Office Space
The most recent series that Joel has going on about hiring and whatnot has got me thinking about offices vs. cubes vs. open spaces for your teams.
He is of the opinion that private offices are the way to go as far as developer productivity, and I agree, I would love to have a private office so that I can listen to my music without headphones (we have cubes here at Magenic).
Adam has talked about the new office spaces that some teams are going to be experimenting with at Microsoft. If teams are so inclined, they can have an open, communal area for development. The thinking is that open spaces fosters better communication between team members. The downside is then you are interrupted by everything that happens in the area, someone else having a phone conversation, for instance.
It seems that the best work area for each developer is based on personal preferences, not some study that shows ‘x’ percent of developers work better in open spaces vs offices or vice versa. Even IF one or the other is statistically better, that still means there is a percentage of developers who stray from the mean and are more productive in the ‘worse’ environment.
The problem is then, when you have a team of developers, how do you decide which environment is best? If 8 out of 10 people want an open space, but 2 people want private offices, what do you do? If you put those 2 people in an open space with everyone else and their productivity is hurt, thats not good. But if you force everyone into their own office, the other 8 might lose their productivity as well. And you certainly can’t split the group and have 8 people in the open area and 2 people in offices.
Basically, forcing people into an environment that hinders their productivity sucks. I’m not sure of the best way to mitigate this either, it almost seems like you have to pick an environment and then hire people that work best there. I’m not saying you can’t adapt, the cube walls at Magenic are shorter than my previous company and I didn’t like them at first, but I don’t mind them as much anymore, so it’s possible to get used to an environment. But the bigger the change, the harder and longer that adaptation will take.
