You want to talk to someone? Nobody is stopping people from gathering in conference rooms or offices or hallways.
Open floor plans? We have one in my building, and you see their people constantly having to get up and walk away to take phone calls. The next step of the open floor plan idea that is being considered at my office is hoteling, where you don't even have your own desk -- you have a locker, and each day you arrive to work begins with the adventure of picking up your desk supplies, dragging them over to your desk and setting up, and then setting down each night. That's just great. As if the soul-sucking inhumanity of slaving away as a keyboard jockey (no matter whether you are programming, or SysAdmining or "DevOpsing" (whatever THAT means)) wasn't enough, now you can't even soften the hard edges of your work environment with a little customization. Nope, you'll have to carry those family photos back and forth every day. Think this is great for "managing by walking around" or "monitoring" of employees? What if you can't find them because you have no idea where they are sitting? And since when is everything better when done as a team? Some people do their best work when solo - let's meet in a conference room, collaborate, and then let me retreat to my cave where I can really get some work done. Oh yes, collaboration... watching someone else hunting-and-pecking their way through an SOP draft in real-time on a projector. Nothing else can drive me to want to gnaw off my own arm as quickly as watching other people type. Things are getting ridiculous. Mike On Thu, Jul 2, 2015 at 1:26 PM, Florian Heigl <florian.he...@gmail.com> wrote: > We worked with around 15 people in a large office for around 9 years. > > > On 01.07.2015, at 10:26, David Lang <da...@lang.hm> wrote: > > > > On Tue, 30 Jun 2015, Stephen Potter wrote: > > > >> There are several thought factors at play with open floor plans. They > may or may not be fully valid, but they are why some people like them. > >> > >> Open floor plans increase interpersonal interaction. The ability for > anyone to be able to provide input into anything is "good". Collaboration, > crowd sourcing, open source development, DevOps all benefit when more > people are involved. If you throw everyone into a room where they can see > and hear everything, you get the best ideas from everyone and quality or > productivity must improve. > > ++ for that. > It was the best enviromnet ops-wise I have ever seen. > Many “findings” presented in recent talks about team org, monitoring, root > cause analysis are just amusing since this was stuff we happily practiced > in our “Corp IT”, “Non-Devops” team for years. > > Easily < 1 Minute Reaction times during multiple outages > quick assignment and reorganization > avoiding duplicate work / unclear responsibilities > one-step handovers / escalations can be incredibly quick as an Ops team in > an open floor env > Also, peer review was just a absolutely normal practice and incredibly > easy. > > Conf calls were not needed because we were in the same place. > > > until you have 90% of people wearing headphones to cut out/drown out the > chatter. > > Actually we only had 10% of headphone people. > They happened to be the same that later damaged the team beyond repair. > I’ll go as far as saying that they were not “fit” to interact with other > people. > > Yes, I also had headphones at times, to concentrate, to not hurt my ears > in the datacenter etc. > But besides that - > no I don’t think at all that it’s all logical to prefer an environment > where you don’t hear the people you work with. > > The one exception was the SAN admins who needed the interruption free work > env to concentrate during their rather dangerous tasks. > They had an adjacent room and could switch desks. > > But in general: > Put up dashboards and tickers and hipchat all you want - human interaction > with mouths and ears is far better. > Even if you might get hit by a paper flyer at times. > > Florian > > _______________________________________________ > Discuss mailing list > Discuss@lists.lopsa.org > https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss > This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators > http://lopsa.org/ >
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