Page 38 - The Art of Designing Embedded Systems

Disciplined Development 25

1st quartile 4th quartile
Dedicated workspace 78 sq ft 46 sq ft
Is it quiet? 57% yes 29% yes
Is it private? 62% yes 19% yes
Can you turn off phone? 52% yes 10% yes

Can you divert your calls? 76% yes 19% yes
Frequent interruptions? 38% yes 76% yes

Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear data show-
ing how ineffective they are. It’s bad enough that there’s no door and no
privacy. Worse is when we’re subjected to the phone calls of all of our
neighbors. We hear the whispered agony as the poor sod in the cube next
door wrestles with divorce. We try to focus on our work. . . but because
we’re human, the pathos of the drama grabs our attention till we’re strain-
ing to hear the latest development. Is this an efficient use of an expensive
person’s time?

One correspondent told of working for a Fortune 500 company
when heavy hiring led to a shortage of cubicles for incoming pro-
grammers. One was assigned a manager’s office, complete with
window. Everyone congratulated him on his luck. Shortly a mainte-
nance worker appeared-and boarded up the window. The office po-
lice considered a window to be a luxury reserved for management,
not engineers.
Dysfunctional? You bet.

Various studies show that after an interruption it takes, on average,
around 15 minutes to resume a “state of flow”-where you’re once again
deeply immersed in the problem at hand. Thus, if you are interrupted by
colleagues or the phone three or four times an hour, you cannot get any
creative work done! This implies that it’s impossible to do support and de-
velopment concurrently.
Yet the cube police will rarely listen to data and reason. They’ve in-
vested in the cubes, and they’ve made a decision, by God! The cubicles are
here to stay!
This is a case where we can only wage a defensive action. Try to ed-
ucate your boss, but resign yourself to failure. In the meantime, take some
action to minimize the downside of the environment. Here are a few ideas: