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Blinkz0rz posted:Or, and my guess is this is more likely because goons, they're the kind of people who can only work in perfect silence and take that deficiency out on coworkers. Yes, I do work much better in complete silence and I complain when I'm asked to work in a lovely environment that doesn't work well for me.
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Jul 24, 2017 19:04
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leper khan posted:They're cheaper. That's the only reason for them. Ding ding ding. Technically, no physical office would best of all, but most companies are allergic to that.
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Jul 24, 2017 20:01
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Pixelboy posted:Ding ding ding. Butts not visibly in chair = clearly slacking off, gotta whip them workers 
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Jul 24, 2017 21:14
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Working in complete silence doesn't make sense to me. Software development is design. It's a collaborative, creative process. How "productive" a single developer on his/her own is, is hardly a concern. They may be very efficiently making the wrong thing for all you know. I'm not saying you should sit in the same open plan office as your customer service department, but I'm all for great team rooms with space to work together, white boards on all the walls, etc.
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Jul 25, 2017 10:13
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Messyass posted:Working in complete silence doesn't make sense to me. Software development is design. It's a collaborative, creative process. How "productive" a single developer on his/her own is, is hardly a concern. They may be very efficiently making the wrong thing for all you know. I'd be fine with that. This is the same enormous high ceiling room as CSR, QA, Product, Marketing, Sales, Accounting, HR, you name it. It's a zoo. The worst part aside from the noise is the constant ad-hoc meetings that I become a part of whether I intend to or not when all I need is an hour block to dig into a task. It also doesn't help that the managers are all at the end of these aisles that everyone is on, and it feels like working in a high school hallway.
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Jul 25, 2017 14:08
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Messyass posted:Working in complete silence doesn't make sense to me. Software development is design. It's a collaborative, creative process. How "productive" a single developer on his/her own is, is hardly a concern. They may be very efficiently making the wrong thing for all you know. I mean, it's not all one or the other. Design is creative and collaborative, but sometimes you're just grinding. The opportunity should be there to chat with coworkers easily, but also to put your head down and just go ham on a feature branch for a day. Really, the openness requirement of an office is just dependent on the ratio of your personal distraction threshold to the respectfulness of your coworkers. In the end, if you've got an extreme at either end of the spectrum, you're probably gonna have a bad time regardless.
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Jul 25, 2017 14:09
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A few years ago I worked at SolidWorks and everyone in the company (except contractors) got their own office. Some had a door, most did not, but it was a 8'x10' room with a desk, a chair, another chair, and the wall that faced the hallway was a big window. There was a second chair in each office so people could come in and talk and have a place to sit down. This arrangement was the best I've ever had because everyone (except contractors who were in a big fishbowl) was able to have a private space, but it was open and accommodating enough for other people to come in and work with you on projects that required communication and teamwork. A few years earlier SolidWorks was acquired by Dassault Systemes out of France and eventually they wanted all of their subsidiaries to do things the way they do, so they moved the company to a larger office space, switched to an open floor plan with half-height pinwheel cubes. the desks were of normal height, then you had a fabric wall extending about 1 foot higher than the desk, and then a foot of frosted glass. People's heads were still visible above the glass and everyone was uncomfortable. We lost some people with the move because of the added commute times (we moved from Concord, MA to Waltham, MA) and still others just couldn't adjust to the open layout after being so used to the more private space we had before. Mismanagement from France and other poo poo drove execs out and it's hardly the same company it once was. All the original SolidWorks people left to create something better while SolidWorks has pretty much stagnated and not really changed that much. Even their website hasn't been updated in like, 7 years. The open environment didn't seem to change the level of collaboration, we were already capable of walking to people's offices and having discussions in a semi-private space. Being open did nothing to encourage more of it, it just encouraged everyone to wear headphones so we didn't have to listen to everyone else's bullshit.
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Jul 25, 2017 16:44
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Messyass posted:Working in complete silence doesn't make sense to me. Software development is design. It's a collaborative, creative process. How "productive" a single developer on his/her own is, is hardly a concern. They may be very efficiently making the wrong thing for all you know. This argument makes no sense to me. If collaborating will be beneficial, I'll do it, even if that means walking a few feet. If it's not, I won't, even if my entire team shares the same open space, cubicle, and pair of pants. Obviously it's a problem if everyone is in a different city, but that's not what we're talking about. It's not that I'm against a team sharing a greatroom, I just think the idea that open space means open communication is logically a non sequitur. Rejection of one does not in any way imply rejection of the other, and it's weird to me how some people see "I wish we all had offices" and then appear to conclude that person undervalues collaboration.
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Jul 25, 2017 18:03
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Long ago when I interned at Apple, their setup was that everybody had an office (with a door) large enough to fit 3 people comfortably. There was also a common area with couches. Nearly always, office doors were open which meant you were welcome to come in and ask questions or chat. If someone was working on something that required concentration, or was on the phone, they closed their door. You could pull a couple people into your office, shut the door, and talk loudly without bothering anyone. When you needed to work closely with someone, you'd just move into their office for a week or two (this did not seem at all uncommon). It worked wonderfully for collaboration. I never had a problem getting time to talk with anyone, the one guy who liked to swear at his code loudly didn't bother anyone, and I never suffered from the open-office problem where some trivial question pulls in every single engineer because they can't resist giving their own opinion on function arguments.
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Jul 26, 2017 04:43
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One example someone I think at Yahoo gave for why they ended remote working is that they saw from outside a room there were a couple engineers in a large room that started with a question. Another engineer overhears them and chips in and they're on a whiteboard. In another half an hour there's 6 engineers coming up with something. And that something wound up being a new product at the company. I'm not saying I agree with it, but the problem with that line of thinking is presuming that more situations like that occur than what we typically complain about in here like people constantly getting distracted. And there is strong academic research showing that the best programmers do not necessarily come from better schools, better tier companies, do better in their interviews, get better peer reviews, nor even have more years of experience than others - the top 3 factors were.... 1. a quiet room 2. uninterrupted time 3. means of isolation. I always got the impression the whole open office stuff was from art and design shops where they were pretty much poor and had a big workshop floor type situation, but maybe someone that actually gives a drat can explain where this trend even came from or the paper I can cite poorly in an Internet argument. From what I can put together, it seems like one of the best room layouts optimizing for software work is a common, central area highly visible from all corners, and everyone gets small offices roughly bigger than a cubicle all with whiteboards. I don't know if anyone's actually worked in such a layout besides maybe as a teacher though, so I can't say it's a good idea either.
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Jul 26, 2017 05:42
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The first open office was designed for a marketing firm, the had the same problems everyone else does. http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/06/03/480625378/episode-704-open-office
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Jul 26, 2017 05:51
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hmm i've been thinking about ordering a man-size cardboard box from uline like, the hilariously named gaylord https://www.uline.com/BL_426/Uline-Easy-Loader scramble into it, code by the light of the screen like i usually do, poke some air holes, bring some cushions anyone tried this? besides sounding like a hilarious dystopic idea, any problems?
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Jul 26, 2017 06:10
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For the first time I've ever heard of the open-office concept it was early 2000s in an article that I read on the net. In the article, the author compared the cohesion and the quality of BeOS versus the mess that Windows was at the time (I think XP just got released, but I may be wrong on that one). One important factor in this was (according to the author) the communication line that was always present and always open between the BeOS developers: kernel people sitting in a spitting distance from the graphics guys, from the audio people and so on and so forth. Whenever anyone had a question or an idea it was an immediate discussion, consensus was reached and everyone was on the same page. Contrast this to the Microsoft culture: closed offices, teams that hated each-other (much less talk), you shall not knock on the door of the kernel guys or half the Windows installation in the world would get a blue screen, etc. The result was obvious: one was an elegant, capable and reliable OS the other one was a complete mess. The left hand never had any idea what the right hand was doing at Microsoft. The rest is history now. (nowadays though open-office just means cheap-rear end fuckers, people who would kill puppies for breakfast if it would save them a penny. of course, productivity tanks and the company eventually folds, but hey ... we're "open").
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Jul 26, 2017 06:15
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necrobobsledder posted:I'm not saying I agree with it, but the problem with that line of thinking is presuming that more situations like that occur than what we typically complain about in here like people constantly getting distracted. And there is strong academic research showing that the best programmers do not necessarily come from better schools, better tier companies, do better in their interviews, get better peer reviews, nor even have more years of experience than others - the top 3 factors were.... 1. a quiet room 2. uninterrupted time 3. means of isolation. How do we define "the best programmers" though? Succesful software development involves so much more than being good at programming.
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Jul 26, 2017 08:01
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necrobobsledder posted:One example someone I think at Yahoo gave for why they ended remote working is that they saw from outside a room there were a couple engineers in a large room that started with a question. Another engineer overhears them and chips in and they're on a whiteboard. In another half an hour there's 6 engineers coming up with something. And that something wound up being a new product at the company. Sounds like a case for a decent-sized room with a whiteboard and some open doors, not for ripping out all the walls in the building. It doesn't matter how awesome your whiteboarded ideas and collaborative design sessions are; if there's nowhere you can go to sit down and write the loving code, without being interrupted by everyone else's collaborative design sessions, all those amazing ideas aren't going to get built well or quickly enough to matter. This story pisses me off because of the last part: "And that something wound up being..." It doesn't bother explaining how much work was done by engineers actually building this alleged product, probably concentrating really hard and not being constantly interrupted by phone calls and random conversations other people were having. It jumps from "meeting" to "now there's a new product." It emphasizes maybe 2% of the loving development process. It's like making a case for the whole company just sitting in a conference room all day coming up with ideas - surely if we're all in one room in front of a screen, new products will spring to life fully formed from our collective rear end in a top hat! We don't even need desks! Not mad.
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Jul 26, 2017 08:41
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Volguus posted:The rest is history now. I'm not sure what lessons we're supposed to draw from the story, given that the history is Microsoft riding Windows to become one of the most successful companies ever created.
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Jul 26, 2017 13:56
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If having your own office is the deciding factor in taking a job or staying with a company then you should probably just leave because there are clearly enough other red flags if that's your sole decision point.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:01
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raminasi posted:I'm not sure what lessons we're supposed to draw from the story, given that the history is Microsoft riding Windows to become one of the most successful companies ever created. I think that's 
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Jul 26, 2017 14:07
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Volguus posted:The rest is history now.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:30
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Messyass posted:How do we define "the best programmers" though? Succesful software development involves so much more than being good at programming.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:54
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you talking bout the columbia study?
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Jul 26, 2017 16:48
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raminasi posted:I'm not sure what lessons we're supposed to draw from the story, given that the history is Microsoft riding Windows to become one of the most successful companies ever created. Yes, exactly. BeOS is dead Microsoft is still going. Hate or love windows (xp, vista, 7, 8 or 10), as dysfunctional as they are, as a complete mess of an OS that thing is even now, they're nowhere near going down. On the contrary. The lesson, i guess, is that theory and practice don't always agree. On paper, the open office with ad-hoc collaboration can give you a better designed, more cohesive product. In practice, letting engineers do their work undisturbed actually creates a successful product.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:08
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Volguus posted:Yes, exactly. BeOS is dead Microsoft is still going. Hate or love windows (xp, vista, 7, 8 or 10), as dysfunctional as they are, as a complete mess of an OS that thing is even now, they're nowhere near going down. On the contrary. I think it's closer that the theory of open offices is a stupid theory. Software does not get written collaboratively. Try having 15 people collaborate over what code to write, see how far you get.
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Jul 26, 2017 17:17
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Vulture Culture posted:correct, it's a fantastic lesson in building the wrong thing really well I still have a BeBox somewhere around here
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Jul 26, 2017 17:59
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I think the lesson has less to do with software quality than the business as a whole. Though it's funny to think about Microsoft moving to an open office configuration, and suddenly the stock price takes a dive.
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Jul 26, 2017 18:15
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Skandranon posted:I think it's closer that the theory of open offices is a stupid theory. Software does not get written collaboratively. Try having 15 people collaborate over what code to write, see how far you get. What about pair programming? There's even a thing called mob programming, although I've never encountered it in practice.
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Jul 26, 2017 20:53
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Messyass posted:What about pair programming? There's even a thing called mob programming, although I've never encountered it in practice. Pair programming is as far as I think such a thing can be pushed, and even then, there is an explicit Driver who basically does the code, and the Passenger is trying to watch out for errors. If they start fighting over brace style or variable names, it quickly falls apart, and this goes up quickly the more people there are. Cost also scales linearly with more people, but you do not get 3-4-5x more productive, so the value of each person quickly plateaus.
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Jul 26, 2017 20:59
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Messyass posted:What about pair programming? There's even a thing called mob programming, although I've never encountered it in practice. Personally I believe that pair programming is great for mentoring (regardless who is actually writing the code) and is great for those times when "I have this really tough problem, let's solve it together on the computer instead of the whiteboard". Other than that, is a bit of a waste of time in my opinion.
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Jul 26, 2017 21:30
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My scrum master at my last position gave everyone a rubber duck. He said if you and the duck can't crack the problem to talk to him and he would link you up with someone that could. That duck knows his poo poo.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:16
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Gildiss posted:My scrum master at my last position gave everyone a rubber duck. He said if you and the duck can't crack the problem to talk to him and he would link you up with someone that could. Every programmer's secret weapon.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:30
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I explain code to my cat when I work from home.
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Jul 26, 2017 22:41
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Volguus posted:Personally I believe that pair programming is great for mentoring (regardless who is actually writing the code) I agree wholeheartedly with this. I had someone new at work asking the whole department, "What are good tutorials for <framework we use>?" and my answer was "Let's just work together for an afternoon".
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Jul 26, 2017 22:43
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Skandranon posted:Pair programming is as far as I think such a thing can be pushed, and even then, there is an explicit Driver who basically does the code, and the Passenger is trying to watch out for errors. If they start fighting over brace style or variable names, it quickly falls apart, and this goes up quickly the more people there are. All of this should be figured out before pair programming even happens. The team should have a style guide with mostly clear expectations.
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Jul 27, 2017 01:25
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"So why did the design team not think through the inconsistencies of this front-end design?" "Oh, they're not really familiar with designing for digital." "Wait, what? Aren't they in charge of the design for our apps and website?" "Yeah, they're actually people from a totally different company, they used to do book publishing. This is their first foray into digital." "Why the hell are people who have only ever done design for books and have never done design for digital solutions in charge of designing our front-end?" "Their head of staff is an old friend of our new CTO and all the members are the people they left their old company with, so the CTO hired them to be the new design team for the entire company after they laid off a bunch of people over at the main office." "So they're in charge of design because of-" "Nepotism, yes." 
Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Jul 27, 2017 |
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Jul 27, 2017 01:53
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Doom Mathematic posted:I agree wholeheartedly with this. I had someone new at work asking the whole department, "What are good tutorials for <framework we use>?" and my answer was "Let's just work together for an afternoon". loving yes, this. Have the person being taught drive, tell them what to type and why, and they will learn so drat fast. Worst is when the person teaching drives and it's like watching someone do magic, in the worst way.
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Jul 27, 2017 02:23
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Gildiss posted:My scrum master at my last position gave everyone a rubber duck. He said if you and the duck can't crack the problem to talk to him and he would link you up with someone that could. lifg posted:Every programmer's secret weapon. I used to do this, but now I just write emails to myself. If it's sufficiently useful, I'll then send it in case i run into it again. Future me has at least 30 IQ on me.
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Jul 27, 2017 04:40
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Volguus posted:Personally I believe that pair programming is great for mentoring (regardless who is actually writing the code) and is great for those times when "I have this really tough problem, let's solve it together on the computer instead of the whiteboard". Other than that, is a bit of a waste of time in my opinion. Unless everyone on your team has the exact same knowledge-set, they will always have something to learn from one another. Mentorship never has to end.
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Jul 27, 2017 04:48
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Gildiss posted:My scrum master at my last position gave everyone a rubber duck. He said if you and the duck can't crack the problem to talk to him and he would link you up with someone that could. I can't bring myself to do this at the office. Usually when I'm at the point that I need to do this, I just message someone and ask to bounce ideas off of them. They know me well enough it will take about 5 seconds before I talk myself into the answer. It's usually just the process of organizing my thought train for someone else and stepping away from my desk that reveals the answer. wilderthanmild posted:I explain code to my cat when I work from home. I used to do this when I had a cat. Now I talk to a wizard hat and sometimes google home or alexa speak up randomly.
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Jul 27, 2017 05:20
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wilderthanmild posted:I explain code to my cat when I work from home. I have a coworker who explains the more complex frameworks we use to her three year old kid at home. I can't help but wonder what that'll do to the kid's upbringing.
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Jul 27, 2017 06:30
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Carbon dioxide posted:I have a coworker who explains the more complex frameworks we use to her three year old kid at home. I can only hope you're not doing much front end development, for the kid's sake.
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Jul 27, 2017 09:01
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