«I would love to say the company has no meetings. The truth is that the company has a few meetings. As a general rule, we try to keep meetings minimized in content and duration. We hope to create an environment in our office where people can spend the vast majority of their time writing code, fixing bugs, and building a better product. Much of this developed organically as part of the culture and company that we have built. It also grew from deliberate steps that we took to keep our work environment quiet and high functioning. Personally, I like our work environment a LOT but some people might find the quiet environment a little unnerving at first. 🙂» – Brian Acton of WhatsApp ¹
Reed praises WhatsApp’s internal “no-meeting culture,” which strives (but doesn’t always achieve, he readily admits) to eliminate meetings entirely. Instead, WhatsApp staffers would rather use “various chat programs” to talk to each other constantly, within small project groups. – on Rick Reed of WhatsApp ²
Buffet says that “the best way to think about investments is to be in a room with no one else and just think, and if that doesn’t work nothing else is going to work.” Buffet believes in an uncluttered mind. He continues by saying, “the disadvantage of being in any kind of a market type environment – and Wall Street would be the extreme – is that you get overstimulated. You think you have to do something everyday.” For Buffet, good investing is made in a silent environment, free of clutter. – on Warren Buffet ³
«Open space is fun but not productive. Last summer, the Project Aardvark interns were all in a big open space. The net result was that there was no such thing as a conversation between two people. Every time I went out there to talk to one of them, it became a conversation with all of them; every time two people had to talk, instead of going off to a quiet space somewhere, they just spoke directly to each other, interrupting the other two’s concentration. Although this slightly helps keep everyone “in the loop,” it also knocks programmers out of flow causing them to lose their concentration and devastating productivity, so I prefer to keep people in the loop using more formal methods, like weekly email status reports, and through informal methods like eating lunch together every day, which is why we have free catered lunches and a really big table.» – Joel on Software ⁴
#Work