

An Office Made of Software - ggreer
http://geoff.greer.fm/2013/08/28/an-office-made-of-software/

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jdlshore
I've worked from home for 13 years. It's bloody hard. And although most of my
work is done solo, my experience has been that collaborative efforts are _far_
more difficult and slow when we can't physically get together.

The advantages of working from home are obvious. Short commute, convenience,
midday naps, no pants required... no wonder people want it.

But the _dis_ advantages are really only apparent once you try it. It's hard
to get motivated. It's hard to feel a sense of accomplishment. No sense of
office "buzz" or excitement. No one to carry you through the mid-afternoon
doldrums. When collaborating, all that rich human emotion and nuance is
squeezed through a soda straw. Can't go for a walk and talk through a
challenging issue. No commute to transition from "work mode" to "family mode."
No high fives.

I'm a hard-core introvert, and I _miss_ people.

My business has been a one-man business for the last thirteen years. One of my
greatest hopes is that, when I'm successful enough to be a sustainable multi-
person business, that we'll have a kick-ass office where we all work together.
Because working from home isn't all it's cracked up to be.

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johnrob
I worked from home for almost a year. It was a great thing for me, because
ever since then I consider an office a perk and not an obligation. My reasons
are below. Everyone is different, and for many people offices are a great
thing.

\- I had trouble mentally getting into work mode at home.

\- Since my home windows are not tinted (I've since noticed that most office
windows are), I was readily aware whenever the weather was nice. In those
cases, if you can imagine this, I felt guilty for working because I should be
enjoying the weather!

\- I only ever felt proud of a day's work during a stellar day. Anything less
made me feel inadequate (in the office, I feel good about what I accomplish
and don't feel guilty about less productive periods).

\- My pets do not come to the office. I love them, but they are distracting!

~~~
tekacs
> \- I only ever felt proud of a day's work during a stellar day. Anything
> less made me feel inadequate (in the office, I feel good about what I
> accomplish and don't feel guilty about less productive periods).

This. Surely this should be considered a fair _drawback_ of office work?

My qualms are with the fact that office work seems to sorely hinder one's
ability to self-report about _actual_ productivity. Whilst this is lovely for
one's mood (the value of which should, admittedly, not be understated), it
seems to bode ill for effectively self-managing one's efforts to _get work
done_.

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greenyoda
_" Offices are a good idea for many jobs today, but there is one specific case
where I think they’re no longer beneficial: software companies. What do
programmers do all day?"_

See what just happened there? The author jumped to the conclusion that
"software companies" employ nobody except "programmers". That might be true
for a tiny start-up, but once you reach a certain size, all types of other
jobs spring up:

\- Managing payroll, health insurance and other benefits

\- Sales and marketing

\- Legal and accounting: someone has to negotiate the contracts for data
center services (even if all the services are outsourced); someone has to pay
the company's bills; someone has to do the taxes and other legal paperwork
(lots of extra paperwork if it's a publicly traded company); someone has to
reimburse employees for travel and other expenses.

\- Recruiting

Imagine a software company with just a hundred employees (not a very big
company at all, compared to Facebook's 5000 or Google's 45000) that consists
of just people working from home. It doesn't seem to scale.

~~~
kansface
Why wouldn't this scale? Sales people typically only work out of offices a
couple days a week if that much. They can make sales calls from anywhere and
typically close big deals in person outside of their office. Is there a
particular reason you think this wouldn't work apart from no one is doing it
now?

~~~
prostoalex
Distributed companies require strong product and project management cultures -
if it's a product that's sellable by sales people, there might be a dozen
tweaks a day that might flow in engineers' direction - TSV export on top of
CSV, change the gradient schema to a darker blue color, find out why two
records are missing from a large customer's account, etc.

In tight shops where sales sits next to engineers and personal relationships
are built, those small issues tend to get resolved rather quickly, leading to
happier parties on both end, happier customers and higher product quality.

In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as project
manager, who then keeps and prioritizes a list of such requests. Sales people
then complain that nothing ever gets done, and requests go into a vacuum,
while engineers complain about too much bureaucracy and inability to
concentrate on large projects with all the pesky requests streaming in.

~~~
dmoney
> _In distributed shops request must flow through a gatekeeper, such as
> project manager,_

Why not a web forum or a chatroom? Some chat software even allows screen
sharing.

~~~
prostoalex
If the company culture is supportive of such collaboration, that's a great
thing to cherish. Frequently with no codified processes engineers would adopt
a NMP ("Not My Problem") attitude, with questions getting ignored, and the
rest of the organization paying less attention to the channel.

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jiggy2011
Remote working isn't for everyone.

The hardest part is motivation, not necessarily because the temptation to goof
off is higher at home (sometimes it can be the opposite, if you are in an
office where goofing off is common).

You don't get the human reactions to your work. For example you can't build
some feature and just grab the nearest person to show and see their subtle
reactions to it. You don't get to walk past another part of the building and
see a room full of people using your software to get their work done or
whatever the effect of what you are doing is.

Instead you end up sending an email at 7PM saying "I have completed item #232"
and you get one back the following morning saying "ok, proceed with item
#233".

~~~
ajslater
Why don't you just grab the nearest person on IRC?

Also, the way your write it sounds like you and your teammates communicate so
tersely as to be an impediment. Don't do that.

In every office I've ever been in, all the programmers type to each other all
day long on IRC. In all the distributed workplaces I've ever been, they do the
same exact thing, miles apart.

Talk to each other. All day long. Constantly. On IRC. Just like you do in an
office.

~~~
jiggy2011
I don't know if IRC is a great substitute for seeing a personal reaction
complete with body language. Just little things like seeing whether someones
eyes light up or glaze over when you show them something.

IRC can also be easily ignored as people go "AFK" or "busy", it's harder to
ignore someone standing in your face.

------
quanticle
>Well, the whole point of an office is to get work done.

I'm not sure about that. The whole point of an office seems to be to allow
management to _verify_ that you're getting work done. Or, to put it even more
accurately, to allow management to _feel like_ they're verifying that you're
getting work done.

I'm not sure Floobits addresses that. In fact, I'm not sure that it's possible
for a product to address that. It seems like the sort of thing that'll require
a generational shift (as newer managers comfortable with remote work replace
older managers who aren't).

~~~
nullspace
> The whole point of an office seems to be to allow management to verify that
> you're getting work done.

This part is pretty easy. Whether remote or working in an office space, daily
standups, commit logs and the delivery of results can go a long way in
figuring out if someone is actually getting stuff done, or is just pretending
to busy at a desk.

There are a couple of things people don't seem to address enough though.

\- A lot of software development involves a group people designing and
debating the architecture in front of a whiteboard. Most of this discussion is
not preemptive, but rather happens on the spur of the moment.

\- I strongly believe (but no data to back this up) that you are more
productive when you work with a team you are comfortable with, both
technically and on an informal social basis. This involves intense coding
sprints through late nights or just having a couple drinks at the bar in the
corner of the street.

I would be happy if working remotely really works for programmers, but
everyone seems to be talking about the wrong issues.

------
unono
There are two types of people, those who feel energized being around people
and those who feel energized by internal deliberation. Offices exist to
satisfy the first category.

What is happening though is that the valuable work of today is conducted by
internal deliberation (building apps, predicting prices, writing compelling
blog posts).

As it becomes more possible for people to distribute their work without a
company (app stores and the like), the office will be bled dry.

------
morgante
I've often felt similarly, having worked on a number of remote projects.

But at the end of the day our efficiency/productivity in making major
decisions is much higher when we gather. Technologically, this is driven by 2
things: 1) Whiteboarding software just isn't there. I can't as effortlessly
sketch something out and share it with remote people as I can on a physical
white board (which is arguably as relevant to "software companies" as actually
writing code). 2) Audio/visual latency still exists. Even if I closed my eyes,
I could still tell who's in the room and who's not. Sometimes I'll come in
just for a meeting because of this.

I do think a happy medium exists in much smaller offices/coworking spaces
where most people are WFH a lot but come in once a week for meetings.

------
pixelcort
I'm quite fond of private offices per engineer, with sets of four offices with
doors pointing inward into a hallway. This allows each engineer to easily do a
quick chat with the two across the hall, and a tiny walk brings you into your
neighbor's office.

As the article points out, private offices are considered more expensive. The
question is, how expensive are they? Is it the increased floor space they take
up? The cost of the materials for walls and doors? More complex heating and
cooling?

It's a sad trend indeed; here in Tokyo private offices are almost unheard of,
and even back home in the SF Bay Area private offices are quickly going out of
fashion.

The fact is that, for some engineers, auditory and visual distractions can
ruin the focus needed to achieve goals. Open plan and cubicle offices are hell
for these engineers.

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bdunbar
Thought: A team of competent people will work together well no matter their
physical situation.

Thought the Second: It's going to take some really _good_ software to
replicate the intangible benefits found when people work in the same office.
Overheard hallway chats, oh-by-the-ways in the break room, impromptu white
board discussions.

Thought the third: Because these intangibles cannot be measured, a majority of
HN readers are going to have a difficult time seeing the value of them. Commit
messages, working code doing something - you can measure that, and it is good.

How do you measure the value of a game of ping-pong during lunch?

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dsego
It's alright to work from home once you get past the wanking stage.

------
beachstartup
our commercial offices house sales professionals and executives. board rooms,
client meetings, land lines, water coolers, coffee machines, nice views of the
city.

most of our programmers work remotely from their homes, and our systems
administrators work from home and in the datacenter.

equilibrium.

~~~
leokun
Where do you work if you don't mind me asking?

------
rokhayakebe
_What do programmers do all day? They read code. They write code. They read
docs. ..._

How are programmers different than bloggers, secretaries, online and social
media marketeers, customer service reps, etc.. in this regard?

~~~
jacalata
Secretaries are different because their job is to work with someone else. All
the others you mention should be able to work from home the same as
programmers, imo - are you saying they shouldn't and therefore programmers
shouldn't, or asking why people here care about programmers and not social
media reps?

