Hacker News Reader

> Whenever I want I can stand up and do a quick and dirty eyeball scan of the office and gauge who's deep in thought and shouldn't be disturbed, who maybe needs help with something, who's picking their nose on Facebook. Project goals, milestones, etc. can be on prominent display on the walls, so everyone can easily reference them--no more "oh, I didn't know we were releasing next Monday" excuses.

I worked in an office like this onc- oh, no, what you're describing sounds more like 5th period English than an office. but seriously, it sounds like you're missing a lot of trust in the ability and autonomy of your reports. I feel bad for your reports, it sounds like you either need to let the axe swing and hire adults or learn to trust and delegate.

There are a couple of things in what you said that raise some pretty big flags for me:

nobody gets to hidey-hole in their office, pretending to not be part of a team.

Seriously? That's what you think people are doing in their office: hiding from the team? I love being part of a good team. I love white-boarding broad design. I love sitting down and hammering out the nitty-gritty details. I even like pair programming and working one-on-one. But I am a classic introvert in that being around people is physically draining. I enjoy company and I'm good company, but it wears me out. Putting me in the same room with 5 other guys for 8 hours a day is a good way to get me burned out and exhausted with your project.

The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS.

This makes me seriously question the kind of work you've been doing. An hour may be on the long side, but there are lots of things I've worked on where an interruption will easily cost 15-30 minutes and have a much bigger impact on my willpower and focus. This is compounded by the fact that I'm mentally exhausted from constantly being in a room full of people.

Tracking a bug down through three layers of application, framework, and security code, for example. Writing that crypto implementation that has to be right the first time or customers get owned is another. Studying that new framework that you want the team to learn because it's the new shiny is another.

where they can go away into if they really need that occasional alone time

Look, I get that you're the boss and you get to tell me what to do. I want the team to succeed, so I'm not going to cause problems; I'll adapt to whatever you've decided we're going to do. But if you really want me at peak productivity you need to understand that alone time is my default mode, not something I need occasionally. I know I'm not the only one like this.

I think I would generally agree with what you said here.

I'm curious if you've succeeded in finding an office environment that would let you work that way ?

Unless you're working from home most of the time, it seems like "the management" would generally not be too keen to this.

No, I haven't. It's a big part of why I have changed jobs frequently over the last couple of years. It continues to be a source of frustration.

Looking back on my comment I was more harsh than I intended and a lot of that is because I am so frustrated with the current standard working environment. If I didn't have a family to take care of I would be extremely tempted to leave software as a profession entirely because of it.

When I was hired at my current job we had full-height cubes which are still not ideal, but workable. But now I've been shuffled into a new team working back in an open plan office. Many days after work I just want to go live in a cave and be left alone. It's not normal for me to be so socially drained and it's not a healthy dynamic for my family. I'm trying on the side to get my own company off the ground so that I can work the way I want to. We'll see.

I didn't take any offense. As someone else upthread put it, the open-vs-cubicle-vs-office debate is full of opinion and personal preference. I was simply explaining mine, as was requested.

I'm glad you didn't take it personally, it wasn't meant to be personal. But in hindsight I feel like I used you as a stand-in for the objects of my frustration. That's not really fair to you. I'm sorry for that.

Thank you for your comment, it provides perspective other than my own which is refreshing and valuable.

I think one of the OPs points touches on this directly though. What is the ratio of questions asked to answers provided, or to put it another way, how many questions are you asking vs how many people come to you for help with their own question? I humbly submit that perhaps you are asking more questions than you are answering - and there's nothing wrong with that, but IMO it does explain a bit why we don't see eye to eye about this. Have you thought about asking one of your subordinates about their perspective on this?

With respect, I disagree about the cost of context switching being BS. I think it heavily depends on the complexity/sensitivity of the task being interrupted, but for any non-trivial task there is almost always a non-trivial cost as well.

> I've never been offended when someone stopped by to discuss a problem they're having...

I just wanted to clarify, I think it would be rather unreasonable to actually feel offended because someone asked your help or advice. I never feel offended in those situations. I do sometimes feel a bit frustrated or aggravated, but it's always about the fact that I was interrupted and never towards the colleague asking for help, and I take extra care to make sure that this frustration or aggravation never shines through to the person I'm helping because that would discourage them from asking for help and I would rather they asked for help than make an incorrect assumption (for example).

Regarding "interruption deficit", or open-plans being important only to those who ask a lot of questions, I think their experiences _do_ matter. I would guess that these people are mostly junior developers, project managers, or simply people (extraverts?) who prefer social interaction as a part of their work.

Their opinions matter too. Junior developers will probably suffer without easy access to those around them (yes, it's annoying for the senior devs, but that's part of the job). PM's, similarly, need to be effective; in a well-run company, they're there to help and if open-offices are important to that, well, there you go.

I'm a fan of slack etc, but I'm also an extravert. If I'm not talking to others as a part of my job, I'm going to be miserable and leave. I don't think I'm the only one.

I don't disagree with anything you've said, it is important that the job is fulfiling for both introverts and extroverts and that's a very difficult balance to strike.

It's important to point out though that if you make asking questions too easy for new employees, they can end up leaning on that as a crutch instead of developing the troubleshooting skills necessary to solve problems independently.

I've been on both sides of this fence. I've been that new colleague hunting for info that isn't clearly documented, and I've also been the senior colleague who was the go-to person whenever a problem came up that didn't have an immediately-clear answer. I was lucky in that shortly after I started my only senior resigned leaving me with nobody to ask, which forced me to get good at that kind of troubleshooting.

It makes me wonder if new colleagues should be given a time period for when they are allowed to ask any question no matter how stupid. After that time, they can of course still ask questions but it's expected that they try to find an answer before asking. Along the same lines of pair-programming for colleagues who have been here less than 1 year.

Yes, this definitely makes sense.

Ratio changed as I grew up. As a fresh junior dev, you ask all the questions, as you get more and more senior, it inverts. I consider mentoring the junior folks and passing along whatever tribal knowledge that's not documented yet part of growing into a senior role and have no problem doing it. In fact, I'd rather someone ask me and break my concentration than not ask and go off re-implementing a linked list or something.

I have to say, what you describe as a manager seems to be more about the benefit to yourself and the way you 'control' your developers and less about trying to provide an environment that is efficient for your devs to deliver code. A lot of the benefits you think you get from an open plan office seem to be achievable through tools like slack.com . Open plan really really sucks as a developer.

The problem is that people hate adopting tools like Slack. They see it as just another tool they have to look at, and they totally discount that the communication is happening otherwise(either in person or another tool). It's not necessarily net new data that they now need to keep abreast of if you are, for example, replacing most email with it.

  After 22 years in software development, I have to say I am tired of all the new tools that supposedly solve all the world problems only to be abandoned in the next quarter.
  There is nothing wrong to talk to somebody when you want to tell them something. A lot of times it's more efficient then email, IMs or other more fancier tools.

"There is nothing wrong to talk to somebody when you want to tell them something. A lot of times it's more efficient then email, IMs or other more fancier tools."

For you maybe, for them no. That's not to say you should not talk to them, but your interruption of their workflow has a cost you may not perceive.

> The whole business about having to waste an hour to get back into the zone after an interruption is, frankly, total BS.

there's your opinion and then there's science which actually goes out and sees how the real world works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interruption_science)

I think open office is OK with very self restrained employees.

I was in a pretty big company with super huge open floors, but globally everyone was quite, you would easily prefer to IM a person 10m away than to try to talk directly. Projects would have group IM sessions and it was the polite way to ask or share information.

If some difficult point arises, there was a meeting space at 10 or 20 meters away, or there's the coffee corner otherwise.

When discussion that atmosphere with people working in other fields, retail for instance, they would find it unhuman and creepy, but I think it really strikes the right balance. I moved to another company more 'startup' like in the athmosphere, with people cracking jokes Here and there, and it's just pure hell from a work POV.

Yes, it is essential to work out etiquette and you don't want to mash people together unless they're actively working on the same project. Don't put Chatty Cathy from Purchasing adjacent to the guys trying to design and build the product.

I'm a developer, and to be brutally honest, I tend to procrastinate when left to my own devices. It's much harder to do that in an open office, and I feel much more productive in one.