Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

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   > When people see their teams working hard around them, they 
   > have little excuse not to follow the suit. 
   > In private offices... ...most people are actually fairly 
   > weak against distractions generated from their own computer

I think this is true. When left totally to my own with medium-term or long-term deadlines it's hard to resist the pull of distractions on the web.

But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members. During the daily standup meetings you publicly commit to what you're going to do in the next day, and inform the team of what you did during the previous day (along with any roadblocks you hit, if any).

I don't find myself tempted to YouTube the day away when I know I've told the team I'm going to to X, Y, and Z today and that I'm going to have to stand up in front of them again tomorrow and let them know my progress (or lack thereof!)

  > In private offices, you mostly rely on bumping in to someone 
  > in the lobby for serendipitous discussions.

Collaboration is crucial! If private offices are so private that collaboration is discouraged, then that's a problem that needs to be solved somehow.

  > A 3 person team packed in to a private office is likely the best 
  > of both worlds.

I think I find this to be the worst of all worlds, hahaha. A conversation can be easier to ignore in a wide-open space (where it's part of the overall din) but there's no such aural camouflage in a 3-person office: it's just you, your work, and a noisy-ass conversation in close proximity.

It's difficult for people to recognize that open offices exist for a reason, but they absolutely do. They are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration, and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced and less natural.

The open floor plan is also a huge cultural boon for that reason. The types of systems that enable communication, collaboration, and mutual motivation in a closed office are the ones that feel "old" and unnatural and corporate. Despite productivity decreases in day to day heads down work, open office collaboration feels very natural and genuine, and that has greater effects.

Plus, it turns out, most of the work in a company larger than a few dozen people is in that communication and collaboration space; not sitting at a desk typing.

How is the simplest cheapest emptiest thing a systematic solution to anything. It's starting to design a workspace, drawing the interior/exterior border, then getting an interruption and coming back an hour later and thinking you are done.

It would be excellent parody of the the hula hoop circle "you know, for kids" gag from that old movie.

Often the simplest, cheapest, emptiest things make pretty good systems. They reduce waste, and have certain advantages.

Your joke is funny, but I promise you that's not the reason for open floor plans.

The key is that even an open plan is a system—it's just a less constrained system, with fewer rules. You still have to view it as a system and study the effects and interactions involved.

  [open offices] are a systemic solution to communication, collaboration, 
  and motivation problems. All three need different systemic solutions 
  in a private office context, but those solutions would be more forced 
  and less natural.

I don't understand how those three things require "systemic solutions" in an office environment. When I need to collaborate with a coworker I just travel ten feet to their office or click their name in HipChat.

Those are systemic solutions.

The question is if the tradeoff in the reduction/change of collaboration is worth the increased productivity from the better layout. That's not an obvious question to answer, in fact—that's what I'm saying. You need to prove which system is actually superior, with data.

A 3-person team in a small office works well for me. The other two people are working on the same project, and since they're also developers they are quiet -- if a phone rings they step outside with it. The room is quiet, so people that walk in tend to be quiet as well.

Having been scrum master myself at different times, you would be surprised how many times people outright lie "What did you do yesterday" part. They are not necessarily evil or lazy or stupid. It's becoming just super hard for people to be disciplined and stay away from distractions from so many things. Comparatively, distractions by people around in open offices is nothing.

But that is also fairly easily mitigated with methodologies like Scrum where you are frequently touching base with other team members.

Seriously, FUCK THAT SCRUM SHIT. A daily status meeting isn't that bad, but "you can only work on it if it's in the backlog" and "sprints" and backlog grooming meetings and this brand of aggressive micromanagement that has revived itself in the name of "Agile"... all of that nonsense needs to die in a taint fire.

There is no manager in a scrum. There are only the developers and a product owner to communicate customer priorities.

Maybe that's how it works if you are doing it "right". But nobody ever seems to do Agile "right". If Agile is so hard to do right, and breaks down so badly when it's done wrong in a small way (like letting your manager in the scrum), then isn't that in itself a problem with Agile?

I don't see a problem in a manager participating. But what would the manager do if backlog is handled by the PO and work load by the dev team? I think any process would break down if a manager decides to fly solo and push extra work outside the framework, for example.

I did "Agile" for 1.5yrs and it was the least agile team I've been on so far. We never had a product owner (we were all expected to understand the user's needs enough to serve as "product owners"). We had devs and a manager, and a "scrum master"/team lead, who was one of the devs and reported directly to the manager. Our scrums were 30m+ long because the manager wanted to know every little detail, and there would be a lot of back-and-forth, most of which would be irrelevant to any given team member. Complexity poker involved guessing what number the manager wanted you to pick, and sprint reviews were two-day experiences in self-flagellation.

Not that all of this would have magically gone away if we weren't an "Agile" team but it did contribute to the problem. "Proper" Agile just doesn't fit well with the way most companies want to run their teams. So managers take Agile and make their own personal tweaks to it. Since their brand of Agile has 80% the same rules to what they read in the book, they expect to get 80-100% of the benefits of Agile. Any questioning of the actual results of this system is heresy, since Agile is a well-established management method used by many successful companies.

If that manager had picked up a management system that worked within the company's framework without making so many changes, or if there wasn't so much Agile-worship in the industry that an "Agile" setup was politically unquestionable, the situation would have been a lot easier to fix. As it is, it wasn't until our team completely collapsed that the company reassigned half of that manager's responsibilities to a new department, and the manager decided to retweak their personal brand of "Agile". Even that is probably too little too late; more and more projects are being moved from that dep't into others, to the point where I'm wondering what the devs there will actually have left to do.

So yeah. I'm very skeptical of anything calling itself "Agile", because it's such a nightmare when done wrong, and I'd bet dollars to donuts there are more places doing it wrong than right.

What would you prefer?

What would you prefer?

A culture of trust where engineers are treated as professionals and adults, not as children who have to justify weeks and days of their own working time. Open allocation as far as is possible within the confines of the needs of the business.

I actually believe that Scrum is a way to avoid micromanagement. There's no way of getting around the fact that the people who pay you want to see steady progress toward the thing they're paying you to do. One 15-minute meeting each morning to assuage that concern is a reasonable solution to me.

You're talking about standup, not Scrum. It's a common conflation to call a status meeting a "Scrum meeting".

Status reporting, if the overhead is around 3% (e.g. 15 minutes per day, or a one-hour weekly meeting) isn't so bad. I think it's actually good if it defuses the suspicions ("what does he do?") that, unchecked, can devolve into political behavior.

Scrum involves a lot more, like user stories and an explicit disallowance of working on things not in the backlog. By the book, you have to leave written records of what you did in insulting detail. It's horrible stuff. But I agree: 15 minutes per day for an all-team status meeting isn't that bad, and can be better than the alternative if that alternative is a culture of suspicion and resentment.

We do a pretty relaxed version of it; it's fun. It doesn't feel like micromanagement to me.

If I need to do something that doesn't have a task in the backlog, I just add one and then click "start" in Sprintly. No big deal. It's basically a shared to-do list, and I'm a to-do list kind of guy.

I like the daily stand up meetings. Specifically the emphasis on the fact that it shouldn't be more than 15 minutes in length.

You have my sympathies though. I can certainly see how some companies would implement Scrum in a way that is really anal-retentive and gets in the way.

I seriously need a 'die in a taint fire'-button. So many uses!

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