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Comment by Maro | Hacker News Reader

If you read Cal Newport's biography, he works in academia, he has never worked a 9-5 industry job, eg. at Meta or any other (software) company. CMIIW.

So, he doesn't really have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work at a large software company like Meta, the same way a SWE at Meta doesn't have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work for a Professor at Georgetown University. Also, to be more specific, he's a Professor of Comp.Sci., not Professor of Psychology or Professor of Workplace Layout Optimization..

I read 2-3 of his books and concluded that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His books are 10 page blog posts tortured to be 300 page books.

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I tried to read his Deep Work book, and it was truly awful. Usually I avoid writing reviews for books that I didn't finish, but Deep Work is one of the worst books I've ever tried to read. To describe it as a 10 page blog post would be generous.

Interesting. I found it great, it completely changed the way I work.

I could not take the book seriously due to how shallow it was. Written to sound clever, but lacking any actual substance. It literally could have been 2 pages of bullet points and delivered more value by dropping the pseudoscience nonsense and excessive "[famous name] is productive because they do X" trope.

The only takeaway I got was that Deep Work is a bullshit term for having focus.

I thought it was the perfect level of depth, contrast this with something like "Art of Impossible" which spends paragraphs talking about your biochemistry and how it impacts motivation, focus, etc- I couldn't get through it because I don't care about biochemistry, I just want actionable advice with concrete examples from high performers so I can think about how and if I want to apply the advice to my life.

Can you please detail how it changed the way you work?

Sure, here are the most impactful changes, they may sound simple to some, but they had a big impact on me:

1. I had already been blocking out "no meeting" time of 2-4 hours a day to get work done, but during this time I would listen to music and sometimes check slack. The book got me to use focus mode on my Mac and phone, set a "heads down until [time x]" away message on Slack and work without music or any other distractions ON ONE HARD PROBLEM. My effectiveness skyrocketed and I was happier at work (the only downside was that I wanted to work more).

2. When dealing with a hard problem, taking a break, taking a walk and thinking through the problem using the framework he mentioned in the book, have used this method to solve multiple hard problems.

3. Forced me systematize how I end my work day and what time I end it (unless there's an emergency)

I read Deep Work. Twice. It has truly helped me in my life. I have done some really great work of my life using it: created value-adding solutions in Computer Vision, worked three research papers.

I am much more saner, calmer, and get more done because I adopted Deep Work philosophy in my life.

I would highly advise reading the book and judging for yourselves (for the people reading the above comment).

Yeah, most of this article is pretty unsubstantiated. Meta isn’t paying a 40% premium for open offices, almost every other tech company has a similar floor plan. And pre—Covid the offices were much more than 30% utilized, I’m guessing that figure comes from the percent of people actually at their desks at any given time.

Which ties into my last remark- even the largest building at Meta isn’t an 8 acre field of open offices. There are tons of conference rooms, cafes, 1-2 person rooms, open spaces and other rooms to break up the space and provide opportunities for collaboration. It’s not as nice as a private office but better then some other companies I’ve seen post-Covid, where they’ve minimized their footprint to the extent that you can’t find an open desk or conference room when another team is having an on-site.

I’m not sure whether this is an intentional misrepresentation of facts or just a complete lack of fact-checking but I was pretty disappointed in this article.

I've read deep work and found it okay. It's satisfying reading it because I already know the content is true and I like to know other people are discussing it too.

But I agree, many authors just pick a topic and run with it. Not having experience doesn't stop them.

You realize that you don’t need personal experience to solve theoretical problems? Especially ones that have been treated by experts in the area for decades prior.

Can you point me to the Wikipedia page for the Theory of Optimal Workplace Layout?

Because if this is a theoretical problem, with clear definitions, parameters, boundary conditions and objectives, which has already been solved, so that non-experts [such as CN] can just look up the solution, then I'd also like to see this!

Surely you understand that not all knowledge is in Wikipedia?

Your second paragraph is a total strawman.

Surely you understand you were being challenged on the existence of an established theoretical solution, not on the existence of a literal link to Wikipedia specifically?

Look to the straw man in your own eye.

No, he hit the bullseye.

If you cannot mathematically define all the variables and boundary conditions, it is not a theoretical problem.

Branches of science concerned human behaviour dont have theoretical problems.

This is a weird mathematical fundamentalism that I haven’t experienced in a while. Actually since I went to study philosophy with analytic philosophers.

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