Re:Workplaces need more walls, not fewer (2014)
by solatic on Wednesday January 18, 2017 @12:56PM
(#13428504)
Part of the reason why this is controversial, I think, comes down to the majority of the type of work that people are doing on a day-to-day basis.
If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here.
But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed.
The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.
If you get to work, have a ten-minute standup, then go and try to hammer out code the vast majority of the rest of the day, then you need a default-private environment. Visual and auditory privacy, in a closed office, with multiple large monitors, correlates with success here.
But if you spend most of your time bouncing ideas off each other, then the fluidity of verbal communication is much more efficient, for most people and use cases, than putting everything in writing first. With such constant change, keeping everyone in the loop is going to be at a higher priority than pure development speed.
The balance is probably what kind of organization you have. Do you have a small start-up where the entire company can fit into one room? An open space (well, relative to its size) probably makes sense. Do you have a large organization where somebody writes spec and passes it to a programmer for implementation? Private offices for programmers are probably best. Do you have small feature teams where management gives feature requests to the team as a whole? Give the team its own private room, segregating them from other teams.