OK, so you're a coder and you want to work in my company. What would be your favorite working environment? An office where you're all alone, or dot-com era open space?
I started to think about this some weeks ago, as the programmers in my company began to tell me their concentration (and, therefore, productivity) was suffering because of the environmental noise. We have open spaces, we've always had open spaces, and everybody seemed to like them. But then, until recently, I was the only programmer, and I usually work on my own, buried into my home basement instead of the main office. I wanted to discover how this problem is solved in the Valley, and it turned out they use offices, or at least cubicles, and no open spaces at all for programmers: no more, now that the dot-com era is over.
In the end, two important truths surface:
- Anyone who needs to concentrate can't stay in a place where other people come and go, talk, listen to music (from different sources at the same time, maybe).
- A coder needs to concentrate.
Open Spaces Are Evil For Coders
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