The Tokyo offices had enormous rooms, with long rows of desks, arranged by section/department. The section manager's desk was at the end of each row. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had small, schoolteacher-style desks, in the corner of the room.

These enormous rooms, with hundreds of engineers, were quiet as a library. They had carpeting, people wore "office slippers," and there was very little chit-chat.

American open-plan offices, on the other hand, resemble flea markets. Loud, somewhat chaotic, and distracting as hell.

But the Japanese also have a culture that is attuned to open-plan offices. When we would bring them to the US, they would be uncomfortable with cubicles and offices.

I have found that "one-size-fits-all" solutions, don't really work, across cultural boundaries.

One floor had an open-plan layout where people were open to chitchat, another open-plan floor that expected everyone to be quiet, and there was a floor with reservable cubicles or sound-proofed rooms. In general though, I do agree that the culture is on the quieter side.

I really enjoyed working there because the level of isolation was entirely up to you, depending on your mood.

It does sound like that office layout (as with most US office layouts) is designed to clearly reinforce the status hierarchy.

Oh, yeah. Hierarchy is very important, in Japanese business culture.

It is interesting to note that they can integrate the best and worst elements of both aforementioned work cultures.

Either way it's interesting such offices are becoming more common in Japan. Could you say more about how they integrate the best and worst of both cultures?

These are based on the accounts of my local coworkers, but their experiences with previous traditional Japanese companies involved strict social hierarchies, long working hours, constant overtime[0] and overall a very oppressive work culture (though this is slowly improving in general). Getting a chance to escape all that while still working for a local company that really understood them is a huge win. As a foreigner, they made it really easy for me to integrate into their work without feeling like an outsider (which is unfortunately a common trope in more traditional offices).

There is a spectrum to this. For example, I’ve heard Rakuten has a lot of bad rep with a bunch of foreign engineers I’ve met. They still have a lot of “traditional” influence in their management culture that I’ve heard has created a high turnover rate on the foreigner side. This Reddit thread last year also was a hot topic that led to a small exodus[1] and some of their Glassdoor reviews are scathing.

On a side note, the government actually takes some interest in these companies too through inspections, as they seem to observe how well-integrated foreign talent can be with Japanese offices. I’m assuming they’re looking long term to increase immigration to compensate the decrease in local talent from the declining population…

Please do take these as stories and not fact. Experiences can wildly differ from company to company and I’m just one perspective.

[0] I recall a story where a company made employees “tap-out” but not actually leave the office to get around government regulations.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/japanlife/s/LmIxQUPakW

Not a praise of the outdated Prussian high school system in Japan - but another illustration that the culture is different.

Toyota sticks out in my mind, only because of the scale of the room. There were hundreds of desks in one large open space, and if you looked up from your desk you could see every last one of them. But I’ve seen it in other smaller Japenese companies as well.

* I did manual labor on a factory production line to pay the bills in college

** Put 20 cent earplugs in your ear

I also probably helped him brainstorm ideas with me and debugging, since he would just say what's on his mind while doing it, and I'd do the same, and sometimes this kind of ping pong debugging/brainstorming together yields way better results than solo work. I really like one time he was trying to see how to open the chrome debugger to debug the chrome debugger, and I just knew how to do it (same shortcut while focussed on open debugger) since I had done it by mistake :D

I am convinced that you get more in a collaborative environment having a few devs sitting next to each other in pairs/small groups that they enjoy being with than anything else. IMO with remote work you get hidden inefficiencies that the company can attempt to fix by just hiring more people in the team (and a culture of let's do less meeting, less face to face, more work) takes over and that 1+1=more than 2 environment I was very excited about is gone..

Can someone who is a fan of remote work tell me how a new grad excited about writing code could find a mentor and really up their game in the remote world with what's becoming "standard" way of doing meetings etc?

A counterargument to what I describe is how successful open source projects have always been remote with passionate people working on them

That said, I can attribute one positive effect in my career to having worked in an open office. Early in my career, I happened to overhear someone on the phone dealing with an Open Source licensing issue (and I genuinely do find Open Source licensing interesting), went over to chat with them afterwards, ended up finding out about the company's Open Source review process, one thing led to another, and not long afterwards I co-ran that process company-wide (for a 100k+ person company), which I really enjoyed and which provided a great deal of visibility into all the work happening in the company.

I don't think "happened to overhear one side of someone's phonecall and strike up a good conversation about it" is a "benefit" I'd say is worth the pain of an open office, but I still want to acknowledge it.

At IBM working in a satellite office, I wanted to contribute to Jenkins. The fact that any person with the authority to allow me to do that was "behind an office door". Multiple emails back and forth - I ended up ditching the idea of getting the approval and quit IBM.

Closed doors should be for focus time, which should not be "all the time". Having small team offices and quiet rooms - can contribute to people's ability to focus. But personal offices is just another door that stops people from collaborating will inevitably stop a lot of valuable collaboration.

Everyone's different, you wanted a mentor next to you, many don't enjoy that relationship. To answer your question, looking at the fresh graduates we take, extremely detailed code reviews, a lot of chat and some pair coding on the overly difficult parts seems to be working good enough for them to reach a decent level within about half a year.

Maybe look around for an active open source project you'd like to contribute to, and ask around its community and propose a regular pair/group coding session?

Edit: Crucially, we all took turns "driving", even during a single meeting. Sometimes someone wanted help on a branch, and they started driving and then someone else "took the wheel" for a few minutes then passed it back.

I found our interactions were similar to session-style sports, like skateboarding or bouldering. We all attempted a challenge together and could see how each other approached the problem. As in sports, sometimes even knowing something is possible is all you need.

I'm curious to see if there's been studies on its efficacy, and whether or not those studies agree with my entirely anecdotal experience.

It may be a bit harder now because as programming became more high level, the cadence of development went up. However I think the skill set that you gain when you are force to work at a lower cadence (and spend more time "sharpening the axe") is still valuable.

Like an open zoom meeting where people unmute themselves only they need to ask something?

With the additional focus-aiding utility provided by services like focusmate?

Similar to people gaming online with audio chat but more disciplined.

Combining home office with virtual open floor communication on demand.

The bad: it's a little too cutesy, a little too "gamer" targeted. It's a little tiresome.

The fantastic: In a call, you get individual volume sliders (and mute buttons) for every single participant. I cannot use Zoom after experiencing this, it's simply intolerable to be at the mercy of the person with the loudest and most obnoxious mike/background noise

I'm sure it's useful for training and mentorship, but that's frankly not your employer's problem these days. People switch jobs every year, and if you train up staff only their next company is really going to reap the benefits. If learning on the job raises retention then it's only marginal. If anything it makes people "worth more" and they more easily find the next gig that comes with a pay bump

You can easily skill up by:

- watching conference videos on YouTube

- during code review

- go on your lang subreddit or forums and read about how other people skin their cats

What you want is basically unstructured interruption based code review ~ which is nice for the junior but horrible for productivity over all

I can't even count how many times I had to tell other engineers, that they have to run a clean build locally...

Not to mention, that mentorship can be useful just for the processes that are present within the company.

I had the luck of working with a dude who was extremely good at analyzing data, simply by loading json files in sublime text, doing a mix of pretty-printing, multi-cursors changes (with usually 1000+ cursors), regex-foo, playing with buffers and other linux commands. It was a weird set of skills that was truly magic to behold, and not amount of Youtube conference or code review could have replaced that.

There are some coding livestream that can help with that, but it's not as efficient as being in the room as talented peoples.

Some remote workers here dismisses even that, because it disallows them to take residence at the other side of the world from the office. Mileage truly may vary.

Having people around me working on the same project is invaluable for me for

* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

* running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled.

* brainstorming. Same as above

* getting a feeling for what everyone is up to

  Sure I can go read their notes but it's not the same. One happens by osmosis so zero effort, it just happens. The other requires scheduling time

  I don't feel connected to me team at all working from home. I feel no more connection to them then when I call my bank and talk to a banker. Nor do I feel any connection to sit at a coffee shop and work around others who are not on the same team.

This is exactly the problem with open-plan offices: they always do really stupid stuff like this, putting mostly-quiet teams very close to very talkative and noisy teams, with no barrier between them. Then everyone wants to work from home where at least they won't be tormented by listening to the obnoxious sales guy yap on the phone all day and can have their pet keep them company.

There was no sales bell, but there was an outage gong. Any time we had an outage affecting the “Book It” flow and revenue stopped flowing that gong rang out. Hearing the gong meant engineers would abruptly leave meetings or lunch to come help fix the issue.

As we scaled and hit the limits of various systems we had periods where the gong rang out semi-regularly (a few times per month). These were hard times for engineers.

Soon, engineering started to push back on Product requests, took the time to re-architect and build better systems, and calm was achieved. Months went by without hearing the gong ring out, then years passed. People joined the company and got promoted, never having heard it ring. Until one day in 2018.

I was working near a pod of project managers, and I hear the gong. Like Pavlov’s dog, it triggers an immediate wave of anxiety in me: something is very wrong. But my blissfully unaware PM colleagues have no idea, it’s the first time they’ve ever heard the gong.

One lady looks up from her laptop and asks: “oooh, did the Food team make cookies?”

All your other points are fine. People are motivated by a mix of external and internal triggers, and you are clearly skewed to the external side.

The thing I quoted is however why anyone geared towards the internal side of things will HATE to have to go to the office while you are there.

Programming requires deliberate thought gathered slowly into a complex matrix in your head before it finds its way to the pc through your keyboard.

Even though I am an extrovert through and through and strongly identify with the motivational aspects of being in an office, me not giving you an answer until an hour has gone probably means more overall productivity for the project than your instant unblocking at the office.

That’s really not that obvious. Things like this (being able to ask questions) and allowing other people to focus when they need are not incompatible.

It should be pretty easy to infer for most people whether it’s a good time to start a conversation with another person or maybe you should wait for a few minutes/hours/until the lunch break/whatever

You are saying that devs need to stay "in the flow". But when you are in the flow and suddenly you have something that blocks you because you have a simple question, the best way to stay in the flow is to ask the question and get the answer immediately. If I have to quit my flow, go on slack, ask on slack, wait 10 minutes, then re-explain because the other person did not get it, then re-wait, ... my flow is ruined.

What you are saying is, at the end of the day, when caricaturing a little bit, that you want your flow to be maintained, but you are happy to destroy the flow of others.

Instead you want to interrupt your own flow as well as that of others to get immediate feedback on simple issues?

Your last sentence is incredible. No, I don't want my own flow to be preserved at the expense of others'. That's why I ask async and do something else while I wait for them to be free. But neither should I be a necessary component of someone else's flow at the expense of my own.

'To keep my own flow, I need to destroy the flow of all my colleagues'

And not:

'My colleagues destroy my flow when they can't babysit me and respond to my questions asap, how dare they'

It's like driving and then going like: 'Gee, all these other drivers are sure in my way, I need them out of the road so I can get places'. Guess what buddy, they also gotta get places, so damn right follow the laws, wait for your turn patiently and you will get there when you get there. Your colleagues also have stuff to do, and the world doesn't revolve only around YOUR flow.

So write down your questions and observations in a coherent list, stop pinging people one question at a time, or search harder in the docs provided that they exist, sometimes that's even better as a learning experience.

Where is this "6" coming from?

Again:

1) You may be incapable of doing work when someone walks next to you, but this is not the case of a lot of people. It's like driving and then going like: 'Gee, when these cars are putting their blinking lights on and it is distracting me, they should all quickly park before I arrive'.

2) My flow is fine, thank you very much: I don't get distracted by people passing by AND I also rarely ask quick simple questions (people needs to understand my work rather than me needing to understand theirs). It's telling that you cannot conceive that someone may disagree with you without themselves participating to a caricatural behavior that you have in mind.

3) THAT'S EXACTLY MY POINT: the world doesn't revolve only around anyone. If you are inconvenienced by something that is convenient by someone else, then, outside of your little person, THERE IS NO REASON TO CHANGE THAT. If situation A means that employee X gets 6/10 and employee Y gets 8/10, and if situation B means that employee X gets 8/10 and employee Y gets 6/10, then situations A and B are the same.

4) I know that your argument is that your inconvenience is huuuuuge and touch everyone in the office and that the benefice for the distractor is smaaaaal and that the distractor is a terrible human being that should be thrown in jail. That's what self-centered people tends to believe.

My solution is: Bob should try to ask with moderation, and Bob and Alice should work together in a situation where Bob does not need to distract Alice. If Bob needs to distract Alice, then Alice just needs to live with it. If Bob has questions but does not need to distract Alice, then Bob should not ask the question and just needs to live with it.

What confuse me is that some people here just answer: obviously Alice is right and Bob is wrong, all the time except exceptional cases.

> What confuse me is that some people here just answer: obviously Alice is right and Bob is wrong, all the time except exceptional cases.

Joking aside, I do agree with your point. It's not black and white and there shouldn't be fear/hostility connected with simply asking a question. However, 100% being open to questions all the time is simply disruptive for everybody.

All scheduled meetings have to happen in disturb time.

Now, that doesn't really work for a customer-facing role, at least not without the cooperation of your customers, but having managed a customer-facing team before, I'll say I encouraged my people to schedule office-hour time with their customers to try to channel the interactions in a more predictable period of time.

…Set an expectation that the turnaround time for an email response is 24 hours…

No! Because the accepted thing is to use your turn signal, as it's acceptable to do some research on yourself before asking somebody, or try to keep your voice down in shared rooms, or to not tap people on the shoulder when they have indicated deep work (headphones).

I am upset from people who DON't use their blinkers, who tap you on the shoulder while you have headphones, and who discuss Game of Thrones loudly next to you while you are trying to work, and I have every right to be. People like that make their lack or desire of understanding or following etiquette everybody else's problem. And that's not okay!

The etiquette of new workers is to try to follow the onboarding documents, and the guidance from their assigned "buddy", and if something is missing, distill the questions they have and go over them with the "buddy". If that's what OP's post saying, fine. But I got the impression they simply like to ask questions cause it's more convenient for them. Let the company, however, use that as a learning and drag itself kicking and screaming to update their onboarding.

> That's what self-centered people tends to believe.

The people who don't use blinkers ARE the self centered people, making their hurry everybody else's problem. A person who asks questions can be doing so for many reasons: not complete documentation, getting bad understanding of something, wanting to clarify some info or to be in the same page as the team, etc.

But if they do so incessantly, then there is a problem, and the problem shouldn't be simply solved by saying: "Yeah, just ask John, he's always available and ready to help". As senior devs and leads and VPs of Engineerings or CTOs, we should foster a place where most questions can be answered easily in a self service manner, and our meetings have clarity on at least the big picture stuff.

If all that is already there, asking many questions all the time can rightfully be labeled a "disruption". In that situation, the person asking questions always makes their problem (not wanting to do some work themselves) the problem of everyone else, and that's what self centered people do. In much the same manner, people not using blinkers (illegal, by the way) make their refusal to follow rules everybody else's problem.

Again, nobody is pretending that they want to do that.

> I am upset from people who ...

And I'm upset from them too. In fact, I'm upset from people who have childish behavior and ask other people to adapt to their needs. In this conversation, you call "toddler" someone who did not propose anything that corresponds to what upset you. You just work differently than this person, so you childishly reacted.

You are clearly not better than people who don't se their blinkers or discuss Game of Thrones loudly: you also don't have considerations for the needs of others around you.

As I've said in my first comment on this thread: what if someone is in their flow and just need a quick and simple answer to a quick and simple question. You call these people "toddler" even if they will never ask someone they know does not like to be disturbed.

> But if they do so incessantly

Who is proposing that they do it incessantly?

All I'm saying is that when A needs to ask a question and get an answer immediately and B needs to not be distracted, both to keep their flow, then, logically, there is no solution where someone doesn't lose their flow. And my point is that you act as if someone here has more right to their flow than the other, which is just self-centered childishness.

> and the problem shouldn't be simply solved by saying: "Yeah, just ask John, he's always available and ready to help".

Should it be solved by "if you have a simple and quick question and Jack told you several time that he loves answering these questions and that you should not hesitate, you NEED to book a meeting, otherwise, according to ath3nd, you are a toddler"?

> If all that is already there, asking many questions all the time can rightfully be labeled a "disruption".

WHO IS SAYING INCESSANT QUESTIONS IS NOT A DISRUPTION?

This is very simple:

yes, incessant not pragmatically useful questions is disrupting, and people who do that are self-centered.

yes, asking people to "book meetings" or "write a message and wait hours before getting the simple unblocking answer" is disrupting, and people who do that are self-centered.

Just be a grown-up and accept that, no, people have no reason to cater to your little comfort. Someone tap you on your shoulder when you hear your headphone? Though sh*t little baby! Are you really arguing that these people are the problem when you are the one not able to deal with that. There, a little trick to you: "hm, John, next time, maybe you can ...", and problem solved (and if John does it again, guess what: WE ALL HAVE THESE KIND OF PEOPLE IN OUR LIFE, you are not special enough that the human condition should not apply to you. And based on you calling "toddler" someone while not even saying anything bad, I'm pretty sure you are the "John" of someone else)

And I (and most other people in this thread) am fed up with them and trying to actively remove them from my life. Hence, when people suggest I should deal with it, I tell them that I will most certainly not deal with it. That there are things that can be done to make their and mine life easier.

There are people who put their soda cans on the ground, there are people who talk loudly in the train, there are people who park their cars wrongly. Yes, it's a mild inconvenience. But I won't be dealing with it and accept it, I will actively shame them for the spoiled babies that they are, making a spectacle of their needs and accepting everybody to cater to them. Follow.Societal.Rules or get out of society!

> Just be a grown-up and accept that, no, people have no reason to cater to your little comfort

Me putting out all possible social clues that I don't want to be asked questions at the moment is not people catering for my comfort. It's people going through my boundaries so they can get their little comforts themselves.

> Are you really arguing that these people are the problem when you are the one not able to deal with that.

Yes, because they are breaking established social norms and work etiquette. I have clearly indicated by wearing headphones that it's not the time to be asked questions and I have indicated what's the best possible way for me to be asked questions: email, slack, a scheduled meeting, and many questions in bulk.

I most certainly will not cater to how somebody prefers to ask ME questions just because it's more convenient for them to do it ad-hoc. The same way developers of open source want you to use THEIR issue tracker, and fill THEIR code of conduct, and follow THEIR coding guidelines, and not you doing whatever the heck you want.

If you want something from somebody (like information), better follow their preferred approach of how to be asked, and not act like a spoiled little baby when you are told NO.

I don't think I should be touched in the first place. I have put a clear signal that I am deeply working: headphones. The accepted social norm is NOT to bother somebody when they have indicated they don't want to be bothered. I am, of course, going to answer the questions, but can't you simply wait until I indicate I am ready to accept your questions?

The benefit of remote here is palpable: you simply don't have the option to tap me on the shoulder, and you can only call me (in which case it's important enough to call), write me an email (which forces you to have a coherent point, and I can respond to it later) or slack me (which, again, I can postpone for later).

> You are just a grumpy baby, the existence of other babies will not change that.

I don't know about babies, but do you know who doesn't like being said "NO" to and who throws a fit ever time when somebody expresses a boundary? Bullies! People who gets upset when you express a boundary and expect that you should just submit to THEIR way of answering, those are the real babies!

Occasionally asking questions (for which it doesn't matter whether it's office or remote) is okay, especially when starting your job. On the other hand, expecting others to be readily available for your ad hoc queries repeatedly, day in and out, trying to actively persuade them that it's okay, and guilt trip them to continue doing so because it's "their work duty", and throwing a fit when people express a boundary to you, that's what real babies are made from!

Learn to ask questions like a decent worker, batch them, write them down, and with as little disruption as possible, and don't bother people who are deeply focused. Your question can wait, the world doesn't revolve around you, and value your coworkers time! I won't back down from this!

the question can also be useful for one other person in the room, so instead of being distracted, the person has been helped.

Asking quick questions in such an environment is also not that much of a disturbance because most people are working on similar features at the moment and there's a high chance that they don't need to do the whole context switch to assist you. It's really highly productive.

For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine. I wouldn't want to wear them all the time as even the best ones become uncomfortable after few hours, but that's also not really needed in a small shared room.

This is untrue for even small teams in my experience.

> For the times where you really needed some time for yourself, headphones work just fine.

Also not my experience.

There would be a large room off of a hallway, divided into 8 offices, arranged like this:

  +---------+---------+
  |         |         |
  |         |         |
  +-----+  -+-  +-----+
  |                   |
  |     |       |     |
  +-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |
  |                   |
  +-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |
  |                   |
  +-------|   |-------+

The larger offices at the top can be used for more senior people, or the group manager, or for a lab, or a library, or a break room.

You could extend this to two teams working on different projects but under a common manager or senior engineer by putting them in separate clusters side by side, and merging the adjacent top offices so that the common manager or senior engineer's office is part of both clusters:

  +---------+---------+---------+---------+
  |         |                   |         |
  |         |                   |         |
  +-----+  -+-  +-----+-----+  -+-  +-----+
  |                   |                   |
  |     |       |     |     |       |     |
  +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |           |             |
  |                   |                   |
  +-----+       +-----+-----+       +-----+
  |     |       |     |     |       |     |
  |                   |                   |
  +-------|   |-------+-------|   |-------+

If collaboration occurs spontaneously and your door isn’t closed, it’s easy to join in. If it turns out that someone is essential, turn it into an actual design meeting.

The best teams I’ve worked on had this arrangement and developed their own cadence - morning walks for cofeee, water cooler tv show commonalities.

Having the refuge of a known private space made group participation easier - I would seek out and benefit from the social technical in person interactions, as opposed to an open office plan where I would start out with determination of defending my personal mental space at all costs.

I work in a large company, and team is spread out over multiple cities.

We actually will often to group video calls to have a similar thing to what you describe - being able to ask a quick question, run ideas by other, etc.

However, going to the office I'm just with people who are working on different things, often doing calls which I find distracting...

Making that solid foundation requires a lot of work though and not everyone has the communication (or empathy) skills to make it work.

Has worked for me, but I'm an outlier in that I grew up on IRC chatrooms before more rich-text and composite media communication methods were available.

Most people on this site in particular are likely to be outliers too: as the way we are communicating right now is as stripped down as possible and people will self-select for this.

Online games work well, because you have a visual and full engagement.

Compare that to work communications... You are totally async on slack, it's just a simpler version of email at this point. Just because people are online in Slack today, doesn't mean that they'll respond within minutes.

If someone is online playing a game, you know that they're there. Old IRC was pretty much the same.

I hate open office space as much as the next person, but small team rooms are great. Can have the walls plastered with post-its, screens, drawing boards etc. If I hear two coworkers discuss something, I can chip in if relevant. Information flow just happens by itself.

* i dont want to be connected with you, get a life

Let me work

Do you just want to sit in silence all day making money for the company? Do you never need to blow off steam? Do you never need help?

> i dont want to hear your quick questions

I'm not trying to be hateful with this next sentence, but I struggle to even understand who would act like this, and for what reason that isn't a diagnosis.

There is no evil master plan. The processes that lead to self-exploitation will sound reasonable and well-intended. (If this wasn't the case, people would refuse to adapt it. Most people don't like exploitation when they see it.)

For example, in most of Europe there is a law that requires employees to record their working hours. This law was created to prevent (unpaid) overtime, and it does that. Now company X implements this by making you write down how many hours each day you worked towards which task. Doing this every day makes you think where you put this one-hour chat you had with a co-worker. It was nice, but which task did it contribute to? (It didn't...?) If you bother to ask, everybody will actually encourage you to have those talks, that it is even in the interest of healthy company culture, and remind you that maybe it's part of the paid break (you didn't forget you have that, did you? it was never anyone's intention that you skip your break). Nobody will be responsible for nudging people towards efficiency. It's all the fault of the individual who feels pressured into efficiency. It was never anyone's intention to prevent you from having those occasional nice chats, and nobody will stop you if you keep doing it.

Still, every day you get to think about how long it took and which task it belongs to, and it feels a bit like lying to just add the time to a random task. This kind of habit can shape your thinking.

That was an unwritten rule the last time I worked in an open space.

Personally, I've experienced open office, fully private office etc. Private office/remote are my favorites, followed by small room with a few people (I also had that in the gaming industry, it wasn't too bad) and, in a distant and humiliating last place, open office.

I wonder how many of these remaining 5 people have a take similar to me. WFH is where I'm most productive and most happy to work. Doing the kind of work you describe above "with 6 people on one project" is for 90% of the time an exercise in babying the least up to speed team member at the cost of distracting everyone.

I get it, some people just like being around people and doing stuff "together", and some types of work may even benefit from that when stars align(brainstorming etc). Most types of work I do in software don't. Especially now, post covid when WFH became normalised and people who were opposed to it on various grounds were forced to learn how to use it effectively.

>* asking quick questions and getting an instant answer. vs chat where I may not get an answer for hours.

That's what the phone is for, with additional benefit of status from everyone. If I see someone is busy I don't phone them I look for someone else, If I see they are "green" I do and I get my answer instantly without disturbing anyone.

>running ideas by others. This doesn't happen on chat for me, and VC is too scheduled

Again, same thing. Pick up a phone. If you just want to run something "by everyone". Wait for your daily/weekly team meeting and ask then. Yes, it forces you to write ideas down not to forget them (if they can wait), but it's massively more convenient to everyone else.

> * brainstorming. Same as above

I had many a good brainstorming session online (mostly with voice). What do you need to accomplish it is: - good audio equipment, Internet access and a quiet location for everyone. No calling into a meeting "from my car, while going to the doctor", or "from the office while people are talking in the background", no "crappy headphones etc". All this ruins productivity for everyone. If people are using cameras(which is nice) everyone has to have the bandwidth for it. Also if you have more than 5 people in your meeting, make use of the "raise hand" feature. Then brainstorming can happen very well. Especially while looking at a document/whiteboard together with systems that show you in real time what everyone does.

In fact above a certain number of people (8 maybe) brainstorming sessions seem a lot more effective to me online than in person. Why? Because you have few communication channels. You have the shared whiteboard/document, voice, and chat so while someone is talking you can post a question to the chat without interrupting.

>getting a feeling for what everyone is up to

That's what regular planning meeting is for.

>feeling part of a team, working on the same thing

I suppose that's a personal thing, but I always felt that including during my 7 years of WFH 100%.

Edit: there is only one real disadvantage to WFH, and it's for junior people wanting to learn. It's much harder to gather knowledge by osmosis, just by being in the office if most senior people are WFH. But then as a leader one has to decide what is more important.

When the CEO is away, the graphic designer and secretary frequently engage in loud, casual conversations, discussing everything from personal matters to home decor, like curtain colors. They also have a habit of yelling over the office partitions, adding to the disruption. Despite using noise-cancelling headphones, these distractions, including both the conversations and the yelling, consistently hinder my concentration.

Interestingly, the secretary has expressed concern about the perceived level of activity in the office, especially when the CEO is present. The secretary has mentioned to both me and the graphic designer that there might not be enough typing noises, suggesting a worry that the CEO might not think everyone is working hard. This concern about appearances adds another layer to the already challenging office environment.

This sentence sums up the biggest headache of my professional career.

I have never worried about appearances, but instead focused on doing good work.

To my detriment. I know I've missed out on key assignments and at least one promotion at my current employer because I don't sell myself or focus on perception management.

I guess what I'm saying is, this exists everywhere, in every field of work.

https://switchandclick.com/best-loud-mechanical-keyboards/

I sympathize, but I haven't yet had the pleasure of working with other people without the existence of those kind of friction layers.

At my age I just assume now that it's just part of the human condition -- but maybe it's just me.

No. Not everyone wants or needs a private office with a door. It doesn't always make us more productive. It is not always better to work from home. Open plan offices are not always bad. Most of my day is not spent working on something so complicated or advanced that interuption will screw me over. I am spending most of my day building block towers because I can split most of my work into small pieces.

On the other hand, if distraction is a problem, as someone else said, it isn't the open plan office which is at fault. It is planning your time; setting DnD when you are actually doing something difficult; it is making sure that people don't randomnly call your best engineers on the phone whenever they have problem but they instead use chat or email as an async method instead.

I don't have to work on some advanced grand vision to not like being available all the time. I am also not claiming that I am going to be super productive when I close the door.

It is not my fault not setting DnD it - this is what triggers me - no I don't have to set DnD if someone wants something from me they should make sure it actually IS important, they should make sure they got their stuff right by trying out things and thinking about what they have to do and what tried and what they really want to ask.

Then they can also send me an email, send me IM so I can reply as soon as I get to it.

Coming to me 9:00 when I am still taking my coat off and opening laptop - asking questions well that is not my problem not setting DnD.

If I ever hire a team that isn't remote, that'd be something I'd want to explore. That and giving them assistants. I want to find out what an experienced dev team that doesn't have to bother with any admin or other distractions can do.

Freeing people up as much as possible to just think and build in peace. I like to think that it would make a difference.

I would love to have someone else sit in on meetings, but i suspect I'm there in the hope that I'll ask an incisive question to shake a hidden requirement loose.

That being said, it's really the crux of the issue with work from home that the trajectory of the company doesn't really depend on individual workers hitting their maximum output. An individual having the best coding experience is rarely the ideal option for the company. It is far more important that the team moves in a cohesive formation. If the distractions truly cut productivity in half we can double the number of seats. Going too far and too fast without focused guidance results in deadtime and technical debt. It's a tortoise and the hare situation. Would we rather have 10 rabbits moving one brick at a time or 20 turtles strapped together towing a trailer with a full stack of bricks.

It's also not like we haven't tried to make remote work and other options be successful. The reality is that it's something we can pretty effectively A/B test. The results have been fairly consistent across fields and even companies. Physically collaborative environments yield better and faster results.

Usually salaries cost more than offices.

> Going too far and too fast without focused guidance results in deadtime and technical debt.

Focused guidance requires intentional communication. Not hoping people will overhear the right conversations.

> It's also not like we haven't tried to make remote work and other options be successful. The reality is that it's something we can pretty effectively A/B test. The results have been fairly consistent across fields and even companies. Physically collaborative environments yield better and faster results.

Show the data.

Yes, they do. But productivity is not linear.

> Show the data.

I don't have the data, but the reasons behind agile are exactly that - extremely collaborative environment.

I think a company that wants to keep talent for as long as possible without offering FAANG level salaries should reconsider this position. Hiring is super expensive and risky. If you have good people, you want to keep them. I think offering flexible, meaningful and enjoyable work is a great way to keep people around longer and if it matters to them that they have a space where they can focus, I would give it to them. Creating an environment where they are less happy probably will make them look elsewhere.

That said, I do agree that siloed work comes with a set of issues, but I think there are other solutions to the problem.

> It's also not like we haven't tried to make remote work and other options be successful. The reality is that it's something we can pretty effectively A/B test. The results have been fairly consistent across fields and even companies. Physically collaborative environments yield better and faster results.

I have never heard this and I don't even know how you would measure it. There are so many variables this would affect, not to mention, how do you even measure productivity short and long term? Do you also measure turnover? I don't think we actually know nor do I think results from one place translate over to another. I've done both and both have worked and have had their own set of challenges. My personal take is that hiring good people matters more than whatever setup you have. Remote gives you a bigger pool of people to pick from and is desirable by many, so based on that I think that it can give a very big competitive advantage.

Writers need flow. People studying need flow. I could imagine techs looking at breast cancer scans need flow. It isn't only programmers who need this.

I've noticed this some times ago and now I cannot unsee it: this all discussion is too often about "what is best for me and my flow even if it ruins other people's flow" rather than discussing a proper solution.

Flow as most are using it here, also known as being "in the zone", is when you achieve a deep state of focus on one particular task, and everything else seems to melt away. You reach maximal energy and enthusiasm for the work. It is where you reach peak productivity and creativity.

Most people cannot just enter this state at will, and when they do achieve it cannot maintain it for more than an hour or two. Getting into this state takes 20 to 30 minutes or more.

When you are in this state it takes very little to knock you out of it. A ringing phone, someone talking to you even if you just tell them to come back in a couple hours, a beep from a messaging app...all of those can knock you out of the zone.

Getting back in after being knocked out takes another 20 to 30 minutes. This means that if you are getting one interruption or distraction every 30 minutes throughout your time at your desk it is unlikely that you will get any time in the zone.

>> In the same vein, an office with a door won't help at all if you have higher-ups who expects instant responses to any messaging/e-mail query every five minutes

> Well, if you don't answer instantly, then you are stopping them in their flow

In the case of a manager interrupting you they probably weren't in the zone. But even if it is someone who was in the zone that is interrupting you them having to stop and message you was probably enough to knock them out of it.

It will almost certainly be more productive for the organization overall for them to work on something else until you naturally exit the zone.

For example, you can be "in the zone", and then suddenly realise you need answer X than only John can provide. In the office, you can look at John and he does not look busy, so you quickly ask. Sometimes, people don't even realise they are asking, they are still in the zone, checking if John is available is done by another part of the brain. After the answer, you continue, you are still "in the zone", you still have everything you need in your head, you are still juggling with different variables, they are still there.

Now, if you cannot ask directly, you have to send a message on Slack. And then what? Well, you cannot continue to work on the part you were working on. So you have to switch task, drop all of the variables you juggle with in your head, get out of the context you were in. Then John answers you on Slack 10 minutes later, you have to recollect everything in your mind.

So, yes, that's my point, not being able to ask a quick question will destroy your flow. The effects are the same as being distracted by a question when you are "in the zone". I don't think that asking someone about something is enough to get out of the zone, as in practice, developers "ask" their computer or internet things continuously. A simple "ls" or "ctrl-f" is as disturbing as asking the colleague sitting next to you.

Of course, it may depend on people, but I think it's just not a smart way to approach the problem as if everyone is always working exactly the same way you do.

I also think that some people will think stuffs will break them out of the zone when it does not always really do, just because they don't even notice the thing happened when it does not. It is a bit like those people who say "I always wake up when the cat pass next to my window" just because the 5 times they woke up, the cat was indeed passing next to their window, but the cat passed there 50 times without waking them up.

I used to work from another time zone for a few years. That was highly efficient. The first half of the working day there were no interrupts and I could go into the flow and be productive. The second half, or more like the last three hours I would have video meetings and back-and-forth emails etc. and just doing "normal" slow programming - not the type needing concentration and flow. People emailing me about stuff would do so when I was sleeping, and when I started working I could start by going through that, plan, start working, and have it ready for them when they got up and began working. It was ideal, in many ways (except that I couldn't physically drop by the office whenever I wanted).

This includes deriving the actual wanted goals early in the project, planning properly and the violently shield the engineers by keeping external factors like the management microcosm, stakeholders and non-developers busy with busywork, placated with blatant lies and overall away from doing damage. Regarding the engineer team organiziation - they will work something out.

They don't need that car-production-belt whistle and whip.

I can see way down the line there'll be a problem with Engineering vs The Rest because we'll be remote and they'll be in an office. But tbh there is always a problem with Engineering vs The Rest regardless.

I want my devs to be able to switch Slack off, not answer emails, go for a walk in the park, and stare at the ceiling for hours while properly thinking about what they're building. Too much code is written in haste.

You sound like my current employer. Working for them the only worrying thing I ever think about is that I don’t want this gig to end, ever.

Pandemic restrictions have ended. You could eat lunch with a neighbor who hates working from home also. Or rent shared working space.

I would love to hear more about how people actually changed their situation, other than the obvious way of looking for another job.

I find myself largely incapable of doing so, open-plan office or not, and have compensated by adopting development approaches that break problems down in consistent enough ways (into small enough pieces) that the structures I have to pick up and put down are never all that complex. Which is good, because they fall out of my head just all the time. ADHD, a very poor memory for detail, and a role that has me responsible for juggling many tasks concurrently would _destroy_ my productivity if this article were universal truth.

Don't get me wrong, I _hate_ working in an open-plan office. But the impact it has on my output is not because the interruptions affect my flow, it's because the constant social contact stresses the heck out of me >.

For high level stuff like architecture design and writing application functions, I appreciate pair programming. I think that is more effective and creative than working alone. But still everyone doing their own stuff in a big room is not my kind in this situation.

First key feature - 50% of the exterior building walls was windows, the other 50% had offices.

Second key feature - cubicle design. It was staggered duets of cubes. Great for privacy... and at best made it easy to turn around and talk to 2 other people if needed. Best of all... each cube had a full window instead of your classic wall. And these windows would all allign so that you could see straight out to the outside if you wanted. You had privacy - but still daylight.

Most "cube farms" I see are a sea of interior cubes completely surrounded by wall of exterior offices. That's depressing. Or we see an open office concept where everyone has light but 0 privacy which is hard for concentration.

This particular design that I got to work in circa 2002-2005 was delightful at least for me (and then we moved offices and that design sadly didn't carry over).

I miss well designed cubes.

The norm here in German startup world seem to be open floors. And if you do have rooms they get crammed full of people.

It's not the end of the world though. A room full of engineers is tolerable, and if they're on your team this is even desirable.

The trouble only comes when the CEO wants to see everyone sweating, so you get stuffed together with Sales or Ops.

Working from home made things a lot easier though. And if the company is big enough it's usually also possible to just book a meeting room if you need to work in silence for a while :-)

Until one of the engineers who has no social awareness decides to eat at their desk instead of taking lunch elsewhere, or you just need some silent time and there's just no option for it.

I'm very reluctantly pursuing on-site or hybrid positions as a last ditch (desperate) effort to find some work, and I'm not the slightest bit optimistic about being in a room full of anybody. I used to think an open room full of people was the better choice, but that was when I was young and naive. Serious focus demands control over your senses, and there's a difference between setting up at a bustling cafe and going in every day to sit directly adjacent to the same people with no concept of real private space.

Maybe he's aware, and just doesn't care because the company has already made him miserable by 1) not having an "elsewhere" to take that lunch, and 2) putting his desk right next to the sales team.

What? How is eating your lunch at your desk a social awareness thing? If it doesn't smell and isn't loud, what's the problem?

In one case, an adjacent developer was bringing in hard-boiled eggs and cracking them against the edge of his desk while wearing headphones and chewing with his mouth open, while the smell of the eggs wafted over the 3ft to mine, and then he'd get started on the apples. He'd do this 3-5 times a day, so needless to say I'm not enthusiastic about open offices. I did also awkwardly bring this up directly with him, but it's tricky to navigate a situation in which it's not just the food, but also the mouth sounds and occasional burps. If I did get a break from this specific person, it would just allow the sounds from everyone else eating chips or having conversations to be more prominent. By the time covid roled around, I was already burnt out from trying to compensate from all those things, and the respite I could have got from working at home just arrived too late to save me.

I guess that's exactly the problem. The only food which doesn't smell is cold food.

In all seriousness, sweating is the biggest factor for me. My clothes smell so much nicer ever since I began working from home

A programmer starts with a couple of these, gets them in the air, then adds more and more concepts. When I am good I can juggle lots of them and see how they interoperate.

Once all the balls in the air, whirling around like some sort of planetary system orbiting a sun, they can coalesce into -- an idea, a solution, or something.

If this gets disturbed, all those balls come tumbling down. This is not a 30 second thing, this can be an hours thing. Or more.

Non programmers do not understand this process. I believe.

It's not the open floor plan office that's the main cause of the problem for DnD type work, nor are offices with doors a general solution.

It's all about policy. A separate office with a door doesn't do you any good if every ten minutes someone drops by to knock on it. A private office also doesn't help if you're constantly bombarded with "urgent" messages from various people and are expected to instantly reply.

Most of the issues can be solved by simply implementing reasonable policies. Can't deal with the noise of an open plan office? Provide ANC headphones. Need time to focus? Define binding "focus hours" each day during which no meetings are scheduled, no messages are sent, and people are left alone. Keep the inevitable exceptions to an absolute minimum.

In addition to that, it also helps to have separated spaces (e.g. meeting rooms) available that can be booked for DnD sessions if the need arises.

Depending on the circumstances it isn't always possible to provide a work environment that everyone considers to be a "nice place to get work done". Some people don't mind background chatter, others can't concentrate if someone as much as coughs somewhere.

It's also a bit hard to not being being cut off in your own bubble as you put it, while simultaneously wanting to be connected to everyone else. Being in a separate, single desk office is no different from being in a bubble in that sense.

Company-issued PPE for hazardous offices?

It worked well, as long as the other people were devs or admins who didn't phone all the time.

What matters is the culture. A culture of “I’m working, only interrupt me only when necessary and keep the chit chat to a minimum, and retreat to a private space for long conversations” is basically the key. That and noise cancelling headphones.

However, what it sometimes sounds to me is that there is this hope of a magic combination to crack productivity effectiveness through open offices or closed offices (or any other low level leveraged idea, like return to office vs remote office). The reality is that any configuration can work if the leaders of the organization are cognizant of the ramifications on the different employed individuals and address them accordingly -- but I believe most skip this chapter in leadership training.

Most arch stones are precisely cut. Or at least we pretend they are precise. The keystone is different because it’s an oversized wedge that you slide in at the end to pick up the slack. You can’t cut it precisely because you don’t know how big it needs to be until it’s doing its job. Once in place though, you can trim it down to make it look like you knew what you were doing all along.

There’s a metaphor here, I think, for the style of “engineering” we see in software. It’s not a value judgement other than to acknowledge that, with software, it’s ok to be good enough and to iterate. Lots of real world engineering is like that, but keystones may be an exception.

This happened at least a dozen times/day. We were allowed to wear headphones, but could not listen to anything streaming online. I would record 8 hours of streaming radio the night before and then transfer it to my Ipod nano in the morning. I was usually so sleep-deprived that I didn't have any time to check the recording before work. Once/month, my Internet connection would go down and I would have 8 hours of white noise (those days were a nightmare).

I eventually figured out that I could RDP into my server at home and stream audio from there, and listen to it through the RDP connection. The Internet filters they were using couldn't detect it.

I think what finally made me quit was when I found out management had screen-monitoring software installed on all of our computers and would review it every hour.

A co-worker discovered it by accident and due to my inquisitive nature (which sometimes gets me in trouble), I tried to telnet into the listening port we found on his computer (to see what it was) and it completely crashed their monitoring software (must have been really shitty software). I was hauled in the next day and questioned to see if I did this with malicious intent and he was fired )I guess they were watching him for awhile and were gathering evidence. He had worked with the company for 5 years).

I got out at a good time. The company in question was in the loan industry and it melted down a year later in 2008 and the whole development team was laid off.

I hated this office experience so much, that since the job I had after this, I've only worked remote jobs (and still do) in my home office or office space I personally rent. I don't think I could ever go back.

But I still have to do something to control my time. A door isn't enough, because someone will just knock or open it. You have to put in effort and plan ahead to control your workflow.

A lot of people seem to believe that work should be easy. It's actually difficult and complex to work really efficiently. It requires knowledge of how to work efficiently, and then it requires a lot of people to stick to a process, someone to measure it and keep people on track, and continuously changing it to improve. That's a lot more than just "don't interrupt me".

Getting paid to waste time not doing your job is considered work now?

Pretty much the definition of 90 % of all the meetings. Just putting on bluetooth earpieces and doing the laundry doesn't deduct the value of me hearing another round of very efficient 'cost savings' that they thought about somewhere up the chain or other administrative ideas.

You mean commuting? Getting commuting hours back each day allows you do to hobbies.

The issue is large open offices where I'm also privy to all the other distractions from other teams that aren't relevant to me.

I called the environment: one developer for the price of two.

Oh sure you can talk about high comp and career mobility. But where does all of the vaunted labor power of software engineers go when they ask for something as simple as a cubicle?

I get that unions were/are necessary for things like mining workers or so, but SWE is quite different. I'd expect a union to be net-negative in our sector.

Further, has anyone talked to one of these persons before on changing the office layout to a developer-friendly design?

I've really wanted to do this but I'm not sure who in my company I would talk to about it.

At which point I might as well work from home, and sell the extraneous office space.

Pomodoro technique also helped me shape my focus state into smaller, less efficient, but more predictable portions. By scheduling interruptions, I figured out it's a lot easier to handle breaking out and into flow stat when you're training that every 25 minutes.

If the interruptions happen early in the morning so I never have the 2-3 hours boot up time, then that day is pretty much a zero from lines of code produced perspective.

Note: if it's some trivial boilerplate code then I can even be productive without booting up and with constant interruptions, this only applies to things I don't know how to do and need to research/think

Conversely when I am debugging or doing more creative stuff like systems design work, I love distractions. For some reason the momentary interruptions really help me reapproach the problem from a new angle.

When all else fails a crack open a beer, my very best work has always been done while sipping a cold one.

You think nobody sees what's on engineers desktops?

Of course they're all Carmack-level geniuses...

Literally sandwiched between breathless "How Github CoPilot produces 80% of our code" articles from the likes of Shopify and "How laying off a thousand more fixed my stock" from the Spotifys.

But it highly depends on who you're getting as an office mate. I've had mostly good experiences, but I've had one very bad experience too.

Most devs, myself definitely included, don't wanna sit there with another one while they work on a single problem. We both have our own respective tickets to worry about, who's got time to split entirely dedicating to 1 ticket that isn't yours?

Instead if we hit a major roadblock we'll shoot out a message like "hey dude got a minute?" And hop on a huddle on slack, but I definitely wouldn't call that pair programming the way it's usually implied

But not nearly to the degree as my old job pre-pandemic that was roughly 3 days a week all in the office and 2 days a week whatever you wanted.