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Best Seating Arrangement For a Team of Developers?
TekNullOG writes "I was given the job to prepare the logistics involved with moving our office. At the same time my bosses asked me to look into buying new desks for a small team of four developers and to consider if it could benefit the team to sit at a round table. In many offices and departments it increases productivity and makes collaboration easy. However, I am concerned that putting developers around a table could potentially be distracting consequently diminishing productivity by increasing coding errors. What are your thoughts?"
I bet your programmers would be most efficient with a laptop on the beach, I bet they would even volunteer to work late.
The best arrangement is to lay them out as a fractal a la Sierpinski carpet. Produces a decent tight packing and ensures that you are able to maximize your space. Other options that came to mind are if you have curved desks you could arrange them in a 69 fashion. Or get desks of different dimensions... some square, some straight, a few L-shaped ones. Then you could make the developers arrange their desks daily in a game of office Tetris.
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The NORAD Command Center in "War Games" was always a favorite of mine, but Starfleet(tm) Bridge or Engineering could be fun too. Folks could have uniforms of differently colored company polo shirts.
A generic command post with visitor theater above it might be intriguing.
Replicating part of the cubical farm in The Matrix could just be an interesting "after-work" team-building project.
Whee!
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
Wow, talk about having an appropriate username. What happens when you hit 20?
Use a staged plan:
Week 1: Set each developer across from a failed 80s comedian. Yakov Smirnoff, Carrottop, Gilbert Gottfried.
Week 2: Remove the comedian.
Note that regardless of your seating arrangement, you'll get an unimaginable boost in productivity during week two.
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Fuck your bosses.
Well, that's one way to get ahead....
My desk also happens to be right next to the break room where people religiously burn popcorn, microwave fish,
There could be another reason for that: http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-02/
That's easy, the best seating arrangement is in a ring around my desk with their backs turned towards me so I can watch their monitors, at all times, and make sure they aren't doing anything other than coding. The best seats are backless stools with only one or two legs so they can't relax/loose focus without falling over.
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Fuck your bosses.
Well, that's one way to get ahead....
Well, that's one way for your boss to get head...
not if other people are in the room
We're the developers of the round table
we code when we're able
we eat pizza with cheese
work when we please
and we don't act real stable
on second thought...this is a silly post. Let's not go there.
blah blah blah
It was a second story window, so I wasn't so scared of getting my back stabbed :-)
I'm far more worried about my boss doing the back-stabbing than a stranger through a window.
John
In Soviet Russia, comedian removes you!
You brought that on yourself.
Depends on the size of the company, in my experience. The bigger the corp, the higher the chance that they mostly hire bums that try their best to just goof off instead of doing any sensible work.
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Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
Yeah, but my boss is a ninja.
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