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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?"
Why do you need 3 html/css? I'm always so curious why business would hire people specifically for this task. What kind of salary are they paid? What kind of tasks do they do? This is the kind of thing I learned similarly to the way I learned to use a word processor. It just kind of happened. If you have to think about this stuff...god help you.
... this is flame bait:
Who cares? They're programmers. They are to the information era what those rows of Chinese women hunched over sewing machines are to the industrial one. You're not going to magically improve the quality of code, or substantially increase productivity, by rearranging their seats. An unhappy programmer working 9 to 5 and constantly afraid of losing his job is still going to produce code. Code that is almost certainly good enough for your purposes.
If these were artists or mathematicians, yes, environment would matter. But they are not. The romantic notion of the brilliant code hacker is an anachronism, and it has been for a while. You need to understand that you are not running a creativity studio. You are running an assembly line. If you employ someone that writes beautiful, profound code, you need to fire their ass immediately, and replace them with a workhorse who can read the specs and implement them with the same level of passion as a mechanic swapping out an alternator.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
Eliminating the ability for developers to take mental breaks is a great way to just piss people off.
You need mental breaks, true. Stand up every 60 minutes. Go for a 5 minute walk.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.