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Comment by vessenes | Hacker News Reader

These are almost exactly IBM's recommendations from their 1970s era analysis of programmer productivity.

A couple short items from their studies -- productivity for knowledge workers improves until they get 100 sq. feet of space and 30 sq. ft of desk space(!).

They recommend walled off areas for functional teams, three to four people per, 300 to 400 sq. feet per team. The teams can close the door when they want. You'd give them a couch and a whiteboard, etc. in there.

This gets you private time for functional work teams who typically want to be heads-down or talking at the same time.

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Yes. and IBM had precisely the problems another poster points out that caved in offices cause[0]: people had no idea what others were doing and it led to some problems. Which is fine if you're IBM,make mainframes, and run you company vaguely like the military. But good luck adapting quickly if you have that management style.

There is a reason open plan offices happen: it's not just a cost cutting measure, it's a management style decision as well. Sure, it might be the wrong decision, but there is a reason to it and it's not just screw the code monkeys to cut costs idea people are suggesting. It's a value judgement that dev's personal comfort and productive is not the sole or primary concern of the company and that the company is better served with more communication instead of productivity. The value judgment seems correct: companies make money from good products, not from merely producing code. However, it's not clear the communication is worth more than the added productivity.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6450733

There is ample research on how to facilitate interaction between individuals and/or teams, and that is via meeting rooms, tea kitchens and shared common space. It is a solved problem.

Of course getting a building with such facilities is expensive, you need to spend both for the building itself and for the architect who designs it.

Yet management pushes open-plan offices to facilitate communication. It's either out of ignorance, or it's wilful, to save cash.

Meetings, yes we need more meetings, thats the answer!

I swear that was the approach Microsoft took to not having an open plan office.

One person's anecdote does not make good evidence. Business decisions need to be based on real data, not anecdote, or worse, arrogance from people who think they know a lot more than they do.

I wasn't saying it was good evidence. I was saying it suggested the rational behind the decision and it wasn't cost cutting.

This is a good post, but I'd make one additional point. Devs are often measured/reviewed based on productivity, so it's not surprising there is pushback on a decision that diminishes their productivity.

Ok. Just because you have a private micro-office, doesn't mean the team doesn't need to communicate regularly, e.g., agile-standups.

Or IM or email. There are very few things that are so important that they literally require everyone to drop whatever they're working on for 30+ minutes at a time.

The desk space recommendation almost certainly no longer applies. In the '70s, it was not uncommon to work with printed listings of code and printed memory dumps for debugging. These were printed on large fanfold sheets.

If you were working with a code listing, a memory dump, and the program output, that could easily take up almost half of 30 square feet. Toss in a giant reference manual or two, and a desk calculator, and it is easy to believe that desks under 30 square feet could interfere with productivity.

I gotta say it - those 160 column printouts of code were awesome for debugging over a cup of coffee...

And they still are. When you can look at 500+ lines of code at once spread over a table, you can immediately see all sorts of things that aren't evident even on a 30" screen.

Those printouts remain one of my secret weapons for isolating really heinous bugs.

I recall debugging a monstrous web system (it woudl require more that one entry in the daily WTF to do it justice) by borrowing a large conference room and laying out the code over about 20 feet linear length of table

I'd say another point for using oculus rifts for development.

A Rift, a Leap Motion, and a wooden crate. Office is done.

It's all fun and games until your programmer starts vomiting...

If only their resolution were better...

Isn't the same true of most of the Oculuses out there? :)

In time. I do worry about putting 2 screens 3" from my eyes for hours on end though.

Apparently, the main issue with eye strain from close monitors and such is the fact that your eyes have to focus closer. But the oculus has two screens and optics, which they use to let your eyes focus at infinite distance. Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

You'll get sick in the stomach long before any effect on your eyes in any case - having it on for hours on end is extremely unrealistic right now.

> Hence, eye strain is not an issue.

There are other subtle effects like fish-eye that are lead to a disoriented feeling when I take off the Oculus.

Think of it this way: your cortex is always learning. Always. So if you present visual input that is subtly different (eye-spacing, fish-eye / pin-cushion, lag) for long periods your brain will learn that. Take it away and you've effectively got mild (hopefully reversible) brain damage wrt the physical world.

Isn't that mostly a matter of adjusting IPD and other calibration?

There are software issues caused by the game / simulation camera FOV mismatch.

E.g. if you walk up to a wall in the Tuscany demo, it'll look like the wall at the center of your view is slightly closer to you than the wall off-center. It's not such a bad artifact in-game, but when I take the goggles off, flat walls IRL look slightly bowed away from my center of view for a while, and things feel ... different.

It's similar to when you stare at a scrolling screen, and then look at a fixed object. The object seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

have you tried this yet? i'm curious

I tried one. The screen isn't there yet for long term productivity, or even long term gaming. They'll get it there though, the motion tracking and field of view are wonderful, it mostly would just need to be much higher res for non gaming activities.

Or a 50" TV screen.

  Or a 50" TV screen.

For that to be of any practical benefit, it'd have to be 4K resolution, right?

If you're just feeding that 50" TV a standard 1080p signal, you're not going to be able to display significantly more code than you'd be able to display on a 23" screen that's also running at 1080p.

Heck, cover the side of a building with a 1080p projector image, and a 27" monitor running at 2560x1400 will still show more code. :)

The modern equivalent, of course, is big monitors and maybe more than one.

It would also be nice to have some height on them - whoever decided that the computer industry must conform to Hollywood entertainment standards has a lot to answer for.

Note to those who want to tilt their monitors into portrait mode to get more height (I have two tilted 1080p monitors jammed together to make one squarish screen), take note of vertical viewing angles (which now become horizontal). Your average TN panel is simply not going to cut it. Get an IPS display or equivalent.

Hey, at least you get a reasonably complete keyboard out of it.

4 screens, some testing hardware, printouts, lunch at desk while reading... 30 square feet is reasonable. Not everyone works on Macbook Air.

It also depends greatly on what you work on. It's not unusual for me to have several towers in various states of disassembly, a few embedded boards, numerous JTAG probes, and a laptop fighting for space around my 2 monitors. In this case, I could definitely use 30 square feet of desk space.

You bring up a great point--my desk is none too large (20 sq. ft. tops), and still it's pretty sparse: phone, keyboard, mouse, laptop (stand), monitor, picture of the kids. Nothing that requires 30 sq. ft.

However, I think the closest contemporary analog to the desk space of the 70s would be screen space. This association totally bolsters the 2+ monitor argument.

I wouldn't even know what to do with more than ~20sqft of desk space. Even 15 (5'x3')is pretty roomy.

Useful information. Do you have an URL for this?

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