Ask HN: What is your biggest annoyance at the workplace? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What is your biggest annoyance at the workplace?

3 pointsrobmiller6 comments

Fairly simple and open-ended. What's your biggest annoyance? Is it environmental, managerial, or of your own making? Is it easily solvable? At what cost?

Happy Monday!

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Anything that breaks my concentration. As a developer, I'm being paid for my ability to concentrate and perform complex thought processes. Anything that impedes that ability costs the company money via the effort I require to rebuild any shattered mental frameworks due to interruptions.

That's one of the reasons I absolutely loathe open office plans. Open office plans are designed with the values of communication and cooperation in mind, but completely ignore that the reality of development work is usually all about how much information you can keep track of while working. If I have to rethink what I am doing every fifteen minutes because two coworkers nearby are taking a foosball break, then I am not being as productive as I can be. Open floor plans are a terrible idea, choosing to save money on real estate at the expense of quality of the resulting software. I've started using it as a sign of a place I would prefer not to work, though with the pervasiveness of this pernicious insult to developer productivity I highly doubt I'll be able to make it a serious filter on any kind of job search since everyone and their misguided brother feels like it's a good way to enhance development team dynamics.

Rewards (i.e. Grade/Salary) at the company are based on your perceived knowledge, value and skill within the company. Basically this boils down to the more vocal engineers get better rewards, even if that means taking credit for other peoples work.

I believe the issue boils down to management having no true idea of what everyone is doing, so believes the general targeted noise coming out of the work force from select members. You then end up with a lot of people jumping up and down saying 'pick me, pick me...' because they want to be the noise that's noticed.

Managers who hire specialists in a field (i.e. me) then proceed to tell them how to work. It's solvable, but the cost is me taking on the risk of ignoring managers and proceeding, or present the reasons why their approach will fail and wait.

Leaders that point in circles rather than lead toward the end goal.

Can you give an example or two?

Sure. I'm working at a travel agency until the end of the year. My current manager (the owner) has plenty of ideas of what he wants from the company, however he has no idea how he wants to get to those end goals. So instead of sitting down and hashing out a plan, he essentially throws darts at a dartboard to decide what he wants to implement next. This is a terrible way to work, as most of the time we get 75% through a half baked implementation before he changes his mind and we move on to a different task. Result: Nothing gets done, and nothing to show for our work.

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