University students conduct most of their work in libraries, drawn in by the lack of distractions the environment provides. There’s often a feeling of solidarity that develops between participants, making the system work with little outside guidance or control.
Offices should be more like…
Interesting argument. Though there are couple major assumptions that I think work against this idea.
- Students dont have offices: You’re assuming students have selected the optimal work environment out of many options, but students don’t have many options. In particular, they don’t have offices (unless they’re grad students, and in my experience most grad students choose their offices over the libraries). For most undergrads it seems the library is simply the best of the bad.
- Students primarily work as individuals. Companies primarily work as teams: This is the big difference: In school it’s all about *you*: your learning, your grades, you as an individual. Rarely do you actually have to collaborate and when you do people book out the group rooms in the library so that they can make noise. Conversely, a company is all about the team. Everything is collaboration, everything is group work. And having an effective teams is all about communication - all the distractions and interruptions you pointed to are really just forms of communication. In teams, communication trumps individual nose-grinding, and so in companies open, communicative workspaces trump library-like silenced halls of study.
The only downside of communicative spaces in companies is the multicast/broadcast nature of most real life notifications. The value of communication goes to zero when that communication is irrelevant to you. E.g. If dev A, B, and C are working side-by-side and A talks to B about something unrelated to C, both A and B are benefitting from the communication but C is only losing focus. If instead of only C, there were 8 other people working in the same room, clearly this is a net loss.
Here’s my solution: Small, open, work rooms of close teams. Only people in the room are people working very closely together. Team-to-Team communication is through IM/other mediated protocols.
