Mort wrote:
I'm in the software industry in an engineering role, and I used to think this was a good way to go. Why has that point of view changed? Agile & "DevOps". There is a movement towards being increasingly and constantly social in the way that we work. Private workspaces have all but disappeared. You might spend more than a full day every week in ritual meetings now, not just as an attendee, but as an active participant. Lively debate is encouraged, but the NT idea of lively debate can be an invitation for trouble. After over 20 years in the business, I find myself desperately wondering "what's next".
The more I hear stories like this, the more I'm glad I've stuff with the type of work teams I have. Doing development pretty much by myself, occasionally working with one or two other people, but, they're people I've known for years and are close to me in age and interests. Granted, I'm not a full-time developer, I'm a system administrator, but, I was pretty picky about the type of role I walked into. I didn't want to get myself into an environment where I couldn't stay.
I agree with seeing people moving to more and more collaborative environments. I support the team that does renovations and planning for these things in my company and I just groan inside as I hear them talk about it.
Granted our group doesn't collaborate as much as other departments in our money-making side do... we're all running our own projects and negotiating on the phone etc, so I don't see us doing much more in the way of setup changes in our area.