Open offices
15 Aug 2011
The open offices I’ve worked in—and some were otherwise great places to work—usually lead to distraction, decreased productivity, and low morale in myself and the people I’ve worked with. For the record, I think offices when used as places to meet, to share ideas, or to bust out code in a 2-week sprint are great. But as an everyday environment, open offices come at a price.—
I think coders tend to shift between modes. Sometimes we need co-worker input to bounce ideas off of/troubleshoot something, and sometimes we need quiet to crank out code. In my ideal office environment, you partition out the devs and those that need to be on the phone for their job (sales, biz-dev, CEOs). From there, groups of 2-4 devs in a single space is probably ideal (large partitioned cube or office). Also, they should have enough personal space in between, and plenty of chairs so they can pair if needed. Ideally, you want to bug your cube/office mates when you’re stuck on sometime that you can’t get past, but not for small things that you could easily look up yourself. Sometimes, having a group of experts can lead to a death by 1000s cuts (What was the command in vim to jump a word? What’s the syntax for text-gradients in css?) That said, I’m a HUGE fan of code reviews, pair programming, group debugging, etc. I think it’s all about striking a balance.
At TeachStreet we have partitioned spaces (bigger than a cube, smaller than an office), which we call pods (long story). Additionally, we have lot of common space (couches, big table, space to move around an posture in front of a whiteboard). We’ve changed up our space a bit a number of times since we’ve been there - I think an important lesson as well is to adapt your space to your needs as much as possible. Each team is going to be different.
(via superamit)
office space work