"There’s a popular theory that people are most productive when they all sit together in big echoey rooms at communal tables with no dividers between workspaces. I think that’s horseshit. The only people who are “productive” in those settings, in my experience, are the type of management people who feel compelled to come over and interrupt you in person rather than send you a fucking email you can look at once you’re done tracking down a bug six levels of callbacks deep. "
yes, a thousand times
I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.
It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.
While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.
Inversely, I think it's up to each one of us to communicate how we should be interrupted when we're busy. If we don't say "headphones means send me an email" then our co-workers don't know that we're in heads-down-mode and they'll keep walking over.
That's all fine and good, but the types of management that Garann is talking about in this article aren't your "co-workers". They'll interrupt you whenever they feel like it because you belong to them.
Its more common then you think, and not everyone can afford to leave their job for something as relatively insignificant as this - i.e. its annoying but its tolerable and the bills gotta get paid
In my experience, face time is very important in an organization and it's not just about productivity. It's very hard to effectively motivate people and align the company's vision if half of your employees aren't even there.
I hear this a lot and am starting to wonder if they teach that in business school?
You don't motivate people by "aligning them with the company vision". That only leads to these embarrassing company events where the 3 stakeholders gush over their "mission statement" for 45 minutes straight while 3/4 of the attendants really only wait for the free pizza to arrive...
You motivate people by treating them like adults, paying them well, and by minimizing the amount of bullshit in their workflow.
Fundamentally I don't think you can motivate people. We may actually be saying similar things, but I think you can only really demotivate them by treating them in a psychotic, demeaning or inhumane ways. Motivation on the other hand is is an emergent, instrinsic human quality that can only be killed, not created. "Not killing it" as you say is largely a question of people actually contributing to work that they find worthwhile and having their contributions respected by the company. But there are some folks who would never be motivated, as they simply do not have that quality within themselves.
I think it's possible to motivate people by providing positive feedback. Suppose you work on a web app, and have 1k signups on the day you go live, and 2k on the next day. Wouldn't that increase motivitation?
I surely enjoy watching the visitor stats of a new website, and feel more motivated when they are rising quickly.
Yes, you can't motivatve everybody for everything, but I do think it's possible to achieve something with positive feedback.
There are classes for that in business school, such as orgazinational behaviour and leadership, but like most of academic learning, you learn to pass a test, not on how well its applied in the real world
And how do you make sure these super-productive adults with their optimized workflows are, you know, actually working on the right thing?
It's easy to naysay "all that traditional biz school bullshit" until it's your job to make 10 top-notch programmers who are each convinced they are great architects to all write code that somebody else is going to pay for.
until it's your job to make 10 top-notch programmers who are each convinced they are great architects to all write code that somebody else is going to pay for.
That makes no sense. That isn't your job, it's your CTO's job.
a lot of people here would probably tell you that if you need face time to motivate people and you are the kind of person who unironically says "align the company's vision", you're probably screwed anyway.
I don't know if I personally would go that far, but I can say that after five years of working in an office, exciting ideas communicated succinctly transcend the medium. if you tell your people good things, you can use IRC, twitter, quill and parchment, or smoke signals. it won't matter. they'll be motivated.
It is a manner of balance. There are people that work better with lots of face time, need to discuss problems, etc. There are other people that can do amazing things when they go off the reservation for a while (could be a day or two, could be a week). Problem is, any team is going to be a mixture of these and, generally, most management will insist on having the final say.
In my experience, a good team (with a supportive manager) will find the best equilibrium for getting things done. The team (in concert with the manager and product needs) will understand when people need to work together and when those that need quiet time can go off and do what they need. At the same time, a good isolationist (or a mediocre one, properly managed) will know when it is important to come together and integrate/deliver.
A company (and management) that insists on rigid facetime and all hands on deck, all the time, don't know how to manage projects. I learned late in my career that one really does need to look for signs if a manager is going to be hyper-controlling and if that is a situation you want to be in. Sometimes it is hard, we get worked up in the focus of wanting to succeed and deliver at the expense of our own time and work/life balance.
it's definitely true. but I'm pretty convinced that the most legitimate considerations are ones born out of physical necessity.
are you doing archaeological excavation? studying wildlife in a forest? need to do everything in magical shielded rooms with no internet connection "for security purposes"? okay, I probably need to be there for that.
oh, you're writing software? for the web? yeah, I can do that anywhere, thanks...
If you are not at the office what differentiates you from someone in china/russia/india/europe? Why should you be paid 150k/yr for something when people who are also not present would do the same thing for 30k/yr? There are people who speak english in other places than Canada/USA/UK...
the quality of my work, both in terms of the product (code, papers) and the experience of working with me (communication, cultural fit, etc)?
just because you have remote people or even just because your entire workforce is remote, doesn't mean that cultural fit isn't important! culture is about way more than how your food smells while you're microwaving it ...
Culture in the USA is not that different from the UK/Ireland/other 1st world English speaking countries. So you have a $109k/year position in SF and a $61k/year position in Dublin. Microsoft figured this out years ago.
>when people who are also not present would do the same thing for 30k/yr?
Because the people who are as good as I am also cost 150k/yr. Salary depends on market value, not what it costs you to live. Just because a rockstar in India can live on 30k/yr doesn't mean he will when he can get more.
That to be blunt is bollocks a co located team where you can both sit together at the same screen and say right mr customer exactly what do you mean by X is far better than some remote developer 500 miles away in a different time zone.
If the kind of people who get paid $150K to write software are having trouble getting motivated, maybe you made a mistake in hiring them, or at least paying them $150K.
I'm surprised it's only 15%. But really, nearly all big companies don't care about this at all. If they need something fast they'll buy it. Everything internal is just about cost, consistency, and predictability.
yes, a thousand times
I realize that we have large variance in both what people work on and how people work on things, but with my personality and most of the work I've done over the past several years, I need a quiet place with no disturbances to get my head wrapped deeply around what I'm working on.
It's amazing how management will spin any little thing to gain control over the workplace.
While I'm ranting, if any managers/other people designing spaces are listening, use soft/indirect lighting. Overhead fluorescent lights that I can't turn off are the devil.