Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

lawnchair_larry

Guessing most of the non-private-office voters are manager types.

Private office for me, but not working from home. I like the social environment, but there are times when I like to close the door. This could be because I don't want to hear you, because I don't want you to hear me, or because I don't want things that I have left out getting touched/stolen.

Also, if you end up being perceived as some kind of subject matter expert, people will bug you non-stop. I like to help, but I only have so much time for that. I found that having an office raises the bar just enough that some of the more casual questions seem to go away.

Ask any experienced coder who does not have a private office if they have done the "headphones with no music on" trick.

My old manager once walked into another site's office and discovered their "open concept." He was raving about how great it was that he could ask anybody anything at any time, and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration. shudder

Thinking over this comment, would it be weird to set up an office where the managers all are in an open-plan setup, and the developers all have their own private offices? I think it would be interesting to see what the outcome was

(Disclaimer: i'm a developer who works in an open-plan office and hates it)

> and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration.

it's funny that he used that word. because I've developed a theory that "too much collaboration" is one of the main reasons why larger companies turn into Big Dumb Companies who then get their lunch eaten by smaller, more nimble upstarts. They collaborate too darn much. Instead of just Making Things Happen and moving forward.

> He was raving about how great it was that he could ask anybody anything at any time, and everyone could have all kinds of collaboration.

Yep. Great for the asker. Horrible for the askee.

Been there, done that, have t-shirt, hope to never wear it again.

It shows the fundamental differences in the work a manager and a software engineer does.

The open communication will make it easier for the manager to load-off work, to stay in the loop, to check on their employees "subtly" and writing all those project plans and reports does not take the same amount of "being in the zone" as software engineering does.

So if the manager works better with more people around them and everybody knows how important communication is since they keep drilling that into managers these days - well of course your manager is going to assume that putting 5 times as many coders into one room is going to give them 5 times the results plus even more since we all know in a team 1 + 1 = 3, right???

The sad thing is, it is obvious that to this day most managers have no clue how software engineering and any other kind of "knowledge work" (I hate that term) is fundamentally different from Ford's ideas of mass production.

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