People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley. Career switching from the military to development has been interesting in this regards. The military uses chat, but only when needed—realtime communication is critical and people are distributed geographically. On duty on the carrier keeping track of planes and other issues happening “in country”, chat is great. On the ground in Iraq scheduling airborne assets and keeping track of SF missions, chat is great. But for most things, chat is more of a distraction and slows down the real work.
I understand chat if you are working in operations, but for pure development, it feels like a college dorm, more about the community and less about the work, where people still confuse time at the office with getting your work done. After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t. Building camaraderie is important, but chat probably isn’t the best way. And putting everyones communications in a single channel isn’t helping communication, it’s increasing distraction.
In my ideal dev team, you have chat, use it for one-on-one communication, and for anything that is time sensitive which goes into group channels. Anything that not everyone needs to know or isn’t time sensitive should go in an email or a message or a shoulder tap. Cluttering a few group channels with a ton of individual conversations, meaningless alerts, and random banter is downright juvenile and a detriment to productivity. I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution.
> People’s obsession with Slack and chat apps (applies to open offices too) seems overly done in Silicon Valley.
> After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t.
> I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution.
"Dorm room chat" is a great way of thinking and talking about it, and I think you can extend the metaphor really far. A lot of young people working in Silicon Valley and startups (not all, of course) see it partially as a lifestyle choice of sorts.
Where it gets interesting and messy is– if your employees value that sort of thing, should you encourage it? Discourage it? I guess it depends on what you're trying to achieve.
I agree completely with the philosophy that communications in general should be lean and tidy. It's interesting to observe that different people have different attitudes about this, and that every organization comes to its own sort of compromise.
> On duty on the carrier keeping track of planes and other issues happening “in country”, chat is great.
Very similar observations from 10 years ago and now. And in the hospital, chat has no role. It's curious watching the Dev community obsess about how many things could theoretically do without getting off their butts, and then swear the latest standing desks.
> It's curious watching the Dev community obsess about how many things could theoretically do without getting off their butt
I understand the sentiment, but it's important to consider the people in situations where it's not feasible to meet physically. It's not about "getting off your butt" if you live multiple hours away from the office.
The collaboration excuse is a red herring. I'm sure some of the managers believe it, but it's not really the point.
Office space is leased by the square foot. $/sf/ year. Building a new building is usually budgeted in terms of $/sf. (Aside from some base unavoidable costs, it more or less scales linearly with floor area in terms of square feet.)
The fewer square feet you need, the less your lease is, which immediately and directly decreases your overhead and increases your profit margin.
Open offices fit more people in fewer square feet. There's a specific dollar amount a manager can point to and say "I'm saving that much money".
Maybe the productivity gains of private offices would more than offset the extra cost of needing more space, maybe not. It's not as easily quantifiable. Keep in mind that office leases are often signed for 10+ years and if you're building your own building you're stuck with it for even longer. Plus once you sign a lease you have to pay to build out the office. This can easily cost several million dollars in itself.
If you're a manager making this mutli-million dollar decision, are you going to go with the guaranteed overhead savings of minimizing square footage or are you going to risk millions of dollars on a vague promise of maybe increased productivity? Unless your company has the money to spare I don't see any rational person opting for the latter, much as I would rather have a private office myself.
As I understand it though, open office is a trend. Your mechanism doesn't explain why there was ever a time without open offices. So what's changed to make office managers more penny-wise, or have there always been "open collaborative offices" just under a different name?
I take it you've never seen a newspaper "bullpen", or a clark's office. :) It comes down to class. Many professions that were once afforded private accommodation are now being downclassed. It's also easier to scale up and down by moving what are essentially picnic tables.
Indeed. Now only the very top management have the privilege of private offices. I've worked on a +400,000 sqft campus where only a handful of top managers had private offices. Generally, you have a private office only if you are important enough that you also have a personal secretary.
On the plus side, most modern office buildings are shoving the private offices toward the interior, with open offices around the perimeter having actual daylight. We can thank the USGBC and LEED certification for a lot of that.
You'd have trouble designing a more depressing environment than an open office in a building interior with fluorescent troffers if you tried. Good riddance.
As i understand it, open offices were the norm. I knew paralegals who worked in open offices before it hit tech offices. It also used to be that way in most offices before cubicles became commonplace (watch movies from the 40s or 50s which have offices as backdrops)
I think what happened is that as the work done in offices gained more value people who worked in offices were convinced that having your own space was more prestigious (by furniture companies, office space companies, etc.) so it became normal to move away from shared cattle pens.
Now shared space is being sold as collaborative so as to insinuate anyone not on board with the concept must be an uncollaborative sort of fellow.
I recall working in a high priced tower a place which made money, some people got proper offices, but most people got three foot beautiful mahogany desks side by side. Expensive desks but floor space was even more expensive.
The trend in businesses across the country isn't from private office to open offices. It's from cubicals to open office. Cublicals don't really predate the big white collar office, but they've been around since the 1960s. Before then offices tended to be smaller. But they had bullpens then too.
People hated cublicals because they imagined the alternative was a private office. Instead the alternative is no real private space at all. People started believing cublicals are the worst of both worlds. Not as private as an office, but still limits community and collaboration.
In the media, cublical farms were considered at best a joke and at worst the tyranny of the modern workplace.
What is pushing the trend further is insane real estate prices. Now even executives and high value employees (lawyers, management, etc) are getting pressured to give up offices.
My guess is that the big issue at play here is land price and zoning issues in the big cities where companies need to be headquartered to attract top talent. It's hard to build new buildings, and it's hard to build them tall. Building out in the suburbs is no longer seen as attractive. So, the solution is to maximize the space available while providing other perks like catered lunches and snacks etc.
I'm pretty certain a reasonable fraction of "top talent" will at least consider a remote opportunity if you don't want to set up an office somewhere expensive.
Open offices went away with the clerical staff. In the 90s, a professional job like IT would be in cubes or shared offices. Real offices don't make sense financially, mostly for tax reasons.
What changed is that IT operations became a bigger thing, and we started needing more programmers. The traditional cubicle created the illusion of a private space, but made IT ops hard because you couldn't see anybody.
Now open offices are back. Wifi is displacing many of the managed cabling requirements, and people are into the feeling of "energy" that comes with a newsroom like environment.
If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.
> If you look around you and see a big open room of people futzing around with headphones -- take the hint. You're the clerk of the 2010's.
Good point.
Whenever this topic comes up I wonder why would a business risk de-valuing one of its biggest investments (payroll) by creating a potentially productivity killing environment. But if programming is now considered a cost centre (like clerks were in their day), I wonder what would be considered the profit centre of a software company?
Many large businesses don't seem to optimise globally. Perhaps the real estate or facilities part of the business sets itself a target to reduce costs by 20%, they execute the plan and at end of year point out their savings and managers get a bonus.
Why should they care if it means that the software devs in a completely different part of the business are now less productive? Most large organisations are so dysfunctional that the negatively impacted parts of the business can't fight back against bean counters from elsewhere.
This is playing out at my work right now with virtual desktops being imposed on all developers, even though it means that projects that used to take 1 min to compile now often take 15 mins to compile. Crazy.
My two cents is that as time moves on we have a need to show growth and it simply isn't easy to do so once you have picked tie low hanging fruits. Thus, we try to look for ways to increase revenue and cut costs that were previously ignored as the cost of doing business. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.
For example, a company I used to work at sold its building and rented (leased?) only three floors and the basement from the new owners. This injected cash into the company. I don't know what the slightly smaller cubicles cost the company in terms of employee productivity. How do we quantify such things?
The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.
I'll agree with gp though. It is reprehensible to defend open floor plans as anything other than a cost cutting measure.
> The next place I worked (steel industry) at had my cubicle which was at least four times as big as that place before but I'm confident my productivity didn't go up four times because of it.
The thing is it doesn't have to quadruple in order to justify the extra real-estate cost because your monthly salary is (probably) much higher than the monthly rent on your desk space.
If you're paid $120k (10k/month) and rent is $5/sq-ft per month [1]; going from 36 sq-ft of space for your desk (small) to 144 sq-ft of space (4x as much) will cost $540/month. Meanwhile even a 10% productivity decrease would cost ~$1k per month.
Edit: Thinking more about it, the productivity loss is even worse than above. You might be paid $120k/year, but the company expects to extract some multiple of this number in value from the work you do (I've heard target numbers like $500k/year) - so a 10% decrease in productivity is more like $4k/month in lost value.
That's the thing though, the 10% number is fuzzy. I agree there's definitely a productivity boost from having a private office, but it's hard to quantify. The smaller square footage and lower lease payments are easy to quantify. If productivity expectations are set based an open office, then the increase with the more expensive private offices is unknown.
Additionally, high overhead increases risk. Maximum productivity is only important as long as you have more work than there are employees to do it. What if there's a downturn (as in 2008)? Now you're locked into an expensive lease and no longer have the revenue to support it. The company with lower overhead can hold out longer until things turn around. Employees can be laid off. Getting out of a lease or selling a building are harder.
I don't think people are saying everyone should have private offices, which I agree is not feasible from an economic standpoint. Nor have I seen any studies saying that private offices justify the costs of themselves in increased productivity gained.
But there are ways that offices can be designed to be less likely to disrupt your work. Maybe grouping a few people in a private office instead? Or set "quiet hours"? Have designated "quiet rooms" where talking is prohibited? I feel like there are a lot of things that can be experimented with or try that are not a huge expenditure.
And I know putting a dollar amount saved on productivity with innovations in workplace design are harder to show, but I think it's a widely known fact that interruptions affect knowledge work and peoples ability to focus. So if someone who should be working on focus work is frequently being interrupted every 30 minutes by noises and people asking questions and it takes that person 15 minutes to get back into the groove each time, it's easy to see just how many wasted hours there will be.
>Maybe grouping a few people in a private office instead? Or set "quiet hours"? Have designated "quiet rooms" where talking is prohibited? I feel like there are a lot of things that can be experimented with or try that are not a huge expenditure.
Having two dedicated "work from home" days every week at my company seems to serve this exact purpose. Those are often some of our most productive days and it cuts back on commute times which have a lot of benefits.
I work from home full-time so you won't see much argument from me :) In an ideal scenario, I would prefer something like 4 days at home, 1 day at the office for face-to-face meetings.
I'm curious, given that you say you're more productive, are there any discussions in your company about expanding remote work to not only be a part-time thing?
It's funny how tech is a great use-case of remote work, yet if one reads today's "Ask HN: Who is hiring?" post, the vast majority of listings require onsite involvement.
I used to think that cost was the main incentive too.
But it doesn't explain why so many A-List silicon valley companies use open plan. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., all have intense competition for engineers, and they spend a lot on perks for their employees. And devote lots of footage to amenities such as gyms, game rooms, etc. It doesn't seem that cost would be the driving factor for these companies.
just because a company is A-list it doesn't mean it's immune from fads and cargo culting, especially given the poetic image of start-ups all in the same room working towards a common goal 24/7, forgetting though that those start-ups are working on POC-quality code most of the time to get funding, which is the kind of coding that gets done when you keep getting interrupted 10 times an hour
why do people fall in this trap over and over again?
if you can do basic math you understand that the cost of people is >>>> cost of the space. For small startups, one person can cost you more, per month, than all your rent.
open space can work great sometimes depending on the type of work done, but I've yet to see a place where people are not simply tired of the noise and the constant interruptions.
I've worked in open offices, they made it impossible for me to program, so I spent all day "collaborating" and doing scutwork until everyone went home at 5, then I'd stay til 9 to get the stuff I needed to get done done.
I'd never do that again, if a company puts me in a position where I can't work during work hours I simply won't, will raise concerns and if not resolved leave.
Life is too short to do 70 hour weeks when you are only getting 30 hours work done.
Indeed. One gig I was at consisted of spending 9-5 doing nothing but meetings/groupwork/collaborating/email and dealing with bosses who kept asking why the coding wasn't getting done and behind schedule in one breath while dragging me into a 3hr+ meeting the next. Getting work done meant getting in before the boss, coding as much as possible until the boss showed up, waiting for the boss to leave, then coding again for another 2-3 hours to keep up. It does get ridiculous.
The problem is we've turned asynchronous communication and decision making into a near-real time short loop without considering the cognitive costs. Switching from my editor to email, parsing the 30 new messages, identifying the content to reply to and fabricating the correct reply costs the mental software model being used to guide the coding and it takes time to get it back into place. Switch in/out all day and your only bit of peace comes when the email writers go home.
If you have 3+ hour meetings that sounds like a bug. Maybe figure out why they take so long or why there are so many and address that.
Maybe get fewer people in the meeting? Push as much discussion as possible out of the meeting so it only involves the people who care? More delegation and indirection?
Managers and leadership should be showing up to more smaller meetings not front line people showing up to fewer longer meetings.
I think a reasonable scheduled meeting budget is averaging 1-1.5 hours per week and that is an upper limit not a target. Unscheduled (as in does not repeat every week at the same time) are something to be avoided for a product development team.
I think it was part of the management culture and how they got things "done" back in the day. The CEO came from a background where solution finding was sticking people in a war room for hours churning through things to find solutions. That works when you're sitting together analyzing data but not when you're writing the code to create the data being analyzed.
It also comes from time valuation. They value their work at $X and my work at $K where X > K so it's oK to burn my $K value because the $X-$K delta is high enough to justify prioritizing their work needs.
Another trend I've seen emerging is devs almost always bring in their laptops to meeting and zone out (doing their real work) when they don't care about what's being discussed. Don't know if its good or bad. Or maybe people now even expect you to bring your laptops in case you don't have any input.
Sounds nice in theory but the managers set the meeting.
What they never seem to realise is a 2 hour meeting with 10 people means they use two hours of their time and 20 hours of their subordinates, most of which is spent waiting for the other 9 to finish.
Lots of those managers simply don't see the inefficiency since from their point of view it looks OK.
My theory pertaining to non-technical supervisory staff is that meetings for some fill up an otherwise very empty day. All the technical managers that I have worked for never seemed too eager for meetings - they were too busy building real things to waste time in meetings.
> Maybe get fewer people in the meeting? Push as much discussion as possible out of the meeting so it only involves the people who care? More delegation and indirection?
Totally with you here. I also make it mandatory that everyone coming to a meeting read the offline discussion before hand. When someone shows up and we have to summarize the back history again it is selfishly wasting everyones time. I finally started refusing to do it and will leave and tell the PM to reschedule.
Yeah, we have an open-office plan, but we've successfully lobbied to have developer meetings largely moved to one day a week, and engineers on important projects get "office hours" to allow for interruptions during a defined time. It's important to separate meeting cultures from open offices.
We have a hybrid space. Cubes surrounded by white boards. Probably 20feet of whiteboard / associate and a few associates with offices with doors and 10 feet of whiteboard. Doors are seldom closed. We use chat for both my team and with another similar team across campus. We are very aware of the penalty of context switching so the spaces tend to be quiet except when there are operational issues. We use a scrum lite approach (daily stand ups but very lightweight).
We agree with the comments here that chat should be used for operational or time and sequence sensitive task coordination. We call quick meetings to collaborate on issues and opportunities right after standup and they tend to last about 10 to 20 minutes at most. These don't occur very often (1 or 2 a week). All of this works very well.
We have tuned the space a lot over the years. We also have a small table in the space so we can do demos (big monitor on the wall) or have meetings when we want and not be tied to formal meeting space availability. We maybe have 2 to 3 meetings a week in the space and usually they involve everyone (there are 3 of us).
My last gig was at a bank and I had no desk. I had a file cabinet and a shared admin (across maybe 80 people). Was expected to find space to work. I carried my office on my back. At times it was great. I could hide from my associates when I needed to get work done. I had 8 people working for me. But when we needed to collaborate or meet we could hardly ever find quiet space to talk through operational issues. We were never allowed to use chat so when operational problems arose people had to assume I was looking at my email.
Net net was I hated this approach. I love what I have now.
That resonates a lot with me. A few years back my manager in a big-co with a lofty motto would not allow me to work remotely for a week or two to stay closer to my dying parent. As she pointed out, "a lot of innovation happens at the watercooler".
Innovation == Talking about what we did that weekend? :)
This was cruel and there is no excuse why in 2016 this arrangement couldn't work for a week or two.
As a remote member of a mostly onsite team there is some validity that you miss out on the SOCIAL aspects of work (grabbing lunch, hanging out after work from time to time, etc) but the "innovation" on our team is just fine.
You should've quit on the spot. "Jobs come and go, but I only have one/two parents who deserve better, etc. Bye." She would've relented and let you go. I've called this bluff several times in my career and I've never lost.
But of course, you don't want to work for someone like that in the first place, if you can help it.
My outlook on life has improved since I recognized that we're in an industry and a time that allows us to re-phrase requests like "I'd like to work remotely for a while to be near my parents in a time of need, please" as a statement of fact: "I'm going to work remotely for a while to be near my parents in a time of need" and simply ignore any attempt to contradict it.
This won't last forever—enjoy it while you can. Say no early, say no often!
It was my first 'real' job and the company was (and still is) considered extremely prestigious in our line of work. So for a junior engineer quitting that job was suboptimal at that stage. I ended up going without permission. Contrary to my expectations I wasn't fired. But was never promoted again, either - no matter how hard I would work for it.
It would have been very easy to explain in interviews however. "They wouldn't let me spend two weeks with my dying mother" is quite a valid reason for quitting a job in my opinion.
That's assuming you want to quit the job. But given the employer, the opportunity to learn a ton if I stayed and my low self-esteem at the time I wasn't overly eager to quit.
It's expected that you aren't going to be gumdrops and rainbows about your prior employer in an interview. The point of this rule is that you don't look like you're bitter or holding a grudge; if the new company thinks you create vendettas whenever there's a problem, they're going to want to stay away from you for fear that you'll be unfair to them if such a misunderstanding arises in the course of your employment with them (e.g., hurting their reputation in the marketplace, leaking source code because you're mad at your boss).
It'd be reasonable to say something like "We had different perspectives on the structure of the workplace and it just wasn't really what I was looking for". They'll probably ask "Oh, what was the issue?" and you'll say "I needed to work remotely to be at the bedside of an ailing parent and they said they'd fire me if I tried, so I quit".
You don't want to look like you're blaming them for making you miss your parents' final moments (we're grownups and take personal responsibility for things like that, don't allow people to stop you from participating in important life milestones), which is why it's a good idea to allow them to dig a little bit before getting at the real dispute. This is a good principle when discussing previous employers anyway. You always want to sound like you're over whatever the slight was, that you see and understand their perspective and don't blame them for having it, but simply don't agree with it. You won't be faulted for that.
That's a good rule of thumb for a variety of reasons, but this is a situation where I don't think it applies. (1) It's the truth, and it's the reason you're seeking a job, and any worthwhile employer would likely sympathize. (2) You've already burnt your bridge with the previous employer, so who cares?
I work in an open office, and would consider myself a knowledge worker. The easiest way to manage it is to work from home, however I also positioned my desk in a corner facing the window (so my back to the room) I also by default put wvery meeting invite to tenative and ubless its absolutely necessary i dont show up.
All that has put me at odds with management to a degree. However, im given all the hard problems and churn out solutions. Based on projects completed, im doing the work of 4 employees at the same level. I should also add that I still answer 5 - 20 questions from coworkers a day, and am the go-to guy to fix many issues (so I dont completely shut myself off). This has put me in a position where my manager has hinted that im going to get promoted if I keep it up.
Of course the company I work for has "non-management management" i.e. you can become a VP without having to manage people. This lets the anti-social hard-core workers still move up in rank and pay.
You will not get promoted. As long as you're super valuable in your current role, they only have incentive to keep you put. I got strung along with that bullshit for years at my first job before I learned this lesson.
It's not a total loss though. If they do find you valuable, play hard on your salary.
I tried to explain that in my original comment, but did a poor job. They can promote you, but you keep your role. i.e. you can be promoted to "VP of Web Development" essentially. So your role doesn't change, but your responsibilities related to engineering can increase.
This can lead to some pretty weird hierarchy where a people manager at the director level is managing an engineering manager at the VP level. However, I feel it is a pretty interesting environment and lets both "knowledge works" and "people managers" be rewarded on equal footing.
Don't believe this line of crap. Employment is a popularity contest. You need to be popular to climb the ladder. Literally turning your back on the room and refusing to go to meetings makes you unpopular. It's true that your popularity among your superiors is the most important popularity, but popularity among your peers is also important; if you can't get the respect of your subordinates you won't be an effective manager. People will work to undercut you. In 99% of cases, you won't get their respect if they think you don't like them.
In aggregate, peoples' behaviors are very predictable. Before every action, ask if this kind of thing would endear a toddler to you or not. If it would, it's a good thing to do. If it wouldn't, it's going to be an uphill battle and you'll have to do many toddler-approved things to undo the damage.
This is why you should bring donuts for the office every week; toddlers love getting edible treats, and so do grownups. Make sure everyone knows you're the one who brought them, without looking like you're making sure everyone knows that you're the one who brought them. This will make people like you more.
Turn your desk around and start going to all their meetings. Say supportive and encouraging things. Make irrelevant broad, philosophical statements, literally stuff you'd find on motivation posters. You'll get popular fast.
If you care about your career, you must realize that your actual job is only ~20% of what you're paid for. You're really paid to be likeable and charming, someone that everyone wants to keep around the office. Do whatever you have to do to keep your code limping along and then put the rest of your energy into becoming popular. You'll be promoted and tasked to hire a version of yourself that hasn't learned these lessons yet, and the cycle will continue.
It seems to me that depending on where you're working, being the person that always saves the day and that does the "work of 4 employees at the same level" is a sure way to not get promoted.
Sadly, there really is a lot of collaboration cargo culting these days.
But it's interesting because in the large majority of fields the best outcomes really are in some ways collaborative efforts. The lone genius is actually extremely rare.
I'm inclined to say the key to effective collaboration is that it has to be driven entirely by the collaborators, and it is only actively happening for a very small percentage of the time spent on a project.
A cargo culting middle manager might think she's helping by setting up hours of meetings with different people to get their "perspective". Those people probably can add value. But the best way to do it is to let the project lead go to them with questions or asking for feedback when they think it makes sense.
Management can help by fostering a culture where people are willing and eager to talk to their colleagues when they need help, or to get new ideas. To some extent communication tools can help, but there are other much bigger factors: Don't make people feel like they'll be penalized in performance reviews for not knowing things or needing help. Cultivate a sense of shared ownership of projects and outcomes. Give people maxuimum autonomy over their schedules.
I really want to figure out which plan is better. I honestly feel that people with bad experiences with open plan get on here and gripe, and it makes open plan sound horrible. But there are bad experiences with offices too. Like rarely interacting with colleagues outside of scheduled meetings. And there's a natural bias towards one's own productivity vs helping the team.
Maybe it's just because open plan is more the norm nowadays, now we hear all the downsides of that. But it's worth considering it was adopted in response to the downsides of offices and cubes (shudder), not some shortsighted irrational plot to cut costs at the expense of productivity.
One thing I know: If anyone says rarely interacting "sounds great", they shouldn't be trusted. Yes you will absolutely maximize your coding focus. Yes that is an invalid argument. Team collaboration is important too. I suspect that to make either plan work you've got to pair it with a solid culture that shores up its weaknesses: minimize distractions in open plan, fight isolation in offices.
My straw man ideal is an open plan that is relatively quiet, but let's you look at each other and leverage body language and enhanced awareness to gague when it's a good moment to interrupt. That's the only way that a whole class of "quick questions" and "crazy ideas" get fielded that would otherwise not cross the interrupt bar of a door-knock or even an IM-ping. And that stuff can be super valuable esp. to a startup team. And it actually can get those handled quicker!
But I suspect it has to be paired with a culture of minimizing extended subcritical conversations at your desk and taking them over to separate meeting areas that are less disruptive.
At my new job, I've really started pushing back against meetings that seem superfluous. Often times I'll find myself saying the same exact thing at 3 different meetings, and it almost never affects anyone else in the room.
What form does this pushing take? How is it working? I ask because I've failed at this before; managers have great power to defend their habits and processes.
Is it possible that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to this problem? I get the feeling that if cubicles were still in fashion people would be complaining just as loudly about them as others are complaining about open offices. I think a good balance between the two extremes combined with allowing people to work from home on days they need to focus is the best answer we have to this problem today.
We can keep writing these articles and reading them and knowing we are right and get nowhere.
1) Say I'm an engineer with a manager who doesn't get it. How can I empathetically (that is, without spontaneously developing a "political performance problem" on my next review) help my manager improve?
2) Say I'm that manager, and I want to improve but meetings and spreadsheets are all I know. What can I do?
... Most people getting work done are typically on a Maker schedule. People scheduling and benefiting from the meetings are typically on a Manager schedule. This article can help those on a Manager schedule understand why large blocks of work time should be reserved for those doing the work. Managers need to strive to make meetings short, sweet and at the beginning or end of a day and concentrated on a specific day. Those are very specific items that can improve the Maker's productivity. The Manager should be protecting Makers from meetings, not subjecting them to meetings and this article makes that clear.
> 2) Say I'm that manager, and I want to improve but meetings and spreadsheets are all I know. What can I do?
Rethink what it means to be a manager. Your job is to eliminate barriers for your team and protect them from distractions. You shouldn't be one of the distractions.
A lot of people say this is the purpose of managers but it seems few actually believe it, especially those who seem to need to actively try to convince people that this is all they're doing.
In reality, most non-technical managers of technical staff look down on their subordinates and see themselves as babysitters who need to make sure that those stupid nerds don't waste the company's money, which they've been charged to protect. This results in "removing barriers" by telling everyone to shut up and get back to following directions. Some managers are very sneaky about this and their subordinates often don't realize that's what's happening.
The first manager I had did this explicitly. If he caught sales or marketing talking to the devs, he would ask them what the problem was. It worked well.
Well one option is that if meetings are shorter and we waste less time on performance-evaluating BS, then the surplus of manager's time will result in less demand for managers.
Right, but do you schedule a meeting to talk to your manager about it? And when they schedule a series of follow-ups to evaluate the effectiveness of meetings and establish a committee... And oh where's that feature you're working on?
There was a post today about Stanley Kubrick, which got me thinking: programming is like making a movie in many ways. So you can tell your boss: "if I were a film director and you knew I'm busy at the film set making a feature film for you, with some Hollywood stars, would you be calling me out for your shitty meetings as often as you do otherwise?"
Or: "If you were Stanley Kubrick's boss, would you interrupt him as often?"
I don't think this will get through to anyone. The only reason people can respect the time used up by a director is because every minute of filming has a massive directly attributable dollar cost to the company. In normal employment, the company is going to spending that money on either yourself or your replacement, so there's not an obvious, immediate economic incentive in allowing you to do what you consider "real work" (building something) instead of allowing the manager to do what he considers "real work" (sitting around and talking about stuff).
The problem with this argument is that it presumes that your manager agrees with the film director - programmer analogy and shares an understanding of film making that would reveal the practice to be bad in that context.
There are good arguments (and, IIRC, even a bit of research) on why continuous blocks of time are much better for efficiency of programmers; and meetings for them should generally be minimized and, when necessary to have, coordinated to avoid breaking up work blocks as much as practical. But that particular analogy is close to the worst way to make the argument to most bosses.
1) Phrase it as a help-me-help-you arrangement. You're getting gauged on how much stuff your team is getting done. Let me help you improve your performance metrics by reducing my meeting load and letting me focus more on coding. Our output metrics will look a lot better and you'll come out smelling like a rose. Sr. Management will love you and your results. Sell them on what gets them ahead (and it's also in your interest).
2) I liken a good manager to an old school point guard in basketball or a good coach. Your job isn't to score but to setup your teammates for success and create a culture of excellence they can thrive in on your team.
Be ruthless about your meeting schedule and filtering input that actually needs to make it to your team. You should be the first POC for anyone needing your team or people on your team to do things to filter it for appropriateness rather than letting your engineers handle things. I'm not talking about their buddy in IT asking them a question, but people like Joe in Accounting who thinks it'd be slick if they could add FeatureX to the software because their boss thinks it's cool and it'd be sweet if it could be in this release. "Ya Know ;)". As a manager your first job is to firewall your people and help handle task requests, analyze them, and prioritize them.
Also as a manager you help handle tasking and assignments. While you're building out your current sprint--and you're keeping up with what's happening so you can keep bosses apprised and off your team's back--you're also preparing for the next one, organizing requirements, incorporating feedback, etc. so when the team is ready for the next batch of tasking, it's already there and ready for them to process.
WRT meetings, make your meetings targeted, on point, and ruthless enforce them. You're the boss. If someone's running their mouth without reason and taking up time, politely cut them off and get back on track. Have a clear objective for the meeting and stick with it. Once you've hit it, you're done. End the meeting everyone get back t work. Schedule your meetings for either mornings or late afternoons (preferably mornings) to give people plenty of time to get "deep work" done without having to worry about only having an hour to code before a meeting. If other people are trying to draw your team into meetings, figure out whether it's something you can handle and if so, you go. Let your team do their job. Again, you're the firewall.
This also means getting to know your team personally and being able to read how they're doing. Does someone look really run down and out of it after a long week? Send them home early. Someone having a hard time getting things done on time? Sit down and talk with them, not adversarially, ask them what's going on, and what you can do to help. Politely point out what you've noticed and why it concerns you. Maybe their estimating wrong or their skill level isn't up to the work. You can help fix that. You're their coach. Know your team and help them succeed.
>2) I liken a good manager to an old school point guard in basketball or a good coach. Your job isn't to score but to setup your teammates for success and create a culture of excellence they can thrive in on your team.
The problem being that this is going to sideline the manager. He's not going to let himself become chopped liver while you become a star; ideally there wouldn't be a problem with the people doing the actual building getting the credit, but the system is organized so that that starpower needs to be redirected onto the manager's own career. This causes a real problem with "get out of the way" management styles.
Maybe it'd be wiser to pay managers a percentage of revenue. That way, the politics matter much less than making a successful product that sells well.
One of the best arguments I've read about corporate structure argued the higher up you go, the more of an enable you're supposed to be and it's less about you and more about how you empower the people below you to do. That's the idea I approach management from - how do I set people up to succeed and continue being successful.
I think part of helping "fix" management is to acknowledge their job is to empower people to "do" and a manager should be measured by their team. The more successful the team, the better a reflection on the manager rather than the manager must be a star. I also think part of it is the lack of training new managers are given. Promote someone from coder to manager, without giving them any training in how to make the shift and many of them will fall back on old metrics for determining their success rather than getting a new paradigm. It's about what I've done / how I've contributed and "led" rather than how I've empowered the people under me. Sometimes leadership isn't telling people how to do something, it's giving them the tools, trusting their ability, and getting out of the way.
My read on pushing collaboration is that it's a hedge against doing the wrong thing. In startups (say, <100 people and in grow-or-die mode), I think you have to focus on producing revenue on a 3-9 month timeframe. If you have a bunch of people working on their own, a lot of them will do things that are valuable, but won't show value to the company for 2-5 years. That not really OK, unless everybody agrees it's OK.
So, everybody collaborates constantly, so when you do something like run a pen-test before you have a customer with a CISO, there's agreement that it's OK to do it early. Otherwise, you might end up with a bunch of interesting work that doesn't have any coherence, and with only 25 people, that's not enough to sustain a company.
Of course, if everybody is working on the right things, and you have manager drive-bys via Slack/email/daily standups 3 times a day, that's a separate issue. It's the fear of working on the wrong thing that's motivating that pattern.
I'm shocked that SV ingenuity has ended up at such a horrific solution for office environments. The "open" plan hardly delivers any collaboration either, just a continuous stream of distractions or creepy silence with a room full of headphones. Surely we can do better?
There's a cultural aspect to collaboration, and an office layout aspect.
Culturally, collaboration can be great. Getting someone from sales involved in a product meeting could be revolutionary, or getting a product person on a sales call etc. etc.
It's possible to design an open floor plan with plenty of private spaces, but most companies don't do this because the people making the decisions are not introverted enough or their jobs don't involve achieving and maintaining "flow state".
Ideas like pair programming have created the misunderstanding that programming should always be done in a social way. There are many times when a problem demands focused thinking, and the ideal office space offers places to do that.
Fittingly, I'm having trouble focusing on reading this article because the team next to mine is having a conversation. They aren't speaking overly loudly, but there's nothing between me and them so I can hear everything.
I can only focus on one stream of words at a time, and can't filter very well. What this means is that if my wife is watching a TV show, I can't have a coherent conversation with her. If guys next to me are talking too loudly (and not rudely it anything, it's just an open office) I have trouble reading.
The other result: if music has lyrics, I can't read very well. Headphones like that are great, as long as you appreciate classical or EDM, lol.
I listen to the same playlist over and over again (used to be pandora, but changed to spotify discover weekly). Literally don't hear a single song until i listen to it at the end of the week at home.
I work in what might as well be an open plan: I share an office with three other people, and the desks are arranged so none of us have our backs to the wall (at least I get a really nice view of a highway out of the deal, though). The whole company is set up like this, with every 3-4 employees grouped into large offices.
It could be worse because I get along with my officemates, but it's easily the worst office arrangement I've been part of. The vulnerability of not having my back to the wall seriously gets to me, and it can get really, really annoying when multiple conversations are taking place at the same time. One of my officemates wears headphones 90% of the time specifically because of this.
Before this job, I've worked in cubes, I've had my own office, and I've shared an office with one other.
Of all those, I preferred sharing an office with one other, with desks arranged so our backs are to the wall. I had some degree of privacy, but I'm not totally isolated from other people.
I agree with the article and many of the comments here. I'd add that there's another thing: a one-size-fits-all design. Open plan offices are very good for workers for whom collaboration is constant; I've seen sales, marketing, some ops, and a few other departments who would constantly interact no matter what kind of office layout they had. For work that requires lots of concentration and little collaboration, though, that layout is counterproductive. Companies should start thinking about role needs and the space required to support maximum productivity, rather than just having a single layout because it's easier/cheaper. How about a ring of private offices for those that need it surrounding a shared collaboration space? I worked at one place like with that layout and it worked very well.
The Harvard Business Review reports "an overlap of only 50% between 'the top collaborative contributors in any organisation and those individuals deemed to be the top performers.'"
That's a pretty high percentage, if you ask me. I wonder what other traits you could identify in the set of top performers that would be equally or more prevalent. The article seems to equivocate more collaboration with more distraction. These two are perhaps related when policy aims to encourage collaboration through shared office space, Slack, and meetings which interrupt deep work. But let's be clear; collaboration is a good thing and we shouldn't act like it's wrong to encourage it, just that perhaps there are better, less distracting ways to do it.
It's one thing to put multiple people on the same task or question and have a focused, active collaboration. This would include things like brainstorming and pair programming.
It's another thing to give people their own tasks but put them in an environment of ambient chatter and real time notifications. This would include things like open floor plans and Slack. (I'm not arguing that these things are bad, just that they're not genuine collaboration.)
It's pretty easy to make an office look and feel like a collaborative space. It's quite a bit harder to find a few tasks that would benefit from real collaboration and invest double or triple the "hourly rate" for that one thing. Then again, maybe it's totally worth the cost?
First of all, forcing collaboration onto people by making them sit together isn't proven to be effective. There is no evidence to show it's in the company's best interests to have an open office environment. Doing it just because Facebook does is cargo cult thinking.
Second of all, it's also against the employees' best interests and pursuit of happiness. Employees should ideally want to choose the sort of office they have, and also be able to work from home whenever they want. Having happy employees leads to the highest productivity and employee retention.
I've worked in many different environments, and I dislike open office the most.
I have already tuned off my email client, only checking it in the morning and after lunch. Contemplating moving me workstation (computer) into my lab where I can get away from the open (short cubical wall) floor plan.
Of course, I am reading HN now, but only because it's taking quite a while to generate Gerbers for a PCB.
But what about people that their job is to collaborate an be in meetings. For example, I'm a business analyst, my job is to meet with users and devs. Eliciting requirements don't take me that much time. All my time is spent on being on meeting to understand what users want and review with them what have been done and make sure that's what they want.
That being said, I always try to make the meeting shorter and people thank me for that.
Then those people can go be in meetings all they want. Let the rest of us get our work done. I guarantee that they'll have no qualms about leaving at 6, but if we do without getting stuff done cause we spent all afternoon in a pointless meeting, they'll start yelling, and schedule another all afternoon meeting to discuss why we're still behind.
Most of the office where I am moved to being an open floor plan, with managers getting offices. The main area is quite noisy and I'm glad I'm not over there. Headphones would do me no good -- sure, I like to listen to music while developing, sometimes, but I also just like quiet. Probably lean more towards wanting quiet than music.
I find that the asynchronous nature of chat programs can actually help this problem. Email takes too much time because it's overly formal. Meetings, well, don't get me started. But asynchronous chat is a pretty good balance of informal, prompt enough, and not overly intrusive. ymmv.
Huh, the website won't show you any content if you're blocking cookie request notifications. You need to disable your adblock / cookie notification remover to be able to allow the site to use cookies, and only then will it show you the article.
Well, the EU law only is about tracking cookies. Technical cookies are always allowed – like, a sign-in cookie is automatically allowed if you click "sign in".
That means 99% of websites don’t need a cookie warning.
Far more than 1% of sites use Google Analytics, or similar services. I don't get why this wasn't mandated as a native browser notification, or something else that is opt-out.
The worst part is that I block tracking scripts and therefore also cookie notifications, and I still got a blank page. These blocks totally broke the website for me.
Good point, that's true. I still believe that it was an error of the European Commission to place the responsibility on the website operators instead of, say, browser vendors.
When I see a modern-day, first-grade classroom I shudder and am thankful that when I was a kid in the 1970s we had desks in rows facing the teacher. Today there are no desks and everybody sits in a circle on the floor. Primary education: For extroverts, by extroverts.
I would like to be what appears to be the 1st person on this thread to point out one key idea:
we have these things called "laptops" with "wifi" access technology. Typically you should be able to unplug your power cord, stand up and move your feet to quieter areas.
My mac laptop also has command-Q technology built into all my programs -- including chat and email.
Also I have these things that go over my ears and delivery music.
I was very surprised how difficult it was to find _any_ quiet place in our rather large open office. Cafeteria has ping pong and sports TV blasting, conference rooms would be reserved, etc.
That fancy, exotic technology you're describing only works well if you actually have some place quieter to move to, or have music you can blast that you can listen to while working.
Not everyone works in an office with spare rooms. And not everyone enjoys listening to metal or house. Cranking up the volume on, say, Erik Satie won't do much to mask background noise.
First hire good people, then just do whatever your team wants and it'll be the most productive/happy solution. This doesn't have to be some universal human rule. Humans are different.
I personally like times collaborating with short sprints alone.
I think a lot of this depends on the type of personality the person has. I've worked in open offices my entire career (18 years). I've never had trouble zoning out from distractions and concentrating on coding. A good pair of headphones is big help in this regard.
With all due respect this argument makes me crazy. So the answer to shitty office environments is drowning it out with noise? I have partial tinnitus thanks to this kind of thinking. And every time you get management to the point where they realize they should change something there's always that one guy saying "where's the problem? Just wear headphones..."
It's not really an argument. It's more of an observation that I've never had an issue. And you don't have to "drown" anything with noise, that's what noise-canceling headphones are for.
In my experience noise cancelling headphones are just as bad for tinnitus - it's not medically clear but try googling "noise cancelling headphones tinnitus" and judge for yourself
Gee, another open space rant. We never see enough of that.
So let's review what open space helps with.
Open space helps with teams working on creative problems. It helps them by allowing them, as a team, to own their collective space in such a way such that they are constantly socially interacting whether they would prefer that or not. The theory is that a group of people, left alone to work physically beside each other on something non-trivial, will eventually work through obstacles that each of them working individually and trying to email would not. In addition, people work through these problems on a non-verbal level, using body language, obfuscation, and all the other social tools that nature has given us to use when dealing with problems as a group (Insert long discussion here)
In a room with 80 people all sitting at cafeteria tables? That's not it. In an environment where teams don't have and own separate spaces? That's also not it. Working on a grunt project that doesn't requires a lot of creative problem-solving? Probably not for you -- and your job is in danger of being taken over by robots. Not responsible for truly helping a business problem and instead just being told what to do every day? You might as well work anywhere in the world; office setup isn't going to change anything for you.
This is really powerful stuff, and I've seen it make a ton of difference to how teams perform. But like everything else, it's been "re-branded", buzz-worded, adopted-and-extended, and compromised to the point where it's a disaster for a lot of folks. I can't help that. It's still a good idea in many cases. (And, quite frankly, as a developer I'd rather just be left alone to code. I do not care about creative solutions to interesting problems. Unfortunately, the people who pay me? They pay me to work through tough issues, not just try to spend the maximum amount of time in flow.)
So it's really getting hard to have an intelligent discussion about this. All the time I hear my friends say "I hate X!" Then I look at what they're doing? It's not X. I'm not sure whether to agree with them or not. I am reminded of the old joke: "Doctor! It hurts when I do this!" "Well, stop doing that."
I'm providing a definition, not a list of assertions. My point was that the phrase "open office" means so many different things in so many different situations that it's no wonder people suffer under it. The phrase itself has been destroyed as a useful concept.
Now it's fair to say that my definition isn't applicable here, but, well, it is my definition. I teach this stuff. I'm sure all the folks making these cattle-call working spaces have their definitions as well. That's fine. It sounds like we need to start disambiguating the concept to prevent more of this cluster-fuckery.
I understand chat if you are working in operations, but for pure development, it feels like a college dorm, more about the community and less about the work, where people still confuse time at the office with getting your work done. After a decade of 70+ hour work weeks, you really appreciate what is work and what isn’t. Building camaraderie is important, but chat probably isn’t the best way. And putting everyones communications in a single channel isn’t helping communication, it’s increasing distraction.
In my ideal dev team, you have chat, use it for one-on-one communication, and for anything that is time sensitive which goes into group channels. Anything that not everyone needs to know or isn’t time sensitive should go in an email or a message or a shoulder tap. Cluttering a few group channels with a ton of individual conversations, meaningless alerts, and random banter is downright juvenile and a detriment to productivity. I recognizing that promoting free flowing communication is important, but dorm room chat isn’t the solution.