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Comment by rayvega | Hacker News Reader

I found it interesting that, unlike Microsoft (and Joel's own company), Google does not give their developers their own private offices.

Are developers at Google as productive as they can be even sharing an office with 3 other people? Does it not matter if you are a certain caliber of programmer that shares an office with others of the same or similar caliber and level?

Perhaps those who work at Google have greater self-discipline and awareness to know when collaborating starts to cross the line into interrupting someone so the need for private offices is not as necessary as with other companies.

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The "need" for private offices for developers is based on an evaluation: the cost of interruptions vs the benefit of improved communication among the staff. I doubt there's a "slam-dunk" case to be made for either side.

In PeopleWare authors pose that productivity is the best when people working on the same project sit together, is average when people sit alone and is the worst when people with unrelated tasks sit together.

Ergo, if you are willing to move your "location" as often as you change tasks it's best to sit together.

Or, you make sure that tasks assigned to a group of people stay "related"-- which shouldn't be hard to do, it most large organizations.

And Google makes this pretty easy because your home directory and all of your work lives in the cloud.

Can we please say "on their intranet" instead of the misleading "cloud" buzzword? (FWIW Googlers call it the "intranet" too.)

Can we please say "on their network" instead? That's a perfectly good word that already means "not the whole internet", and we don't need another.

"Intranet" is a pretty standard and inoffensive term for a company-wide network, isn't it?

I was a Google intern...

I didn't mean to tread on your experience. I should have said "in my experience, Googlers call it the intranet."

Oh, well, then buzzword away, o holy Gintern?

> sit together

Does "sit together" mean in an open environment or just in the same hallway within their own offices. I didn't think they specified here.

Google has a different perspective on collaboration. You can see some of it in this Google IO talk: http://code.google.com/events/io/sessions/MythGeniusProgramm...

I don't think they speak for Google there. They're advocating things which are the exact opposite of Google's practices, like doing open-source projects out in the open so people can see your mistakes (compare: Chrome, Wave, Android, GWT).

Can you clarify - what is not open source about Chrome or Android?

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