Yet another entry to the "Is Water Wet"? list.
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Metallica at 3pm sounds good to me. I fail to see the problem with open offices. I'm sure there's still meeting rooms if you need to do something private, or quite probably the option to work from home if you need peace. Maybe people associate having an office with status and like to view others as 'beneath them'.
Wastedtalent wrote:
Maybe people associate having an office with status and like to view others as 'beneath them'.
Noise, Man! You can't institute a STFU rule, and you can't expect people not to use phones. If all you do is surf the interwebs, fine, but if you have to focus, open-plan offices* are a nightmare * The correct term, which the article writer seemed not to know
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Wastedtalent wrote:
Maybe people associate having an office with status and like to view others as 'beneath them'.
Noise, Man! You can't institute a STFU rule, and you can't expect people not to use phones. If all you do is surf the interwebs, fine, but if you have to focus, open-plan offices* are a nightmare * The correct term, which the article writer seemed not to know
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I much prefer to work in a lively environment than somewhere silent when I need to focus. If I don't want distractions then headphones and music works fine. I guess it's personal preference.
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I much prefer to work in a lively environment than somewhere silent when I need to focus. If I don't want distractions then headphones and music works fine. I guess it's personal preference.
Wastedtalent wrote:
I guess it's personal preference.
Yup. I don't even want music, when I'm working.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.[^] Worth the click just to see an [alleged] picture of Facebook's warehouse, I mean workplace.
I found that, and the New Yorker article linked, quite interesting actually. I'm not renewing my existing contract pretty much for the reasons outlined in these articles! Where I work now is a nightmare for interruptions.
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Wastedtalent wrote:
I guess it's personal preference.
Yup. I don't even want music, when I'm working.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
I think the open office environment only really works on a department or team basis. I've been sharing with a call center (noisy AF), sharing with other devs and testers (both single and multiple teams) and now work from home. Sharing a work area with other like minded people feels like it was the most productive and satisfying place to work, especially when working to a common goal.
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I think the open office environment only really works on a department or team basis. I've been sharing with a call center (noisy AF), sharing with other devs and testers (both single and multiple teams) and now work from home. Sharing a work area with other like minded people feels like it was the most productive and satisfying place to work, especially when working to a common goal.
And size matters. More than a handful of cow-orkers is too many.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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And size matters. More than a handful of cow-orkers is too many.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Ideally yes, but I was in an office of over 30 devs, testers, PMs and a systems architect working on 3 seperate projects but all for the same system and they was great. Disclaimer - Previously us 30 IT guys were in a room with about 150 call center staff so my opinion my be a little bias.
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Programmers surrounded by people who moust constantly be on the phone, groups of coworkers that talk loudly from one end of the office to the other of soccer or movies... the perfect environment I'd say. Then one asks why code quality sucks.
* CALL APOGEE, SAY AARDWOLF * GCS d--- s-/++ a- C++++ U+++ P- L- E-- W++ N++ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t++ 5? X R++ tv-- b+ DI+++ D++ G e++>+++ h--- ++>+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X * Never pay more than 20 bucks for a computer game. * I'm a puny punmaker.
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Ideally yes, but I was in an office of over 30 devs, testers, PMs and a systems architect working on 3 seperate projects but all for the same system and they was great. Disclaimer - Previously us 30 IT guys were in a room with about 150 call center staff so my opinion my be a little bias.
Matt.L wrote:
Previously us 30 IT guys were in a room with about 150 call center staff
I'd keep a machete on my desk.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
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Metallica at 3pm sounds good to me. I fail to see the problem with open offices. I'm sure there's still meeting rooms if you need to do something private, or quite probably the option to work from home if you need peace. Maybe people associate having an office with status and like to view others as 'beneath them'.
There are multiple types of "open" offices; cubicle farms, the same without the walls and what the author describes, which is where you are all sitting around the same physical table without much in common task-wise. In my experience, the latter two work if you are on the same team and doing roughly the same thing, though it still works far better in the research and design stages, versus actual development. I actually prefer cubicles EXCEPT when I am in full-blown coding/engineering mode, in which case a private office is preferable. I like being able to be reasonably private, but still being able to hear technical conversations from team members. BTW, one problem with music in "open" offices is that to the people sitting at a distance from the source, it becomes unpleasant noise, make worse when there is more noise coming from the other direction. The photo of Facebook makes me cringe since it will be prone to echoes. That constant background noise is very destructive to productivity.
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Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.[^] Worth the click just to see an [alleged] picture of Facebook's warehouse, I mean workplace.
I went for an interview at a certain New York location. The developers all sat in long lines with 3-4 feet of elbow room on shallow desks with enough room for two screens, a keyboard and mouse and a telephone. There were about 8 developers in each "strip" of desk with another 8 face to face with them on another strip. This was in a room with about 10 double strips plus large monitors around the walls set near the ceiling showing stock tickers. The room had glass walls, the meeting rooms had glass walls and you could see through to other identical rooms with either developers or stock brokers in them. :wtf: There was a cacophony of sound from all the telephone conversations and the clacky "special" keyboards with coloured keys for "sell" and "buy", etc. (despite being for developers) echoing off the hard surfaces of the room. :confused: They offered me a lot of money to work there :-\ and I responded with a request for double that amount :omg: which, luckily, they declined - although I got the impression they had thought about it for a while first! That was a close call! :sigh:
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.