>whereas organizations want to get a bunch of people working at a group optimum.
It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal.
The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics.
>what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time.
I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity.
No sane manager is going to want to do that without a really good reason.
>programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication
That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small, relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise.
The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work without constant supervision.
It's a management issue, not a programmer issue.
I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to become the new outsourcing. Because cheap.
But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US.
If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere?
Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is essential to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet?
Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.
Pretty much nothing you've written here refutes what I'm saying. You're a programmer, so naturally, you assume that your optimal use is programming, and you draw conclusions starting from that assumption. But if you moderate that assumption a bit (you're also well-used as a planner, an organizer and as a communicator, among other things), you arrive at a different set of conclusions.
"The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality"
No, that's just cynicism talking. Larger organizations care about your personal productivity, but they care less than small organizations.
Part of the brilliance of modern corporations is that you don't always have to be at peak productivity as an individual in order for the company to profit. Which means, in turn, that you can do things like get sick or have a family without having to give up your job. The flip side of feeling less efficient is that you have some cushion when you actually are less efficient.
"I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity."
You obviously don't want to interrupt someone gratuitously, but the point is that your perspective on what's important can differ wildly from your employer's perspective. Keeping someone in "The Zone" is not the only goal. An employee in "The Zone" who is churning out "The Wrong Thing" is worse than no employee at all. So you need communication. And as soon as you need communication overhead, people are going to be interrupted. It's a cost of doing business.
The 5% thing in the original article doesn't add up for me at all. The top 5% of the programmers that I have come across are able to do things that the typical YC company doesn't need at all. He talks about someone who would hire 30 of them if they could. Really? What kind of team would that be? Could you keep them motivated doing all the bits and pieces a startup needs to do? Maybe they are building a new OS. (I doubt it)
It sounds a bit like people shooting the shit about great footballers or something where you up the ante to large it up ;)
It's an exceptional and rare organisation where this is even remotely realistic as a goal.
The appearance of productivity is usually far more important than the reality - especially in mid/late corporations, where the most significant outputs are primate status plays and politics.
>what you see as interruption might be, from the context of the company you work for, be the most globally productive use of your time.
I think Joel Spolsky covered this neatly somewhere. If you kick a programmer out of The Zone with a distraction, you can lose whole hours of useful productivity.
No sane manager is going to want to do that without a really good reason.
>programmers nearly always err on the side of too little communication
That's because programmers like to be left in peace to work on small, relatively well-defined problems. Communication can be limited to progress and code reviews and goal-setting by team leaders. Everything else is noise.
The real problem with remote working is that too few corps understand it, and too many managers believe employees aren't functional adults who can work without constant supervision.
It's a management issue, not a programmer issue.
I think at some point we're going to see some faddy Harvard Review type write a faddy Harvard Review type book about remote, and it's suddenly going to become the new outsourcing. Because cheap.
But meanwhile - Paul Graham's problem is that he has a nostalgic hankering for a vision of SV and start-up culture that's already well on its way to being disrupted by the global talent he wants to move to the US.
If you're a world-class five percenter, why on earth would you want to move somewhere with insane living expenses and in-bred VC culture of the Valley when you can bootstrap and innovate around it elsewhere?
Does he really believe all that funding and schmoozing and presentation is essential to getting a business up and running on a planet with an Internet?
Graham maybe needs to consider the possibility that those five percenters aren't his future employees - they're his future direct competitors.