Hacker News Reader

Comment by basicallydan | Hacker News Reader

Check out Fog Creek's office: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

> Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).

The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it. I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations or - in some cases - literally just messing around all day.

There's gotta be a balance.

View on HN

I don't understand if you like Fog Creek's environment or you don't.

At any rate, I'm so over the open floor plan/cubicle mazes. I get really distracted by the doppler effect that conversations (sometimes LOUD conversations) that pass by my cubicle, have. Perhaps I'm just a curmudgeon, but I much prefer the solitude that an office with a door provides.

I've heard that cubicles are worse than open offices in terms of audio distraction. In an open office, you've got a constant visual reminder that people can hear you. People tend to be more mindful of their volume levels and where/how they make noise.

I work in an open floor plan. We have fairly standard carpet and ceiling acoustic tiles, the walls are drywall, so we haven't gone to extremes to soundproof but it's not tile and open warehouse ceilings either. We have a culture of being reasonably respectful, but will still have conversations at times. In practice... I find myself hardly remembering the people that exist even 20 feet from me. In theory I can see about 50 people, but I almost never actually remember that. I'm somewhat sensitive to conversation and extremely sensitive to music (can not stand music I'm not in control of), and I'm fine.

I do have modestly nice passively acoustically isolated headphones and frequently use them, but I do that anyhow, not because I'm trying to dodge noise, and I can go hours without them just fine, usually putting them on because I want music, not isolation.

I find myself wondering what percentage of open office complaints come from A: people who are simply psychologically unsuited to them under any circumstances B: people whose open office experiences involved tile floors, warehouse ceilings, and glass walls, which would be a completely different acoustic experience and C: people who haven't actually spent any time in a decent one and are just assuming they'd hate it. No sarcasm. For that matter the studies that keep asserting how bad they I find myself wondering about A and B... certainly you can construct an open space that does suck, but that doesn't mean they all do, and I've never dug into one enough to see what they specify as the "open space".

And to be clear, I'm not asserting that they're obviously better and everybody should love them (and let me reiterate I completely believe in the existence of a set of people who will never like them), but my experience just doesn't seem to bear out the "they suck and can never work and why on Earth would any company ever put them in" attitude... at most it seems like they might be slightly worse on average but it may be below the noise threshold, and it would be the incredibly-perfectly well-run company for whom this would be their biggest problem.

Open offices are more vulnerable to bad cultural practices that you have no control over. A private office fixes these issues with pure physics. If open offices had librarians shushing everyone for talking too loud constantly and stopping people from shoulder surfing they would be a lot better for many people.

I think that's actually a good idea. Someone in management should try it and blog about the results.

Managers hate these solutions because they are explicit social conflicts that creates a lot of ill will and negative morale. If a pre-commit script enforces something vs. an angry email from another engineer it's far less personal.

Worse yet, you have to be a pretty high level manager to make the middle managers do this, because some of them like the noise, or being able to get status any time, etc.

I wish that was true here. One big floor, I can clearly hear several conversations right now. I should be doing math; I'm here posting on HN. We have one guy that likes to put somebody on the speakerphone, and then yell into it. For hours. I'm so distressed.

The guy the other side of the corridor likes to play the radio allllllll day long over some large studio monitor speakers. I shut the door to this office but another guy who sits at the opposite end of this large office (therefore as far away from the door as you can be) likes to open it and jam it open.

I truly despise the flow of bland music that I have no control over, and the ongoing chatting/arguing that passes for radio entertainment. It's like listening to other people's pointless conversations.

I sometimes put headphones on but incessantly bombarding my ears with noise just to cancel out other noise is like spraying deodorant on excrement - pointless. It also means I'll suffer gradual hearing loss

I sometimes wonder if people don't understand that we need time to solve problems and problem solving is best done in quiet! The other guys in this office do not write software so I sometimes wonder if people don't "get" it.

I can beat that. At one job, I had a person a couple cubicles to the left of me regularly call the person a couple cubicles to the right of me, and both would turn their speakers on. I could hear each half of the conversation coming at me from two different directions.

Maybe invest in some noise-cancelling headphones, and use a white noise generator. I like SimplyNoise for that. It does a great job at drowning out background noises.

And then if you can STILL hear them clearly, put in earplugs under the headphones and crank up the volume.

No, sorry, not damaging my ears for bad decisions of management.

I don't mean to be argumentative, you are just trying to solve the problem that I am in. I've done the headphone thing, they are noise cancelling, I listen to SimplyRain on them, and that helps, but I just can't take all that input. I want quiet. I need quiet. I don't want distraction that is slightly less annoying than the current distraction, at the risk of my health besides.

But yes, your suggestions are really good for the people it can work for.

id be tempted to open the phone up and snip the speaker connections

I normally work remote, but when I come into the office-- I come in 2-3 hrs early and stay 2 hours late to get my work done...

Sorry, to be clear, I am very much in favour of Fog Creek's environment :)

Offices are a really great example of the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals, either by treating them like IT or tech support, or like college kids. Google or Facebook's revenue per engineer is probably 3x that of a law firm or consulting firm, but the overwhelming practice in the latter sorts of places is for each professional to have an office with a door.

When you're a growing startup, having private offices costs you flexibility as well as cash because open plan is easier to reconfigure as you grow. If you're at the point where you're commissioning a Ghery, you're well past that excuse.

From my time at consulting firms and experience with law firms, this isn't true any more.

I was at the offices of a large law firm in the City of London yesterday and only very senior partners had offices. They had a lot of very nice meeting rooms on separate client facing floors and 'working floors' with open plan offices where lawyers and paralegals did their work.

US law firms anywhere but Manhattan give attorneys their own office, even typically legal interns and those who haven't passed the bar yet. And it is almost always external offices with a window.

Even in Manhattan they typically just share with one other associate for 2-4 years.

This definitely isn't the norm in my experience. I have friends in many of the magic and silver circle law firms in London. All of them have shared private offices for their junior staff and individual offices for the senior staff.

> the push to keep programmers from thinking of themselves as professionals

Hah. If only we had someone else to blame for that. We do that to ourselves. Programmers act like spoiled little kids when choosing which jobs to apply to or how to conduct their career, (look at all those juice bars! Never seen an accountant use that as a selection criteria.) are often completely unreasonable, (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.) and consistently refuse to move to management. (you must pay me more and more money to drift further and further away from company priorities)

Programmers refusing to move to management is not unreasonable. I like being a developer. It's what I studied in school and it's the job I applied for.

yep barristers don't have to stop being lawyers the more senior they get - unless of course the want to switch to being a judge

Yup. The guys with their names on the door still write briefs for a living. So to with doctors. Head of Surgery at a hospital still cuts people open for a living.

It is if you expect career advancement. If you want to stay in the same role making the same salary, plus a minor bump every year for 30 years, by all means don't push yourself to try to figure out how to manage more parts of the organization you work for.

But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company. They want to be like doctors without taking their work half as seriously.

"But programmers want their companies to indulge their lofty career ambitions while still being exactly as useful to the company."

What lofty career ambitions? My productivity at work goes up at least 40-50% every year. I'm not expecting to capture even half of that.

To expand on this a bit: I was on ~$80k/year in 2002. If I had even had 10% raises each year I would be on ~$250k/year.

Instead I'm just under $200k. Not bad by any means but I wouldn't call sub-10% annual raises as lofty career ambitions.

You really think that your productivity has risen more than 10% every year? Do you have any numbers to back that up? I know you use a ticket tracking system. You can add up all your completed story points, by year, pretty easily. If you're really getting 10% better every year, consistently, it should be easy to ask for a bigger raise.

My experience is that developers don't increase their value as fast as they increase their pay.

Out of interest, what do you do? And where?

It is interesting the thought about moving to management - I often see that developers have to become project managers or managers of some sort as they get older.

Do any of the employees get excited about juice bars, or is it just the management trying to use juice bars as a decoy.

> (I want $100K salary right out of school, it better be $140K in a year or I'm jumping ship.)

Professionals get high pay. Software engineers get pay in this range, and it's bizarre to scoff at pay concerns when you are arguing that employees are unprofessional.

Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.

The employees might not give a damn about the juice bars once they get hired, but you better believe they're all sharing picture of Google's workplace and just glossing over their environment and culture and recruiting practices.

I just went through the process of getting my post graduation job (Computer Engineer btw). Before I went to any interviews I asked my peers what sort of offers they got and it was all between $75-90K. I went to job interviews and when they asked what I expected for salary I told them what I had heard and was scoffed at from several companies. I received 3 offers, $65k, $70k and $95k. I got the $70k offer to go up to $83k with a two month signing bonus which I took mostly because of the better location.

Companies will constantly tell you that you are worth less because it isn't in their interests. Don't buy it.

Very informative, thanks. It is often too easy to undervalue yourself with software development.

> Professional software engineers with years of experience get pay in that range. Guys just starting out want that kind of money. I see it all the time.

At Google, new grads get 120+k with their bonus, not including the ~62*$500 in stocks every year for 4 years or the ~$25k in signing/reloc bonuses. If a new grad gets offered that amount, why would they not want the same elsewhere?

Until 2009 or so, we used to have private offices at Cray. There were plenty of impromptu conversations. I would argue that they were more pleasant and productive, since we didn't have to worry we were upsetting everyone around us while brainstorming or discussing tech trends. We would meet in an engineer's office so not everyone had to hear the whole thing.

Stack Exchange's office is very similar. Starting to feel like Joel is the only one who still believes in private offices.

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708933,-74.006578,3a,75y,203...

http://i.imgur.com/Kk0jP5o.jpg

Pretty interesting people working there, I see.

See, that's the kind of thing you need a shared space for. Who's going to notice your horse head in a private office??

Indeed: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.708501,-74.006614,3a,75y,190...

Are those... cells?

I think that's just what they call "business casual"?

See also http://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2013-06/lets-all-ju... (though it looks like the chap there forgot the unicorn head)

Windows to open spaces in my back? No thanks...

I'd assume that if that made you paranoid like it would me, you could mostly cover them up, or the parts that let other people view you.

Added: Max_Horstmann's put them at your left or right approach also works for me.

You can move the desk around. My "window" is on my left.

Don't you feel like in a terrarium?

Yes.

JK. It's by far the best office I've ever had.

The transparency of the window is a weakness. Some folks have started putting up posters and curtains.

But the real issue is that they transmit basically all the sound. Fortunately there usually aren't conversations going on just outside people's offices, but if two people are talking while walking down the hall or the person in the next office is yelling at folks on hangout, it's not much quieter than a cubicle.

Oh crap! "Private" offices with glass doors, yeah. So that you never immediately see who enters your office because the door is behind you and you have to turn around. Also with monitors visible to everyone who passes by. This is way worse than any open plan office.

THAT is a gorgeous workspace. I'm envious..

The 37signals offices have lots of private (and semi-private) spaces https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYMokpfL86Q

Can they not afford carpet.

Why would you want a carpet that is hard to clean and looks ugly in most cases?

Carpet both absorbs ambient noise and muffles the sound of people walking. It's also more comfortable to walk and stand on: http://www.livestrong.com/article/351733-tips-on-standing-wa....

Polished concrete is beautiful and striking, of course, and at some point software development became a creative profession rather than an engineering one, and we stopped mocking people who put form over function.

I was thinking it looked half finished with concrete floors :)

Raw industrial loft space is fashionable in NYC creative fields, and tech in imitation thereof.

Those look like great offices!

I must be in the wrong job haha

How are those offices private when there's a full glass wall on the corridor, and what looks like an opening below the ceiling to the next office? That appears to add up to neither visual nor audio screening.

(Audio distraction causes trouble in conversation for me, and visual distraction disrupts any kind of concentration. I might actually prefer a tall cubicle to this setup, not to endorse the cubicle.)

Private offices are not an extension of your home, it's your workspace. Why can't people see you from the corridor?

Just turn your back to the glass, or use an Oculus Rift.

Motion within one's visual field, especially intermittent motion, deters concentration on things other than that motion. (Why do you think TVs cut scenes every few seconds?) The desks there do not obviously make it possible to face away from the corridor; plus people walking by cast shadows. Facing away does help, but it's inferior. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895162 has someone else reporting the same complaints about motion; I guess it's not a coincidence this is someone else developing nontrivial algorithms.)

The feeling of being watched over your shoulder isn't something I'd dismiss either, though it's not a work-ruiner by itself for me. If you're actively anti-privacy, stop calling them private offices.

I've worked on open plan floors and also had a private office before. Currently, I share an office with one other dev and I feel it's the best setting I've ever had.

Peopleware does suggest two person semi private offices as a preferred setup based on real productivity studies.

I can confirm this. One of the most productive spaces in my career has been a long U desk with myself and another programmer at each end. We could roll over and talk to each other, or just sit with our backs to each other and ignore the other person. Great!

>> Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office

> The longer I spend in this environment (coming up to five years) the less I like it

> I like the idea of having large, interesting open spaces for more social activities including work, but most of the work I do lends itself well to being not surrounded by people having conversations

This is confusing.. Are you saying you do like Fog Creek's setup, or you don't?

I've seen a couple of comments expressing confusion at @asicallydan's comment, but it seems pretty clear to me.

For the last five years he has been in an environment with private offices. Initially he liked the private offices, over the years he's liked them less and less. Now he likes the idea of large, interesting open spaces more than private offices.

Haha, actually it's the other way around. Originally I had "The longer I spend in this environment" at the top but moved it when I thought it'd be good to start my comment with an example of a type of office environment I like the idea of.

I think he says he likes to mix it up depending on what he's doing. Quiet space for focused, intense coding, open space for socialising.

I do!

Now check out Atlassian's new office:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/atlassian/sets/721576316725737...

Guess who's winning the bug tracking market share

I'm not sure - who is winning the market share?

That said, I'm amazed by the size of the offices etc. from just bug tracking software. Does everyone not just use Trac or Bugzilla or something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com