Make Data Not Look Like Data - <AUTHOR> http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/Make_Data_Not_Look_Like_Data <comment><USER2> This is why it's important to have good UED (user experience design) people.

It can be very frustrating for a programmers to work with them because they just don't seem to care how hard it is to create some design they've come up with. They keep warbling on about some people called "users", who are the most important apparently... funny that.

</comment><comment><USER3> Short, and very very good. Those diagrams will definitely stick with me.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is the opposite of the problem.

For any non-trivial application, the user needs to understand the data model they are working with. They don't need to know the gritty details of how things are encoded and enumerated, but they do need to be aware of the entities and their relationships. This is true for _any_ kind of user, savvy or not.

Deep usability problems happen when the application omits, hides or distorts aspects of the model that the user is manipulating. For example:

\- inline formatting codes in word processors

\- fake folders in filesystems e.g. My Documents

\- "apply" button in dialogs

\- wizards

Design should start with the user model, then create the user interface to manipulate it. The internal model can be different from the user model but they should have a one-to-one mapping.

<comment><USER5> Perhaps they should have a well-defined mapping. Why should one-to-one be helpful?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bad screenshot. It blends into the article so I thought it was about him & ignored it. It took a while to find wtf he was talking about in the dzone article.</comment>


Ask HN: Is GWT/Google Web Toolkit still being used today? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Technically, yes - looking at the GWT Google Group, there's evidence of people still using it. I'd assume it's mostly in internal/enterprise scenarios.

As far as public mindshare, though, it's dead. It's Java, it compiles slowly, the old DevMode plugin stopped working as of FF27, and the Javascript ecosystem has advanced far beyond what GWT could do in terms of developer experience and sharing code across client+server.

Also, the discussion of "GWT 3.0" and the J2CL compiler seemed to add a lot of FUD to the community. It hasn't been clear what GWT features would still exist in a notional 3.0, and J2CL was stuck behind Google's walls until just a couple weeks ago.

</comment><comment><USER3> According to [https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Google-Web- Toolkit](https://trends.builtwith.com/framework/Google-Web-Toolkit) ~43K sites use it.

</comment><comment><USER4> RStudio uses it.</comment>


Lastpass' Certificate is invalid - <AUTHOR> http://imgur.com/i9lHTOF

<comment><USER2> Which page did you get that on? The cert on [https://lastpass.com/](https://lastpass.com/) looks valid to me.

<comment><AUTHOR> tried to go to their homepage minutes before I uploaded the image and google gave me the warning</comment></comment>


Redditlet: a Bookmarklet that shows what Reddit says about anything on the web - <AUTHOR> http://redditlet.com

<comment><USER2> I've seen this before. I don't get what makes this different.

</comment><comment><USER3> nice... hours of fun to be had...</comment>


Commercial tool cracks Bitlocker (Used on Win7 and Vista Enterprise) - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/12/first-commercial-tool-cracks-bitlocker.ars

<comment><USER2> Misleading headline. All this tool does is suck the encryption keys out of the memory of a running system. Full disk encryption is only safe if attackers can't get to the running system.

</comment><comment><USER3> From a PC Mag article on the same tool:

"The technique is impressive and useful, but not all it may seem. First, it recovers the encryption keys from a physical memory dump file which must be generated separately with other software (for instance ManTech Physical Memory Dump Utility) requiring administrator access to the system."

That said, I would be surprised if Bitlocker didn't come with NSA approved "password recovery" mechanisms.

<comment><USER4> It's one thing to have systems for the NSA, it's another thing if Microsoft's "Windows 7 Ultimate" biggest feature is easily beatable by the public. Anyone smart enough to want to steal your data is smart enough to download this program off bittorrent.

BitLocker is nothing more than another annoyance to deter lazy thieves now :\

<comment><USER5> Anyone smart enough to want to secure his data should be using TrueCrypt: <http://www.truecrypt.org/>

<comment><USER4> "should" yes, but it doesn't take intelligence to want to encrypt your data, just paranoia.

Microsoft is selling Windows 7 Ultimate to people who are computer illiterate with the sales pitch that it will secure their data. These people would never hear about TrueCrypt. They only hear about computer solutions with hundred- million-dollar marketing campaigns.

Some of my customers are the totally computer illiterate types who only use Microsoft products. I had been selling these people Ultimate as a way to encrypt their shit. Now I can't really recommend it as protecting against industrial espionage. And they'll never use TrueCrypt, it's too user unfriendly.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Lessons from Research into Buttons - mighty-fine https://theconversation.com/i-studied-buttons-for-7-years-and-learned-these-5-lessons-about-how-and-why-people-push-them-110084 <comment><AUTHOR> Just this week had a meeting discussing strategies on how to reduce the number of duplicate leads on the CRM system. The meeting ended up with a discovery,that the lead capture form on the website submits multiple records if pressed too quickly. I couldn't count the number of meetings and discussion on lead gen we had.Knowing now that this button renders most of the stats on leads to rubbish,makes me quite sad...

<comment><USER2> We had a form that was really slow to go through; we couldn't do anything about speeding it up because of where the submission went so we added a little JavaScript to disable the button after the first press.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I'm not in charge of the website dev in the company, that was the very first thing thst came to my mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> Originally published at The Conversation, where you don't have to push a button to dismiss an ad to read the actual article.

[https://theconversation.com/i-studied-buttons-for-7-years- an...](https://theconversation.com/i-studied-buttons-for-7-years-and-learned- these-5-lessons-about-how-and-why-people-push-them-110084)

<comment><USER3> Ok, url changed to that from [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/02/04/five- lesso...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2019/02/04/five-lessons- about-pressing-buttons/). Thanks!</comment></comment>


The Open-office Trap - <AUTHOR> http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/the-open-office-trap.html <comment><USER5> Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - <USER2> doesn't love the suspense of arriving for an oversold airplane? Now you can have that at work every single day!

Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - <USER3> in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something.

We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard.

I wish I was joking.

<comment><USER6> _Hot desking is the new thing_

I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge.

It was interesting to see and a little frightening. Right off the bat the noise level would have turned me off. I asked how hard it was to hire and he said interviews are held in the room with him or another senior person pair coding with the candidate.

<comment><USER7> At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform.

The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the machine acted funny, it would wipe the hard disk and reinstall both OS' from a network image. The whole process was completely automatic and was done in 20 minutes.

So it was real hot desking, and it worked great. You sat at any computer, it became your computer. Way before Google started to talk about stateless computers and their chromebook.

<comment><USER8> We had this for meeting rooms at a previous job. It worked quite poorly, since it took a _long_ time to pull in your profile. Meeting runners learned to get to the thirty-minute meeting ten minutes early so that there was some hope of being able to use the computer for part of the meeting. Also, the Windows profiles we were using didn't include applications, so there was the fun of each person who needed, say, Skype, or Chrome, downloading it onto each computer that they hadn't previously used it on.

<comment><USER9> The university I went on used a similar setup, and pulling the profile took no time.

I don't know what's wrong with corporate enviroments, that Windows profiles take so long to roam. That seems to be true to all of them. Also, corporate IT has an extremely irrational aversion to simply installing the software on all the computers for once. Even when it's free software, or things that everybody uses. That also repeats everywhere.

<comment><USER10> I remember from the old days when I used to deal with this. It was most often a case of people putting a lot of big files on their Windows desktops.

Certain people refused to put their big files on the network share because they said it took to long to load and then complained that their roaming profiles took to long to load because they had those big files on their desktop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We've just moved into our first place where everyone has a private office. It's absolutely amazing! I had been complaining for years about open-plan offices [1], but I was actually surprised at just how much more productive it is to have a door that closes!

[1] [http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the- weak/](http://blog.circleci.com/silence-is-for-the-weak/)

<comment><USER12> I've personally had the opposite experience. I'm far more productive in a team environment. In video games my most product times are when an artist and/or designer and I sit together and work together. Even when we are not directly interacting with each other seeing stuff on each other's screens lets us see what each other is working on and communicate early and often.

I understand that some people in certain roles would do much better with no interruptions in a private office but it's not a one size fits all solution. If your work consists of something you can mostly do on your own that's certainly one case where private offices might be a win. If your work consists of lots of collaboration it seems less clear. At least to me.

I'll also note that at least for me I'm much happier around other people than isolated in a private office. I'm not saying I want to be an a 1960 bullpen but a room/area with 2 or 3 other coworkers I'm working on stuff with is my personal ideal.

<comment><USER13> Working alongside 2 or 3 other coworkers isn't really the same thing as an open-office though. At the moment I'm sitting in an office of approximately 30+ people. Working on my own in this environment is annoying. Working with my team (2-3 other people) is also annoying, as we can't speak without being overheard. And I'm sure when we're working as a team, and conversing a lot, we'll be annoying others who require some quiet.

A private office doesn't mean you have to work on your own, it just means you have the option to.

<comment><USER14> I am in an office of 4. It used to be an office of two, which was great - <USER4> productive time of my working life.

Even with just 4 of us, it means there is a good chance someone will be asked something, and regularly the head comes down to discuss stuff with one of us (often me). I can deal with it for the standard bug fix type work, but trying to learn something new is really difficult with constant interruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The office depicted in this article looks almost exactly like the office I used to work in before I moved to a smaller place a year ago. It was a nightmare for those who are sometimes loosely (and perhaps erroneously) categorized as type-A personalities:

I want to focus on one thing and do it as perfectly as possible before moving onto the next thing; I hate multitasking unless the situation calls for it; I have highly (and perhaps unnecessarily) attuned peripheral vision and hearing. The chatter was impossible to tune out -- especially design discussions taking place two workstations over. People who did 'soft' jobs kept suggesting that I listen to music to drown out the chatter without realizing that mine is not the sort of work that can be done while music is playing.

People walking about in the background behind my screen would distract me from the complicated problem displayed on it. It was difficult to have private chats with people -- the moment I asked to see someone in one of the glass cubicles, everyone (including the person called) would assume that person was in trouble.

My current office layout is very 'residential' \-- smaller rooms, wooden furniture, doors and windows, no sterile white partitions and ceilings etc. Needless to say, I haven't had any problems concentrating.

</comment><comment><USER16> What's funny is that I actually have no idea what a non-open office would look like. I've worked for 15 years and have never even walked in an office that wasn't open. How do you give each person an office without using like 5x the space as a cubicle farm? That's the real reason that companies like open offices - because they can jam a lot more people in the same space. Someone who is ok with a 6x6 cubicle would feel trapped in a 6x6 office.

<comment><USER17> The fully loaded cost of IT people is $50-75/hr.

I worked in office space in NYC a few years ago that was $80/sqft. 6x6 cube is $3k/year. Using your assumption that an office is 5x bigger (not sure if that's accurate or not), you're looking at around $15k/year for an office.

So the delta is $12k/year, equivalent to 160-240 hours/year or 8-16% of a salary. IMO, with many developers you'll regain productivity far in excess of that by shelling out for an office.

The reasons companies eschew offices has more to do with taxes and lack of giving a hoot than cost.

<comment><USER18> What do you mean by taxes?

<comment><USER17> Cubes and other modular arrangements are easy to quickly depreciate, which reduces taxes.

Buildouts and other capital expenses depreciate over longer periods.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting article. My favorite sentence is this though, "Open offices may seem better suited to younger workers, many of whom have been multitasking for the majority of their short careers."

Despite what I want to believe and what I have been told (all companies only want to hire multitaskers!), multitasking is neither productive nor really possible. You can really only do one project at a time.

<comment><USER20> What they call "multi-tasking" is actually an inability to stay focused on one task due to a combination of procrastination and sheer boredom. So if you keep switching between writing a sales report, reading incoming email and conversing with your neighbor, congratulations, you may not be getting anything done, but you are multi-tasking!

<comment><USER19> I am an expert multi-tasker!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Open-offices are downright dangerous. We had an Indian colleague who had tuberculoses. After it was diagnosed, every employee had to get an examination. One colleague got infected. Worst of all, the management handled the matter rather unserious and kept jamming everyone in the same office (including the infected colleague!) Gladly, I worked remotely for that company.

<comment><USER22> Why is it relevant that he is Indian?

<comment><USER21> You're right, it's not relevant at all, it may only evoke bad sentiments. I'll edit it.

Edit: forgot I can't edit it -.-

Remembered why it was relevant: Since tuberculoses is still a problem in India, they already assumed that he may have tuberculoses before the diagnosis (he was coughing heavily and had signs of an ulcer). But not only did they keep him working, he was still in a tightly packed office with all the others.

<comment><USER22> On second thought, this should have been obvious! Sorry for the snark, and I'm glad that you followed up with this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am thoroughly disillusioned with open offices. Headphones are a paper-thin barrier against being interrupted while in the midst of thinking; a good, solid, closed door might do the job better.

<comment><USER24> there is also this small minority that can't stand headphones, especially if there's any sound coming out of them. being part of such a minority in an open space environment in one of my previous jobs wasn't fun. at all. what did i do when i needed to concentrate? just schedule a meeting with myself and use the meeting room for work when i need concentration. or just do the easy things and avoid complicated stuff. it's the bug count they cared about, not the essence. then only good thing about that is that I would return home mentally fresh, and could concentrated very well on my personal projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Open-plan offices are a cost-effective panopticon: cheap, effective way to ensure that not only the boss, but other co-workers are aware of where you are and -- more or less -- what you're doing. The "other co-workers" bit is crucial because even if the boss can't find Dave himself he can ask anyone in the space "hey, have you seen Dave" and be led to a meaningful answer.

Companies will get rid of open-plan offices when they stop being such gift- wrapped boons to middle management, and not a second before. If you don't like it, adjust or exercise your right to be fired. This is America.

<comment><USER26> First, the answer to "Hey, Have you seen Dave?" should be "In his cubicle/office". If a coworker (or worse yet, the boss) does not know this, then there is a different problem. But yes, it does work well for management- by-surveillance. Whether that's a good thing is yet another different problem.

Second, not all readers of HN are American. Nor do they subscribe to the same political/ethical/social beliefs. The article was about whether open offices are _productive_ or not, not whether we _should or should not_ have them.

<comment><USER27> There is tangentially a correct aspect to it, in that playing geolocation and SPOF games are non-productive so they fit well with an open office.

If you need to talk to Dave, first of all Dave being a SPOF is a bug or management failure to be worked around. Secondly geolocating Dave is almost certainly non-productive. If you need to converse with Dave you call/text his phone to maximize productivity.

This is an insightful observation about the core values of open office vs alternatives... an open office simply isn't interested in productive activity. Its interested in non-productive activity, which has been proven over and over in scientific studies.

Its unpleasant, perhaps even inhumane for a large segment of the population, and unproductive for everyone but in a cause and effect relationship the bug is in the core values of the organization, that productivity doesn't matter. Its not that they don't know its non-productive, its that they don't care that its non-productive.

Also note you can't fix that core value epic fail by merely generating a new, technically superior architectural fad. You merely end up with an organization that's non-productive that has really nice private offices.

In that way its kind of like a HOA... I don't want the weirdos and dirtbags to be hidden, I want to be able to glance at a companies office and tell instantly if they have screwed up values, so in a weird way I want failing companies to implement open offices, so I can identify them and avoid them.

<comment><USER28> > Its unpleasant, perhaps even inhumane for a large segment of the population, > and unproductive for everyone but in a cause and effect relationship the bug > is in the core values of the organization, that productivity doesn't matter. > Its not that they don't know its non-productive, its that they don't care > that its non-productive.

No the problem is that most management activity, including program management, project management and the like is fundamentally unproductive. People who don't know what they're doing (ie. middle managers, project managers and program managers) can't productively contribute to real efforts.

The problem is the people judging whether this is true or not are exactly those middle managers/project managers and program managers.

Once management infects a company, it always just keeps increasing in my experience. A European bank I worked at had 3 project/program managers or architects per developer. You were lucky to get 2 hours of actual work in on a day. They were actually working to expand, not the developer team, but the management team.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Can we stop pretending open offices are about anything more than spending a minimum on an office construction? Let's face it: it's much cheaper to convert an empty warehouse space into a office space than to buy or build a traditional one.

<comment><USER30> They're also for management or sales to walk potential clients through while waving a hand through the air like a magician opening a curtain, before they take the client back to their nice, quiet corner offices. Also interior design showcases for hipster cred.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is a dupe from January of this year. Here's the discussion from then: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7024488)

<comment><USER32> Even though I know it's a dupe, I'll upvote it every time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I can't believe we're still having this debate, how many years has it been?

You can't simply take a closed-office environment and just knock the walls down, pass out headphones and cram everyone in one room.

You need to change the work culture so that open offices work. You have to adapt things like pair programming and remove things like phones and email. Put everyone on a certain project at the same table. Switch partners out.

You can't have people who sit by themselves, don't communicate and don't work together in an open office environment. You're nuts if you think that's going to work.

<comment><USER34> I suspect a lot of the productivity we get from peer programming comes from the ability it gives us to focus better in a noisy environment.

I've found when working from home I'm significantly more productive on my own than two of us peer programming in the office.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> It's clear that both open and closed office plans have their advantages and disadvantages. Ditto hot desking.

I'm surprised that no hybrid solution to this problem exists, or at least one that's taken hold. The best solution we currently have seems to be giving everyone a private office and augmenting it with really good team collaboration software. In most cases however, this does not eliminate the need for direct human collaboration, which is partly why open office plans exist in the first place.

It seems you could accomplish a hybrid approach by somehow giving each employee the ability to toggle the privacy of their workspace on or off. How you would accomplish that remains an interesting question. Some ideas that come to mind:

a) Have two physical workspaces for the employee: one private, one open.

b) Some sort of _The Jetsons_ -esque enclosure around the workspace that can be toggled. Might use technologies such as electronic smart glass (for privacy) and/or active noise cancellation.

c) Have two floors and lifts under each desk. Want privacy? Just ascend or descend into it. It could even support hot desking on both floors, provided the proper visual cues and safety features existed. The cool part about this approach is it could in theory make moving your desk much easier.

d) In the future it could just be a matter of telling your standard ocular and cochlear implants to filter your peripheral vision and hearing accordingly.

Disclaimer: Some of these are admittedly crazy.

<comment><USER36> In "Peopleware", Tom de Marco tries to solve the problem, based on Christopher Alexander's observations:

[http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_13](http://javatroopers.com/Peopleware.html#Chapter_13)

Edit: see also the discussion at

[http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces](http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?PeoplewareOnSharedSpaces)

His first rule is that there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution :) but there are patterns :)

He does identify the need for all three of

\- a communal space

\- a semiprivate/team space ("war rooms", etc)

\- a private space

Also:

"Each team needs identifiable public and semiprivate space and each individual needs protected private space. "

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Anyone here _not_ ever work in an open-office since professional employment? I was going to say that I had never had an office, including my stints in food service and construction...and I had never even had a real cubicle, i.e. partitions where I _couldn 't_ see the person across from me.

But that's not true...I had about a year in the "dungeon" when I was moved to my newspaper's online multimedia team, in a windowless basement...by then I already had the habit of surfing the Internet, but I did manage to learn enough PHP and MySQL to build a crime-mapping site and do other data projects, and even do things like get Drupal working (which ended up not being very useful, but still, my first web framework).

<comment><USER38> Yes.

I threatened to quit if I didn't get moved out the main room with sales (fully expecting to actually have to quit, I was already half out the door).

Boss begrudgingly gave me an office, 3 months later he said it was one of the best idea's he ever had (he was a boss after all).

These days I work for myself (small consulting supported startup) so I have an office at work and an office at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> It is amazing, how a so old wisdom (I read it many years from now in a book called "Peopleware" from 1987! could be ignored so many decades (by people, who claim to be reasonable).

But it just seems that some ideas, because they are economical interesting, stick so much, that management people come up every 6 month with an other idea or excuse, why the dead horse must be ridden again (and not buried).

</comment><comment><USER40> Old news.

If work is boring, routine or extremely exhausting open spaces are great cause' you can talk to each other and lift each others spirits.

If work is any type of creative, where you need to concentrate, it's better to have your own space.

<comment><USER28> It makes management feel better if they can constantly spy on the people they employ because they have zero trust in them.

And of course this immediately leads to the situation that the workers are out to exploit the company merely to rebel against this situation. Or at least, that's the attitude it brings out in me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I have worked in cubes, private offices, shared offices, and open offices. For productivity and thinking, I found the physical barriers were proportional to the thinking. For communication, in any of these, company IM worked quite well most of the time, and when it failed, face to face worked out.

I strongly advocate for private or team-member-shared offices at any chance I get. It's just that much better.

</comment><comment><USER42> I work in such open office arrangement. The worse is when the two guys across your desk have their phones on a conference call on speaker phone and the echo of both come through as they speak, utterly distracting, I might as well just pack and go home.

</comment><comment> luka-birsa Couldn't agree more. Open offices, while fancy looking, sport apalling usability. After moving into ours we had super issues with the team adapting to the noises and layout. Things got better only after most of the people started using headphones.

Separate office with a closed door = productivity boon.

</comment><comment><USER43> Would love it if my company would get us each an office. We have the money for it. I feel like since we've expanded and I moved out of the 2 person office I shared with one of the front end devs (I'm back end) and into the 5 person back end space, my productivity has plummeted.

</comment><comment><USER44> Previously posted to HN: "Creativity is Not a Team Sport"

[http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ](http://fixyt.com/watch?v=QfMvqkrQkYQ)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494705](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7494705)

One of the best lectures I've seen on the topic.

 _[There 's] a very long and well-established literature in psychology that getting groups of people together is_ no way to _come up with ideas._ Creativity is not a team sport. _What you 're looking for is somebody's individual, intellectual trunk to make new connections and come up with something new._

 _Let 's imagine billions of neurons in my head communicating with stuff they've been talking about all their lives together: there's a high probability that occasionally they'll come up with something new. Let's now think of the line of communication that you and I have got between each other, which is impoverished, because we have to try and translate complex ideas into language, and how many times do you find you've got a good idea, it's almost in symbolic thought inside your head, and you really_ can't _articulate it to someone. And when you_ do, _they get the wrong idea, because really, language can 't encapsulate it until it's fully formed. There's no good evidence that I know of that these brainstorming sessions will come up with a solution or a new idea._

 _What they_ might _do is improve a little bit of team spirit, or show some of the people in the group, "well, if that's the best they can come up with then I'm doing OK". The idea that you can marshal creativity is an error. I'd go a little bit further than this: if there is somebody who's spending 80 hours a week running a creative team, I'd stop them right there and tell them "you don't_ run _a creative team, you_ allow _a creative team to run ". That would be the first thing I would jump on. People ask themselves "how do I make a team be creative?" You don't. You_ allow _a team to be creative._

(Emphasis in original.)

More: [http://redd.it/21qgiv](http://redd.it/21qgiv)

</comment><comment><USER45> I am ok with open-office if company provides paid sick leave. In Ireland there is at least one week every year, when 70% of company is at home with flu.

<comment><USER46> Would you really trade your health, physical and mentally for paid sick leave?

I rarely get sick, but then again we're seven people in one office and only one have kids ( kids makes a difference ). Mentally it's different story. I can't begin to count the number of days where I get home stressed out due to the noise of my co-workers and people going in an out of the room to talk to one of my colleagues.

Maybe I'm just special, but for me to completely focus and do my best work, I need an almost eerie silence. That's doesn't mix well with co-workers talking on the phone or a radio playing.

Open offices have been known to be a bad idea since Peopleware, but they are just so cheap to build.

<comment><USER45> People in open-space are more sick, paid sick leave ensures that employer is not passing his cost savings on me. Non-paid sick leave indicates dysfunctional company and lack of trust (at least in Europe). It is a principle.

Open-space was major reason (together with new born children) why I quit corporate world and started my own business two years ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is another interesting and good article, and I'm glad to see it getting (yet more) mainstream attention. But eventually, I think we should probably look at this as a solved problem and try to figure out what's going on upstream.

In other words, I'm completely convinced that open offices (and cubicle farms, where I work) are harmful. To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?

<comment><USER48> > To me, the more pressing question is: why are they still so common?

To quote a very cynical and jaded friend of mine, "It increases shareholder value".

Yes, studies show that open plan offices, especially badly-designed open plan offices, hurt knowledge worker productivity. The problem is, knowledge worker productivity is not expressed as a nice, neat number on a balance sheet. Facilities cost is. Thus, when a business gets into the mode of increasing profits by decreasing costs, all they see with respect to this topic is that office space expense. Cue the management bullshit stream about "collaboration", switch to open plans, and watch that number drop. The productivity drop tends to lag, however. Since many executive suites can't see forward past the next earnings report, or backwards past the previous, they see a nice increase in margins for a quarter or two, followed by a drop in revenue, schedule slips, or increasing costs in other areas caused by the open plan switch. They then move on to fixing this "new" problem, not realizing they caused it with their previous "fix".

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Do we have to have one or the other? Can an office have private/personal work spaces, and communal open social places that can sometimes host real work? I feel often that managers/owners feel they have to force one or the other on their staff, not considering that their people are probably very diverse, and seek differing models from individual to individual.

<comment><USER50> Inevitably there's a limited amount of floor space; somebody ends up on the wrong side. I'd say, why not have closed offices space entirely, and let the socializers wander from room to room?

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Burying this thread as a dupe: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+office+trap#!/story/forever/0...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+office+trap#!/story/forever/0/open%20office%20trap).

Once a story has had significant attention, reposts are treated as duplicates for about a year.

</comment><comment><USER52> At my last job I had a private office, my first. Now I work in the most open office I've had since leaving the Army - my office there was called "The Motor Pool"

I didn't find it as distracting as I thought - but I am someone who can tune out everything when watching TV.

I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.

<comment><USER30> >I miss being able to break wind somewhat discreetly though.

"What's more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain."

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> Open offices are awesome during a crisis. On the other hand, they really suck when you need to focus on a problem. They work well for young start-ups, as crises tend to be quite frequent, but as a company matures, I think they become more of a liability than an asset.

<comment><USER54> I find them awful in a crisis; generally there are a few people that can actually fix and work on the crisis and people start hovering behind them trying to drive from the back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I wonder how dependent all this is on culture and expectations.

I've spent my entire career in Japan, and have never _not_ worked in an open office. To my knowledge, non-open offices basically don't exist in Japan.

So is every Japanese company just leaving productivity lying on the floor by insisting on open offices? I wonder if there have been studies on switching to closed floor plans in Japan.

(Of course traditionally the cultural emphasis has been on consensus, not productivity, so there hasn't been a lot of impetus to experiment. Things are changing, however.)

<comment><USER39> It is simply a myth, that the Japanese make everything right. This myth arose, because of the success of their industries and the quality engineering movement they coined. But they just don't do everything right. They do of course some things right. How is, that they have stagnating industry for decades now. How is, that they produced Fukushima and showed, how a country can fail in letting one totally incompetent corporation mess everything up. (Fukushima was _not_ the first problem, this corporation produced -- but the bureaucrats did let them continue and problems where pushed under the carpet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Not sure what the definition of open-office is. In our office, we have gazillion cubicles (the classic valley office). No sound proofing. And people of a team don't sit near each other. This means that you can end up with sales guys around who are constantly on the call and meetings. What's worse is that they keep pitching the same lines over and over again and you have to listen to it. It makes you empathize about a sales person's job but you end up hating your job and never want to step into office.

<comment><USER57> Now imagine that but with no cubicle walls!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> There is definitely a need for better working environments.

This small table with a wool shell looks nice, and the idea could (with heavy modification) be used to create long benches of private working space where noise and visual distraction is reduced and people are not boxed into cubicles.

[http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/13088/gamfratesi...](http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/8/view/13088/gamfratesi- the-rewrite-desk.html)

<comment><USER59> I get a 404 on that link. Can you check it out? \---- Edit: found it [http://www.designboom.com/design/gamfratesi-the-rewrite- desk...](http://www.designboom.com/design/gamfratesi-the-rewrite-desk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Like anything taken to the extreme open offices are bad for you. I personally have worked in an open office and a semi-open office (where your team is in a part enclosure/room with a door). And I much prefer to have a semi-open office rather than a private office.

A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have with anyone. A semi-open office keeps it private on the team level.

<comment><USER61> > A private office for me would totally kill any social interaction I have > with anyone.

Perhaps a better working environment would allow your day to be spent more efficiently and leave you with spare time and energy to get an actual social life, instead of requiring your job to double as your social life and end up performing both functions badly?

<comment><USER14> You are likely to spend more than half of your time awake in your workplace. You might as well try to make it a pleasant place to be. And being sociable at work is hardly likely to exhaust you to the point of preventing an social life outside work.

<comment><USER62> Do workers prefer spending more than half of their awake time in their workplace in order to make more money, or do they simply not have enough bargaining power to negotiate for a shorter work day?

<comment><USER14> Its been discussed on this site that competition for remote work is fierce. That would suggest a lack of bargaining power.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I've already bought in to the notion that open arrangements may have short- comings.

But in the Bay Area circa 2014 what arrangements are being tried out and seeing advantages? Low cubes, high cubes, fully enclosed offices, bull pens, mini bull pens, periodic re-arrangement, unassigned?

<comment><USER14> bull pens? I assume this is the name of some office arrangement. It isn't very inspiring though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> The problem with the open-office / everybody in their own room / some mixture articles and proponents of various solutions is that they all seem to ignore the effect of calcification.

</comment><comment><USER65> I always wonder when i see reports like this at the amount of cherry picked data in the studies - and also the ability for the journalist to properly interpret it. The problem i have with this piece and so many others is that its just calls out a number of sometimes unrelated "problems", cites some studies with open offices and calls it a day. They fail to really come up with a strong conclusion or offer viable solutions.

As a designer working under an architect and having just completed an open office building for a 150+ employee financial firm[1] - i feel i have a pretty good handle on this subject. There a a couple key anecdotal design criteria that i'd like to address in relation to open offices that the report does not address.

Natural Light - Access to natural light

Artificial light - using the correct lighting for the task with the right output measured in lumens for the particular task.

Ventilation - Natural and sufficient HVAC Acoustics - Are proper acoustic absorbent materials being used.

Planning - has the space been thought out in a thorough way - is there a meaningful program to which the open office functions in both arrangement, flow and activities.

Psychology - Has there been effort to educate the staff about the new space and general systems in place to govern how it functions.

All of these points above can be easily planned for by hiring and adhering to the advice of design professionals like architects, electrical engineers, hydraulic engineers, acoustic consultants etc. Does this happen? In my experience - the answer is generally - no. Building offices and fitting thee out is an expensive exercise and time and time again i see clients willing to cut corners and forgo professional advice at the sake of saving a few thousand dollars. It may be that the ROI in terms of employee productivity could be significantly diminished due to a insignificant saving during the build phase.

I would agree in some respects that there are limitation to open office layouts - but that its due more to the ill-conceived notion that achieving an open office work environment is as easy throwing some workstation and humans into a cavernous space and expecting it to just work.

Moreover that is why indeed planners are moving away from open office and employing the newer philosophy of ABW (activity based working)[2].

[1][http://marklawlerarchitects.com.au/commercial/hunter- street-...](http://marklawlerarchitects.com.au/commercial/hunter-street- office-development/)

[2][http://www.jll.com.au/australia/en-au/Documents/jll-au- activ...](http://www.jll.com.au/australia/en-au/Documents/jll-au-activity- based-working-2012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER66> Backdoor age and disability discrimination.

At some point, when an organization loses the purpose for its existence and selecting leadership comes down to office politics alone, the selection process becomes attrition. Since excellence no longer matters (there isn't real work for a person to excel at) the leaders are selected by subjecting people to artificial stresses and seeing who cracks (either a full-scale nervous breakdown, or just a passive loss of interest) first. Those were the weak, the less dedicated, etc.

Open-plan offices make that attrition faster, and provide more insight into who is next to crack up and entertain the crowd with an open-plan-induced panic attack.

That's also why this toxic micromanagement, in the name of "Agile" or "Scrum", that programmers are subjected to will probably never go away. When there's no good way to pick leaders (because the work isn't challenging or interesting) the stress of being watched, hour by hour, is a powerful attritive tool.

<comment><USER67> When I was younger I could probably handle a weirdo office like this for a year or two. Now? No way. I need some level of quiet, non-social time, etc to be focused and get things done. I imagine environments like this are the equivalent of saying, "We don't hire anyone over 30."

<comment><USER66> Moreover, "We don't hire anyone over 30" means "We don't hire anyone good".

That's not to say there aren't good people in their 20s. There are quite a few of them. But they want to learn from people who are better than they are. That's the trait of A players: they want to learn from the A+ players. If you don't have anyone over 30, then the good under-30 people you get will quickly leave.

<comment><USER48> > If you don't have anyone over 30, then the good under-30 people you get will > quickly leave.

At least the ones who are _actually_ good, as opposed to the ones who think they are $DEITY's gift to engineering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> reading the title, i thought that it was about OpenOffice office software suite.</comment>


Request for Education Startups - <AUTHOR> https://blog.ycombinator.com/request-for-education-startups/ <comment><USER3> Naval Ravikant's tweetstorm today is highly relevant to this [1]:

1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing.

2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials.

3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $Bs doing this for young founders.

4/ The more meritocratic an industry, the faster it moves away from false credentialing. I.e., the MBA and tech startups.

5/ A generation of auto-didacts, educated by the Internet & leveraged by technology, will eventually starve the industrial-education system.

6/ Until then, only the most desperate and talented students will make the leap.

7/ Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long.

8/ The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet.

9/ The tools for learning are abundant. It's the desire to learn that's scarce.

10/ Educational credentials are badges that admit one to the elite class. Expect elites to struggle mightily to justify the current system.

11/ Eventually, the tide of the Internet and rational, self-interested employers will create and accept efficient credentialing...

12/ ...and wash away our obsolete industrial-education system.

[1]: [https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160](https://twitter.com/naval/status/912220382450524160)

<comment><USER4> Ycombinator doesn't care about credentials?

Sam Alton - Stanford Drew Houston - mit Collision brothers - mit/harvard Airbnb guys - <USER2>

We could go on, so let's do...

Please tell me honestly if you think google Facebook Amazon Microsoft would be where they were without the "traditional credentials" of their founders? Stanford, harvard, Princeton, harvard, respectively.

At this point all these SV demigods like Ravikant (Dartmouth/Stuyvesant-look it up) are just being irresponsible getting kids' hope up.

<comment><USER5> Do those folks really count as traditional credentials?

Google founders suspended their Ph.D. programs.

Bezos has a BS.

Gates dropped out.

Zuckerberg dropped out.

<comment><USER6> > Gates dropped out.

> Zuckerberg dropped out.

Both of them managed to get into Harvard, which is an academic achievement in itself though.

<comment><USER7> Not as much really as it is about who you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It seems to me that education needs its own "industrial revolution." Education with 30 kids and a teacher in a classroom for 9 months doesn't seem to scale well. There aren't enough good teachers, and it's inefficient to have so many kids together learning the same thing, and the same time, at the same pace. It's too inefficient, and any improvements are going to be cost prohibitive.

I think we need to separate instruction, student work, and assessment. Students should be able to receive instruction in multiple ways (1on1, group, watch videos), do their work with something like TAs, and be assessed at their own pace.

Japan is starting to see to super-star teachers that parent pay for. Why do we always need a teacher to provide direct instruction in the classroom? Why can't we reward the best instructors, like Kahn, by having kids be instructed that way? The reason is because instruction, work, and assessment are not separated now.

I wish there were more experimentation in education, but since everything is a big ball of wax paid for with property taxes, there's a lot of reluctance for anyone to experiment with their kid, and since it's all or nothing, there just are minor experiments in the classroom

We need tech to find a way to scale the classroom and deliver it cheaply to students, and I think we need a separation of concerns in order for that to happen.

<comment><USER9> It's kinda crazy that assessment has been coupled with instruction for so long, it pretty obviously creates a warped incentive model that stands on some real shaky ground.

I think the model also doesn't scale well for assessment, which prompts the creation of few, ineffective, but highly scalable assessments upon which the functioning of the entire system rest, which in turn prompts practices like teaching to the test. This creates even more messed up incentives but this time facing students and teachers as opposed to institutional practices.

I think that assessment, when decoupled, can't be done with an institution or institutions. Instead we need social networks that use a consensus process to define knowledge and who has it.

<comment><USER8> Agreed. I think about the analogy of interchangeable parts and if that might apply to education. Maybe teachers should just teach and assessors should assess. Interchangeable parts made it so equipment could be more efficiently be manufactured. But that didn't preclude there being a lot of different types of equipment. In fact, there's probably more types of equipment because of interchangeable parts. So for education, having an assessor focus on assessments, independent and separate from instruction, might make it so that there could be easier to assess and more types of assessment, so the teacher doesn't have to always do it. And that might help compare results across teachers.

College Board owns SAT, AP, and (essentially) Common Core so there's been a trend to tighter coupling. I like the idea of an AP Test that anyone can and be assessed separate from the teacher. Same for SAT. I think we need more of that model, not less.

<comment><USER10> I agree that we need more and better assessment - but I don't understand why we would allow a private body to do what should be a utility function of our educational system. Currently, the College Board is able to fill this niche (at great cost) due to a lack of trust in the assessments of individual instructors. Rather than further increasing the cost of assessment by expanding the use of private arbiters, we should seek to make the assessments that are already taking place (in _far_ greater number and scope) more reliable and trustworthy.

I believe this would take the form of a dedicated assessment tool that allows teachers to create individualized assessments JIT based on - or in concert with - their planning and performance workflow. If I'm teaching a structured lesson on polynomials, I should be able to create a valid assessment simply be requesting that one is made. My students should be able to take that assessment on the spot and the results should be immediately available.

I will take assessments with 80% confidence of validity 10x/week over assessments with 100% validity once per year every. single. time.

There's more to be said here - but that's the gist.

<comment><USER8> Why not have multiple assessors? Let people/parents/whoever pick who they want. Some schools use ACT and others SAT. Having a single assessor seems suboptimal. Alternatives tend to keep things more in check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _PLEASE_ have someone with an education background on your team. (Preferably classroom experience.) Don't assume what teachers want and need. Don't just survey teachers. Get them on your team and have them help steer your product development.

<comment><USER12> If you closely followed this advice, I don't think Kahn academy would have been invented. What teachers want and what students needs are not the same.

<comment><USER10> Perhaps, but KA is a supplement - not a replacement for - more traditional in- person educational experiences.

<comment><USER6> KA lecture videos were much more in-depth and much more useful than any high school math lesson I ever received.

I mean, Khan is obviously a top teacher, if he wasn't, he'd get replaced by Johnie Academy or whatever pretty quickly. You can't really staff every high school with top teachers, especially if they earn below average wage (that's the case where I live).

It's also a feature of the whole digital format. The lecture can be bugfixed until there are no mistakes left. And have you ever tried telling your high school teacher to rewind 3 minutes and speak 2x times as quickly?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> These all seem to be assuming the institution-teacher-student model of education we have today. Even the "New school models" section is assuming a delivered experience, which has an institutional bent.

I think biggest area of disruption in education would be in building fundamentally new architectures for educational systems, based on networks and social communities instead of funnels and institutions. The latter have a pretty huge list of undesirable properties and negative externalities, especially in how they limit diverse experiences and learning.

An eye-opening read on this front for me has been Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich [0]. It's insane how much of what he wrote 40 years ago still holds true.

[0] [http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html](http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html)

<comment><USER13> The way to achieve your goals would be through lobbying your local school district, state education agency, and state legislature (if your American). A startup has limited power and no legal authority to change the public education system.

<comment><USER9> I don't think this needs to be directly tied to public education. My concern is more that educational startups tend to assume an institutional model (i.e an institutions defines what is being learned, how it's being learned etc etc). They don't need to change public education but rather create services that embody a different educational paradigm.

For example a matchmaking service for shared learning goals or interests could for sure be within the power of a startup. Something like 42[0] but without a fixed institution. Or community level organized learning environments for various subjects. Or even to go more in the vien of Papert and Turtle, a npm type system but with a strict pedagogical focus.

There's a ton of systems that can be hugely powerful without depending on a classroom model or a school/institution. And there's no reason these can't be as impactful or more as systems and services targeted towards public/institutional education.

[0] [https://www.42.us.org/](https://www.42.us.org/)

<comment><USER10> I am sympathetic, but an obvious hurdle is that our employment system is largely biased toward that traditional pipeline. High school GPA/ACT Scores > Various Tiers of High Education > Standardized Credentials for Employment.

I'm not sure how you would resolve the two (without, of course, cracking the nut on a neutral, true-ability assessment system).

<comment><USER9> I think the latter is possible, but even without there are options.

There's a long-tail of credential consumers beyond traditional employers that holds a ton of value. Community level organizations, digital social networks, even open-source communities.

There's also a decent set of skills that can't currently be measured or conveyed by traditional standardized credentials.

Both of these represent an opportunity for a new academic/assessment paradigm to step in and create real value today.

That being said there's definitely going to be huge hurdles in getting to traditional employers, their logic is not necessarily based on best placement or best skill set, but often times on bureaucracy/ass-covering/good-enough mindset. Not to say that isn't valuable at very large scale organizations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I would love feedback on my project BlockSchool from anyone who is interested in ed-tech!

BlockSchool is an online coding school for kids ages 6 to 13. We hire teachers from top colleges and companies like Stanford and Facebook, and connect them with students who don't have easy access to high-quality instruction.

Our classes are conducted via video chat in a fun 3D block-based world where everything can be controlled by writing Puzzle code (our visual programming language), JavaScript, and Python. It's collaborative, social, and kids love the creative freedom we give them.

We are focused on 1:1 and 1:2 instruction now which isn't 'scalable' but later on, we plan on offering a help service for kids only when they get stuck or need a new concept explained. This will lower the cost for students substantially. We hope to follow in the footsteps of VIPkid on this front.

We are based in Seoul/SF, so we have a number of students in China, Japan, and Korea already, but a majority of our customers are in the US.

If anyone is interested in offering feedback, here is our website: [https://block.school](https://block.school)

We'll be applying to YC too! Hopefully our project is relevant to what they're looking for. We're also growing quite fast :)

<comment><AUTHOR> I am running a startup that is a market place, [http://greensprout.co](http://greensprout.co) for afterschool programs and summer camp providers (limited to Bay area). Naturally I am interested in this space. As a Korean, it is great to see startups working from Korea. The coding school is getting popular. So, it is a good place to start. But, there are many varieties. This seems to me like a tutoring service for computer programming. As you said it is video chat, is there youtube video to introduce the service? That will be helpful.

I have one kid, who is at your target. But I am not sure if I need tutoring like for block programming. I am more interested in real programming. Also, it is not clear what you will achieve at the end.

But, keep doing the good work since you have traction and I guess that people like the teaching quality, which you need to keep it consistent.

<comment><USER14> How old is your child? Has he/she done programming before? We strongly believe any beginner should start with visual programming first. Happy to share all the reasons with you if you're interested.

Here's a short clip of a class (it's also on our website): [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4xaiZrbD_Y)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Something I don't see on the list:

Homeschooling related startups

Big companies can be a unique resource for small, independent operations. In k-12 education, some of the smallest and most independent are homeschooling families.

They need to comply with state laws. They sometimes need to accommodate 2xe students. They need to prove their children actually received an education.

There are no doubt other areas where they could use help. This is often done currently via free websites, free email lists, etc. There is a homeschoolers legal aid group or something. I was a member when I was homeschooling. So, there are some supports already, but it tends to be pretty sparse and a lot is local, homegrown.

<comment><USER16> Homeschooling is the right entry point for disruptive change. The new home schooling community (as opposed to the traditional religion focused home schoolers) is large and growing and much more open to new ideas than the education system.

<comment><USER15> I was a secular homeschooler, so I forget that this distinction even needs to be made. Thank you for bringing it up.

One subset of the homeschooling community is gifted kids who don't fit in well at school. They frequently have either a very high IQ, above what gifted programs are geared to, or are 2xE or both. Their parents are often well educated and comfortably middle class. The needs of this populatuon would likely be a good point of entry.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Oh hey! We're one of the companies on this list :)

We went through IK12 (now a part of YC, same people) and it was the single best decision we ever made for Kodable. Education companies have some pretty unique problems, and it is almost guaranteed that the partners will have seen it before, know how to handle it, or at least be able to connect you with someone that has. At this point I think that YC/IK12 companies have a presence in pretty much every school in the USA and most countries around the world, so the network of edtech startups you get access to is just incredible.

Edtech startups can be really hard, but this is one of the few things you can do that will actually make it just a little bit easier. If you have any questions please feel free to reach out - Jon at Kodable dot com

</comment><comment><USER18> May I point out - to YC and others interested in the space - their is a fairly large market for continuing education. Nurses, accountants, lawyers, and lots of other industries require practitioners keep up to date and take courses throughout their professional career. Perhaps their are not enough students to warrant a massive big name startup, but there are definitely enough students for a reasonable sized businesses.

<comment><USER19> In fact, there is a huge cottage industry of exactly this in at least the software engineering world. Several companies with enough revenue to make any seed-stage startup sneeze.

Making tens of thousands of dollars for a 2 day workshop/corporatetraining is not unheard of. No millions of dollars from VCs required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> > For instance, we believe there's potential for a company to build a service > that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for > the service.

I disagree. I already pay taxes, book fees, technology fees, extracurricular fees to my school district. I would not pay another cent for anything I didn't have to pay.

A big problem in K-12 education today is actually over-involvement of parents. Helicoptering, or whatever you want to call it. Sure a teacher wants parent support -- but from home. They do not want to, do not have time for, and should not be dealing with 20 parent interactions a day, technology-assisted or not.

<comment><USER21> The bigger problem is that it would make it much harder for poor parents to keep up with the richer ones because they _could not afford the service_.

<comment><USER22> This problem has a solution (albeit an imperfect one), which is charging wealthier schools more in order to charge more poor schools less. Obviously that model has drawbacks, but it may work better with a tech product than other areas, where marginal cost is relatively small.

<comment><USER23> We already have that, it's called Title I: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Educa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_and_Secondary_Education_Act#Title_I)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I work in an education company. As ironic as it sounds, we've found the biggest factor that is stoping change in K12 education is that teachers systematically refuse to learn anything new.

It's not in the US though so YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER25> If I didn't have five kids, one in college, and monthly financial minimums that preclude taking time off from regular work, I'd jump at applying for YC. I even _had_ a great ed-tech startup... 5 years ago ...

Textfyre Final Presentation, 2012 [http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Prese...](http://plover.net/~dave/textfyre/Textfyre%20Investor%20Presentation%20September%202012%20V3.3.pdf) (The slide with the team has been removed...no need to share that info)

We were in talks for a couple of months with Gates Foundation, but our timing was off. They had just pivoted away from helping startups to giving millions of dollars to big education publishers like Pearson.

I gave up after realizing that I'd vastly under-estimated the networking (and cash) requirements in even proving the plan. Education is a really hard business to crack and we were targeting textbooks.

Fast-forward a couple of years, maybe 2014-15, and I'm listening to a gal from Pearson being interviewed on NPR. She's essentially spouting many of Textfyre's ideas (embedded testing, interactive content, variable reading levels).

I laughed and cried at the same time.

The funny part is, not a single person ever told me the plan was bad. They just told me the education business sucks and it would cost a lot of money. But bar-none, everyone _loved_ the plan. And this goes through to today. I chat about this plan once in awhile with someone that's peripherally interested in ed-tech and they all say, "Why aren't you still working on THAT!"

I'd love to. Write me a check.

</comment><comment><USER21> > For instance, we believe there's potential for a company to build a service > that meaningfully connects schools and parents, and to charge parents for > the service.

I'm sure that will play well with parents that are already straining under the load. This sort of thing is so rife with bias that it is _very_ hard to step away from your privileged position for the 30 seconds that it takes to vet the idea that you have to wonder why this cycle repeats over and over again.

 _Any_ kind of parental contribution to the school system outside of taxes will end up as a way to differentiate between the haves and the have-nots and at best will lead to children from disadvantaged environments not being able to take part in fun stuff, at worst it will disadvantage them even further.

This kind of thinking seems to be present in more than one YC project, the misguided attempt at their version of 'basic income' which fails to take even the most basic precautions against doing damage rather than improving things is another.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't know if this exists, but I think something like a "GitHub for textbooks" would be valuable. Let people (teachers or otherwise) collaborate together on open source textbooks and create a pretty UI for reading those books (like GitBook).

</comment><comment><USER27> I really hope this isn't driven by a desire to capitalize on the coming wave of school privatization under DeVos. What she and her compatriots have done to Michigan's school system is not only a tragedy for the communities they serve, but also a demonstrable failure:

[http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos- michigan-s...](http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/betsy-devos-michigan- school-experiment-232399)

Tech lipstick on underperforming, segregated, for-profit schools isn't going to make them any prettier.

</comment><comment><USER28> School has played a socialization role for kids and a role in the community - teachers have often been role models, and education has often extended beyond the subjects taught, to, at its best, teaching deeper life skills.

And then of course there are various troubled or at-risk populations of students where no amount of educational technology will help because they come from broken homes and underserved communities.

This is not to denigrate the idea of Education Startups, but rather, to point out the broader scope of "education".

</comment><comment><USER29> I used to work as a developer for an online charter school many years back so this space is very familiar. I even thought about starting my own company and breaking into this space because the software I worked on wasn't very good (it was miles above what was already out there, for sure, but I thought there were many places that could be improved).

The problem I ran into, which completely discouraged me at the time, was that of making money. You need a significant amount of capital to sell to a private school and a public school requires sales cycles of at least a couple of years. It just wasn't possible with me already having a family, mortgage, etc.

I would love to see the whole thing get disrupted. I even think about doing something in it from time to time. Having YC behind you would certainly be a big help. One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and helping to shape their minds so _you must_ use valid scientific research to back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think about the world. This is the biggest hurdle, IMO, because it's so easy to just appeal to someone's bias narrative. For example "brain games" which "train" your brain basically only train it to play those games but they're still hugely popular and sometimes marketed to the same demographics.

<comment> barry-cotter > One big issue you face is that you're going to be teaching children and > helping to shape their minds so you must use valid scientific research to > back up your ideas less we create a generation of adults who cannot think > about the world.

Don't let the barely adequate be the enemy of the actively harmful. Most education research is of low quality and education does not incorporate known effective techniques like mastery learning or spaced repetition.

Education degrees and education research deserve all the respect they get.

<comment><USER30> Honestly, fixing the education of educators would be the best long term solution.

Alternatively, creating a complete, ready-to-go curriculum package for every course (as defined in every state) that could be handed to _anyone_ might be a startup-able solution to that problem.

Although, that might also just be a patch that leads to a local maximum of not-very-good teachers teaching from better-than-before curriculum. Where making better teachers would lead to better teaching (eventually).

<comment><USER10> I believe there is opportunity in giving teachers better tools to teach _as well as they are capable_.

Teaching is difficult enough from a personal performance and logistical standpoint that there is low hanging fruit in simply helping teachers be their best professional self.

For example: I have approx. 200 high school level students. If I assign them to write _one page_ I have just given myself 200 pages of assessment to complete. Assessing writing is more cognitively demanding than simply reading 200 pages, so if I can read and provide feedback on each page in 3 minutes - working non-stop - I have 10 hours of work. I have 5 hours of prep time per week which is primarily used for preparing the 7 hours a day I spend actively in class with students. Given that we don't complete just one assignment per week - you can see the logistical difficulty.

I teach english. There are commenting/notemaking tools in almost every online word processing toolset, but none of them are streamlined for assessing writing (i.e. providing rubric based feedback, rapidly annotating with custom or pre-created notes, allowing for layered annotations to identify different structural features of writing). There's opportunity in figuring out what teachers already do and slash the time required to do it.

<comment><USER30> I completely understand. I teach AP Computer Science to about 100 students a year and I assign _many_ Open Response questions which are solved by writing code by hand on paper. I grade these using the same rubric as the College Board which takes into account much more than "would it compile". For every hour of homework I assign my students, I assign myself double digit hours of grading.

Some AI + a pool of previously graded assignments could probably automatically pre-grade essays (or my open response questions) with comments and notations which would allow a teacher to skip the 100% correct papers, and focus on the hot-spots of the others. Automatically identifying plagiarism (via the internet and other students) would be a nice side effect, too.

Those kinds of solutions seem way more useful than Yet Another Gradebook/Attendance System or a Teacher->Parent Chat Room or even Distributed Tutoring Systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> A lot of great ideas and important issues on Education startups can be found in this 5-hour long video "Technology In Education: Witnesses testified on technological advances in education." recorded on OCTOBER 12, 1995.

[https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology- education](https://www.c-span.org/video/?67583-1/technology-education)

<comment><USER16> I second this. The panel includes true visionaries like Adam Kay and Seymour Papert. Seymour's comment about kids learning french in France remains one of the most compelling suggestions for the type of technology-supported learning we should be focusing on. The comments above contain many of the reasons why change is hard and slow, but education needs more of these kinds of big ideas rather than incremental improvements of the current system. I also find it useful to distinguish between the process of learning and the system of education.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I would like something that increases parental involvement or at least oversight of their kids. 1:1s and close contact with your manager or team in problem solving is invaluable. What does that mean in the context of a classroom? Is it valuable? Teachers probably have 120 kids at some level so it may not scale.. And I think it's to early or weird to have kids participate in a stand up but an app to help parents understand what kids are working on and how they can help would be interesting. How can you improve the feedback loops. I think kids hit critical periods where they don't understand something and may not have the skills necessary to solve so providing some sort of peer pair (programming?) may help? Maybe start this in AP CS or a high school programming class or something and see if it is effective.

The other idea is work/life balance for kids in school. How do you monitor that and help them? I think kids have more energy but at the same time need downtime etc.. What does that mean in the context of education etc..?

<comment><USER33> My fiance's children just started in a new school system and they use an app called ClassDojo that is intended to increase involvement between teachers, parents, and the students. At any given time, my fiance can login, see photos of what the kids are doing in class, send/receive messages with the teacher(s), check grades/assignments. Compared to their previous school system, the level of involvement is beyond compare. Her son who is in middle school also uses an app called Remind that has all the assignments and communication between parent/teacher/student on specific assignments.

<comment><USER34> ClassDojo and Remind are both alumni of ImagineK12/YC Education!

<comment><USER33> I can't speak from personal experience, but based on my fiance's feedback they are great tools!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I know it doesn't fall neatly into any of those categories, but I'd love some feedback on my idea:

I want to create an organization that is essentially a 6 week retreat for students before they begin college. Selecting the best applicants possible, they will go through rigorous training to become their most successful selves, covering Academics, Social life, Health, and Lifestyle topics. Elements of secrecy will help it's applicant pool, I was heavily inspired by the Bohemian Club.

Long term, the alumni network itself will more than make up for the cost, in turn making the applicant pool stronger and stronger.

It's an aggressive plan, and requires years of building up from the ground. But it's my dream to make it happen.

<comment><USER36> "Selecting the best applicants possible"

I predict stunning success, based on this sentence alone.

That said - I think that providing help for people who are already doing well is nice, but it doesn't really support the real goal of public education: educating (all of) the public.

Unless you're thinking that this will be a great for-profit biz, with the most successfully students+parents most able to pay top dollar for this?

In which case - yeah, you've got a solid idea. It's essentially the same as idea as going to Harvard/Yale/Cornell/etc. If you can get a good round of 'seed families' (students+already successful parents) it just might work.

<comment><USER35> Sorry I didn't see your comment until now.

Right, it is intended to be a for-profit business, not really interested in tackling better education for everyone.

Long term I think a great case will be made for taking some % of students that couldn't afford it, just based on their accomplishments/skills to date.

Rich parents send their under-14 yr olds to a summer camp (just for fun & MAYBE some sports lessons) and pay 10k+. For a program proven to boost their kids' chance of success, I think they'd be willing to pay even more than that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm making my own learning materials for self-studying Chinese.

[https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

VoiceTube is a similar startup company that scaled this up to help people learn English.

[http://www.voicetube.com](http://www.voicetube.com)

I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical business. I emailed 100 Chinese teachers in universities around Taiwan, but didn't get any replies.

If someone wants to do the business and marketing, I'm happy to give you everything I've done so far.

<comment><USER38> > [https://pingtype.github.io](https://pingtype.github.io)

> I have no idea how to turn my Chinese-learning data into a practical > business.

A couple of suggestions:

1) Find someone learning Chinese who's physically near you (so you can be in the same room) but who you don't know personally, e.g. someone at a meetup. Open your site, and give them your laptop and observe what they do. (Don't ask them questions, until they get stuck and ask for help. Just observe.)

2) Try to answer these questions:

\- What do you have now (data and/or functionality)?

\- To what people could those be useful?

\- In which contexts?

\- What else would they need in order to get started using this?

3) Try out some other Chinese learning tools (ChinesePod, Popup Chinese, Decipher Chinese, Chairman's Bao, ...) and, for each one, make notes on paper about each thing that happens after you first visit the site (or open the app). That will help you understand onboarding flows.

My email is in my profile if you'd like to discuss in detail. I'm in Beijing, so same time zone as Taiwan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I work in the IT department at a community college. One of the biggest costs we face is our ERP, Ellucian's Banner. I'm not on that team, but the number of times I've been interrupted by them talking about a problem in Banner is really really high.

AFAIK, the biggest reason there are no real competitors is that Ellucian does a good job packaging the law and regulation related stuff for financial aid. Apparently that's difficult enough that no open source alternative or non-open source company has been able to do better.

I'd love to see someone fix that problem.

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting that learning science is not represented in the categories — something along the lines of:

 _" There's lots of research on ways in which material can be presented that makes it easier for kids to learn. We would encourage companies that have relevant expertise and the ability to bring research-backed technology to market."_

Or is there not an interest in something like this?

</comment><comment><USER41> I work on the policy side of digitalisation. Looking at the things listed in the YC call this all doesn't seem too much line the things that are really needed. Here some major issues that education (thinking here mainly about schools but this covers all sectors. And about developed counties other than the US, which has a strange, immensely commercialised education) faces : \- cost (depending on the country education can be 3-8% of GDP), most of which is salary \- equity - even in the best of countries kids with the right parents fare much better \- changing demographics - massive increases (including migrants but also due to housing cycles etc) in some areas while in some villages a school might end with 6 students, all at different ages. \- how to truly personalise learning (without kids being on devices all day or teachers having to insert massive amounts of data) \- teacher training in subject matter, technical skills and pedagogies, while time and resources are limited \- lack of good teachers (often due to pay...) \- relevance of learning content and methods \- improving assessment \- lack of time for teachers (choose resources, plan lessons, learn new rules /curricula, do a lot of admin,... -measuring impact of new policy /tools /... (issues are scale, the direct cause-effect link, worry about too much /instructive tracking, etc)

I think for none of these there are any good solutions out there short of throwing money at the system, which few places can /want to do. For anything to find actual uptake in education it needs to be timely, cost-effective, easy to train /use, respect very specific laws, and tested /proven in a real setting.

There are huge concerns about issues such as vendor lock-in. And looking at some of the proposals listed, there are things that seem crazy /near-evil, eg the suggestion to give a system free to schools but let parents pay.

This seems like a rather negative post, but I just mean to give a bit of perspective. Education is complex, deeply personal, so emotional, immensely important, shapes and determines society and our common future. There is a massive amount of both idealism and frustration on the part of the people involved (especially teachers) . Most have experienced a dozen broken tech promises and been covered in advertising leaflets of questionable commercial providers.

All that ends with either the same pretty much evil players dominating this complex market (everyone in education hates Pearson but few can avoid using some of their products as they know how to play the system, including the funding models and rules ), or with an increased influx of highly commercial tech players (Google, Microsoft, Apple,) which don't understand/care for the aims of education and just see a massive market and an opportunity to train the next generation of users on their systems.

Maybe you'll have some ideas... :-)

</comment><comment><USER42> It's not K-12, but some of you may be interested in reading this paper about the online exams service at ETH Zurich (Switzerland).

[http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478](http://dspacecris.eurocris.org/handle/11366/478)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder if the Ycombinator folks may have recently watched School Inc ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrDfCy5Q9wI))

</comment><comment><USER44> Please make an alternative computer science DEGREE, YES with a DEGREE (equivalent to brick and mortar) that is affordable and suitable for working adults

</comment><comment><USER45> A professional football player starts playing at the age of 4-5, a professional dancer starts practicing right from childhood, but I see most people only get interested in code when they need a job and they start fearing. Our education system should introduce problem solving and coding right from primary classes, teachers should be trained exclusively for these, and the big G, F and others should collaborate with government/NGOs to produce better curriculum and teachers.

<comment><USER35> Disagree. Coding is one of hundreds of skills that can lead to a good career, and coding is absolutely not for everyone.

Football/dance are extra-curriculars, I am all for coding being an option early on (high school?) but not anytime before then. If a kid shows an interest in coding, they'll find a way. And parents nowadays are more aware of it as a viable option

Even if this seems worth it anyway, a teacher "trained" in coding is not a programmer I would trust to teach my kids coding, and hiring CS majors would be monumentally too expensive. At the end of the day it's not practical.

<comment><USER14> Why not before high school? As someone teaching kids, they grasp the concepts just fine at young ages and if the material is presented in a fun and personalized way, they tend to enjoy it more than other subjects (depending on how those are taught).

Actively exposing your child to coding will greatly increase the likelihood they pursue it later on.

Our pricing is as low as $22.50 per hour with a friend, which I consider pretty affordable compared to many extra curriculars!

<comment><USER46> There's no issue with having an introduction to computer classes and the fundamentals to some, but the original comment was more in the line of making it a mandatory class. They need exposure, but it shouldn't be forced on them. Fostering an interest is far better than demanding kids sit in a 40 minute class to learn functions.

Also $22.50 may seem cheap, but it is quite expensive especially if a family has 2-3 kids that they'd like to enroll.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> TeachBay (for grade schools) - Parents bid in an auction for seats in a teacher's classroom at the beginning of the school year, instead of having the principal assign students to teachers. This will reward the good teachers, punish the bad ones, and give everyone an incentive to do better.

<comment><USER33> While I believe your idea is with good intent and I am not going to bash you, I would strongly consider going back to the drawing board on this idea. I can't even imagine the number of ways this could possibly go wrong. From punishing lower-income students where parents are able to compete for the "good teachers", abuse by parents to punish a teacher, and even going as far as to create a racial barrier within the school preventing access to "good" teachers by parents blocking access to classes.

<comment><USER47> The number of ways this could possibly go wrong - It's true. It could end up being a disaster. But there are also probably unimaginable ways it could go right.

Lower-income students being punished - Lower-income students are already being punished for living in poor neighborhoods and being forced to go to terrible schools. Parents are already competing for good teachers by moving to wealthier neighborhoods. It wouldn't bother me one bit that some kids would get better teachers than others because I believe this system would provide better education for all students in an absolute sense.

Abuse by parents - I'm not sure what mean by "abuse". I am certainly not advocating for physical violence. I wouldn't use the word "abuse" for teachers having to be responsive to parents' demands.

Racial barrier - I'm not sure why anything in this proposed system would inherently be racist.

<comment><USER33> To address "abuse by parents", I am not referring to physical violence. Abuse by parents in the sense that a group of parents can conspire to "punish" a teacher they perceive as being unfair to their child by not bidding on that teacher's class, potentially resulting in the teacher being fired.

The racial barrier doesn't mean that it has to be inherently racist. It can simply mean that, for example, white parents avoiding African-American teachers. Or vice-versa. A bidding system such as this could potentially result in an unintended segregation within the school.

In many school systems, there is already a "bidding" process among schools that put the good teachers at the good schools and the bad teachers at the bad schools. It is called school choice and allows parents to choose which school their child goes to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Anyone want to take a crack at MyMathLab?

<comment><USER37> Speaking of maths, I'd like to see a cheaper TI-83.

Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/768/](https://xkcd.com/768/)

<comment><USER48> Do you mean wolfram alpha?

<comment><USER48> Or, whatever you know. You can reinvent the wheel for all I care. [https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83](https://play.google.com/store/search?q=ti-83)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> What about corporate educational systems?

</comment><comment><USER50> I've been slowly working on an idea in this area for a while and and would love to be able to work on it full-time, part of its a software problem and that's the only part I've been working on thus far. I'm not doing this for monetary reasons at all, and don't really see how VC would ever be the right solution and lawmakers probably wouldn't allow it to happen either. But anyway I'll put the gist of the idea up here. I'd like to see what everyone thinks. I've been working on it anyway even if it is completely futile, just because I at least want the software for this to exist and maybe somewhere, some government would allow it to happen. So here goes.

Basically, number one indicator of success in school (excluding socio-economic factors) is having good teachers and very low student/teacher ratios, ideally 1-1 for most tasks (i.e traditional tutoring) and very small groups i.e. 3-5 per teacher for group work. Small groups have tons of benefits from keeping kids focused to dealing with misbehaving kids, etc.

Anyway, the idea consist in doing away with the traditional concept of a teacher at the primary school level (but eventually all levels). You can do this by hiring all your teachers on an hourly basis and leveraging college students, stay at home moms/dads, or just anyone with a GED and wanting to make a few extra bucks on the side. These teachers can work even just a couple hours a week if they want. Also, you don't have to have high standards on anything other than the teachers ability to communicate, being nice and helpful,liking to work with kids, and having a GED. The calculations I've done allow you to cut your student/teacher ratios by about a factor 3-4 and additionally allow for special tutoring of kids who need it for a couple hours a week.

Another key aspect of the model is that now kids are in smaller groups and can be paired with others who work roughly at their own pace, also I want to note that age no longer plays a role in determining which classes a student is in.

The whole time we're doing this the teachers and students are using software that has learning algorithms designed to tailor learning materials to the particular student. That student, then has a personalized and adaptive learning pathway through the digital courses at his school. There is also no longer the idea of a particular "year of work". Students take a comprehensive exam to exit every class and a fully comprehensive end of year exam for the courses they have mastered in that years time frame. All students can move more or less freely to and from groups and take these exams whenever they want, skipping entire courses if they have already mastered the materials and can prove it by passing the exams. So its not age but ability which determines where a student is placed. You can think of a school year (or a entire primary through high school curricula) as a graph where the classes are nodes and to go from one class to the next all a student needs to do is pass a particular exam.

The only real pedagogical emphasis is that we try to teach students how to teach themselves and provide them the digital materials to do so. Also my dream would be to be able to offer this to kids from the poorest neighborhoods first, because they're the ones who would benefit the most from a small group learning environment and 1-1 tutorship.

Anyway, that's the idea. If anyone is interested in helping out, please ping me up (email in bio). Right now the software is slow going since its just been me and my brother working on this in our spare time. Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER30> You have to imagine a school full of children like a room full of hackers that will work harder to break your system than they will to follow it.

On this forum people say "all you need is a library card" to learn Computer Science, but you also need to _read_ those library books.

How does your system deal with students that just refuse to do anything?

<comment><USER50> > How does your system deal with students that just refuse to do anything?

How is this dealt with in normal schools? From what I remember, students that didn't do anything just got passed on to the next year (maybe having to go to summer school which just meant showing up and you get passed on to the next grade).

Obviously, software can only help minimally here (by giving teachers better insights sooner into which students aren't doing their assignments, etc). I think overall, you really have to lower student/teacher ratios a lot. This helps significantly with misbehaving or problem kids in my experience and creates a more personal connection to the teacher.

If you have any ideas yourself on ways to solve this problem I'd really like to hear them.</comment></comment></comment>