Interesting Links for 29-06-2016

[andrewducker]

AI fighter pilot wins in combat simulation (tags: ai airplanes war military ) Who governs Britain? This is the UK's new 10-party system (tags: politics europe uk ) Majority of new Labour members support deselecting MPs who undermine Jeremy Corbyn (tags: labour politics uk ) Jeremy Corbyn loses 'no confidence' vote among Labour MPs by 172 to 40

Comments

[alextfish]

Our company deliberately sticks with open plan offices because it's easy to overhear conversations between others in your team, and thus easy to chip in when you have something relevant to add even if those others might not have thought to include you.

When we need to ask someone a question, you can just glance around the office to see which of the relevant people are at their desks (and not in conversation with someone else).

I also find it pretty companionable (though it helps that I get on well with the other 3 clustered directly around me). When I get a silly email or read a colleague saying something ridiculous, I can catch someone's eye and sardonically quote it, have a 30-second conversation about it, then all of us get on with our work again.

And we do have IM, email, phone etc for contacting our American colleagues; but nonetheless, I feel much closer to people here in the UK office, pretty much because of these kind of quick in-person interactions. Some of them happen around the coffee machine or at lunch, but a lot of them are around our desks.

[andrewducker]

I'm in an office with about 150 people. I'm not convinced the model you're talking about scales well to that much background noise.

[alextfish]

Hmm, yes, perhaps. We do have 150 people here but spread across 4 floors, and I can only hear people on my half of this floor (each floor is split in half by a kitchen). So I only overhear conversations by the about 40 people closest to me, which is deliberately people who're in my team or vaguely related teams (and thus whose conversations are most relevant to me).