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

[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).

[agoodwinsmith]

When the management team that promotes open office to its peons also adopts open office for itself, I'll take it seriously.

[andrewducker]

To be fair our top-level management do have an open plan office.

But it's about a quarter of the population density of the area I work in.

[agoodwinsmith]

Fair enough. It just seems like non-stop meeting, though. Meetings are good for deciding, but not much good for doing.

[andrewducker]

At that level meetings _are_ doing. But yeah, at my level most of what I do needs concentration and quiet.