Yeah, but the issue people arguing against open-space have, myself included, is that we explicitly don't want to have these interactions, at least not in unstructured form - because your request for feedback from me "now instantly" is actively preventing me from getting my work done.
The usual solutions I've employed or been subjected to in the past are: 1) headphones on == no interruptions of any kind, 2) direct questions and requests to IM (with notifications off), and 3) if you need someone's repeated help during the day, then note your questions on a list, and agree on a period (e.g. every hour on the clock) when you and that someone will go over the list together. In my experience, 3) is magical, because once you start noting questions down instead of asking for help immediately, you'll discover that before the hour is up, you'll have answered most of your questions yourself.
FWIW I'm a pretty independent worker and I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help
That being said, it's entirely possible that some tasks will require absolute focus and having a 2 minute conversation will legitimately lose you a large amount of productive time. There may also be a subset of people who are more likely to get these particular tasks, and those people will feel the negative effects of an open plan office much more than others working on more easily interruptible tasks.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/02/12/human-task-switche...
> I agree people should try and work things out on their own before asking for help
That is far from ideal in two ways:
- knowledge sharing suffers. You do your research and solve your problem or you don't and you have to ask to someone else more experienced. Knowledge sharing is kept to an oral tradition. Teams quickly start depending on one or two key members and juniors are often with a feeling with being left alone.
- you still have this anxiety of "when is it okay to interrupt?" On both ends. Everyone's threshold is different, so there is always someone who will be annoyed by the interruption and suffer.
The way to fix this is by promoting collaboration (pair-programming sessions are great and both partners already expect the communication, so "flow" is easier to maintain, also it is terrible to do on open-floor plans) and having a clear written practice to share knowledge and documentation.
There is no single situation where an open plan office leads to more team and individual productivity.
As one gets more senior in their development career, their days will get more and more punctuated with meetings. You start gradually moving from the "maker" to "manager" schedule. So your reality will be a day with a handful of 1 hour time slots available for deep work. In my view you just need to deal with this reality and learn how to be productive in it.
IMO, senior developers who are “productive in it” are getting by on pattern matching.
Just like I can drive to my local mall without even thinking about it.
They haven’t actually learned how to be productive working this way.
I have seen plenty of software that appears to have been written by someone who was 'not even thinking about it' and it is invariably problematic and expensive-to-maintain.
Do you really believe there are senior devs that are productive without even thinking about it?
That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?
All the time. I’ve done it myself plenty of times over my career.
> That just strikes me as odd -- maybe they are working on stuff should be given to Juniors?
Would you give a delivery job to a brand new driver or a driver who has done the required route dozens of times and could do it without thinking?
I do disagree, however, about it being a problem related to lack of experience. It is good when someone can learn to handle interruptions, but it's even better when they don't have to. Handling interruptions and impediments are the main responsibility of a good manager, not of the developers.