The practice: five offices, one floor
Floor 3 is the practice. Five offices open off one corridor, each one an agent with a defined job, and the floor is built so that the work moves between them where you can see it.
The first post said the practice has six offices. Five are on this floor. The chief executive is on floor 11, engineering has the whole of floor 4, and the front office is the reception desk in the lobby. This post covers the five that remain.
The floor
You step out of the lift onto a landing. It has a bench, a plant and the floor’s name on the wall. It has no desk, because a desk with nobody behind it is a desk you walk up to and wait at. Reception used to be here, back when the practice was the ground floor. It moved down to the lobby with the front door.
The corridor is 6.5 feet wide. Each room is 14 feet wide and 15 deep, with its door set about a third of the way back from the near corner. A nameplate sits beside the door at eye height, a header sign sits over it, and a blade sign sticks out into the corridor so you can read it as you walk. A flat sign seen edge-on is a smear, which is why the blade exists.
| Office | Nameplate | Brief | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Release | What Is Shipped and What Is Not | What is sitting on main that nobody has put live. | West, nearest the landing |
| Operations | The Box, and Whether It Is Up | What is running, what stopped, and what is about to fill up. | East, nearest the landing |
| Finance | Billing and Cost | What is charged, what is collected, and what the box costs to run. | West, second |
| Compliance | Regulatory and Legal | Claims, contracts, and the paperwork that has a deadline on it. | East, second |
| Security | Infrastructure and Application Security | What is exposed, what is stale, and what only looks like it is working. | West, third |
Finance faces Compliance because they read each other’s findings. Release has the room nearest the landing to cover a gap. Security audits what is exposed, operations watches whether the box is up and finance watches the cost. None of them notices a fix that has sat on main for three weeks. Release owns the distance between merged and deployed.
All five read and report. None of them changes a file. Engineering on floor 4 is the one office that writes code, and its brief says so.
What you see at a desk
Each room has a desk, a monitor, a cabinet, a plant and a rug where a visitor stands. Press E and a panel opens with the office’s name, its brief and a line saying it reads only. A visitor also gets a short list of what the office does. Each office has three standing jobs, and the labels are plain questions. Security’s include “What is exposed?” and Release’s include “What is merged and not live?” Operations asks “Is everything up?” and Finance asks “Does the catalog match the code?”
The lamp by each door shows one of three states. Green means a session is running, amber means work is queued, and dark means idle. A small flag appears on the door when an office has stopped on a question. Everyone sees these, because the data behind them carries a room, a state and a flag, and nothing about what the work is. The browser asks every ten seconds.
If you are not signed in, the monitor reads the office’s name and the word “locked”. The panel says the computers in here are private. The noticeboard in reception, which I come to below, says the same.
If you are signed in as me, the monitor says what the office is doing: waiting to start, a line of current activity, or “answered, press E to read”. The panel gains the last question and answer, buttons for the standing jobs, a box to ask something, and a History link for everything the office has been asked. The Tab key opens one sheet showing all the offices at once, from any floor.
How the offices work together
Four things move between rooms.
First, colleague notes. When an office starts a session, it is told what each other office most recently reported, trimmed to 1,200 characters apiece. The notes arrive as reports, not as instructions. A finding written by another session is evidence about the world, and a session that treats it as an order is one injected sentence away from doing what a file told it to.
Second, findings. An answer is prose, which suits a person in a doorway and suits nothing else. So every office also files findings: a title, where, how bad, and what it would take. The ledger is append and close. Nothing is edited after filing, and filing the same title again raises its count and its last-seen date, so a fault that keeps turning up reads as persistent rather than as six separate discoveries. Findings land on shelves in the records archive on floor 8 a second after they are filed.
Third, handoffs. A finding can travel from the office that found it to the one that fixes it. The finding goes with it, so the next office reads it instead of rediscovering it. The doorway panel shows “Handed over by the security office” on the receiving end. I press the button every time. No route exists for an office to hand work to another, because an agent queuing work for another agent is a loop with no ceiling.
Fourth, questions. A session cannot wait for a person, so a question ends one. The office stops, the question appears with up to four options and a statement of what the office will do if nobody answers, and a flag goes up on its door. My answer starts the next turn of the same session, with everything it had already read still in front of it. Of the things the practice produces, this is the only one where the office is waiting on me.
Drafts are separate again. Whatever the practice writes for the outside world lands in the out tray at the top of the Tab sheet. Nearly all of it waits there until I send it or drop it, and a short confirmation reply can go out on its own. A draft closes when it is dealt with, and a finding closes when the problem is fixed.
The noticeboard
The board on the lobby’s west wall faces the directory, so you pass it on the way to the lift. The heading is “Welcome to Extant 2000 Offices”. Signed in, it lists every office with one line each: free, working, waiting, answered or could not answer. A line saying “Waiting on you” goes first when something is parked for me. Signed out, it says the board is private and tells you to press L.
The doors, the names, the briefs and the lamps are public, because they say nothing the company’s own site does not. What the offices found, asked and wrote stays behind the sign-in.
Next in the series is floor 4, where each product has a developer’s room of its own.