Reading the comments here I find it interesting how management totally ignores feedback from developers. A lot of devs think open offices and endless meetings are a drain on productivity. So you would think the reasonable response would be to address these issues to get as much productivity out of these often highly paid people but instead the top guys often do exactly the opposite. It's a very curious dynamic.
This is a constant trope, and every time it's wheeled out a bunch of developers say they would love more uninterrupted time and their own offices vs open spaces. Both of these ignore the obvious - you don't optimise on productivity locally you need to optimise on output of the system as a whole. Productivity of the system as a whole is significantly improved by communication. Devs in offices may burn through a ton of tickets very productively achieving failure by building the wrong thing.
Secondly, people who have never been managers often don't understand the externalities. As a manager, I've been asked "Why should the devs get so much better computers/bigger screens etc than us?" Different conditions can create an intense feeling of unfairness among people who don't get those conditions. Those types of things can wreck the culture at a company.
Finally, open space is much much more flexible, so easier to change up when you need people to sprint together on a thing, when you need to scale up your team etc. Offices are extremely inflexible and typically anchorpoints for people's perception of their own status. Therefore once someone has an office, it's practically impossible to get them to not have one any more, even if circumstances have significantly changed.
It's easy to blame management but it may well be that management have a totally different set of problems to consider than you.
The biggest problem with this argument is that the output of the system as a whole is not improved by open offices. It has all of the same problems that apply to productivity of individuals, with virtually no advantages. It’s a myth that communication is hindered by private offices, as much as managers or PMs want us to believe otherwise.
If devs are burning through tickets yet building the wrong thing, it’s not the office layout that is the problem. So having an open office environment while changing nothing else in that example simply means they are going to build the wrong thing much more slowly.
You are correct that it’s hard to come back to open space after having an office, but it isn’t for the reasons you mention. The reason is simply because open offices suck.
" It’s a myth that communication is hindered by private offices, as much as managers or PMs want us to believe otherwise."
I don't like open offices either but I don't know if you can throw that out there. Private offices offers a degree of separation (so does working from home) that will probably reduce certain types of both beneficial and nonbeneficial communication.
They also often enable meaningful communication because you can have a quiet and focused conversation. From my experience open offices and cubicles are terrible for communication and collaboration.
The people who strongarm every conversation always win in an open office plan because they can 'overrule' people when they are still trying to figure out what they mean.
Those people are ecstatic because everything is working for them.
Many people choose to suffer in silence. So if the office plan is part of their problem they won't complain very loudly. The conversations you see on the internet won't have their input and so what you witness in these threads seems pretty split.
Anyone like me, who tries to play ombudsman, goes around and tries to figure out what people actually think and make sure they get what they need. This is fairly effectively hamstrung by an open office plan because you can't express your fears and doubts in a one-on-one situation. You can't negotiate and coach them to something actionable.
The usual response at this point is "so get a meeting room". Yeah, the thing is that when you take out private offices and put in group work areas, you need to more than double your meeting rooms because you just nearly doubled the number of people you can fit in the building. But that totally ruins your pie chart showing how much cheaper you made your developers, so nobody does the right thing.
(Also, the next time someone increases density at your offices, I highly encourage you to check out the OSHA laws governing the number of people allowed per bathroom stall per gender. It's a good bet your company is violating the rules, or will if they fill all those cubicles)
"Productivity of the system as a whole is significantly improved by communication."
That's an overly-generalized statement. Communication is sometimes helpful, when the people involved are good communicators. Often it's a source of distraction, e.g. email chains with multiple people replying-all to a topic that is at best tangential to what you're working on. There's also an equivalent that occurs with meetings in which people invite everyone they can imagine having any interest in a topic. This strategy has a wonderful way of bringing together a large number of people, most of whom have no valuable input, or interest, in the topic at hand.
The more detailed a job is, the more uninterrupted time it requires. So, if you want quality work and don't want to push the due date, give the person doing the work some uninterrupted time.
I've been a developer for 26 years professionally and, outside IT, I ran a 501(c)(3) of several hundred people. Yes, you can leave people alone to get work done without compromising organizational goals.
And most importantly, open space is cheap. None of the reasons you listed explain an open space containing 40 people working in different roles and teams, some of whom will never ever have a work related conversation.
dev-output-per-sq-ft is one thing that seems not to get mentioned very often. If you can put 4 devs together and get .3 productivity out of each, but with 1/10 the sq-ft for each, the idea is that the company is coming out ahead on ROI.
This is a trope argument. You don't have to be connected at the hip with the rest of the company all the fucking time to make sure you are building the right thing. We are people, not cattle. You can instead do daily standups to make sure people are going in a direction you want. People (Management esp) who never get in the zone, don't fucking get it.
Status, envy, screen size - this is all bullshit. You have never been a good dev.
> Status, envy, screen size - this is all bullshit. You have never been a good dev.
And in one line you've summarised WHY general office workers often think tech people are blinkered and entitled with poor social skills. The personal attack wasn't warranted when someone was trying to explain another perspectives.
Sorry, but no. You don't deliver 'the wrong thing' because you're not interrupted constantly. One status check per day is enough to insure that. All the urgent communication that can't wait a day is ego-driven not results-driven.
Therefore once someone has an office, it's practically impossible to get them to not have one any more, even if circumstances have significantly changed.
What sort of change are you imagining which means someone should stop having an office?
Change in job or responsibilities, when offices are allocated based on status or job description. E.g you’re a manager so you rate an office, and you move to product manager and suddenly the rules say you should be in an open space.
Or space pressure gradually ups the threshold for a single office (initial rule is for managers, then managers of teams larger than X, than department heads only...) and your career progresssion fails to keep up. Or change in HR policies...
"E.g you’re a manager so you rate an office, and you move to product manager and suddenly the rules say you should be in an open space"
That already shows the problem. Why are offices by rank and not by need? From a rational point of view the big guys probably dodn't even need an office because they are either in meeting rooms or traveling. I don't want an office as status symbol but as a place where I can actually think clearly.
Well in this particular example, I would argue that a team manager with honest-to-goodness managerial tasks(1-on-1s with members of the team, discussing personal issues, doing evaluations and negotiating bonus & compensation, etc.) is entitled to a private space in which to do it.
(to clarify, I was talking about a line manager)
As for the rest, you can argue all you want about status symbols and proxies, but once they're entrenched in the company culture it's next to impossible to change them. Rationality doesn't enter this picture... Or when it does it's through cost-cutting initiatives, and we all know how those are great for morale and boosting productivity.
I know you're speaking hyperbolically, but the fact is: probably everyone needs an office. Thus, there has to be some method of distributing them-- which like every other distribution system in the history of man, will be undermined.
That’s the one kind-of solid reason (albeit one which implies bad planning and/or inflexibility on someone’s part). But if so, you’d damned well better be giving anyone doing desk work flexible options for working remotely.
Here’s a quick experiment. Tell your devs what you want. Get the hell out of their way. Identify the people and rituals that are ‘interrupting’ by nature and put in huge road blocks and obstacles between them and your devs. See and measure the difference in output. You will stay amazed.
You aren’t wrong about it being difficult to allocate resources so I can understand where you are coming from.
If it is a money problem, don’t lie to developers and tell them that it is “to encourage collaboration” i.e. don’t pee on my leg and tell me it’s raining.
If management truly believes in the collaboration meme, I fully expect them to share a big office. After all, what could be more important than having the gears of management fully meshed?
Either hire low skilled cooks to make your product and control them rigidly (like McDanals) or hire chefs. You can imaging how unhappy (!) a chef would be if you treated them like a Mcdonalds worker.
There are lots of roles where 'collaboration' improves the outcome. I would cite HR and sales as examples of this.
Overall, engineers think they are Chefs but we all know that this view isn't shared by senior management in many organisations. So to get an exception for developers to share offices while everyone works in open plan would need special evidence. I don't think the evidence for productivity problems for developers is decisive. None of the tech behemoths made it into a big issue - so there's no PR sale of "do it like Google". It doesn't feel like you could tell a CEO that it's _obvious_ that offices are better - it would just sound like special pleading.
You're right that offices are very expensive: the cost savings can be pretty significant. Even industries where it's traditional to have offices (legal) are moving away from it.
Um, I think Microsoft made a point of mentioning that developers had a door.
It will never be “obvious” to CEO’s that limiting interruptions to developers makes a difference if their mental model won't allow them to consider it.
It’s a bit like the use of torture, studies show that it isn’t effective but that doesn’t stop people from employing it and believing it is effective.
A company with big shared tables for developers is sending the message that the company doesn’t think of devs as “chefs” but as “code monkeys”. Developers should consider this when choosing who they work for.
All true. And yet, management has to keep an eye on individual productivity, for at least two reasons. First, optimizing global productivity requires at least reasonable local productivity. And second, local productivity affects morale. You can lose your best people if they consistently feel unproductive.
It seems like ultimately, most senior managers don't care about feedback from developers.
They will ignore and steamroll any opinion that does not fit whatever arbitrary metric they need to meet, and when your dire predictions come true they will act like there was no possible way to expect them.
It's worse to have focused productive time on the wrong thing than it is to have meetings that clarify requirements and goals.
I've watched a lot of very highly paid people dive into deeply technical and interesting problems that nobody needed a solution to, and fight to protect their time so they could finish. That wastes more time and money than meetings.
Some of us are adult and have a professional attitude and don't need constant management. We know what needs to be done. We don't need to be treated like children.
> Some of us are adult... We don't need to be treated like children.
Why do you think planning and management is treating people like children?
How do you know what needs to be done? Are you sure you know what needs to be done?
I said stuff like this when I was young just starting out writing software in the film industry. There were dailies and rounds, progress updates twice a day, and I fought them. I was wrong, and it took time for me to understand why.
In my experience since then as both an engineer and a manager, it's clear that knowing what needs to be done at all times is very difficult, and unless you're a one person shop or in research, it involves talking to other people frequently.
If we knew what needed to be done, businesses would never fail, over-engineering wouldn't exist, no deadlines would ever be missed, and no budgets would ever over-run. I've seen a lot of people who think they know what needs to be done. I've never met someone who actually knows what needs to be done most of the time. If you do, you should manage instead of writing code.
FWIW, I don't know if this will help you or irritate you, but as a manager, your response sounds to me (ironically) quite immature. if I got this response from someone on my team, it would be a huge red flag.
I have been manager or team lead fort a long time (20 years+) and I never felt the need to check on people daily. Some may need that but in general I expect people with some experience to understand the real problems and not to do stupid things. Team members should also talk to each other without the manager having to schedule meetings for them.
Nothing of the things you describe will be prevented by daily status meetings and sitting in one big noisy room.
> Nothing of the things you describe will be prevented by daily status meetings and sitting in one big noisy room.
That does depend entirely on the kind of work you're doing. In film & games, daily is truly necessary. In pure software at LargeCorp, yeah daily status is too much, but it's common to need recurring periods of daily planning. In high flux environments like a small startup, I don't know how to avoid the constant stream of interruption & planning.
Your suggestion of what's wrong feels different than what I imagine as healthy, so I get the feeling we're talking past each other. I don't want constant meetings at all, and I don't love open offices either. But I do want devs to not go off the rails, which even the "adult" professional ones tend to in my experience. As a manager, you've never had devs who would rather work on something other than what the team is supposed to be producing, and rationalize it convincingly and with professionalism?
What is the right frequency of communication at your job? As a manager, you're responsible for team estimates and team progress reports to your manager, no? You are also responsible, I presume, for technical leadership, information sharing, establishing best practices, assisting devs who need help, etc.? Do people on your team ever get stuck and spin their wheels? How often do you track & report your team's progress? Are you putting most of those activities in a different category than meetings? Are you scheduling updates on a Maker's schedule?
I communicate very often with team members but preferably one on one or with the people directly involved. My main focus is to make sure people are working in the right direction and to make sure that everybody knows what they need to know. So sometimes you need full team meetings and often I just tell developer X to talk to developer Y directly to remove obstacles.
My observation from the few large companies I know is that there is a huge layer of management types who basically report to each other and create a lot of busywork without real output. If a developer doesn't know how long something will take they will grill him for estimates until he gives the politically correct number. I rarely see any of them engage in the real problem or help solving them. It's always "When is it done?". And they certainly never listen to complaints and actually act on them. The A/C making a guy sick constantly because it's too cold? This is what a manager should fix but typically they don't. Workplace too loud? Fix it! Stop calling meetings to discuss that already have been discussed.
You can't plan your way to success. It can only be done by actually working.
Noone can dispute that it's important to work on the right things. But are meetings the best way to communicate those? is there more efficient/effective way to do so? Because also no one can dispute that meetings are generally considered overhead.
The original article very clearly states that it discusses managers having to manage makers. Some of the jobs you described definitely don't seem to fit that description, so please don't hijack the discussion.
Also, not all teams have poor management. That you worked in the film industry where supposedly people had no idea of the priorities daily says nothing about the software industry in general.
My last several jobs involved sync meetings once every 5-10 days. Every meeting took 5 to 15 minutes and we all knew exactly what to do. Intermittent meetings only happened when somebody was blocked.
I've had success with an intermediate to a huge open office vs a private office which we called a lab, but might also be called a team room. We had about 6 people in there, all working on the same project, and it wasn't a constant distraction. We did a fair amount of pair programming as well, where a domain expert would sit with me as the computer scientist, and it was a very low bar to engaging in that sort of thing to slide around the corner. Of course we all had our own two person shared offices as well, but our main workstations were in the lab so most time was spent in there.
I agree that managers should very mindful of filling their teams' calendars with meetings. But there's not much a manager can do about open offices. They didn't design the building or the floorplan, and they can't change it now. Those decisions are made way above the typical managers' pay grade.
You know how developers feel their managers never listen to their input before making big decisions that have drastic impact on their day to day work? That happens between managers and executives just as often.
As a manager, I have never been consulted about work space beyond a general "how do you want to arrange these desks we bought for you?" kind of way.
Me neither. But I know for sure that someone around VP level or higher could make changes if they actually cared. They shouldn't hide behind facilities policies.
At my place, the people who book the meetings are the ones who are coordinating work done by others, so they need meetings to be productive. We have a product owner that is constantly justifying her existence by talking very much about things that have zero relevance to what we are doing at the moment.
