
Office distractions could be costing more than $30k per employee each year - robteix
https://hackernoon.com/office-distractions-could-be-costing-your-company-more-than-30k-per-high-performance-employee-each-ba7e4f772d78
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RickS
Exec and management types, if you're reading this: Private offices or hub-and-
spoke office styles are an unbelievable competitive advantage. I write this as
I hear the laughter from an unrelated standup, and the drivel of no fewer than
8 conversations I don't care about. And I'm on hackernews instead of doing my
job.

Please let me work in peace.

~~~
rjeli
What's a hub and spoke office style?

~~~
tzakrajs
Microsoft does this AFAIK and it's where you have many private offices
flanking shared meeting spaces. You can actually close your door and focus,
then pop-out for an impromptu session with coworkers on a white board.

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TimJYoung
This has been discussed numerous times here, and I agree with the premise of
this article, but some of the prescriptions for solving the problem just seem
silly and reek of over-complicating and over-managing the process. Trying to
gauge or limit how much time a developer spends on a given solution is
problematic because a) you're professing to know the solution before it has
been developed, in which case you should have just written it yourself or
_told_ the developer the solution, and b) you're just making it worse on the
developer by imposing an arbitrary deadline that will only induce stress and
result in the solution coming _later_ , not sooner. As a deadline gets closer,
the productivity of a developer is proportional to the amount of time
remaining. The only exception is if the solution, or the design of the
solution, is known and all that is left to do is the typing.

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easilyBored
so if we remove "distractions" and work like robots will we get $30k more a
year?

People are not robots. If I'm worth $200 an hour for the first 5 hours to an
employee, by the 16th straight hour I'm barely in the positive territory.
Companies should STFU and pay more, their earnings and cash piles show that
money is being made.

~~~
valuearb
If it's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep
that money for yourself?

The truth is workplaces that limit distractions are much better places to
work, and more enjoyable for employees. I've run organizations that offered
one person offices to every developer, and it was a big reason why our
turnover was extremely low.

~~~
easilyBored
_If it 's so easy to run a profitable business, why not run your own and keep
that money for yourself?_

Irrelevant. How do you know know I'm not already doing that.

My main point, which will valid for as long as humans are are the switch is
that you cannot maximize every second.

~~~
valuearb
It's relevant that you think the company doesn't deserve the money it makes.
If somehow employees could make that money without all the services and assets
of the business, they already would be doing so.

And it's not about maximizing every second. It's about providing the best
possible work environment to allow people to be more productive.

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soared
tl;dr:

More clickbait. This blog assumes that employees are earning $110k a year, get
interrupted 6 times a day, and each interruption requires 23 minutes to
recover from. So each employee spends 2+ hours a day "costing the business".

Despite the interstellar sized logical jumps, the article is weak. Self-
selecting high performance workers? Assuming everyone earns $110k? Etc.

~~~
cableshaft
I wish I only got interrupted 6 times a day. I usually get interrupted that
often by lunchtime. I don't think it takes a full 23 minutes to recover from
that, but 5-10 isn't uncommon.

~~~
atempthrow
I get about 23 full, uninterrupted minutes in a day.

When I'm in the office, I wonder if my coworkers wait for me to start working
just so they can ask me how my day is going or to tell me a joke.

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thephyber
I agree with the morale and wellness argument. Too many distractions lead to
mental thrashing.

But -- there's an assertion here that the $30,000 would have been better used
in another way. The concept of agile development encourages these distractions
because it encourages changes earlier, rather than later in development, where
more resources have been squandered. Microsoft famously found that the cost of
a defect grew by an order of magnitude for each stage of development in which
it was allowed to fester.

Hence, I don't think the author has proven that business-related
"distractions" are a net negative. If the distractions are completely
unrelated to work, that's another animal altogether.

HPEs should only be considered "high-performance" if they are able to deflect
distractions when they need to. Otherwise, they are simply highly compensated.

~~~
valuearb
Many distractions aren't work related.

Many of the remaining distractions that are work related aren't necessary.

In an open floor plan the product manager can accost an engineer about a
business problem, and they can directly solve it sooner in development, saving
time and money. But they did so by distracting a half dozen other employees
who had little to no interest or anything to contribute to the conversation.

At a previous job we insisted on one person offices for developers. The
product manager would go to the engineers office, they'd solve the problem
quickly and early, and we got the same benefits without distracting another
half dozen people. If they needed some more people to help with the decisions,
we had conference rooms.

