

Ask HN: What is your biggest annoyance at the workplace? - robmiller

Fairly simple and open-ended.  What&#x27;s your biggest annoyance?  Is it environmental, managerial, or of your own making?  Is it easily solvable? At what cost?<p>Happy Monday!
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JacobHarrington
Anything that breaks my concentration. As a developer, I'm being paid for my
ability to concentrate and perform complex thought processes. Anything that
impedes that ability costs the company money via the effort I require to
rebuild any shattered mental frameworks due to interruptions.

That's one of the reasons I absolutely loathe open office plans. Open office
plans are designed with the values of communication and cooperation in mind,
but completely ignore that the reality of development work is usually all
about how much information you can keep track of while working. If I have to
rethink what I am doing every fifteen minutes because two coworkers nearby are
taking a foosball break, then I am not being as productive as I can be. Open
floor plans are a terrible idea, choosing to save money on real estate at the
expense of quality of the resulting software. I've started using it as a sign
of a place I would prefer not to work, though with the pervasiveness of this
pernicious insult to developer productivity I highly doubt I'll be able to
make it a serious filter on any kind of job search since everyone and their
misguided brother feels like it's a good way to enhance development team
dynamics.

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iSloth
Rewards (i.e. Grade/Salary) at the company are based on your perceived
knowledge, value and skill within the company. Basically this boils down to
the more vocal engineers get better rewards, even if that means taking credit
for other peoples work.

I believe the issue boils down to management having no true idea of what
everyone is doing, so believes the general targeted noise coming out of the
work force from select members. You then end up with a lot of people jumping
up and down saying 'pick me, pick me...' because they want to be the noise
that's noticed.

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daven11
Managers who hire specialists in a field (i.e. me) then proceed to tell them
how to work. It's solvable, but the cost is me taking on the risk of ignoring
managers and proceeding, or present the reasons why their approach will fail
and wait.

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Jeremy1026
Leaders that point in circles rather than lead toward the end goal.

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jtfairbank
Can you give an example or two?

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Jeremy1026
Sure. I'm working at a travel agency until the end of the year. My current
manager (the owner) has plenty of ideas of what he wants from the company,
however he has no idea how he wants to get to those end goals. So instead of
sitting down and hashing out a plan, he essentially throws darts at a
dartboard to decide what he wants to implement next. This is a terrible way to
work, as most of the time we get 75% through a half baked implementation
before he changes his mind and we move on to a different task. Result: Nothing
gets done, and nothing to show for our work.

