to you directly in an open workspace. But the flipside, which I gain a lot more from than I lose, is that I can address other people who might know something immediately that would take me a 15 minutes to figure out--that kind of stuff is a big time-saver. I tend to figure out what other people on my team are amenable to this sort of interaction quickly, and respectfully don't interrupt people who aren't.
Of course, there are still times when I need to concentrate deeply, and then headphones go in. If that doesn't cause people to weighing the value of my time versus what they'd gain from talking to me, setting polite verbal boundaries usually does.
And finally, there are always going to be distractions even if you're working in a private workspace, and all the strategies that work for those distractions work for the distractions of a shared workspace.
Tuneless whistling is also irritating.
Do any of you like to drink while working?