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0 pointsIrregardless13y ago0 comments

> Do you require that local employees be physically visible at all times? What if they need to take a walk to clear their head and focus on the problem at hand? What if they need to go to the bathroom?

Yes, remote and physical team members must have a mobile webcam that they bring with them on all breaks. The webcam must have RFID tags built into it, and their homes and frequent break locations must be equipped with RFID scanners to verify the location of the camera and prevent any funny business. No exceptions, ever.

Also, when people ask questions they never EVER preface them with "Let me know when you have a second".

Seriously, are you in third grade? Can you read something and not interpret it literally? The Greek knew reduction to absurdity was a shitty argument more than 2,000 years ago... how come you still haven't figured it out?

From adrianhoward above:

> Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams, and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close proximity improves productivity in all cases." -- http://conway.isri.cmu.edu/~jdh/VRC-2008

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5 comments · 2 top-level

Yhippa13y ago· 3 in thread

I think after reading the tone of your response I can determine that I would have a difficult time working with this type of personality. As a developer interruptions are a huge productivity drag. I have to stop whatever I'm doing, answer your question, and figure out where I left off and get back into the right mode to program which can take a while.

Right now I have a few work-from-home days a week and I find I'm enormously productive on those days due to lack of interruptions. If the company cannot sacrifice face time and trust for higher developer productivity (even in the name of teambuilding) then I wouldn't want to work there.

IrregardlessOP13y ago

Like a few others who have responded, you're not seeing the forest through the trees. That's somewhat alarming for a group of people who are supposed to be creative problem solvers.

Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something. As a resource to the team, you hurt it's overall performance by making yourself less availble.

darkarmani13y ago

> Team productiviy > your individual productivity. It's that simple. Do you think your team members interrupt you just for the fun of it? No, they interrupt you because they need your help to accomplish something.

Team productivity is the sum of individual productivity though. Having all of the individual productivity disrupted is going to lead to lower team productivity.

I think Joel said it best 13 years ago: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000068.html

===

"Here's the simple algebra. Let's say (as the evidence seems to suggest) that if we interrupt a programmer, even for a minute, we're really blowing away 15 minutes of productivity. For this example, lets put two programmers, Jeff and Mutt, in open cubicles next to each other in a standard Dilbert veal-fattening farm. Mutt can't remember the name of the Unicode version of the strcpy function. He could look it up, which takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which takes 15 seconds. Since he's sitting right next to Jeff, he asks Jeff. Jeff gets distracted and loses 15 minutes of productivity (to save Mutt 15 seconds).

Now let's move them into separate offices with walls and doors. Now when Mutt can't remember the name of that function, he could look it up, which still takes 30 seconds, or he could ask Jeff, which now takes 45 seconds and involves standing up (not an easy task given the average physical fitness of programmers!). So he looks it up. So now Mutt loses 30 seconds of productivity, but we save 15 minutes for Jeff. "

2 more replies

MortenK13y ago

Are we really talking about "the team" here, or are we talking about a PM who interrupts developers multiple times during a day, in order to re-prioritize tasks, get status reports, etc?

crazygringo13y ago

I completely agree. Dealing with remote team members has always been difficult with teams I've been on, and I would guess they have been only half as productive.

This isn't through any fault of their own, but they just can't be "in the loop" as much. Most communication takes way too long to type out in e-mail or IM, so you need to get them on the phone -- but calling and getting transferred, and then they're not at their desk, etc., is just too much of a pain. There's a HUGE difference between waiting until you see that someone is at their desk, and repeatedly remembering to keep trying to call them -- or sending them an e-mail to call you, and then you're out.

They can't see when someone on your team is having a little difficulty and instantly help out, turning someone's hour task into 5 min. They're not involved in the informal meetings behind someone's screen where a feature is changed slightly. They're just missing out on a lot of "informal" information that is crucial for productive development.

And even over the phone, I find it's much more difficult to explain things and make sure they're understood crystal-clear. Sometimes you need to see the understanding in their face. Sometimes you need to draw, sometimes you need visual aids, sometimes you need to pull up a web page, but it's too much work to pull up videoconferencing or something.

In the end, all these problems are "technically" surmountable, sure, but I've never seen it work. Maybe remote work would be fine in a waterfall-type development model, but with modern-day "agile" development, it just doesn't work as well for collaborative teams.

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