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What Kind of Office Space Do You Want to Work In?
Geeky asks: "A friend of mine was visiting a client in their new offices. All very flash, award winning architecture, but virtually unusable as a place to work. For a start, the desks were the width of keyboard + mouse, and just big enough for the computer. No space for manuals or other paperwork. This was done to enforce the clear desk policy. No clutter was allowed - apparently the architect was still allowed final say over the use of the office, and even forbade such extras as plants being added. I've also been in offices that took open plan to extremes and mixed meeting areas and (in one case) a coffee shop with working areas. The noise pollution was extreme." Sounds bad. What kind of office architechture (and environment) do you think sponsors a constructive work environment? Are there any other other office layout horror stories like this one?
"Being in the UK, I've never experienced cubicles in the Dilbert sense, and open plan offices are the norm. I don't know whether the isolation of a cube or office would drive me insane or make me more productive.
So what factors affect your happiness at work? Have you ever changed job based purely on a poor environment?"
I want to work in an environment where the managers will respect my request to TURN OFF THE FLOURESCENT LIGHTS!!!!
Big tall idols to my mythic gods should populate my workspace. There should be plenty of altars for sacrifice, and nice gutters for the blood to run down when things get too hectic. After a hard day coding, there's nothing like ripping out the heart of some of the pathetic management. I would also appreciate a survivor-like central meeting place where all can gather to vote people off the island.
Oh.. and free sodas, windows and skylights, as well as alot of work space.
If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. -Ghandi
Zero-Knowledge Systems, the company that developed freed0m, has a fantastic work enviroment -- it is an open loft, huge desks, computers, toys, food -- apparently, it is quite good at encouraging good work =) (You can see more pictures and details here.)
However, I believe that I have a pretty good job myself -- I'm an admin on GameSpy Arcade, and I work from my house! =)
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CitizenC
Lock me in a room with a tatami mat. You think I'm joking? Keep your manuals, reports, etc. spread about the floor. No distractions, no plants or desks to maintain. I have to go to work soon... more on this later.
To supply geeks with insufficient deskspace. I've worked in open areas, in cubes, and now in an office. In each, I've had loads and loads of desk space to clutter in "just my" way. Having (carlin voice) your stuff (/carlin voice) just where you want it is an absolute necessity. Individual workspaces are much more important than the whole office design (though to be honest, my first week in an "open" environment drove me insane =).
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The gravitational constant of protein has changed. - Turbine
(a) Cubicle Fluff
(b) Free Beer
(c) SGI with 27" monitor and T3 connection
(d) More cubicle Fluff
(e) More Free Beer
(f) FLUORESCENT LIGHTS! (Take That)
(g) Cubicle fluff
(h) Free Beer
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
In three years my desk was never clean, lots of paper, notes, plans, disks, etc. If your desk is clean it's because you have nothing better to do than clean everything up!
You can't handle the truth.
Really, i just need to convince supervisors i do my best work with naked women dancing around. And the beer that helps the thinking process.
I've just started work in a new job where everybody works off laptops and most people don't seem to have a permanent desk... You can just turn up and plonk yourself at any table and plug into a power point and network connection. I guess it has its advantages, but I tend to move into a desk and personalise it, acquire some books to stack on it and spread bits of paper with scribbled notes around to show that it's mine. I feel a bit rootless.
Never trust a man in a blue trench coat, Never drive a car when you're dead
I hate hearing people talk while trying to program. I work at home and live with my parents (I'm only 15, which is why I live with them). The most annoying thing to hear while trying to work is either a phone ringing or people talking in the background. Television/Radio/Mp3 seems to filter out other talking and provide me with a good work enviroment. I suggest that you buy a good pair of headphones and some good cds.
no fluro's that cant be dimmed...or if they can be dimmed then a dimmer per work staion not one dimmer for the whole room.... no cables on the floor to trip over, no 2m per person floor space and not 3 21inch monitors per person.
:]
I think I want to work from home with my coffe machine and my bed close
Do Not Read Burgatronics... It's Evil
If I had total control over everything, though, I think I'd go for a tropical beach mansion look (you know, the kind drug lords live in?). With free drinks (with the little umbrellas in them, and some alcohol, I code a LOT better when I'm a little tipsy).
funny munging
The happy hacking keyboard is a great way to reclaim needed desk space. I can't believe how much space traditional keyboards waste.
I've worked in cubicles before, and they're not all really that bad. Some companies have big cubicles (so you could fit say, 3 machines in them), some have medium sized ones (maybe 2 machines), and some try to cram you in closets.
As long as you're not in the last category, they're not all that bad. It's your own private universe where you can do whatever the hell you want to it, essentially.
I prefer the "war room" setup, though, just because there's more social interaction with the other geeks.
Ideally, I would like a space in the basement with a good stereo, or my headphones, and a solitary lightbulb, and a large steel door. The powers that be dont seem to understand that productivity increases with fewer distractions. Even someome walking behind me bothers me.
I am still trying to get a better desk and chair.
Usually things like this are a case of the creator not being forced to use his own creation: Form before function. Sometimes it makes me want to go back to sweeping sidewalks for a living.
If I have just one task at a time, such as programming one project, then a computer or 2 on a table, with or near a fridge, and I'm also good to go.
However, I think jobs with one task are boring. I like to multitask. But the side effect is a cluttered desk. It needs walls to prevent collapse. Strong walls sometimes. And I usually need 3 computers or more. A real walled office space is necessary. Window preferred (but my new job doesn't have the window).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I think that when the aesthetics of the office get in the way of working that is just over the line. The coffee shop example also puts conveniences in the way of working. In both cases it seems to me that other concerns have taken precedence over the ability to work successfully.
I don't see how clutter on one person's desk would stop anyone else from working and if it helped that person then i don't see the motivation.
If you want to make the office aesthetic in addition to functional though, I'm all for that.
"It's because they're stupid. That's why everybody does everything."- Homer Jay Simpson
A nice view of a garden or park; big, comfy reclining chair to allow you out your feet up on the desk whilst idly surfing; room for two monitors, mouse; all cables at the back securely out of the way of flailing feet; some sort of foot-rest for intermediate slouching...
Enough space between desks that they can't see me dossing (American: goofing off :-P), but that I don't have to get out my chair if I want to ask a question.
Oh, and a vending machine, and someone to bring me tea.
The conclusion of your syllogism, I said lightly, is fallacious, being based on licensed premises
Then there's the the office block that looks like a giant phallic symbol, not too far down the road from there. If that says anything about attitudes of the management & architects, they should be forced into politics, like all the other sex addicts.
Even the Royal Family, in England, is bothered by "modern architecture", which -looks- functional (but isn't) and which also looks bloody ugly. Once Prince Charles (the bane of "modern" architecture) becomes King, let's lobby the US and UK Governments to declare mimd-damaging and work-mangling designs as capital crimes, and hand Charles a large axe. I suspect construction designs will change. RAPIDLY. Charles demonstrated, some time back, that when it came to architecture, he'd be decent competition for the Incredible Hulk.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's all about offices. Not only does this allow you to surf pr0n, but it cuts down on noise dramatically. It's best to be paired up in an office with the coworker that you work with the most. Face time is dramatically important, and you can convey a lot more information that way. You (me) also tend to slack off less when there is a human nearby who is also working.
The next factor is furniture ergonomics, a word vastly overused but also a concept dramatically underapplied. I am a BIG MOFO (6'7", 350 lbs) and my office furniture is never the right size. An office willing to buy you furniture that fits you is a must.
Finally, I come up upon the topic of lighting. When I worked for Tivoli Systems I shared an office with two people, then with one person, then had my own. In the latter two circumstances the lighting was to my specs; A desk lamp for close lighting and a halogen torchiere for room lighting. One of them is enough to cast a good, broad-spectrum light (or so it seems) with enough light to find your way around the office without falling over things, but not enough to make your eyes tired. The desk lamp is a necessity to provide enough light to see documents by and to provide enough light to where staring at your monitor isn't too high-contrast, but not enough to where you have to crank the brightness beyond the point where black is no longer black, but a dark grey. Having proper contrast is a must.
You also need a bookshelf, in my ever so humble opinion. While I am constantly using digital documents (you can search them, after all) I frequently turn to books from ORA or Microsoft Press (I work in a Microsoft-centric shop at the moment) for in-depth information. You need a place to keep these books that isn't your desk. Avoid clutter when possible, but when you need to lay out a lot of docs at once, nothing beats a desk.
OT Side note: The thinkgeek ad I'm looking at right now spells "movie premiere" without the trailing "E". Give me a break, folks.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Whatever people say about microsoft, they have the work environment right... Every developer has an office, with real walls and a door. While this is perhaps out of reach for many less profitable companies, they should at least consider it. Cubicles are barely acceptable, "open environments" are totally inappropriate. I used to work in one, and everytime someone had questions for me or whatever, 5 other people basically stopped working.
Well, I work at a startup in Silicon Valley (this is a summer job for me and my first time working.) The office is really nice, each person has a large desk (each one is a corner desk.) While we do not have plants, we decorate an employee's workspace with ornaments just before he/she comes from vacation. Each cubicle has two shelves for manuals/books. Even the president of the company shares the same kind of cubicle as everyone else. I hope everywhere I work has at least this kind of environment.
Well these oriental tecniques definetly have a point to them and work, we could learn a lot from Feng Shui and such like if people stopped jumping on the bandwagon and defrauding as with fake advice.
But what a lot of people don't take into advice is land cost. In countries like Japan, they work in much smaller spaces than ours and are still productive.
This is because they have a different outlook on work. It's not easy to just assume that aligning offices differently will change things.
Personally, I like any office that can be changed around easily and is informal. Luckily us decadent westerners can afford to do that
"But Doctor, if they take away my head surely I'll die?"
"Fun Gums"
Being in the same room with your project team is a must for us. And everyone not in the project team should be in a different room. This works not too bad with a project team size of up to seven people or so.
I always like some not too loud noise in the background, usually some dumb pop-music station that has some news.
Not allowing music (even without headphones) in the office is really weird for me - one of our employees brought a soundcard along with him to install in secret at the office just in case we didn't allow them.
Strong coffee is a must - also, we work over a supermarket so there's always time to run down for Cokes and whatever.
Working with a view to the outside world is nice as well, I always try to arrange myself so I have something to look at outside if I look away from my monitor. Natural light, especially non-direct lighting is great.
The book Peopleware by Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister has a section with seven chapters about the office environment alone.
This book is a must read for anybody who manages people in the tech industry, wants to manage people in the tech industry or who just want to get additional perspective on how many facets of management, environment and coworkers can affect your productivity and your happiness.
This book is as essential as The Mythical Man Month by Brooks.
If you haven't read this books yet, read them now.
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Our facilities people keep wanting to shove us in cubicles. We've found that a no-cubicle, "pod" structure works wonders for us.
:) Why do people look at me like I'm crazy when I say things like this?
A "pod" consists of 4 regular "L" shaped computer desks placed together to make a cross shape. Place these pods in the middle of your group's work area (assuming a large rectangular work area), perhaps (but not preferably) with desks ("offices") on the outside corners.
Results: A really open atmosphere, potentially loud with people asking questions over desks (but most of us like that). The other co-workers are amazed at how much space and open windows we seem to have, even though we're the most compact group in the whole building.
Not for people who want quiet, enclosed caves, and it's not the best layout for "work alone" types.
My philosophy: I want to be able to hit any one of my workers over the head with a thrown bean bag, without hitting a cubicle or regular wall...
There's some interesting research into this subject going on at Herman Miller, which has led to things like Resolve and Aeron.
;)
I imagine the "no clutter" policy will last as long as it takes for the architect to get his shots for Architectural Review, and then the workers can get back to filling their workspaces with faxed cartoons and stuffed aminals.
AARRHG!
Also: Xerox color printers that emit 18khz sounds that apparently I can only hear are very bad. Anyone know of any good noise-cancelling headphones capable of filtering such things out?
How i long for my cubicle. I now work in an open plan office, which i hate - there is no availiable customisation of my workspace, plants get moved or knocked over, my monitor toys get moved or stolen, the layout of my desk is played with, i have to lock my drawers etc. I get blasted by other peoples desk fans, and blasted by thier heaters in the winter. I have no shelving, because there are no cubical walls around my desk. In a cubicle i was free to put up whatever posters calenders, userfriendly cartoons as i liked. i could control my environment with fans or heaters without affecting others in the office, i did not feel like my boss was watching over my shoulder, i was far more productive, possetions were much safer, and my machine was never ever used by others. How i long for my cubicle That fluoro lighting has to go... i just turned my office ones off and had a cheer. That says it all really. Why do my colleagues insist on having all the blinds shut? One day i am just going to take them all down. then see if they do anything. Why do people insist on having thier monitors facing the windows anyway if they can't see the screen - move it so you _can_ see it, dont shut out all natural light for fucks sake.
Aminal - DRUMMS!!
I was a manager type at a financial services firm in the IT department. I had one group of support folks with half height cubes, so they basically had one big open area - and they loved it. It was the ONLY IT dept. where the desktop support guys literally got hugs as they walked through the building. This was at one of our remote sites, and worked so well, that when I got back home I immediatly implemented it there. BLAMMO - it completely SUCKED at our home site. Constant bickering, yada yada yada - it turned a borderline-typical IT department (user base didn't especially care for us, but they weren't openly hostile either) into a pathetic IT department. Not only were the users openly hostile towards us, WE were openly hostile towards us. So, I have learned that it depends - offices, full height cubes, half height cubes - you better take your people into consideration.
mas cerveza, por favor politically incorrect stu
I order to work properly I need a very large desk. ;-)
I have 2 Display tables (the kind they use for teporary displays that has the fold-up legs) one 6 and one 8 foot, made into an L shape.
When I'm working on school reports or such (I'm only 14) I like to be able to spread all my papers out and be able to look at everything without having to dig around for it, its also nice that I have to computers/monitors, I can have one Program running on one (a dictionary or such) and something else on the other (web search or something) The tables also have enough room for my asssorted junk, such as my tv, Amp (for my compter/radio speakers, still has a built in 8-track, but it does the job), broken printer, and assorted boxes of computer crap I just haven't put away.
Also, I require alot of light, ot flourescent, Halogen, I have 2 halogen light strips (the last one just had the bulbs go out on it, btw when a halogen strip goes out do all the bulbs burn out at once? this is the second one that done that)and a large overhead light (60watts
also, If I was working in an office, I would want QUITE!!!, I can't stand noise, but I am good at filtering it out, and telling the people in class who keep talking where to stick it! I hate trying to do work, and listening to people carry on a conversation, the teachers these days don't care anymore as long as the works in tommorow.
I used to have a semi-open cubicle near the door to my office (and the pop machine). There was constant traffic, and it was very hard to focus. Now I have an office, and it's far better. I'm significantly more productive, and enjoy working more. I wouldn't work for a company that tried to shoehorn programmers into "open-office" bullshit. Coding requires long periods of uninterrupted concentration, and that simply can't happen if sales people are pestering you every five minutes.
On a side note, flourescent lights can be really nice if you get those "full-spectrum" bulbs instead of the traditional, cheap, crappy ones.
Interestingly enough our management just asked us for suggestions on how we want our new workspaces to be after we move. Right now we are in a cube farm. I've worked in offices with two very cool layouts that worked really well, and it is now my preferred working environment:
The way I like to set things up is by dividing teams up into project rooms. Meaning that the people you work with most should be immediately accessible to you. This can be done using either a big room or, if that's not possible, using large cubicle walls to create a roomlike division.
I then put workstations around the outside of the room so that the developers are facing a corner workstation or a wall, their preference. There should be half height walls or no walls between developers on the same project team. This makes it easy to get to know your team members, and allows for impromptu communication, and good line of sight for nerf blasting.
Optionally, in the center of the room is a conference table so the team can quickly and easily have a group meeting. Since their workstations are in the same room however, this is not a requirement.
The room should have as many whiteboards as it can hold, nuff said.
This layout can be scaled. For example, if you have lots of space, you might have actual offices around the outside of a large room, with the offices opening into conference room. The office walls stifle communication a little bit, but you can alleviate that if your offices are big enough by putting 2 or 3 developers per office. The office situation works well though if you like a lot of peace and quiet, but I still prefer having everybody on the team in one room because while quiet is nice, it has a tendency to divide the team. If you need some isolation, headphones are great.
Lighting should be a per workstation basis. I like dim lighting, helps my eyes relax. If brighter reading light is needed, there are several good desk lamps available.
And plenty of space should be allowed for books, diagrams, etc. For workstations I prefer a U shaped desk so I have surface space on three sides of me.
Oh, I don't know... Fancy, converted warehouse space with exposed brick, cathedral ceilings and micro-teeny, impossibly bright halogen bulbs everywhere certainly looks very cool, but nothing aids my productivity better than a nice, solid, slammable *DOOR* and *WINDOWS THAT OPEN*.
... and WINDOWS THAT OPEN! Oh sweet Mary. I'd die locked up in one of those solid-glass phaluses downtown.
Where I work, the office space is ridiculously spartan and cheap, and yet is perfectly functional: Think random 1970's dentist office architecture with lots of little offices and a large central "waiting room"-style common area with fridges, a large countertop, etc.; ancient, solid-metal government surplus desks (LOTS of drawers and pull-out work surfaces!), dozens of $30 Office Depot desk lamps and torchieres (we removed probably three quarters of the flourescent tubes from the overhead fixtures because everyone hated them so much)
Privacy and fresh air. The rest is just eye candy.
-A.
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What did the walrus say to the penguin? "No soap, radio."
Late at night.
My company has been remodeling for two years (8000 people onsite). The space has altered as they procede and is poorly designed. Add to that a vendor change for cubicle s and we now have a mish-mash of puke colored cubes with large "meeting spaces" which are seldom used.
My current space is 9' x 8' and houses an NT tower, an Irix box, an AIX box, 2 Macs, an open space for the PowerBook or any Win/Mac configs I need to do, and the varied underdesk space.
My new cube will be 7' x 7' and is "enhanced" with combined functionality! I don't see 'puters in a closed, unventilated cabinet as "functional"!
If I could have an open shelf system, a decent KVM hub, and a decent power source, I'd be fine, but that is inconsistant with the "vision"!
Anyone ever leave a job over cube design stupidity!?!
I feel better, the problem's still there.
Bright Fluorescent Lights
It just wreaks havoc when your working on a computer. I've yet to find much of a solution for it except taking matters into my own hands and shielding the monitor from the lights with something above the monitor.
I work in the internet dept. of a car dealership. I have an office right off the show room floor with no door, where I work on my computer all day. I have to listen to bad 80's music blaring on a radio, and loud salesmen over the intercom or even worse right outside my office talking to me because there are no customers. They make me dress up too because I am right on the showroom.
Its bad enough I am looking for a new job.
Anyone want to hire the sole developer of SubaruParts.com and NissanParts.cc?
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I don't really mind double posts on
I've never understood how people keep their desks clean at work. Right now my desk has on it the following:
And that's just what's on my desk, let alone what's on my shelves, under my desk, or in the filing cabinets.
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The perfect workspace would feature:
*Lots of fancy LCD monitors clamped (not placed) on the desk.
*No PC towers or stuff like that - everything should be hidden under the floor. No noise or things to trip over.
*Everything cordless (including power cords).
*Big desk space to put as many manuals on that will fit. Cleaning personnel shall clean the surfaces without displacing any manuals.
*Comfortable swivel chair.
*Open plan office with non-Newtonian behaviour. You can see, hear and smell everything of interest to you while filtering out the visual clutter, noise and fart smells. Also, noone can see or hear you without you wanting them to. You are free to fart or pick your nose.
*Access to any required food and drink without having to get up or order. Your wishes are read directly from your mind and immediately executed.
*Matter transporters replace toilet facilities and double as fat removers.
*Bright lighting which switches to deep blue when you say "Red Alert" (why not "Blue Alert"?)
*Deals with the government to prevent NSA agents from breaking in and ransacking your computer
*No management interference!
*Capability to go home at any time without first having to find a suitably equipped telephone or jumping out of the window.
*Enormous viewscreen at front of room displaying slashdot
etc.
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Believe it or not, I actually take quite an intrest in the workings and dynamics of work spaces. I'm not an architect, but I find what different architects do to solve this problem quite fascinating.
:-)
I've seen and worked in a variety of spaces. Cubicles are cool if they're large enough because it's a little like having your own office, but it's more open than that. I've also worked in places where desks are just shoved where they will fit without partitions (quite usual in the UK), and that allows a bit more social interaction, but can be distracting if you're coding. Great for being an admin in though.
One of the more intriguing options I've seen is hot-desking. The concept sounds... different. With no desk of your own, or space of your own, you are expected to just work wherever you want with a laptop and mobile phone. Although a lot of people find it liberating (especially in media companys), I think for geeks, it would actually be quite constraining - you can't have your manuals nearby.
I've seen it go the other way as well. Every member of staff gets their own office that they are free to personalise as they want. Some companies have even allowed budgets to be given for people to spend on decorating their office. I seem to remember the company that "pioneered" this approach was an advertising agency that wanted offices full of toys and fun things to act as a stimulus to the imaginiation. Oh, they had a basketball court in the foyer as well for meetings.
Personally, I work from home and myself and cow-worker use a spare bedroom in my flat. There are pluses and minuses with the situation, but not having to commute is fantastic. I haven't been in a car or on public transport in several weeks. I live in a city center so I'm near most things.
I suppose the ideal working space for me would be a mixture of the above ideas. I like the idea of having space to personalise, but I also like the idea of being able to move over to a sofa with a laptop on a coffee table for a bit if I choose to. I think gimmicks like free food and drink are good, as is the idea of being able to shoot some hoops whilst discussing database design internals. Perhaps a mix like that is the best solution. Well, it sounds like fun to me.
There is this myth about "mental health" and "computer power" (I switched off my monitor when I am not working)....
I come from a country where fluorescence is norm, and I have not seen people complaining about "dizziness" blah etc.
It's all a fixation with light bulbs (a 60W light bulb emits less than 10% irradiation than a 40W fluorescence). That's not good.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
On behalf of architects everywhere, I would like to extend you all a formal apology for our profession's: lack of understanding; our unwillingness to listen; our obsession with personal agendas; our disregard for basic human comfort; our arrogance against (l)users; our prioritizing ideas over substance; our facination with 'creativity' for the sake of it, and ignorance of proven solutions; our elitism in being 'producers of Culture', and obnoxious pretentiousness; and for when we forget to look at the engineer's drawings, until two months later, somebody asks, "Hey, is there any cross bracing in this building...?" --- "Hey, I just found this drawing... and its got bracing going through... er.. where we've drawn all the windows ... "
But seriously, I can't apologise for these people. Just know that the sorts of problems you're talking about, as "users" of buildings (that's what architects call you), is a direct result of how they are taught.
Perhaps someone could start a "programmer's/IT office user organisation", to collect information and promote the better education of architects in this respect. They (architects) would be chuffed to know they're being noticed, (although they'll still think they know better.)
The advantages
1) I like swiveling around and having the whole team right there for any input...really speeds up roll-outs when you can grab the collective knowledge of the team.
The disadvantages.
2) Stuck with the lighting that a suit decides is the proper atmosphere....ugh personally I like a cave as far as lighting goes.
3) Noise level, absolutely hurts productivity while deep in any code or systems logic.
4) Wanderers....the people from other ends of the business who insist on making rounds for smalltalk.
5) Accessibility; Sometimes there are conversations amongst a team that shouldn't be heard by anyone/everyone within earshot. This is particularly important with the systems team for security reasons etc.
My ideal, at least partition areas thoroughly by specialty, developers,systems, designers, etc. .
This isn't about an office exactly, but a place where I did a lot of work.
My high school (the one I have since graduated from) was built in 1967. Needless to say, it showed its age. It was filled with lots of day-glo orange and green furniture, had indirect lighting, wood paneling, high ceilings and earthtones everywhere. The classrooms were huge.
Overall, it was an extremely cozy place. The building was warm and inviting to staff and students alike.
Then, they realized they needed some more space. So they spent my sophomore through senior years renovating and expanding. The result was horrible.
The school suffered under what I call the 1990s Sterility Movement. White walls, white floors, white ceilings, white concrete, white furniture and row after row of bright white, eye assaulting florescant lights. What little color there was ended up in the little bits of trim here and there, even then it was neutral colors.
This was supposed to be "refreshing" and the minute amount of color was supposed to provide "flair", but instead it utterly destroyed the character of the place. There was no doubt in anyone's mind we had suffered a $77 million downgrade.
I suppose they were trying for the yuppie/soccer mom house design. Where the whole place is horribly bright white and feels like a museum.
I beg any architect or building project manager out there, PLEASE do not give in to making whatever office, school, etc you are responsible for, feel like a hospital. Add some color! Add some character! Making everything hideously white will not make the people who have to deal with it happy!
I have to say, the company where I just finished working at had one of the best working environments I've ever seen. Absolutely perfect. Everyone was happy, even when knee deep in coding pointless crap that some moronic client decided to add.
There was a main area with a bunch of large L-shaped desks all layed out. No walls or dividers or anything to seperate the different desks. Much to everyones enjoyment, a couple of large stereo's blasted Rob Zombie, VNV Nations and Megadeth. To make sure everyone got music they liked, we created XMMS and Winamp plugins to allow for voting of song changing: didnt like the song and just click the next button on winamp. If no one objected by clicking to negate teh change within 5 seconds, song changed. It goes without saying that this was an extremely social room. But everyone would be constantly working while they talked. It also helped to have the director of operations in the room, so there was no excuse to slack.
When someone was getting into deep code mode and started to get annoyed by the tunes of Front 242, they were free to move into one of the offices. Since everything is stored remotely on the network and most of the people were fairly computer savy, we didnt have to bring anything with us to escape the social room. Just walk in and log in. Thats it.
Unfortunately, this work environment only works really well with a bunch of tolerant people who are at least amiable towards each other. It was also extremely fortunate that we all liked the same music, otherwise we would have had to resorted to marginal volume levels or even head phones.
It didnt hurt morale either that playing Unreal:Tournament or Quake 3 at the end of the day was standard operating proceedures. Semi-Monthly fragathons also helped keep morale up; dragging in clients and friends and having nice huge games running. (Hmm... 100baseT connection to a kickin switch to a dual 700mhz Xeon (2mb l2 cache) system w/ 1 gig of ram and a 5+1 SCSI tower running Unreal:Tournament server). Having stuff like that helped morale immensely.
Fin
Myren
Never underestimate the joys of a window on the 11th floor. I think every office should have one. In fact, I think no one should work in an office below the eleventh floor. All such spaces in buildings should be devoted to free beer, free speech, and foozball tables.
Seriously, though, I love my current office arrangement. The window is really a nice thing. I know some people don't like sunlight, but I find it a lot easier on my mental health than the incessant buzz of flourescents. I usually just turn the lights off. Let's see: Free coffee, hot chocolate, milk, etc, a communal fridge, lots of storage space and desk space so I can cover every square inch with cables and post-it(tm) notes. A small enough group that I can stick my head out and yell down the hall to anyone I need to talk to if need be. The promise of a nap-room and an air-hockey table in the next move. All these things are really great to have. But I wouldn't care about any of it if I had bad management or hordes of stupid/annoying coworkers. What makes an office for me is whether I dread going there in the mornings, and all the nifty perks in the world won't erase that.
Geek-grrl in training
"Beware of a tall dark man with a spoon up his nose."
To truly understand recursion, you must first truly understand recursion.
Let's face it. The architect there fancies themself to be an artist. They are making artistic demands upon a situation that calls for an engineered solution. The outrageous non-ergonomic rules, the fact that they were "still allowed final say over the use of the office" indicates the architect doesn't care at all about function. They only care about form.
Workers there are just pieces on display. It's not a workplace, it's a gallery for the architect.
Asthetically the place is OK. Plants are located all over the place. The only thing I miss is at my last company one wall of my cubical was windows. It would be really nice where I am now since we're right across the street from a large regional park/nature reserve in the crouded Silicon Valley. I also wish they had free softdrinks. Until they do I make due with my .
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
I'm an environmental modeling researcher, and I need insight, not numbers!
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Then you need to go to work for Interpath, Located In Research Triangle Park, NC. They used to be a great company to work for until they got bought, and changed a *lot* of stuff- like instituting the "No Doughnuts" Policy. People like you deserve to be together... P.S.- You must be on the Protein Diet.
-Matt
Start with a big cubicle farm. People with like tasks (engineers) or working on the same project (same portion of the site) have cubicles located proximal to each other. Many times, people will tear down the wall between two cubicles to form a "bullpen" where those two (sometimes three or four depending on the space requirements of the people involved) can share the space and work better.
Each person's workspace is his own, and short of legal requirements (no p0rn, no fire or safety hazards, etc.) what you do with your own space is your own business. Some people have very neat and orderly spaces, some (like me) have a cube filled with clutter. You want an arcade game in your workspace? Fine, if you've got the room. You want a TV and Sega Dreamcast in your cube? Fine, if you've got the room. (Just try to keep the volume down on both of them so as not to annoy the neighbors, something people are very good about doing)
Surrounding the cube farm are conference rooms (the only people in the entire company who have actual DOORS on their office-space are the legal dept, so closed off rooms being available is a must). The conference rooms are fairly well sound-insulated so that if groups need to meet, they can. The conference rooms vary in size from cozy (2-3 people comfortably) to gargantuan (30-40 people), so you can pick a conference room that fits your needs.
Coffee bar and vending machines are located in their own walled-off niches, so that they can generate the noise that is "natural" to them, but they do so largely without interfering with anyone. (In the building I work in, they're further separated by having a conference room in between them and the workspace).
There are also rows of phone-booths, which are essentially closets with phones (as opposed to traditional "phone booths" like you might see at the airport). The doors are heavily sound-proofed, so if you need to make a private call to your therapist or doctor about the lab results, you can do so without your cube-neighbors overhearing.
The only complaint is the ever-present "flourescent lighting" complaint, however our buildings/facilities department is very understanding about people who disable the lighting above their cubicles (And they'll even, if you fill out the online request form, come over and "do it right" removing the bulbs completely as opposed to just twisting them to the failure-point.
From my experiences so far, this has been the best work-space I've ever had.
It sounds like the designer in question was emulating Frank Lloyd Wright's attitude without his skill. FLW did thorough planning in many of his designs, right down to the furniture, plants, and textiles. Some of his house designs basically need his furniture to be functional. But he was good at striking a balance between the technical requirements (function, lighting, security) and the human requirements (comfort, accessibility, etc).
If you're only good at one end of the spectrum (as seems the case with the technical requirement-driven undersized desk/noisy environment example), you ought not be in the business of designing total environments -- especially not trying to come up with an ideal environment for a large number of people with differing functions, habits, and needs. Why is FLW so famous? Because it's really hard to get the environmental design balance right. And even his best designs don't fit everyone -- some people find his office spaces to be ugly and unlivable.
The upshot is that the definition of my ideal workspace is probably useless to anyone else. A more reasonable approach to designing a successful workplace, IMHO, would be to meet the technical requirements at a common level, while not expecting to meet human requirements at a similar common level. That appears to make some designers' brains hurt, offending their sense of consistency. Get the hell over it.
I think not...(*poof*)
Cubicles can sometimes be annoying, but in this case, I actually really like my cubicle. It's big enough, it's lit by sunlight, it's got a ton of deskspace and plenty of drawers, and McAfee.com is nice enough to let me do what I want to it. One of my coworkers took all of the soft cloth padding off of his cubicle walls so that it looks like a big metal industrial box. Kinda cool, actually. I took out one section of one of my walls so that me and my neighbor could interact without having to stand up and talk over the walls.
--
As horrible as the office in the story sounds, the office I work in is exactly the opposite and hurts just as bad.
Florescent lighting lights the entire office. The ceiling is composed of a white-ish gray drop tile ceiling, the floor is covered with a short bluish-gray carpet, and to finish the whole "gray" decor theme, every inch of every wall is gray.
I'm on gray overload. Gray is such a bland, neutral color... typical of many stuffy offices where people live "neutral", uneventful lives.
So here I am, working in a color deprivated environment, no wall decorations allowed, a place where the green colored power light on my box is a pleasure to look at.
We don't have an "anti-clutter" policy. I have a rather large desk (it is gray) and I keep a large amount of "stuff" piled on it... programming references, database layout bibles, software specs, etc...
Here's a suggestion: get a laptop and work on the couch in your office's lobby! Not only is it relaxing, comfortable, but it may also make a statement!
Regards
--Cr@ckwhore
(Stay away from GRAY)
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Yes, this is where I'd like to work. Too bad I don't know anything about wax.
More photos available here and here. These pictures really don't do it justice, though.
Form and function are one.
I can't function without at least one large whiteboard to translate what I'm thinking in to something I can look at on the wall while I'm documenting or working. The bigger the better as you can then scribble anything that comes in to your head without having to rub it out all the time then think "what did I just have there?"
One of the engineers I was working with in London this week was telling me that all the desks in their Chicago offices are made of whiteboard material, so not only can you have the usual network techie clutter, but you can scribble entire routing tables on your desk while using your £2,000 LCD 21" monitor your boss bought you in mono mode (green, of course) to emulate a 20-year-old terminal.... aah, bliss - I think I might go work for these guys!!
Philosopher (n) - a wise person who is calm and rational; someone who lives a life of reason with equanimity
Big companies don't use cubicles and prefab offices for some evil corporate keep-down-the-worker-bee agenda. They use them because they keep people productive and sane. 9 times out of 10, those 'cool' offices you hear about end up being nothing more than a novelty that soon wears off when you remember just because you work in a bright happy shiny office doesn't mean you aren't working. And then you are left with an office that distracts the mind and just plain isn't designed to get work done.
What did you eat today? http://www.atetoday.com/
Thus, office space accomodation should be extremely important to any company that takes its workers seriously. Companies that do not treat their workers seriously, generally aren't worth working for. Definitely not in the high tech business, where people's brains are the company's real assets, and where working days of 8 hours or less actually are the exception.
Here's what I want from my employer in terms of office space (I'm a software engineer, and spend more than the required amount of time in the office):
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
I think our office did it right. Of cource we are all in cubicals, but thats nice. It means privacy. We have 1/2 the buildling on 1 side of the kitchen 1/2 on the other. And most of our meeting rooms are 'themed' to the client type that we have. It's really quite nice. It's a relaxed enviorment, and yesterday we got free coffee!
--
http://www.dennistighe.com
I come from a country where fluorescence is norm, and I have not seen people complaining about "dizziness" blah etc. It's all a fixation with light bulbs (a 60W light bulb emits less than 10% irradiation than a 40W fluorescence). That's not
good.
Hi, I'm a technician at a large manufacturing plant who also considers it a part of my job to repair people's problems with thier workplace. One of them is disagreements with lighting. Examples include disabling epileptic seizures, headaches, and fustration at flickering lights. Be considerate of people who are brave enough to complain about lighting, because they may also be in the payroll or accounting office that does the paper work for your office too.
But most importantly, lighting (or lack of) is often the most stimulating factor in the workplace. To me, white text on a dark screened computer monitor in a dark room allows me to focus on the subject at hand. Most people are familiar with a white browser and black text that has the familiar look of paper and india ink --instantly recognizable as user friendly software, but can be brutaly harsh on the eyes after long periods of time.
Many users prefer customized settings for thier own experience and for a good reason. Some people may tolerate the exhilerating intensity of 60Hz flourescent lights as it simulates the great outdoors. But for others, it will cause mental blackouts and collapse. People have entered the hospital for such a trivial thing such as lighting. Its happened where I work. Please do not dismiss other's complaints about lighting as "myths about mental health and computer power" and having been from places where "fluorescence is norm."
What kind of office architechture (and environment) do you think sponsors a constructive work environment?
That's easy. Individual offices with doors. I spent the first 15 years of my career that way, and it was perfect - total control over my environment, no noise or distractions. I later went to the cubicle plan, and it sucked big time. Now I'm back to an individual office. In my home. Now this is perfection.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
I work for a .Com in Portland, OR, and we make our home in a 90 year old, 12 story building downtown. I've done the cubical/flourescent light thing before, and this is much nicer. We have space on four floors of the building, and each one is a little different. The top floor is all offices suited for one person, or two people that don't mind sharing the space (Which is what happens for most of them). We stick execs, HR, accounting, and IT up there. It's generally the stuffy floor. :)
:) ) There are five office rooms and an open area. Two of the offices are smaller, but hold two people each comfortably. The other three are much larger, and I've never figured out what their intended purpose was, back in 1911. But, we put two developers and two designers in each. Everybody has a real live desk, and I assure you they're all pretty cluttered, and all have several books on them. Then we have the QA people and project managers in the open space. Now here's the kicker. We're up high enough on the 11th floor (The surrounding buildings aren't much taller, maybe 5-10 stories taller) that we don't need to turn the godawful flourescent lights on. Natural light is more than sufficient, any time of the day, and it's the best environment I've ever worked in. I'm not sure I could go back to working under the blue glow of the tubes again.
:)
:)
Now, the floor that holds the developers and designers is by far the coolest (No bias here, nah
Then on the other two floors are marketing (Open space with cubicials) and currently unoccupied space (Smaller offices that we have't expanded into yet). But I won't shed a tear for the marketing people in the cubicals under the blue glow of the bulbs.
So in summary. Natural light is a Very Good Thing. Large enough desks so that you can sit at least 20 inches from your monitor is also important. And no architect should ever have the power to enforce how much junk a developer or designer has on his or her desk.
If you can't open the window, I don't want to work there.
Silence, solitude, and personal space must be available, somewhere. Some company work spaces are like cult brainwashing weekends - you can't leave, you can't be alone, you can't hear yourself think. Of course, if your company doesn't want independent, creative thought, all you need is one big meeting room.
Whenever I'm forced to choose between two evils, I like to go with the one I haven't tried yet.
Thus my approach is to use a single 75w desk lamp. This shines light where I need it, is easier on my eyes, and saves 245w all at the same time. If for some reason I need my whole office as bright as the sun (ie: finding a screw lost behind my desk) I turn on the fluorescent units.
Admittedly I could probably save more power by using a small 20w fluorescent desk lamp, but I certainly wouldn't consider my current approach "environmentally unfriendly". It is certainly much more friendly than the typical USA "flood the office senseless with fluorescent lighting."
I am considering ordering and trying out an eclipse light, a specialized indirect 13w fluorescent unit.
Thinkgeek sells them for ~$40.
The mfg website for this unit appears to be onetech
Neither site mentions the wattage, I found that in a review.
-Matt
Right now I work in your typical cubicle environment, I'll guess-timate mine is 5x8. A little cramped with 3 systems and a small library. The main printer for my floor used to be on one side of my cubicle wall ( sales shares my floor ) which constantly had traffic. Our department's paper shredder is right outside of my cube, and there are very few things more annoying than that. We are not a software house though, we are almost entirely hardware, so there are not many programmers that the company has to consider. We programmers wear headphones to drown out the noise, which then makes people assume that we are anti-social or something. No, we'd just like to be able to concentrate thank-you, that and I happen to enjoy listening to music as opposed to paper shredders, doors, and pages.
Anyway, my perfect office, i.e. with a ceiling and a door, would be a modest area, 10x10, 12x12, or something like that.. Windows, but the ability to completely shutter out all light. My desk would be in the center of the room. I'd have a nice stereo and speakers in all corners. Most of the time, the room would be pitch black, other than the light from my monitor, and something by Rush would probably be coming out of the speakers, at a rather high volume. Oh, and I mustn't forget the dorm fridge.
Yes, that would be perfect..
Stupider like a fox! - H.S.
AAAH! Why is everybody so obsessed with living in cubicleville? One of the most important things I need in my workspace is a door I can CLOSE. Then I can switch on/off the light all I want, change the environment to be the way I like it. Plus, I don't need to fight for meeting rooms when I want to gather a few people for a quick discussion. Sharing some time with your coworkers is great - having to endure them all the time is madness....
In the act of remodeling our home, my wife and I have decided to create a truly useful home office. Some may disagree, but things like cubicals don't work in a home environment. So, we set out to find office furniture that looks like it belongs in a home when not in use and is still reasonable in price and functionality.
We've looked at many different things from low-end to high-end modular furniture (computer cabinets that, when open, have room for decent sized monitors, a keyboard, etc. (or so they think) yet look like high quality furniture of the quality you'd find in your dining room or bedroom (i.e. real wood...not laminate...no water beds allowed ).
Bottom line is that we've found NOTHING on the market that is truly designed with computer users in mind despite being labeled as computer furniture. Most furniture looks like TV cabinates with a keyboard draw attached. It seems that what we've been looking for doesn't seem to exist.
Furniture designers don't seem to realize the needs for real computer users.
We need:
1) space for one (if not two), mini-towers or desktop machines per cabinet. They need to be out of the way yet accessible.
2) space for decent sized monitors (17-20 inch) and a means to adjust the monitor to a comfortable and egonomic position.
3) Keyboard drawers that provide ample wrist support and space for the mouse (yeah..like I'm going to reach into the cabinet to move my mouse).
We saw one model where the face of the keyboard drawer drops down to make a decent wrist support and then flipped back up to look like a panel in the furniture. While we liked this line, there were still things that were all wrong.
4) accessible, yet hidden cable runs with maybe a ethernet port or two.
5) space for a printer (small laser or inkjet would be nice). Access to the printer for maintenance is essential.
6) Cooling fans to keep our stuff from overheating.
7) Auxillary spaces for such things as hubs, switches, and UPS.
8) Surge protection and plenty of outlets.
9) Usable desk tops and cabinets that provide ample storage space and functionality (like for printers).
10) Bookcases that seem to integrate.
11) it to be standalone (vs built-in) so we can take it with us when we move.
As a result, we're now considering designing our own furniture and then will take the interior designs to a cabinet/furniture maker to clean up the design and then build it ("Damnit, Jim, I'm an doctor (um..computer geek)..not a brick layer (or skilled cabinet maker)...")
Have others run into these problems and what did you do about it?
RD
Think about it:
Each worker can do whatever they want in terms of work setting, dress, etc.
It's cheaper for workers and employers.
It promotes flexible work hours
Workers are happier and in my experience work better and accomplish more
And my favorite point: It's wholly more envrionmentally sound. Getting ride of commuting, even if by public transportation, is better for the environment. Also, people don't print things up constantly as they do in an office since meetings are virtual.
My boss and his wife run the office. Common things I've gotten chewed out for include:
Visible wires: He once yanked out all the visible wires on my computer because it made everything look "cluttered." Result was I had no keyboard, no mouse no monitor no network....
"Junk" everywhere: Boss was furious about all the computer parts I had lying around during a major upgrade process. He didn't like having "gutted" computers visible. I explained that the ONLY was to upgrade the hardware inside was to open the case. Didn't let up until I said, "You can't replace spark plugs without opening the hood and you can't replace the muffler without going under the car. I'm replacing the engine, gas tank, exhaust and braking system while adding 4-wheel drive!"
Asked for ergonomic desk and chair when I started showing signs of carpel tunnel. Was put in charge of purchasing new workstations for whole office. Was taken to used furniture auction by bookkeeper and left when I didn't see anything that was even remotely ergonomic. Was chewed out by owner for "Turning down some great deals." New desks were purchased without my input. I was not given one of the new desks, but a desk that was smaller and less comfortable then the one I had before. It was just as well because the new desks were no more ergonomic than a folding table. Was told to "Crank your chair up," when I asked about getting a keyboard tray.
Visible Wires (round two): Moved to new office space. Has windows, but no shelving or storage space. Was yelled at because I positioned my desk at the only angle where I didn't have monitor glare from the windows because "We can still see the wires. Our Network Admin has his desk against the wall!"
I explained that there are exactly two positions in the office where desks could be put where the windows would not conceal the monitors with glare, and only one of them was against the wall. (I'm in a corner with a window on each wall. If I go against either wall, I have glare from the other window. Result, I have windows, but can't see out of either one without craning my neck. *sigh*)
Matthew Miller,
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
I worked for a large travel company a few years ago. Great company, great ideas, and many innovations (aside from having a 90% female workforce (yeah..I'm a pig)).
But, the work areas (cubicals) while not horrendous, were a little impersonal. Rules like:
a) No personal effects.
b) No papers on desk after hours.
c) Must use black rather than blue pens.
Naturally, in the IT department, we skirted many of the issues by putting things on walls facing AWAY from the normal viewing area and stuff put to the sides of our monitors where they couldn't be seen unless you walked into the cube.
Then, there was the hot-swap desks for the consultants. They had no area to put things (despite being FT consultants). No barriers between desks...just phone and PC.
Needless to say...this didn't last too long as we started having difficulty in keeping consultants.
What I've had in the past:
- 40 desks in a big huge room with nothing to deaden sound, and a management policy that wearing a walkman to deaden the noise and get some work done was "unprofessional looking". Can you guess that Andersen Consulting was involved?
- 100+ people in a gigantic room with cubicles, and about 25% of them regularly on the phone or checking voicemail with speaker phones. (By the way, if somebody near you is checking his voicemail with the speaker phone, go find a private office, call him up, and leave a message saying "I was wondering if you could please SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU INCONSIDERATE PIECE OF SHIT!". It helps if your voice isn't recognizable.) Even worse was the fact that there weren't real desk, just those psuedo desks that hang off the cube wall. So the guy opposite me would start stomping his feet to the music he was listening to, and my monitor would shake. Or somebody would sit on the desk in the cube next to me, and my monitor would rise up.
- 8 developers in a big room with no cubicles but lots of nerf guns. This one actually worked pretty well.
- Most of a floor in a building shaped like three hexagons. Cubicles clustered in little "pods" around the windows, all the "support" rooms in the middle. This one worked very well, because the rooms in the middle and the shape of the building kept it so only a few dozen people were in your line of sight, even if you stood and looked over the cube walls.
What I have now:
- Three people sharing an office originally meant for two. Since I'm new, and these guys know lots about the application, it's working pretty well since I can ask them questions and have them show me stuff. Even better, they like to keep the lights off and the blinds drawn some (but not all) of the time. We've got real desks, and lots of bookshelves.
What I want:
- A private office. One that I have room for a white board on one wall (or a window that I can write on with dry erase markers!), a window, and room for posters and paintings to make the place feel like home, and desk and bookshelves like I have now plus a side table and a guest chair. One of those nifty little desk lights they have at thinkgeek. A secretary to give me @$@#$@#NO CARRIER
--
A "freaking free-loading Canadian" stealing jobs from good honest hard working Americans since 1997.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
In order, my preference would be my own office; a large cube with high walls and fairly completely enclosed; or share an office with the right kind of people. Now, it may still be true that being alone would allow me to goof off too much, but I think coworkers are more of a distraction. And once in a while I encounter a problem that requires some deep thought, where I need to be able to talk to myself, out loud... and at the job where I had to do this the most (was doing some computer graphics stuff, working out affine tranforms and stuff like that), we had the "open office" thing going on - just a bunch of desks in a big room. There was a guy there who had a very loud voice, not that he was yelling on purpose, just his normal speaking voice was sort of bellowing and penetrating... you couldn't help but hear everything he said even 20 or 30 feet away. So I'd occasionally disappear and find a storage room or an empty office where I could sit and think. Then my boss the SOB had the nerve to tell me he didn't trust me to leave the office and I needed to tell him where I was going. God that guy was a jerk, I can't believe I stayed there so damn long...
Anyway, my ideal office I think would be a high floor on a skyscraper downtown, with lots of smallish offices around the periphery with nice views, so that everybody can have one; surrounding a huge meeting/recreation space. The idea of movable furniture so spontaneous meetings can happen sounds good in theory, but I've never tried it; and I don't like the idea of being "homeless" either, having to use this movable furniture all the time and not having a desk of my own. Whatever you do for meetings and "war rooms" should be supplemental, not the normal way of working. If the extroverts like to spend all their time working that way, they can do so, in the large space outside the offices. Everyone should have high-end laptops with wireless ethernet, so they can take them to the meetings, but also have a full docking setup at the desk, with a large monitor and keyboard. Needless to say the laptops should not be required to run Windows. There should be no admin; because any good programmer can administrate his own laptop. Every admin I've known has been a big obstacle and just somebody to avoid at all costs. You don't make use of them, you work around them.
Nobody should stand in the way of telecommuting. Just give me an SSH connection into some kind of Unix server, and I'll be happy (can forward X connections over it too).
The article is worth reading, if you're interested in the subject. Seems like Jay Chiat was the ultimate PHB, imposing his limited personal vision on his entire company, and brooking no disagreement.
I work at home, so anything annoying is my own damn fault. That having been said, I find that my most annoying aspects are temperature control and noise. I decided that, for convenience, I'd be in the same room as the computers. They're noisy so I built a big enclosed rack, soundproofed it and installed the quietest fan I could find to vent it. The only problem is the air conditioner, which has to run 10 months/yr even though I live in Kansas. I got a quiet model, but it still makes a lot of noise. Not to mention that since the computers like it cold and I don't, it's never really the right temperature in here. I need to get the AC ducted into the computer case.
Ergonomically speaking, I'm OK. The desk is at the right height, there's plenty of space and I'm facing the door so I'm comfortable and not paranoid. I have natural light in the daytime and indirect halogen light at night. Since I got the laptop, I can move around more, but I need to get more of the house wired for ethernet...
Now all I need is a laptop cooling unit that doesn't make much noise and has a space for a mousepad...
Of course, they are pricy, but that is why it is nice to have an employer who pays for them.
lighting is a necessity, but not that heavy white light that we are all used to in the work place. an ambient soft yellow/white is best for the eyes that are accustomed to staring at various colour schemed screens throughout the day.
desk space is nice, but what is necessary is either a personal bookcase or shelving enough for the various manuals that come my way. (i've currently got about fifteen manuals sitting in a box near my desk for a new software system that i'm trying to get working, ugh.)
music or no music? doesn't matter to me, apart from a basic idea that i don't want to listen to gangsta rap while trying to parse out bell switch statistics. within an environment where the company purchases computers with sounds cards in all computers, a no noise environment would be best, i.e. if another person can either hear your music or be disturbed by it, turn it off or find another alternative.
and frankly, desks don't matter to me more than their surface area. what does matter is chairs. if one has an uncomfortable chair, all hell could break lose and that i'll do is get upset instead of being relaxed and fixing the situation.
now these issues only deal with the physical surroundings and not the social atmosphere of the office. for those of you in the sysadmin arena (either nt, bsd, sol, etc...), you have to deal with user's needs. the battle that we fight against them to not stand over our shoulder to make us fix a problem(?) is one that we won't win. and the various social problems in offices cannot be addressed within a single post. yet, physical problems aside, most problems that the sysadmin community faces belongs to the social genre.
I worked for a week in the PacBell offices in San Ramon, CA. Of distinction, this was the place Scott Adams worked when he started Dilbert, it houses the second largest cafeteria in North America, after the Pentagon, interoffice mail was picked up and delivered by robot, and (at least, 6 years ago, when I worked there) everything, including lights, blinds, and robot pickup, was handled by an automated phone system.
With the right codes, you could close all the blinds and turn off all the lights from anywhere in the world.
In the grid of cube-forests and offices, there are mini-stores, like you'd find in an airport, between sections. I got lost in there on the first day, and walked past three, that all looked alike, selling drinks, prepackaged sandwiches, candy, and other stimulants.
Highly wacky.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
So many people are hung up on the latest and greatest ways to ergonomize and design a space to death. I work in a group that went from a collection of 5 or 10 with ancient metal desks holding multiprocessor systems and cutting edge hardware to a group of 50 with underpowered machine on $2000 desks and $1000 chairs. Guess how are productive went... I think a great CS guy (like Ivan Sutherland or Dave Evans) once said that the most productive development environments were the ones with expensive machinery on cinder block and old doors, and the least productive environments were the fancy, over-architected and clean ones. The meat of the matter is if the group is good, the conditions melt away. You find fault in an environment when you're not happy with the people around you. Ideal office mates: A group of really amazing individuals driven by their passions to create innovative products and services. It's about art and science and the human condition.
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
-Stryemer
We are the music makers,
and we are the dreamers of the dream.
IKEA 3 surface Effectiv desk: $750
21" Trinitron monitor: $1050
Herman Miller chair: $999
Telecommuting in my underwear from a office bigger and better than my boss's: Priceless.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
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Home.
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The Beach.
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The Mountains.
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Barnes & Nobles
I think it's clear: the office is the pits. With modern technology everyplace is my office.The down-side is it is hard to actually get away from work when I go home, to the beach, to the mountains, etc.
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Martin
It's bad enough to give me a headache after about an hour or so. I've been working with the display awkwardly off to the side for a few days. I've been leaving a message for the facilities guy every day, but he never calls back.
Scott Bishop, if you're reading this, call me first thing Monday I just want my office fixed.
Have you ever worked in an area that had flourescent fixtures with electronic ballasts? The electronic ballasts boosts the "refresh" of the flourescent fixtures to about 17000 Hz. When you couple this with 5000Kelvin bulbs, the effect is that of a skylight. It is clean, refreshing light. There isn't ANY "flicker". Period.
I prefer indirect halogen lighting reflecting from the white drop ceiling when I can get it. The key for me is to have a lot of light when needed (ie: trying to read a manual or find something) but keep it much darker as the norm.
I also enjoy an environment where when I have to think really hard about something, my co-workers will turn off the music. I don't mind music when I am just coding. However, when I am trying to debug or plan, I must have quiet.
-John
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Sig Return: 204 No Content
The best office I ever had was one we set up at the Department of Justice. I was doing some contract work there a few years back and initially, they set us up on one of the upper floors, mixed right in with the clients. I told them that it was unworkable, due to the distractions, so they gave us a windowless room in the basement - A large storage space, really. (It quickly got nicknamed 'The X-Files Room') It was heaven - 4 folding cafeteria tables and some disused desk chairs. We could turn off the flourescents, play music, wear shorts and sandals. Whatever we wanted. I set up a small lan and the development team worked seperate from everyone else. No one knew or cared how we worked, as long as we produced. Which we did. We had a whiteboard for impromptu meetings. We had one telephone for the whole group. The workday started usually sometime before lunch and ended usually after midnight. It was probably the ugliest workspace in the building, aside from one of the janitor's rooms, but it was easily the most productive space for coding. Now I work in an open Japanese-office-style space, right outside the CEO's office. We have to wear a suit, keep our desks reasonably clean and of course, noise is prohibited. They don't even like us to wear headphones - small ones are ok - since it makes us look like we are isolating ourselves. (Um, yeah...)
God, I miss that old space!
Developers should be hidden away and left to their own devices - left to be the creative slobs that they are.
Well, it's after 4 am here - enough for now.
Cheers,
Jim in Tokyo
-- My Weblog.
I'd give up my current desk in cube land in a heartbeat for a nicer office like that again.
Girls?
No Laughing Allowed!
When I've worked somewhere without enough desk space I usually end up with piles of paper on the floor. That said--I am neater when there is less flat space to put things, but there's a limit, and that office space crosses it.
My ideal office is the one I have. The kitchen's down the hall, the library is next door, and I can watch the kids playing in the back yard. All I need to do now is move the machines into the basement and just keep the monitors here so that I don't get quite so much noise.
Where I work (at a small ISP) we just had a fire and my office is now in an RV outside of the building that burned. It's actually kind of nice, i get to sit on a nice comfy couch, plenty of room for books and papers and things, nobody really bothers me. Unfortunately the building is almost done being rebuilt so soon it'll be back to the old desk in the old (new) office :T
No space for manuals or other paperwork. This was done to enforce the clear desk policy.
Buy yourself some cheap furniture (Or some crates and plywood... whatever) and put it in your office. Then make some overhead transparencies with top-down photos and diagrams of your cubicle and things. Make the desk big enough that you only need half of it. If challenged by management, get out your transparencies and give them a presentation saying with the small desk, it was 100% covered by the computer and 0% clear, but with your extended desk, your cubicle's desks are only 50% covered, and as such 50% clear!
Do it up with lots of diagrams, entire pages devoted to showing the calculations to work out surface area and things like that.
If they argue with that, coordinate you and your co-workers all to work 10% slower. Don't tell anyone you're doing it deliberately. If confronted, blame lack of deskspace.
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
I think I pretty much live in workspace heaven. I work with 5 other people (our HQ staff is only 6 people), our average age is 27.
Our headquarters is a 10 bedroom farmhouse on 13 acres of land. My office is a bedroom with two closets, a private bathroom, hardwood floors, and a door that closes (and locks). I have complete autonomy over music, lighting, office arrangement, and furniture choices.
I have a full kitchen to work lunch/dinner from, and a meeting room with La-Z-Boy couches and a conference table.
If I'm too tired to work, there is a visitor cottage with 22 beds in it (for when we have chapter retreats).
I came from working in a cube in the corner of a warehouse, so this is pure bliss.
Yes, I was visiting a friend at a major web-consulting firm in San Fran (near the Sega building) and the desks were arranged in a Sierpenski-triangle fashion, for maximum workable surface-area. They probably have mathematicians working out the exact shape for maximum nervous-energy generation.
I can't complain about the size of my cube, 5x7, it isn't huge, but I have tons of desk space. The most important thing I've noticed is where your cube is in relation to the most traveled aisles. My aisle is pretty busy, so time staring at netscape is sometimes limited based on how busy I want to appear. But some people who have cubes out of the way get really used to people not bothering them. You can sneak up on them and really catch them slacking off, it is a fun thing to do when things get slow. But the biggest problem is the difference in tempurature from day to day and building to building. You can go from one building to the next and there is a 15 degree difference, and if you go to the lab, forget about it, you better have a sweater on.
25 years ago IBM had some architects design the Santa Teresa labs based on user input. They got it right then and only a few employers have figured out the right way to do it:
DeMarco and Lister have a bunch of good ideas, too. Like getting rid of paging.
My current employer has an excellent evironment: private offices for everyone (some shared now due to rapid growth). Each office has a door and a window. Some people have incandescent lights, but during the day most lighting is sunlight. After the last move they got rid of the paging.
My previous employer had one thing better: windows that open.
The one thing IBM didn't know about in 1976 is telecommuting. Some people do it a lot. For many projects it's hard to not meet with other team members on a regular basis.
Hi -
Run, don't walk, to get the book "Peopleware" by Demarco and Lister. It outlines a number of very specific things to consider in the work environment. Below is some info on it from amazon.com:
Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams, 2nd Ed. by Tom Demarco, Timothy Lister
Paperback 2nd edition (February 1, 1999)
Dorset House; ISBN: 0932633439
"Peopleware" asserts that most software development projects fail because of failures within the team running them. This strikingly clear, direct book is written for software development-team leaders and managers, but it's filled with enough commonsense wisdom to appeal to anyone working in technology. Authors Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister include plenty of illustrative, often amusing anecdotes; their writing is light, conversational, and filled with equal portions of humor and wisdom, and there is a refreshing absence of "new age" terms and multistep programs. The advice is presented straightforwardly and ranges from simple issues of prioritization to complex ways of engendering harmony and productivity in your team. Peopleware is a short read that delivers more than many books on the subject twice its size. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
TWR
EOM
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
The last place I worked was the swanky Madison Avenue interactive branch of an old school Madison Avenue ad firm.
The design really rather reflected their attitude. Everyone got Aeron chairs. The creative team had one very very large room, and the account team had the other. This worked out nicely for them. They had plenty of space to freewheel and kick back and discuss and create.
The tech team, which actually built the sites that the creatives designed, were situated in a converted hallway, with their backs to one another, in such a cramped space that you couldn't sit Aeron to Aeron without bumping the body behind you.
Eventually, the techies were separated into vacant _offices_ with views of Madison Avenue and the nearby church. Not well thought out.
Cubicles are a good idea for only one reason. They are cheap.
:P
I like my workspace the way it is, thank you. Everyone gets an office with a real door. You're free to play games, surf p0rn or have long conversations with your girlfriend or sex therapist on the phone if you please. It's your damn business as long as you're doing the work you're supposed to.
With my own office, I can choose my lighting. If I didn't like the fluorescent panels in my office I could always order a halogen lamp or a desk lamp or whatever on my expense account.
There are plenty of meeting rooms around if you want to meet with a lot of people. You can always have people in your office too. Discussions get too loud? Close the door. Your neighbor annoy you when he screams at his computer? Ask him to close his door.
The coffee bar (along with the soda dispensers and arcade games) is in a room by itself. Feel free to be noisy in there.
In my current setup I have two walls covered with whiteboards and the third has a corkboard. And any changes I want made to this are just an email to services away. One of these whiteboards has my current task list. The others are usually covered with pictures of the architecture of the latest thing I'm working on or schematics of the accident my friend had with his truck and boat trailer on the freeway.
Oh and my office and desk are very messy
Mmmm.. Donuts
Back in the horror days when I worked for GTE (for their ADSL development...hint, don't buy it), they stuck 6 of us in a corner conference room (the small kind) with poor ventilation (ie, no air conditioning) on the side facing the afternoon sun. This was in summer. In Texas. It regularly got 90+ degrees in the office around 4 pm. It didn't help that we also had 6 computers in there (and an asshole "architect" who just loved Microsoft and VB and insisted on turning the lights on everytime we turned them off even though he was never in the office, er conference, er room from hell).
If you really wanted to save power you would light with daylight, and perhaps even have some system for using outdoor light as the backlight for your LCD flatscreen (with a fluorescent backup). Natural light is about half visible, half IR; the best fluorescent lamps are between 20% and 27% efficient, giving you between 3 and 4 watts of waste heat for each watt of light instead of 1.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I worked at a small company that decided to buy up a whole whack of office space, but didn't hire people to fill it. There were three rooms, and for security reasons they wanted at least one person in the back. I was the only person that sat there. I was surrounded by about 25 empty cubicles, in a room that couldn't have been more than 15 degrees celsius (don't know what that is in American). I got really freaked out, especially with security cameras around. On the plus side, I goofed off tons and nobody ever noticed :)
That was the most person-unfriendly place I ever worked. I would rather have been in the office where there were seven of us and only six computers and we were hot desked (I was part-time and could use computers elsewhere on campus if need be). At least I talked to other people, and didn't feel quite so alienated from the rest of the company.
I've always enjoyed observing how San Francisco differs from Silicon Valley, not just in the kinds of people who live or work in either place, but also in how the offices look.
:) Open Source forces you to think of things a certain way, but it frees you. Non-Open Source forces you to think of things a certain way, but it constrains you. The 'Open Environment,' if you'll forgive the buzzword, frees you to think of the work environment as a dynamic place.
San Francisco typically has open offices, where everyone can see everyone.
In Silicon Valley, cubeville is common-place.
In SV we often see CEOs work in the same types of cubes which their employees work in. (Hey even John Chambers is rumored to fly economy and encourages his employees to do the same.) So, there's a form of equality which flows through SV, and to a certain degree SF which you might not see on the East Coast. SF definitely has the 'Trendy' thing going for it, while SV is populated by 'Geeks' who are more likely to want secluded work areas.
Usually, programmers tell me they prefer offices, even non-window ones, to cubes. Marketing types often like open spaces. These are generalizations, of course.
What I don't understand is why companies can't be modular? Why can't some work-areas be small offices, some be common areas, and some be cubes? I find the Chiat-Day experiment interesting, not because it failed, or because if its 'forward-thinking' approach, but because it is exactly the same thinking which has brought us cubes and open spaces in today's office designs.
'CONTROL!'
Upper management wants to control the environment. Leaving the worker bees to live in artificial habitats not of their own choosing.
Think about why we like the idea of our own house so much? We like it because we can shape it to however we like to live. Funny thing is, though, we spend about 40 hrs a week living at work, while we typically spend 54 hrs living at home. The rest of the time we're either sleeping, commuting, exercising, or shopping out of either of these environments. 40 hrs is a huge amount of time to live someplace you don't like.
What I would advocate is for work-places to be a lot more dynamic, where people can choose (perhaps, but not necessarily, by seniority where they'd like to work).
The goal would be to allow the work-place to be dynamic.
FAQ:
Q: Nice idea nwonknu, but what about people that are different who work in the same department.
A: I think that the Computer networks and the telephone have already allowed us to be liberated from these sorts of restraints. The only thing which working in the same area as your team helps to accomplish is having people, usually managers, interrupt your work unexpectedly. Part of what a dynamic environment would accomplish is to allow dynamic groups to form if they are required.
Personally, I like to equate today's work-environment to a hard disk. When you don't have enough free disk space (open office spaces, as in unused cubes) you start to have all sorts of other problems, that are the result of a over-crowded environment.
Q: nwonknu, you're idealistic.
A: yes.
Q: Your idea itself tries to force something on others. You're not much different than the other 'control' freaks.
A: Compare this idea to Open Source, why? because I said so.
Well, I am now in a country where fluorescence is NOT the norm :). So I have been in both places.
I do not disagree that lighting is important in workplaces. The place I used to work in has atrocious (yes fluorescence) lighting. We had an open office,with rows of cubicles. The problem is that the ceiling tubes are not arranged "in sync" with the cubicles, so some cubes are overbright and some are too dark. People complain all the time.
But the fault is not the fluorescent. I have also worked in a factory as a line engineer running production of LEDS (irony). The whole plant is lit by fluorescence and the lighting is well-designed. There are "rest areas" of semi-brightness (for people to rest eyes), and bright areas for work, and dark areas for LED testing. The point is that flurorescence works, and runs at lower wattage.
The "flickering" of fluorescence is usually caused by (a) bad tube (b) bad power supply (running lower than 50/60Hz required). It's nothing to do with fluorescence.
Now when I work at a desk, and the lighting is not good enough, I flipped on my desk lamp. Fluorescent of course.
(oh yeah, I share your disagreements with halogen. Those are bloody dangerous things, and over bright for the eyes.)
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Quoted from another slashdot story.
Fh
One thing that's ticked me off about most office environments is how the size of the workspace is tied to the social status of the job. The higher-ups in the company (Often Senior VP and higher) often have their own private office that's 30 times bigger then the smallest cubicle... they often have room for a couple of couches, a mini kitchen (So they don't have to eat with the rest of the grunts)... maybe even a pool table and bar, etc. While I think that every office needs a pool table and some couches, these should be shared among the whole company. They should *not* be the privledge of just a few higher-up employees.
One of the things that I like about the company I work at now is that absolutely everyone, from the President to the VP of Technology to the Administrative Assistant, works in the same sort of cubicle. There are no private offices, but there are plenty of meeting rooms and public space. The President experiences the same noise and traffic levels level that I do. We're getting pool and foosball tables and a few couches (I'm working on getting a MAME box), which will be shared resources in a public space.
VP of marketting, programmers, administrators, mail carrier, receptionists, what-have-you-- all of these jobs are important to the survival of the company. *everyone* deserves a good workspace.
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
When I can come up with a way of managing it so that I can handle my phone through the headphones as well, I may never take them off from the time I sit down until the time I leave.
I have quit several jobs because the environment was so noisy that I could not concentrate effectively. IMHO "bullpens" ought to be banned, walls should be at least 2.2 meters height minimum, and there should be standards for acoustic damping and isolation which companies must meet or exceed. The ability to sit and do work when the guy in the next cube is on the phone would be more than enough to compensate for the inability to "prairie dog".
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
I worked as an intern at Bell Labs this past summer.. The office space was a mixed bag. I worked at the Holmdel, NJ facility, which was in the process of being converted to what they called "Atlas" space, Atlas presumably being the name of the company/design/whatever that they had selected for the renovation.
Anyway, the good parts: nice adjustable chairs, a full-sized L-shaped desk layout, with the computer in the corner, with a pullout height adjustable keyboard tray etc. etc.
The best part, in my opinion, was that the doors and part of the walls of the cubicles had whiteboards, and they provided a set of eraseable markers etc.
The definite downside, as repeated in other posts here, was the cubicle height cut-off... The "walls" left about two feet of clearance from the ceiling, so noise carried through very easily.. Because the offices came in blocks of two with big gaps between, the most you'd ever hear would be the noise from one other person (in the adjoining block), but it was still annoying.
Perhaps the best perk of the management offices was walls that touched the ceiling
The co-worker I shared an office with showed me the older layout, it was still in place in some of the areas in the building. The old offices all had real walls... Interesting decision, it was meant to increase productivity(!) by making it harder for people to have private conversations, but IMHO it just made people whisper more and in general productivity went down...
You turn off page-specified colors in IE using the "Accessibility options". Netscape only allows overriding the background, so e.g. the article name bars on Slashdot become white-on-white. (Hey Taco, FIX THAT ALREADY!)
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Yes, electronic ballasts can remove the flicker. Compact-flourescent bulbs with electronic ballasts rock, I use them all over my house.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
At my last job, I had an office. It was nice. I had loud music after hours and a non-windowed door so I could freaky with the secretary.
At my current job, I'm in a cubicle. Of course, I'd like an office but I'm really learning to like the cubicle. It allows me more interaction with my coworkers. I've found that I'm much more likely to ask for help or offer help living in such a communial environment than I every was in my office.
Overall, I'd say the best working environment is one you can customize. No matter if it's a desk, cubicle or office, the key is customization. One size doens't fit all and a comfortable employee is a productive employee.
The best office environment tip I can supply, however, is this one... Have a guest chair but always have something on it. That way, people can't just enter your work area and sit down. If you want someone to spend some time with you, take the laptop case (or whatever) off the chair. If you want piece and quiet, not offering the person a place to sit is pretty effective.
InitZero
One of my jobs I work at a University and I have several small labs to take care of. Not much to look at but mostly I have the needed room to work and enough quiet to not be to bothered by people around. I also can work from home a lot which is fantastic.
:)
My other job I'm a programmer for travel-italy.com and they have a lovely new building of a villa style. It's not huge but it is roomy and probably the nicest looking place I've worked. It is elegant but still working enviroment. The programmers have a little area with a view of the fountains and enar the kitchen and bathrooms.
Overall I'd say I have it good.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I like GNU/Linux, and I flourished best in a company that downsized the excess crud. Then I and a few other people could roam around and pick up all the goodies and ornament our personal spaces. Essentially, we served as our own architects, and could fix or repair anything without calling in some other professionals.
Read Christopher Alexander's books for some tips. I need a window to be able to think. I also appreciate a little privacy when I talk on the phone, and I don't like hearing others talk on the phone either.
Like some programmers, too many office architects look for the "magic bullet." They jump from fad to fad without any empirical evidence. When the space no longer works, they tear it down and start over.
Here are almost a dozen names for schemes to rework the office environment:
The list is from "Building Evaluation Techniques," ed. Baird, ISBN 0-07-003308-0.
The idea of this book is to make formal evaluations of how the environment affects productivity, and adjust as needed. It depends on a certain amount of flexibility built into the space, not everything predetermined by the architect down to the last millimetre and cent. Here is a good book too: "How Buildings Learn: What happens after they're built," by Stewart Brand, Penguin, ISBN 0-14-013996-6.
In fact, after evaluation, many businesses drop these new-fangled ideas as impractical. Workers don't like them, and find ways to resist or work around them.
The eXtreme Programming idea is new, but it puts forward a model of having a big room with high-powered workstations in the center on tables. Programmers work as two-member teams on the same computer. All around the center, at the borders, are cubes or private spaces for times when a person needs to work alone or with privacy.
Another idea that aids in personalizing and customizing office space is the HVAC system from Johnson Controls, that allows desk users to tune white space to control the sonic environment, as well as temperature, air flow, and lighting. This can be employed in any of the office environments, cubicles, offices, big rooms.
There are many models for forming social space in a business. There are many programming languages, and each has virtues and faults. It is up to us to choose the best tools. Professional architects and design engineers can help, but can't design everything perfect to begin with.
I was very interested in this a few years ago and read quite a few books on it. The book that most influenced me was Peopleware which talks about the best environment has the most amount of un-interrupted time. For example un-interrruped by phone calls, by noise from other people, by PA system paging etc. It also said offices are best and at most 2 or 3 people per office. Best was 1 office per person.
Well when I started my own company I gave that a try. We got a space with 21 offices and gave each of are 16 employee's their own.
It was an utter failure. Some employees would download porn all day, others would be on the phone all day but the biggest problem was communication. We were in the video game business where the product is something that has to be fun and visually pleasing as opposed to a perl script or a command line utility or even many apps which only have to be functional. I've come to believe that this "fun and visual pleasing" requires lots of interaction and feedback from the various team members and that separating the team into offices prevents this. Well prevents is a strong word but I now believe that it would be best to have almost the entire team in one room. This way artists and programmers can give and get instant feedback and collaboration.
I believe the reason the Peopleware model did not fit was that the Peopleware model was for "average" programming tasks. By average I mean that the majority of programmers have a technical spec. They don't really need to interact much with others to implement that technical spec. Making the spec might have required meetings etc but once the spec is finished they programming job is fairly solitary. Things like writing drivers, database apps, network stuff, custom corporate apps, etc.
Games on the otherhand have to be fun and pretty. Two things that can't be specified. Sure you can write down alot of stuff and there is tons of stuff to implement in making a game "engine" that may not require interacting with other people on the team but when in comes to making the actual game, making an enemy or weapon or even setup screen, many people need to give their input. "Make it a little faster... Can you adjust the height he jump a little?...When he goes past that make it a little louder...Can that fade out a little slower?..." etc.
Basically that means that what is good for some programmers "private offices" is not good for all programmers.
-gregg
This is more of a legacy MS Windows issue than a Linux one. It also does not apply to flatscreen (LCD) panel displays.
The default refresh rate on many CRTs is 60Hz. This creates an interference pattern with any proximate florescent lighting, and is the major cause of "monitor glare", which isn't in fact glare, but flicker. It's particularly noticable in peripheral vision -- I often find I'm more disturbed by a co-worker's display (caught from the corner of my eye) than they appear to be.
The solution is to set monitor refresh to some higher level -- 72Hz or better seems to push the effect beyond any perceptible threshhold.
In Linux, check the output of your X server (startx -- 1>.startx.log 2>&1 & should save output to '.startx.log) to see what rates are being selected for your X session, or monitor the rates with tools like xvidtune or your window manager or desktop video tuning tools.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Even worse is when they check their voicemail over the speakerphone...
But eventually they get their own:
"Bob, this is Dr. Smith, The test results came back positive...."
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If there is one reason I did not leave MP3.com it was for the bad ass engineering office space. They have some pictures at the job pages. The only thing that sucked sometimes was that because of the massive growth you could be stuck with three people in a room that was really meant for two. But other then that the office space ruled.
Part of my job is as a web developer, and the work load is split between my office (a real office with a door, totally customizable to my every whim) and my home-office. The only real difference is that I can drink and smoke like a maniac at home, which I find is very productive. I'm aware that neither habit is good for me physically, but man, can I crank out the code (bug free!) in such an environment. It's tough to quantify productivity, but I honestly feel 50% more effective after 4 - 6 beers. Often, after an 8 - 10 hour coding frenzy at home, I'm amazed at how attractive and efficient the final product is... with the exception of a mild hangover. I don't know if the booze helps me relax or focus, but whatever it does works very, very well.
It's weird but true.
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Slashdot: News For Zealots. Stuff That's Hypocritical.
Just think:
This is lifted from Gregory Pfister's In Search of Clusters: the ongoing battle in lowly parallel computing. Among the discussions: caching systems work best by randomly clearing sections in the cache (desktop), which should remain fully populated. Emptying the cache (clearing your desktop) wastes cycles. In the section "The Cache as a Messy Desk" (6.2.7, p 146):
Suppose you walk into an office and start to work on some project. You dig the files out of a desk drawer or cabinet, put them on your desk, and work. Then you start something else. No, don't put the old stuff away; restrain your tidiness even if you completely finished the previous job. just get out the new things you need, find an empty spot on your desk, and works there....Eventually, of course, your desk will be amess with no more room left on it. That's when youclear some space off by putting some of the itmes on your desk back in the files -- but only clear enough space to do the next theing you need.
Notice that the desk never, ever gets clean. In fact, except for the initial period when you first start using it, the desk is always completely filled with "old stuff" of various ages....
Cache memories work exactly like that messy desk; Noting is emptied out of them until the space it occupies is required for something else.
Viva la mess!
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Without ANY doubt, I'm dramatically more productive at the location where I can shut the door and get some uninterrupted work done.
So that's rule #1, a real office. Rule #2 is access. Ability to get to it and your work site whenever you need to. You know, sometimes you are just on a roll and being forced to go home cause everyone else is just sucks. But rule #2 also requires a boss that understands rule #2. If I work until after midnight and then roll in the next day around lunch time, I don't want some lame 9-5er making smart-ass remarks about how lazy I am. If that smart-ass happens to be your boss, much much worse.
Rule #3, not office related, but office politic related. Dress code. I think clothing manufactures are convincing media to run stories saying that people are far more productive and feel better about themselves when they are dressed professionally. Yeah, right. Sometimes I have to wear a shirt and tie and worse, occasionally a real suit, to work. On those days, I don't do jack. All I can think about is getting home early to get out of the thing and into something more comfortable. When I'm comfortable, I can work longer hours, take less breaks, and manage stress better. Jeans and T-shirts are the way to go.
And finally rule #4. Access to a secretary. You know, those under-appreciated and now considered un-needed employees. IT people are getting damn expensive and being interrupted by the phone constantly is a killer. I also need someone to keep my life organized. Someone who knows to find out when someone says their CD-ROM drive is failed, whether they just use it to listen to music, or need it for a critical part of their job.
(How many of you get those damn phone calls that start out "Hello, this is ____ from xyzzy research, and we are conducting a survey. This is NOT a sales call and will only take 5 minutes." Yeah, sure, I was getting two of those a day and each took like 20-25 minutes, until I got a secretary to run interferance. Once upon a time, ZDnet would at least give you a free year's subscription to PC Week and a host of other of their mags, but after a while they stopped, so I said "flock("em") all...)
An ideal work environment is worth making 10-20 grand a year less, maybe more. I spend most of my life at work, I'd like it to be pleasant and rewarding. Yeah, for the right pay, I might put up with a cube farm, dressing up, and not getting much real work done. For the right pay, I'd spend my days dreaming and waiting until the quitting bell rings so I can run home, escape, and spend some of that extra dough...
It really amazes me how employers tend to focus on things that make their people less productive and eager to leave the work site asap... They'll spend several million on cute architectural features in the lobby and common areas of the building, then when it comes to housing the employees that exist to make them a profit, they skimp, make a huge cube farm and then often circle the outside of each floor with real offices for "important" people so they can have windows and to prevent the working staff from looking outside.
The button to toggle image loading is funky also.
Think I'm becoming a convert.
~ppppppppö
Being tech-workers, I assume that most of you have seen the classic anti-tech-work movie, Office Space. How do you feel about this movie's portrayal of our work environment?
Not a week has gone by without one of my co-workers quoting a line from this movie in relation to something in our office. Like when our printer is fucking up, someone will reference Samir's line "This is a Fuck!". When a co-worker was frustrated with contradictory commands from two different bosses, he referred to Peter Gibbons' (Office Space's main character) criticism of three of his bosses telling him to "fill out his TPS reports". Everyday when I stare at the lifeless void of my cubicle, I fondly remember the scene when Peter kicks down a wall of his cubicle to get a better view of the window. Stupid-ass coporate slogans, meaningless yet interminable work, pointless levels of bureucracy, fake-smiles and forced-'good morning's... all of these seemingly unnecessary idiosyncracies of the tech-office remind of Office Space, and make me wonder if the tech-'revolution' has changed anything about the way we work from the kiss-ass-to-get-ahead ways of our parents' blue-chip office jobs. Break down the cubicle walls!
In the words of Peter Gibbons: "It's not that I'm lazy, it's that I just don't care."
In Rapid Development. Chapter 30.
:-)
A few pages. Some good statistics. A sample calculation showing that at the time and place he was writing hiring a new developer vs getting a better office space was no contest in bang for the buck. Over a factor of a hundred different.
A couple of references. Including IBM's paper describing their design considerations for the Santa Teresa complex back in the 70's.
Cheers,
Ben
PS In case it isn't obvious, this is a recommendation.
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
I've worked in cubes, offices, and shared offices.
After all this time, I think my dream office environment would be:
1) Offceis for each person. You need to be able to hold stuff and express your interests - floating offices and shared spaces don't let you do that much. So, even if small, an office where a person can settle down, listen to whatever music they want (or seal themselves away from all noise) and just be comfortable.
2) Shared areas where people can work together. Though having your own office is nice, there are times where you want to quickly work with a group of people to do things for some period of time - for a few weeks or months. In those times you need a shared area to work with together that has a number of computers to work with.
In short, I think there is some level of combination of the office/no office idea. I like an office but know it limits communication and slows us down. On the other hand, I also know a totally shared space would be very uncomfortable for me.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I worked for a beltway bandit contractor, who wanted a security SCIF built cheap. So what they did was buy an office that used to be a bank. The work spaces were set up in what was the bank vault, complete with steel walls, a 2-foot thick door, and instructions on the wall about what to do if you got locked in. There was no temperature control other than 'cold', and the acoustics made it sound as if every PC in the room was venting directly behind your ear. Eventually the vault was inspected by the client; it failed the criteria for a security SCIF, and we moved to saner surroundings.
:)
Now I work at a different company in a rather spacious and comfortable cubicle. I just don't understand it when people say they couldn't work in a cube.
Genocide Man -- Life is funny. Death is funnier. Mass murder can be hilarious.
On behalf of web designers everywhere, I would like to extend you all a formal apology for our profession's: lack of understanding; our unwillingness to listen; our obsession with personal agendas; our disregard for basic human comfort; our arrogance against (l)users; our prioritizing ideas over substance; our facination with 'creativity' for the sake of it, and ignorance of proven solutions; our elitism in being 'producers of Culture', and obnoxious pretentiousness (etc.)
But seriously, to make a point, I think that every industry is guilty of these transgressions, especially those in the design / creative fields. A good architect / web designer / programmer will take the time to listen to - and when necessary - educate a client.
Conversely, as I client you sometimes have to educate your architect / web designer / programmer if they need it.
It's all about proper communication.
At my previous job (an ad agency) we had this old historic building converted into a modern workplace. The outside of the building was painted neon yellow, red and teal and all 13 rooms inside were painted a different vibrantly, annoying color (I believe this had to do with a color specialist recommending vibrant colors to boost low morales, but I digress).
The work area for the designers (including myself until last week when I quit) consisted of one medium sized room containing 3 desks and all the rest of our crap. There was little work space, our printers were located in a different room and there was zero privacy. At the very least we convinced management to go with white and teal walls in our area -as not to affect our design work. The previous choice was hot pink and red.
As for the rest of the building, we had two receptionists on the ground floor, eight creatives on the second floor and the president and his secretary on the third floor. As you can see, the creatives were held in high regard.
DigiSquid Design.
After working in an open-plan office for 10 months
I quit my job and went back to the lovely, lovely public sector and my own, private office with huge, long desks and a door that you can close (and lock).
Jesus - open-plan offices. You can't concentrate because you can hear what everyone else is saying and you know they can hear you. You feel opressed because you know that other people are aware of your presence...or absence...regardless of how much actual work you undertake.
Even tho' the bosses were actually quite cool, I felt quite annoyed when I once received a winpop (yes, ok, ok ) from him telling me how to handle the call I was currently dealing with.
Nope - no substitute for personal space. I can get several manuals open, several piles of printed PDF documents on A4 and still have easy access to my PC in this office.
Of course with the advent of affordable broadband theres no need for the majority of "us" to go into work at all. Even if we were timetabled to actually go in 1 day a week, just to stop the onset of madness, it would be a massive improvement. And I suspect it would also alleviate London's transport problems.
I know that I'm not alone in doing the highest quality work in the early hours of the morning. Try persuading the suits that that's the case...
So, can I be the first person to say that I work in the servant's quarters on the top floor of a 19th century manor house in its own grounds by the river Thames?
Our biggest problems are:
a) 'listed' building i.e. we're not allowed to do very much to it
b) we work in what were essentially the servants' bedrooms, they have thick doors, and room for about 4 people in a room. This means that often we can't group people together how we'd like to
c) PCs near the windows often have difficulty starting up in the mornings due to the temperature the offices reach at night, particularly at the weekends
d) random infestations.. mice, wasps, fleas, flies, dead birds in the water tanks (once someone left a glass of water on their desk and came back the next day to find a mouse desparately treading water in it)
e) because we're on the top floor, the 'heat' is often used up before we get to it
f) three flights of stairs (built before elevators and we can't add any due to a) above)
g) difficulty employing young developers, who for some reason don't want to work in a manor house in the middle of rural Oxfordshire
the advantages speak for themselves I guess, also there is a company boat you can hire to go up and down the Thames, more parking spaces than you would believe, and a canteen serving good old fashioned British stodge at reasonable prices
... oh, and we own the building and the grounds and rent some of it out to a government agency.
Well, about a year and a half ago, I was working for Mindspring Technical Support, down in the suck-fest known as Atlanta. This essentially was my general 'desk' setup and atmosphere...
Typically there were two rows of double sided cubicle walls, each side handled 4 segments, for 16 total seats per row. Typically you just hoped your seat was open and that you could use the same PC as the day before. If not, you only hoped you were sent to a PC that was working. Every shift had to share a seat, so you had to be sure to get out of your seat quickly for the fellow taking over to be able to start work on time. Each row on each side typically had two halogen lamps near columns. So, it was cramped, always shared and typically darker than a goth club.
Personally, I didn't mind that, but I don't know how it is now... the smell was absolutely fucking atrotious... The floor rarely had adequete ventilaton. (You guessed it, one person comes in sick, nearly the entire row ended up calling in sick a few days later) You could also imagine the atmosphere (sound wise) with many people packed into one floor with the tight spaces of the cubicle rows. If there were enough calls going on at one moment, unless you had your head BURIED in between the headphones, the noise was actually sometimes defening. Actually more annoying than listening to white noise.
That was the last time I had any sort of office/cubicle desk work.
My own personal office environment preference would simply include better spacing, clean carpets and better isolation for each cubicle to help deal with noise. That is, if I had to work at Mindspring again.
To be fair... Mindspring was actually a rather fun (in between the headaches of various catasrophies) place to work, extremely laid back... which pretty much compenstated for the evironment at times, and is sure a hell of a lot better than your typical shirt-and-tie stuffy office environment. One fellow was apparently comfortable enough showing up to work wearing only a bathrobe (tightly tied closed, thank god) and slippers. *shrugs* Being able to relax and feel laid back at work does a lot more than anestetics and impressive architecture. I probably would go insane being in an office space that was designed more for looks rather than helping the employee settle in and get work done.
Insufficient funds, charging $3 fee. Insufficient funds...
My company's thinking of cutting their costs. Given what real-estate goes for in NYC, I whole heartedly support them. What they don't spend on rent, they can spend on me :-)
I also have a home office (ADSL connection, router/hub, a LAN full of pretty fast G3 Macs, printers, scanner, QuickCam, PC Anywhere and Lotus Notes clients, yadda, yadda, yadda,) where the dress code is nil, the coffee is not drowned ground dog sh*t, where I don't have to listen to other nerd's conversations (or encounter marketing rep.s) or get comments about my eclectic tastes in music or food,) and I believe that this is the way of the future.
Its not where you are but what you are.
The real revolution to come from the ubiquitousness of the internet will be the democratization of hegemony and the elimination of the tyranny of place.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Interesting to see your post, I've got my own copy of the book open to Section II, dealing with the issue of workspaces.
There are those who've always held that Peopleware (Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister, Dorset House Publishing Co., New York, © 1987 ISBN: 0-932633-05-6) is a programmer's wet dream of the ultimate work environment. I'd also say that things have changed a lot in the 13 years since it was published: the Internet, a workforce which has grown up in cube farms, voicemail and pagers replacing overhead paging. Still, there are some powerful truths, argued with facts, contained in the book, and echoed in more recent works such as Steve McConnell's Code Complete.
I do strongly feel that open-plan and private-office workspaces fall at either end of a large continuum, and probably are not ideal for much contemporary technical work. The shared office or high-walled cube approach seems to work better than either open or private layouts.
Of the environments I've worked in, two of the most conducive where a "pod" arrangement of cubes, in which four cubes shared a common corridor access. Scooting back on my chair I could convene with co-workers on similar projects, yet within my cube, I had relative privacy. The other was a "coding pen" with three developers at standard desks pushed up against walls. Small enough group that multi-way communications weren't overly common, enough people that collaboration and quick queries were possible.
One of the worst environments was at Visa International, which has "rationalized" its contractor workspace environment by placing all contractors on a single floor of its Foster City offices, dubbed the UN for its international flavor. My direct reports were six floors above me, and co-worker contractors were a dozen cubes down the aisle and across the floor. Hardly conducive to communications (but I got the skinny on the Y2K project and the marketing design campaign).
Private offices, in a development enviroment, tend to cut too many communications channels. The worst situation is closed doors and no glass -- it's hard to tell what you're walking into and/or whether or not it's appropriate. Even a cube-orientation can be almost as effective. The same office which originally had a "coders pen" moved to a new location in which a high-walled four-workstation unit shaped like a "+" was the initial furnishings. Interactions were virtually stifled: the only ways to communicate were to walk around the entire periphery, or to shout in a voice audible over the entire office. Later, a section of cubes with mixed wall heights was adopted -- communications between common working groups was possible, distractions from other groups were minimized.
With the Internet, the opportunities for distraction have also increased. As you say, downloads, pr0n, computer games, personal business, are all distractions. I don't feel that this is the best mode of operation for most technical work, particularly for people who aren't used to working in such an autonomous environment, unless a well defined (and resonably revisable) set of performance milestones can be established, in which case I really don't care where you work or how you spend your time, so long as you produce.
My current employer has just moved from a large-office, high-walled cube environment to a workspace typified by smaller office spaces (8 to 20 workstations), with low cube walls -- about 5'. The effect, for the developers and QA team who share a space with 14 workstations, is that neither public nor private workstyles are facilitated. Noise and distraction are significant problems, as is privacy. Conversations by co-workers, phones (particularly cell phones), pagers, etc., are constant. At the same time, it's impossible to carry on a private (or discrete) phone call at my own desk.
Low walls essentially turn the space into an open-plan office, with various group and individual workstyles meaning that there are radically different work patterns. Neither privacy (a quite, distraction-free personal work environment) nor a small-group bull-pen are possible. Other departments have similar or worse issues with major corridors walking through workspaces, mismatches of proximity and projects -- work teams being split up or disparate teams being pushed into the same space.
It's a less than optimal situation, and working from home (lots of windows, radio, large desk, network connectivity, remote access, phone, IRC) make it an attractive alternative. We do have a large number of conference rooms, and the space is still being built out, so there's hope for improvement.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
I just started new sysadmin job. All I can say it that my office rox. Here's why. My workstation (that arrived yesterday) is Apple G4 dual-500 dedicated to the MacOS. Next to it is a G4 400 dedicated to LinuxPPC. Behind me is my personal server--a G3 333 running LinuxPPC. Next to that is a badass. It's a Sun Ultra30 with a 24" Sun monitor. All this is in my office. The only downsides are that it's really hard to leave that little place of heaven and go home for the evening (and I don't have a bed there), the abient (sp?) noise is not noticeable to me but others tend to notice it (the machines, switches, and hubs I have running in there), and I am getting a little cramped for space. But hey, I still have room for that mini-fridge of Mountain Dew so I'm still good. :-)
...is where I work. I am the "boss" so no-one bothers me or my personal environment. Chaos applies. Everything seems just perfect in it's imperfection. All order, virtual and otherwise is in the mind, depending of course, on how much coffee I drink. A "visually" perfect work environment is for designers to design for other desigeners to admire. When a Japanese artist achieves perfection in a particular work of art, visual or otherwise, he has two choices: destroy the object in question, because it is against every known law of nature, or "install" a deliberate imperfection that is called "wabi"... I believe, hidden somewhere in this way of looking at things, call it a "philosophy" if you will, there lies the secret of the "perfect" code, especially a perfect crypto code. Anything perfect can be perfectly duplicated, thus "cracked"... Introduce deliberate chaos, and you have the "true perfection" of uniqueness... the "thing in itself" ... the "one of a kind" (twosided to accomodate decryptage only once by the other half of a pair).
So the moral of this story is: Be ye not like your pop in the sky, for even His "perfection" is totally virtual.
Yours, (where's my mouse under all this paperwork)
Aazz, otherwise known as Azed-Glanz
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
I've got piles of paper, floppy disks, unlabeled CDRsm various ISA and PCI cards (even some VESA and a full length EISA network card!), books, vendor literature, old comdex badges going back to 1989, empty soda cans, candy wrappers, a few stale Doritos, music CDs, anime posters, etc. There's a telephone under there somewhere too. However, I never seem to have any working pens! But I've been there for 10 years and have seen my salary increase sixfold since I started. I've seen lots of other SWEs come and go. The ones with pristine neat desks who bitch at you if you leave a rubber band there never last.
Well, this is my current programming environment. We have an open space environment without cubicles, fluorescent lights, or whining managers. Instead, we have a huge green screen (like the one used for special effects in the Matrix) on one side, ambient lighting, a chill out area with couches and TVs, a couple of SL1200 decks (record players) with an incredibly complex effects mixer set up in the front. If you are stressed, you can relax by spinning a set on them. The fridge is full of beers, pop, and food. There is also the bud bowl (a term for the lingo literate) as well - gives you a fresh perspective on some issues. Ah yes, and the view of the mountains on the North Shore here is nice. We have the freedom to work from home, but its too much fun here. Code and have fun... =)
BCDude
if we dont have some cool rules ourselves, then pronto, we're bogus too.
I have a friend who worked for Cisco. He was telling us (we work for a VERY small e-commer company) about a sh!t hot developer at Cisco that could only work when listening to the loudest heavy metal possibly bearable to a human being. So Cisco made her a sound proof room. Also note that a shower was definitly not a personal preference on her part. (Yes she smelled)
Our office consists of a 20 x 30 room with a dartboard, my stereo blasting SKA, or Everclear, or other appropriate music, a beer fridge, and my desk is two keyboard carrols (I got sick of the Server keyboard in my lap all day.... broke a kick ass IBM keyboard by dropping it)with two 19" monitors on it, and a 24" wide table that is 5 feet long next to it. I thought about getting a return for my desk but this small table works much better. The beer fridge is right under it, very accesible, and the white board is right above it. So the perfect working environment....
Rule of Life Number 2: Remember, it can all go to hell at any minute. --Jimmy Buffet
Plus God damn it you f*ckers CAN'T ADD! All you guys went to college, right? So I know you must have at some time passed some kind of college entrance exam. And they teach people how to add by the third grade at the latest! Why the Hell can't you guys ADD?
I have been a land surveyor, specializing in construction layout, for over twenty years, with a temporary, and now mercifully terminated, side-trip as a small-business network admin - a job which I have lately found so disgusting, between Microsoft's perverted customers-be-damned lust-for-gelt and the recent systematic capitalist crack-down of hacking in general, that I threw it all up and went back to the field. Best career move I ever made too; I even got a raise out of it!
Now I KNOW that an architect is an artiste and can't be bothered with mere technicalities like making their damn grid lines add up the same up one side of the plan as they do down the other. But for the last decade or so, almost all the architectural drawings I have used were produced on CAD systems, and damn it all, they STILL don't add up! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right. Yet at least half - and I'm being very conservative here, the correct number is closer to 80% - of these foundation plans off which I'm supposed to lay out the design in the field, are literally impossible to stake, at least in a Euclidean universe, because they don't add up!
So I have to assume that you bastards are doing it on purpose!
Indignantly yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
I work in a dowdy little engineering company, that has a high regard for appearance. Ironically, the design of the office and even the entire office complex is swarming with bad taste.
To make matters worse, there are people in the office that use EXTREME quantities of cheap cologne and perfume. This LITERALLY forces me to stay a minimum of 20 feet away to avoid getting a headache.
I really miss my graduate school environment-- a 24-7 rat's nest of cabling/electronics, and bullet-proof office furniture from the 50's, blissfully exempt from bean-counting jackasses, department store paintings and useless erognomic furniture.
It's also important to segregate your life, as you noted. If eveyplace is the office, and the office is the pits, your life will soon start to suck.
Scenerio in point: You're at the beach and a deadline is near. Your solution just does not work right, Your cell phone is just in range so you loose contact frequently. It happens again. Total frustration. Right then, your little girl pokes at your sunburned shouler again, sending waves of sand and salt into your keyboard. "Look dady", she starts. Her touch reminds you of your own father's 5PM shadow kisses when you were her age, what a bad burn you have. Her high pitched voice has penetrated your shell. Possilbe actions:
A) Yell: "Yeah, Great! Another fucking sand castle. Will you kids shut up, so I can think for a minute!"
B) Try to unstick the jjjjjjjjj key. Say, "That's very nice dear."
C) Drive home early.
Maybe it's because of people like me, who don't check their e-mail every single time WMMail lets me know another piece has arrived. If I did, I wouldn't be able to actually do anything. If you need to talk to three people before you send out a quick memo, and you e-mail them it might end up blocking for up to a day. The phone on the other hand rarely blocks for more than an hour.
----------------------------
Here's the ideal work environment:
1. Small teams, no more than 3-5 people at the most.
2. Give these people whatever hardware they need.
3. Stick 'em in an irregulalry shaped room [doesn't matter how, just as long as it ISN't a box- an L would work easily] with outlets EVERYWHERE.
4. Weekly meetings with the next guy up on the food chain.
5. No dress code- your ass has to be covered and your shirt can't say Fuck or other bad words.
I had this at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, working a multimedia piece... it was GREAT environment- we could work in piece without seeing each other, we all had our headphone,s and if we had probelsm, everyone else was a voice away.
An unproductive work environment? Suits, daily meetings, and particularly CUBICLES. If I ever have to wear khakis and work in one of those fucking things I WILL kill someone. I'm sure many of you have the same loathing I do of those charming little prisons.... people work better in groups or solo, not stuck in a rat maze of coffee pots and neckties.
Keep us comfortable, keep us happy, give us our SPACE, leave us ALONE and we get it DONE.
My company has some converted warehouses on the South side of Austin, Texas. It's a pretty standard cube farm. Each cube is about eight-by-eight and has a single occupant. This is plenty of room for me. The only problem is that the AC at my end of the building has been on the blink for the last couple of months. The thermostats are bottomed out at 56 F and it's still averaging over eighty by 3 P.M. It's kind of funny though that everyone has a $5000 Sun on their desk, right next to the $10 fan.
It's good to use your head, but not as a battering ram.
I prefer an actual office ROOM (not a fuquing cube!) with:
Steve Magruder
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Sience I work for a small company we have about 8 people in one large room. Each person has their own desk with Plenty of room for a Sun Sparc Workstation with a 19" monitor keyboard, Mouse, dumb terminal and still some extra room to hold you lunch and some manuals and paper work. there is also a book case seportating management from the techs which gives us some privicy to do your work and also cuts down noise from telephone calls. the techs desk are clustered in grops of 2 or 3 so there is plenty of room to move around it but there are still people to chat with and/or ask those silly little questions that you seem to forget every now and then. It is actually a fairly confortable enviroment where there is little noise and pleanty of work space without the isolation of a 1 person office.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
As a recent graduate of architecture school, and a future architect, I'd like to drop in my two cents.
There are thousands of architects in the United States; hundreds here in Los Angeles alone. But most people -- even in the profession itself -- can only name a few big names, like Frank Gehry or Eric Owen Moss. Most big-name architects are arrogant to no end (the classic example being Frank Lloyd Wright), and they tend to give the profession a bad reputation. Most architects I have known and worked for actually do care what their clients have to say and go out of their way to make sure the resulting design fulfils the client's (and not the architect's) desires. That's not to say that the architect doesn't try to influence the client's decisions, but if the client wants a brick building, then the architect is either going to design a brick building or pass on the project.
Several posters have mentioned that architects have a "we know best" attitude about just about everything. In our defense, I can only point to history in which architects did know best about just about everything. Many, if not most, of the greatest thinkers in history were at least part-time architects (from Leonardo da Vinci to Thomas Jefferson, there are more). Over time, however, the position has been diluted to building designer, rather than cultural philosopher; some people are unwilling to let go, despite the fact that they really have no qualifications.
The primary task of the Architect is to produce usable shelter for the client. If the client finds the result unusable, for just about any reason, then the Architect has failed.
At the same time, not all problems with buildings and spaces are the fault of an architect. Clients love to insist on mediocre ideas and marginal plans, and then have the gall to complain to the architect when they get what they asked for. Lots of buildings these days aren't even designed by architects at all. It's not uncommon for an owner to bypass the design professions (architecture, interior design, etc.) altogether and just hire a contractor to make changes to their space.
But in the end, architects do have a responsibility to listen to their clients needs, even if those needs seem counter-intuitive. Just as a chef would be way out of his or her element telling a radio astronomer how to search for extraterrestrial life, so are architects when they try to tell clients how to use their space. Architects can really only offer advice from experience with past projects.
"I came here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. I'm all out of bubblegum." MSE USC APX AIA CSI CASp
The trick is to be an opportunist. As an independent Java contractor, I exist outside the system. I'm currently working with a major developer in Austin, and once they gave me an office, I kept finding ways to skip up the food chain. First my project manager left for a long vacation, so I moved into his office and had a lake view for awhile. Then I shuffled down the hall a few doors and worked with another team member, still with a lake view. Now I'm back where I started, but I'm now the only occupant of a two-person office (no view, though). It's pure gold - I get a shelf, whiteboard, two desks, and a phone that never rings. This week I brought up a cd tower and a boombox from home, and between that and the free food, I'm in heaven. I am, of course, bragging, but the basic point is that my grandfather's maxim was correct: "Forgiveness is easier to come by than permission." If you hate your environment, change it; you'd be surprised at how accommodating people will be if you don't act like a jerk.
Honk if you've killfiled JonKatz!
I'm a tech support guy at a small college. My work entails about 60% repair and setup of computers in the 'pit', 30% calls on campus, and 10% coding and such. I require a a large desktop area with several monitors so that I can be working on several machines at once as well as my desktop machine with dual monitors. I also need at least two large shelves for parts and a bookshelf for my books as well as a filecabinet. When I started here, there were four of us in a large room. We had a work bench running along one wall and large 'L' shaped desks blocking off each corner so that we each had a personal area with two walls as well as all facing into the center which facilitates conversation (picked up a lot of stuff about working on PC's there (I'm the Mac Guy). Now, I'm stuck in a 6'x8' closet with hardware piled everywhere! The head of the department decided that the full time programers needed to be in one room (our 'Pit'). Of course, the programmers are now complaining about not having quiet to code in. Makes you wonder where management gets it's ideas.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The most important thing is having a boss/supervisor who understands
that happy workers are the most productive.
Originally, our project team consisted of a single person working in a
tiny office on the ground floor. This office had a large glass window
facing out onto the corridor, so anyone walking past was able to look
in.
When I joined there was two of us, with two computers on a tiny desk and
harsh lighting and air conditioners that never turned off, even in the
winter (we ended up having to tape over the duct to keep the cold air
out).
When they employed a new manager, we went straight upstairs and begged
for a new workspace.
We now have a large, airy office with good natural light. We have huge
desks, comfortable chairs, lots of shelf space, a Solaris and a Linux
workstation each, a fridge, inflatible furniture, Nerf weaponry, a large
electronic whiteboard, posters. I'm also allowed to steal bandwith and
power for my personal web/mail server.
Now I actually want to come into work, rather than fighting to stay
away. In fact, I spend much of my weekends there too instead of my own
computer room at home (I live alone), because its such a great place to
work.
Get yourself a manager with a clue. You'll like it.
My workarea on a contract a couple of years ago had speakers throughout the area piping in a local radio station. It was one I often listen to at home, but I didn't want to hear it at the office. Fortunately, the PA speakers were not too high and they had on/off switches on them.
Many years ago I fixed another problem by just bringing in a wire cutter late at night. A quick snip fixed the problem.
FLW did the Johnson Wax building, including designing the furniture. This included a three legged, wheeled chair. The chair was totally unstable. When the company went to Wright about this, he said the people needed to be trained in how to sit in the chairs. They finally got him down to the place to try the chairs himself and he fell over. In an interview later in his life, he admited that some of his furniture gave himself bruises. So there ya' go. Even fancy pants architechs can put out nice looking but impractical stuff.
I drank what? -- Socrates
Read Peopleware by Demarco and Lister for the reasoning and proof of why this is so.
I've had the pleasure of working in both of these environments, and I'm easily 20-30 times more productive than when I'm in a cubicle environment (like I am at the moment). I know this because I managed to write 30 pages of documentation in two days whereas it took 50 days to write the first 20 pages in my most recent contract. I've repeated this experiment many times over the last two years and hope that you will take the time to test it too.
I'm looking forward to the Olympics so I can telecommute again and get some real productivity back from the black hole of time that is my "office" at my current multinational telco client.
Andrew van der Stock
In my current job I had a private office until space got tight and now I have to share a 10' by 10' office with a co-worker. I now know much more about this co-worker's life than I ever wanted to. This co-worker started out quiet and considerate, but now feels quite free to be herself. I hate it. Not the co-worker, I like her, I just wish I wasn't sharing an office with her. It is a constant chafing. We both have to have guests in the office often and that interferes with eachother's concentration. She likes it bright; I like it so that her under-the-shelf lamp doesn't reflect in my monitor. I am at a point in my career where I feel that I am entitled to a more private space to work in. When I leave for greener pastures, the office-sharing will be a reason.
I would rather have a cubicle than be cooped up with another person in a tiny office.
Until last week, the telecommunications company from whom I'm now trying to get fired had centralized all their UNIX admins in one location. Three of us were in one office, four in another down the hall. Given that the person for whom we worked -- CTO of the company -- understood the importance of what we did and of keeping us happy, we were free to do anything we wanted. This extended beyond simple office decoration and lighting - we wore whatever clothes we wanted, took regular frisbee breaks outside, grilled out every Friday, and kept beer in the fridge. I personally took a lot of calls on my cellphone while wandering through the woods behind the place. We weren't there to be viewed by the public, so there was no dress code. (Hell, the CTO once greeted a FedEx guy while in shorts and flipflops... FE: "Excuse me, sir, do you work here?" CTO: "Yeah, I own the joint. Who the fsck are you?") The job had many pressures, but none of them inherent by simply being at the office.
As for our actual offices: They weren't designed or built very well, so we had to make do. The walls were pretty thin - like they'd just fall over if a good breeze came along. Three of us made do in one office, while four others occupied another one. It was a tad cramped after you toss in a few desks and computers, but having us together was better than being alone in separate offices. Those were for the management types, who spent the day on the phone keeping other manglement types off our backs. We could easily ask each other questions about how such-and-such was done at one location, what the password was for server *foo*, and just make weird conversation in the meantime.
Nobody doing any serious work ever had the overhead flourescents on. A lower-powered incandescent lamp back in the corner was much more relaxing. Eventually, we tried blacklight tubes overhead, with pretty cool results. We also swapped out the soft-white bulbs in our lamps for red and blue "party-light" bulbs, and combined with the blacklights, it made for a really nice college-bachelor-pad meets dance-club meets ops-center environment. Direct light was where it was needed, and elsewhere, just the soft glow of blacklight and several monitors. And while our office took the route of a spotlit mirror ball, the other went christmas-light crazy. We wrote nasty things about our subsidiaries on the whiteboards, and in yellow highlighter on the walls (only visible in the blacklight, see). Laetitia Casta still hangs to the right of my desk with promises of August 19 falling on a Saturday.
Music was definitely an integral part of our happiness. At my previous orkplace, music consisted of a tired old boombox, permanently tuned into the classic rock station, which frequently got turned down or off for the benefit of a phone call being made by one of the four cow-orkers in that office. That sucked. Here, everybody had satellite/subwoofer systems, and being of the same early-20's age bracket, there was a lot of overlap in our musical preferences. So that was nice, at least until other businesses in the adjoining suites started complaining about the volume.
Working there was even more enjoyable than working from home, which I've also done. I actually looked forward to going in in the morning, and frequently stayed late. There was no fear of "Omigod, the VP of *foo* is coming today, everybody clean up!" As long as we got our work done, and there was lots of work, there were no complaints. The architecture was not in any visual or physical design; it was in building a group of people who could get anything done, and keeping us happy to work there. All of the old paradigms of a "proper office environment" -- fake plastic trees, desk drawers full of paperclips and ink pens, suits and ties -- took a backseat to our stolen road signs, desk drawers full of empty cans, and shorts and t-shirts. Unfortunately, the company just went through a major reorganization, and damn near everybody has been moved out of here once again. I'm looking for another job now, but I doubt I'll ever have another workplace quite like this one.
--
This is not about the workplace but rather a high school computer lab. Anyways the high school I used to attend had one computer lab (the one with the nice Macs and SGI's) that was dark other than overhead lamps above each computer. It was dark when you first walked into the room but once you were at a computer you wouldn't even notice that it was dark at all. The 21" monitors, keyboard and mice all sat on a counter and the computers sat on a shelf above the monitors. It's somewhat hard to explain but it's one of the nicest computer setup's I have seen. This setup seemed to be perfect for using a computer and I think many of these ideas could be used in the workplace.
;) Has anyone ever used one of these workstations that mount to the cieling?? I'd be interested to find out how well they work in the office.
The teacher of the class that used that lab said he would have liked to have workstations that mounted to the cieling and could be moved wherever you want in the room. This is the setup he would have liked to seen but due to cost restraints they had to settle for that setup. I guess they spent too much on the SGI's!
I would have to agree, when I need to work closely with others (design, architecture) I need to be in the office to be productive, but when i need to build, the home enviro is ideal....solitude and soda.
MODERATE THIS UP PLEASE
i suspect many folks would like to be made aware that full spectrum fluorescent lights exist.
Truth be told, that camping trip was the most astounding work environment I've ever been in... quiet, peaceful, beautiful.. but I didn't really have the bandwidth to do that all the time of course. As in, I had none, and therefore no communication. :)
The cubicle I was given, however, is absolutely phenomenal. It's large and open (I have all of my computer books stored in one of the cabinets currently!), and has this phenomenal view of the SF Bay with distant views of SF and Oakland. Plus, it's got the wall to the aisle practically absent, which has been absolutely wonderful for talking with my coworkers when I need to (yay training!), or just being shot at by their nerf weapons. :)
If I don't really want to deal with my coworkers for a bit while dealing with something, I often crawl under my desk where I'm keeping a sleeping pad and bag. Dark, cozy, warm, and coworkers often don't know I'm there unless I tell them.
Also, on telecommute days I'll be found out on my front balcony, laptop in lap, enjoying my plants and neighborhood trees while working. It's still not the mountains, but I have better bandwidth (yay 50 ft cat5s!)
But the thing that impresses me the most in all this is that I now work for a company that truly appreciates my idiosyncracies for work environment. I'm not going to like my surroundings the same way as my officemates; in fact, I'm not always going to like the same surroundings I did a few minutes ago! Being in a place of work that allows me the freedom to work as I work the best is key. And that is probably the most important thing to consider when trying to decide for others -- they need the space and freedom to decide what they like the best.
Gwendolyn R. Schmidt
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
Yes. Those are great stuff. I love flourescent bulbs, got them in my toilets. Flickering is a lousy excuse : a good tube does not flicker because there is such thing call a "capacitor".
:).
This place is running full of incandescent-skewed people. My karma has taken a load of beating for being pro-flourescent and fighting losing battles (which is funny, so much for moderating w/o personal prejudice). But at least I post without being an AC
Sigh.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
Our client, MasterCard International, has invested millions of dollars in its "Priceless" advertising campaign.
Your posting has the potential to dilute the impact of this campaign, causing irreversible damage to our client.
Your posting has the potential to deceive, mislead and confuse consumers and the purchasing public into believing that Slashdot and specifically your office requirements thread is in someway connected with MasterCard. Slashdot readers may think you are selling credit cards.
Please remove your posting immediately and we will not need to take further action.
First Ralph Nader, now Slashdot. Sheesh.
Cordially,
The Legal Bozos at MasterCard
P.S. Huh? See http://www.votenader.org
I currently work a quasi-government job in a great building on the California Delta. All the I.S. staff there works in offices closer to the water, and other, data-entry type positions work in cubes in the middle of the building.
The water has a very calming effect that everyone there loves. Especially our lunchroom with a patio that hangs out over the water. Very nice.
Though I love my office, if I could change one thing about the structure, I would like the I.S. team to work in a single, large work area close to the water. And big desks are the best!
Older biology research buildings (at both the NIH campus and at research universities) have rooms with one or two lab benches. Researchers have 1 or more rooms along a hallway, according to their status. Usually there are 3-4 technicians/students per room, and if they're lucky, each has a desk with a computer. This is an ok setup, but tends to be isolating.
More recently, people discovered that if you stick several research teams in one gigantic space, it encourages collaboration. Newer buildings are built with gigantic (hallway-length) rooms with 10-15 lab benches, and 1-3 researchers, with all their associated technicians and students, share the space (each researcher has their own benches).
Having worked in both situations, the new collaboration-friendly spaces are MUCH better. It's a bit noisier--there are generally multiple radios playing--but it really does what it's supposed to. It makes it much easier to share information, learn new techniques, or borrow reagents when you run out. It also tends to be more fun when you're working, unless you're trying to get some serious writing done (there are smaller rooms for that).
I would guess that the computer-world situation is similar: when you have many people working on separate-but-similar projects, it improves productivity and creativity to stick them in a large space that encourages them to work together. And when you have people who need to do very focused work (like hard-core coding), you need to provide smaller quiet retreat spaces.
I'm one of those people who was lucky enough to have an employer who would allow me to work at home... At present, I only have to show up at the "office" once or twice a week to report on progress. And so no one minds if I turn off the lights, work past 2 a.m., keep (and occasionally consume) alcoholic beverages near my workstation, play games, or visit frivolous websites (I'd smoke too, but I'm trying to quit). As long as the work gets done on time, which I'm happy to say is still the case! I could even dispense with the weekly visits to the office if my employer had a way to do easy teleconferencing. I just wonder why this working at home hasn't taken off as much as it should have. Information workers, and especially programmers such the majority of the Slashdot readership, don't need a specific place to work that one has to go to at 9am and go home from at 5pm. Much of what we do can be done at home, and with the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections and high-end personal computers, it's no longer a question of whether work can be done in the home. Whether it will be allowed is the question. And now, as gasoline prices soar, making the cost of transportation increasingly expensive, and the environmental risks inherent in the consumption of fossil fuels are growing (e.g. a melting piece of the Arctic), I hope that this option of working at home becomes more and more attractive to employers.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
It's simple.. You have your home and you have your office. At home you generally relax and do simple household maintence while at work you put your nose to the grindstone to get things done. Most people associate their workplace with their job and their home as their life's homebase and do not want the two to mix. ie. you wouldn't want the fustration of a family problem bleeding into the workplace... or a big project keeping you tied up in the den when you'd rather be firing up the BBQ in the back..
Yeah, some people have the dicipline to do their work and live both in the same place. I doubt employers will like it when ALL of their employees are working from 8:30PM to 2:00AM... And when certain employess hand in reports with the titles coloured in with Crayola and spilt coffee.
If you can juggle it, thats great... go for it. But the office place symbolizes work and puts most people in that productive mindset.. though I wouldn't mind being able to turn the lights off, some people may find the atmosphere wrong..
I dunno.. heh.. whatever.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
I agree. I stumbled into a fantastic company.. (No, it's not Cisco.) But I have a large cubicle, actually I adopted an extra cube, so I now have two. I have a stereo. I am 15 feet away from a well stocked kitchen.. Computer, big monitor, computer of recent vintage. I've got it pretty good. I'm also empowered to change things. If there is something I can buy to make me more productive, I can usually get it. My company wants to keep me happy and working hard on their initiatives. By creating an atmosphere I want to work in and can change as needed, they get just that.
Not if you have a 4 year old.
Computer: $2000
Chair: $80
Enough time to hotkey away from Freecell when boss comes: Priceless
There are thing money can't buy...
Get a job where the company gives you your own private office, in which you can smoke your cigarettes/drink real coffee/make strange noises IF they wont do that QUIT your current job and get another, if you STILL can't get your own office - STOP complaining and face the fact that you are NOT worth listening to and should just shut up and do your (current) job..
This is the only way to make employers understand..
Kind Regards,
JDM
Safelite. 1992 or so. They'd moved most of corporate out of state, after denying they were going to do it. What remained was a vast cube farm full of collections people, taking up an entire floor of the building. Other than the elevator core and the copier/supply room and a perimeter of offices, nary a real wall in sight.
They kept promising they wouldn't move the rest of the company... even after, one Monday, everyone came to work and the cube walls were gone. Anything tacked to the walls was neatly stacked on the nearest desk, and the desks were still laid out in cube-farm fashion. It was eerie.
It hampered productivity, needless to say. Imagine a roomful of people all spaced exactly ten feet apart on the phone (headphones, mostly) saying "You say you can't pay this? It's only a $100 deductible. Could you sell your stereo?"
The saddest part was that they explained that we shouldn't worry that we were going to be moved, the cubicle walls for the new offices were backordered, so they were going to take ours and we'd get the new ones when they came in. No, wait, that wasn't the saddest part, the saddest part was the collectors that believed it.
(As a programmer, I had one of the perimeter offices. We pleaded HVAC problems and kept our doors closed. Oh, and the company packed up and moved shortly thereafter.)
Slashdot's token middle-aged housewife
The 2-story building had a Y shape with a central, rounded-corner triangular hub (in which steps were situated)...
Each arm of the Y (as well as its "trunk") had a central hallway and an office on each side, typically occupied by just one person. Exceptions included dep't heads and above, who seemed to get 2 such offices (enlarged into a single room supporting meetings, et al. by removal of one wall).
Offices were rectangular and equipped with two large tables and at least one full-height bookcase, as well as a simple (IKEA-class) office chair and the odd visitor chair.
Simple, unadorned, practical, quiet (with the door closed)...
Over half of the engineers had a view overlooking the lake, some from the 2nd floor, out their square, openable windows (one per office).
Those who missed out on a view over the lake got a view into the forrest... I often saw fine pheasants and large, slow-moving Swedish hares through those some of those windows...
Now, if that doesn't help you understand why Swedish technology has found its way into lots of places around the world... go there and partake of the simple elegance of design that's to be found there...
Don't let me forget to mention that one of ASEA's office buildings had elevators that don't stop for passengers... One must literally jump aboard a (relatively, slow-) moving one-person capsule (on a loop).
That should satisfy the environmentalists, as it would likely save energy in a busy building, albeit at the expense of the Occupational Health & Safety Reg's... ;)
I did the writing on windows thing in college, with water soluble markers. The problem is, you can no longer read what you are writing when it gets dark. (Kinda annoying.) Nonetheless, I got a lot of useful work done that way.
I've also tried putting white contact paper on the wall and writing on that, but the marks didn't go away if left for a few days.
I eventually settled on pulling late night sessions in the classrooms in the math building and copying down the results on paper. I found it really helpful to have a lot of space to work out my thoughts in.
I never tried dry erase, 'cause I can't stand the smell of acetone, but I may buy an 8' sheet of dry erase board for my apartment. (Slate is too heavy to consider. :)
Strangely enough, info on the construction of home music studios can also be useful.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I work in a cubicle whose one side is open to a pretty well-traveled corridor. What bothers me the most is the paranoia that someone could be standing right outside my cube and looking over my shoulder. It's not even that my boss could be watching me surf the web at work (hey, 95% of the time it's work-related research anyway). It's the fact that my thought processes, and their half-products that appear on my monitor are private. Maybe I'm paranoid, but I find it very stifling and uncomfortable writing code while someone is (or could be) watching me work.
I wouldn't mind a set-up where I'm facing the outside of my cube. I find it much easier to tune out the distractions that are right in front of me than those that are going on behind my back. Alas, the desk setup doesn't allow that...
"The reason that every major university maintains a department of mathematics is that it is cheaper to do this than
kinda like my office. i really have to be thankful that my employers worked with me on the lighting in my office. i've left a company or two in large part because of the conditions of work (flourescent lights, bad chairs, bad monitors, etc)
my current setup is pretty rigged:
Lumichrome 1XX CRI 98/6500K (go for teh UV, you can pick up the missing IR with full-spectrum incandescents)
Aeron Ergonomic Chair from Herman-Miller
Effektiv funrishings
SGI Flatpanel monitor Split keyboardfrom Microsoft
Logitech Mouse
3 windows that face north
i'm not bringing all this up to show off my setup here, but moreover so that people can see what a reasonable healty office stocks.
we also use 4200k (i think) flourescents for general hallways/etc.
much of this equipment is a little pricey - i had to split some of it with my employers. but unless you're employers outright don't care about your health then they shoudl at least be amenable to you bringing in your own equipment. you'll pay extra for the quality, but when you're in you're office you'll know where that money went.
I just recently accquired a new position with another company; however, for the last year I had been the sysadmin at a small ISP- My office was a very large wiring closet, beside the rack itself. Hot, noisy (but good noise) and way too compact. Now, I am the Director of Computer Training for a health care system, and I have no office. I roam around constantly, with my laptop, plugging in as I need at an unused cubicle. I couldnt complain less. It beats a wiring closet.
Wasn't it the other way around? I remember reading that the trend towards "casual Fridays" started from a survey conducted by Levi's.
A large corner office with an impressive view with a big oak desk, a comfy leather chair, two secretaries positioned outside the office, and a refridgerator and wet bar in the corner...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
...in about two weeks. Looking for a Sept. relaunch.
But thanks for paying attention.
What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
What part of "gestalt" don't you understand?
Thank you very much. I wish I had some moderator points to give you.
Do you have any idea how difficult it is to create a CAD drawing with inaccurate dimensions? It is twice as hard to produce a dimensionally-wrong CAD drawing as it is to just do it right.
This is SO true! I'm a mechanical engineer, and I've dealt with some drafters who just couldn't be bothered to draw things to scale and keep their dimensions associated to the lines they were measuring. GRRRR!
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
- A converted house with 3-4 people per room. I was core business then and I enjoyed the company. Typically people doing similar tasks were together, but I was the only one cutting up audio on PC. Found out about Tangerine Dreams there.
- Stardard office in academic setting. Down the end of the corridor, only thing past me was a meeting room. I got very isolated and "bad things" happened.
- A less isolated "office" (just a bit of the floor with a door and walls to the ceiling. A bit better than above.
- A cube-like desk at the end of an isolated corridor, not much better than the second room above, but more desk space. Still haven't go used to people always coming at me from behind though.
- A traditional cube in the middle of the office. This is great for overhearing stuff. And for that reason I'm not pushing to get moved into an office.
I'd like to take my existing cube, remove the desk on two sides, raise the remaing desk up and have two stools installed. In the new (previously desk) space I'd like a soft leather couch. That would be my ideal work area. But I'll probably just have to do with the Nerf guns I've recently ordered...Kris J. -- Introducing Nerf into Perth, Australia.
Personally, I think the moron who thought up enormous square office buildings where the only economical way to get employees seated is in a 'open plan' or 'cube farm', should be keel-hauled and then left to die in the glare of a florescent lamp. Perhaps he would enjoy the buzz of a hundred old florescent ballasts as he ponders his crime against humanity.
The funny thing is, you most likely wouldn't even consider staying at a hotel without windows, or live in a home or dorm without windows. But somehow we take it for granted that offices don't have windows, or that you only get a window if you're a VP or something. I've read studies that tall, narrow, buildings (with a window in every office) are about the same cost as big fat squat buildings (with the bumper-crop of cubicle ghouls).
I'm starting to wonder if my eyesite will ever recover from the too-dim florescent lighting, just barely not quite enough to read comfortably.
My workspace demands (my next employer _will_ comply or I won't bother...):
1. Window (prefer one that _opens_ now there's a unique idea!
2. A door
3. Walls. Real walls -- you know, the kind that aren't cloth-covered metal frames...
4. A Celing
5. Desk facing _door_ (but w/out window shining on the monitor causing glare)
6. Big-ass whiteboard
7. Conference table (seats 4).
8. Two-three paintings (none of that motivational crap)
9. Lots of bookshelves
10. No _freakin_ intercom. If they want me they can send a page to my beeper.
11. Comfortable lighting. Florescent can be OK, but you need task lights too.
Guess I'd better work on beng a VP...
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
In my workspace, first and most important is a *huge* desk. This cannot be overstated. Room for my monitor, my paper, and my current source of caffiene. With plenty of leg room. And a footrest. Second is a decent desk chair with back support. If i have to sit in one spot all day, I want to be able to still stand at the end of it. Third comes lighting. Daylight-level lighting is bad, as is natural lighting. It washes out the images on my monitor, and more than that, I get seriously burnt in those conditions. Sunburn in an office is not fun. I want to be able to turn off the lights, dammit. A single desk lamp would suit me just fine, and the savings i'd make on asprin due to a lack of eyestrain headaches would be enourmous. Fourth - noise. Having spent most of the last few years in very noisy working environments, I now find that *some* background noise is necessary. Music is good. People talking I can live with, but really could live without. So what do i really want in a office? A real office (with a door) would be nice, but a cubicle is just fine. Open-plan is the stuff of nightmares. That's all i have to say for now. "A tidy desk is the sign of a cluttered desk drawer."
"TV is a crutch for those who lack imagination."
My current cubicle walls make it just about impossible to pin up pieces of paper, calendars, etc. Thumbtacks and regular stick pins will fall right out. Since I treat the cubicle wals as an extention of the desktop, I need something to stick pieces of paper to them. Regular office tape works if enough is used, but eventually it dries out and the paper it's holding will slide behind the desk. Duct tape sticks too well to the paper and will rip it if I want it removed.
My solution? Magnets. I'm not talking about those wimpy fridge magnets one gets at Wal-Mart. I'm talking about Neodymium magnets like those removed from old hard drives or bought from www.wondermagnet.com (or ebay). They will hold anything to the cube walls and can be obtained in a variety of sizes. I have one that's about the size of a quarter and it can hold a copy of Linux Journal to my refridgerator (back of magazine placed up against the fridge, _one_ magnet placed on the front cover and it will stay). They don't mar the walls or leave marks on the paper either. I've also used them to hold pens, car keys, etc. to my cubicle walls. The only bad thing about them is that they can ruin floppy disks and possibly monitors if left too close to those items.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Maybe I'm weird but I used to work in jobs where I was on my feet all day. Once I saw a co-worker in an office where she had this sort of lab-bench-like desk and a high chair so she could sit comfortably.
It made perfect sense to me. You could stand until that got tiring and then you could sit until that got tiring (Yes, sitting can be tiresome. Why do you thing your butt hurts and you need to stretch so much?) You could alternate back and forth throughout the work day.
I bet back trouble would go down tremendously if this became the rule at the office.
Seems like someone has been watching a little too much "Survivor" lately... :-)
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
--
"I'm surfin the dead zone
In the twilight, unknown"
A friend of mine has a big camouflage net that was once used to cover Harrier Jump-Jets. For a long time, I've really wanted to replicate JWZ's tent of doom. Of course, I would expect many PHB types to complain about it being a fire hazard.
Maybe it's because I live in the banking and corporate capital of the country (Delaware). The local media here has been running stories about how casual days are getting out of hand, along with tips about what is casual (and casual definetly does not mean jeans, sneakers and/or t-shirts, according to the them). The most casual you can apparently get is something like Dockers and a dress shirt. Gee, to me, that's dressing up! :)
I have a friend. We'll call him LowTech, because he doesn't own (or didn't for the longest time) a computer. LowTech is a finish carpenter. He does cabinetry. I asked LowTech, and his wife (and business parter) to build my desk for me.
It's a VERY nice three-tier built-in unit, which wraps around 3/4 of the room. The three, under-desk shelves have room for up to eight full-sized towers. It is large enough for TWO people to work at comfortably (although I'm the only one using it).
The desk was tailored (LowTech took my measurements) to fit me, with plenty of leg room, and front to back depth. The main tier of the desk has cable gromets and chaseways to keep all the myriad cables connecting my computers, neat and organized.
The top tier of the desk has cut-outs for computer monitors, and is wired for electircal power in six locations. This way I have access to electrical services without crawling under the desk.
If that were not enough, the next planned remodel is to convert the space to the south of the office into a sitting room, with a large wrap-around couch, and a huge bay window. That space is the only location on the property with a scenic view of Mt. Rainier.
Some of you may not believe me, after having read the above description. I point those of you who doubt my word, at the below URL. the picture is of me, at the desk which is still without the lamintate desktop, and semi-gloss finish for the oak trim.
I call it the LARTStation. There is no excuse for a bad desk.
--B
Where cubicles do become a problem is when they are small and regimented. We have had an opportunity to specify our next office space ourselves, and we've gone for cubicles arranged in samll groups with floor space in between. I think we're getting the groups in different colours too, so that there is a sense of place to the cubicles and you can say to a visitor "Joe? He's in the Blue block on the left".
(Whether this thing will ever actually get built is another question).
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
The best office space I can recall having was in some old management space in a local condo complex. We were a bit smaller company then, so it fit. Sure, it's a bit unprofessional to have to walk into a condo clubhouse, up the stairs, and sometimes through a party in the party room to reach the office. On the plus side, we had access to indoor pool, weight room, raquetball court, and sauna (and the locker room with showers was nice for bicycle commuting, too).
These days we're in a regular small office building, with the same loose "where it will fit" arrangement of cubicle walls. It's still not fancy, but I like it.
In general I think programmers need more interaction than with private offices. Reasonable cube layouts allow enough privacy for concentration, while making it easy to poke your head over the divider to ask a question. We made a deliberate effort to carry this over from our old offices, after looking into office spaces that had enough offices for everybody.
I've actually got my own office, though. I share it with the server rack, and I only bother to close the door when I'm changing back into by cycling clothes at the end of the day.
My office is set up this way. They get their outside offices, and then what do they do? the complain that it is too hot in the winter, too cold in the summer, and any number of complaints in-between. I'd kill have one of these offices if it would get me away from that.
Also, if people in offices want to talk on the phone all day, I really wish they'd close the door. The women across from me has this falsetto-sincere voice that really grates on my nerves. She calls her husband and children about 70 times a day, pages her husband on the SPEAKER PHONE, and dials in general on the speaker phone. That's annoying since they invariably have those things turned way up in the first place, and because they are too lazy to pick up a handset until someone answers.
I have one of the cube-farm cubicles that measures 6'x6' with a L-shaped desk taking 2 foot of the perimiter. Luckily it has a corner piece, an overhead and a filing cabinet built in. I'm also on a power segment that surges 50% less than the rest of the office. My phone solution? I use a handset. It's nice and it's light, and I don't even notice I'm wearing it. From time to time I have to speak and type on a dialed-in system, so it's all good.
Lowmag.net
I know for certain one of those groups is Scientology. The reason they are restricted in Germany involves some rather shady dealings with land and evictions of non-scientologists, discrimination against non-scientologists by scientologist-owned companies, and so on. The "religion" was banned outright, and They are no longer welcome in Germany.
I don't think that I would mind if they were removed, they did give us John "Plays John Travolta in every movie" Travolta, and Tom "Interview With the Vampire sucks" Cruise, not to mention Lisa Marie "marry a mutant" Presley. Such wonderous contributions.
Lowmag.net
I used to work and smoke in a smoking office in the US. We all smelled like we'd been in a bar all day and that smokey amber color is really hard to get off the Macs.
Now I'm in a non-smoking office and treasure my smoke breaks where I go outside and focus my eyes on things that are far away.
I will quit someday (hopefully by choice and not lung cancer) but smoking forces me to leave the office. No phones, no idiot boss, just pretty trees and sweet, sweet nicotine.
Dirt doesn't need luck.
I've got a designated volume of space in the cube farm, just like everyone else. But I don't know if I could call it an "office". Lately I spend all of time time:
1. At a customer site
2. In my car on my way to/from the customer site
3. In the machine room fixing servers
4. In the lab fixing other things
Real sysadmins don't need officies. They're too busy to actually stop moving long enough to use one.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Nice apology!
Like someone else pointed out, it's not necessarily all the fault of architects, though... given a choice, people frequently DO insist on the worst design, and an architect's job is to please the client.
Having said that, man, I knew a guy from high school who designed houses... last time I saw him I happened to have a copy of "A Pattern Language" with me, which I had just discovered (it isn't the be-all and end-all of architecture, but it's the best thing going right now). I figured we could have a great discussion about it since he'd been to a decent architecture school - but as it turned out the guy had never even HEARD of it. I couldn't believe it. The most important, useful and provocative book about architecture I've ever seen, and it's been out for 25-30 years or so, and... totally ignored at this guy's school. Meanwhile, what, they're filling students' heads with Le Corbusier or Philip Johnson or some such wretchedness... no wonder our built environment sucks like it does.
By the way, Philip Johnson: what an asshole. Ever seen the JFK memorial in Dallas? WTF?!? I love the Glass House... a completely unusable space designed to make a statement, but then he encloses the bathroom (I assume that's the bathroom, anyway - never seen a floorplan) as if it's meant to be functional. What is it, Phil, house or sculpture? It's a failure at both. And this wanker is still taken seriously!
Same with Frank Gehry. Fifty years from now he'll be the guy who provides someone with a bunch of scrap titanium. Thanks, Frank, for wasting a shitload of resources on dumbass buildings that won't even make it to the 22nd century without some serious help... and who's going to bother at that point? What a joke.
But hey, not that I'm bitter or anything.
Anyway, it isn't just the architects who should be apologizing, the professors and clueless hipsters and even less clueful clients and developers should be publically groveling as well...
www.poetictech.com
:)
'nuff said
Not a plug... but I sure wouldn't mind having one..
Speaking of Speaking of fluorescents..., they go with the 50's culture that invented formica kitchen tables with chromed borders and flimsy, metal legs, with "BIG hair" hair-dos, with airplane-winged highway yachts and cholesterol-cookin' grandmas who luckily killed off a half a generation with their receipes. They go with James Bond movies and the early sixties, Playboy mansions and cow titted Playgirls. They go with smoking jackets and sunken living rooms..., with push-button controlled curtains and police interrogation rooms. In other words, they go with most boss's cultural conception of what the world should be like.
"Oblivion is just a click away." -Aazz
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
The subject says it all.
Imagine a 'coders pod' in a round office tower. Each floor has high enough ceilings for two offices, stacked. Each office has a real door, sound insulated walls, and faces out a floor-to-ceiling window. The office can be small. Small enough for a decent desk, computer, and perhaps a guest couch.
When you want to go into code mode, you close the door of your office and crank your music. You don't disturb your co-workers because of the soundproofing. You've got a good machine with multiple flat-panel screens and good network connectivity. You gain the focus you need to crank out the code.
When you want to be sociable, you can open your office door or even work in the central 'open concept' area. The central area is where the admin staff and managers work. There are meeting facilities, free food/coffee/drinks, a 'play area' with game machines, nerf weaponry, etc. There's even a small work-out area.
I think this environment would be best for a game development company. Romero, you listening?
Grant/Kablooie!!
Shop Smart. Shop S-Mart.
A. Definitely. Then her bottom lip will start to tremble and I'll start to feel like the terrible father I undoubtedly am. By way of recompense we go for ice cream, and strangely enough, the idea of a mini-marshmallow at the bottom of my waffle cone gives me the insight I need to fix my problem.
I'm at home today (said little girl just wandered into my office and made a bee-line for the other PC: I have half a dozen unplugged keyboards strewn around the room to try to distract her but she has an instinct for which ones allow her to cause damage). This is where I work when I'm not at the office. Working at the beach doesn't work for me: (a) because of the sand thing; (b) because I'm in Minnesota, and if it's warm enough to go outside there are too many mosquitos; and (c) because this 366MHzPII laptop I have generates enough heat to cause second degree burns on an unprotected lap.
If I'm working at home, the kids are either with their mother or at day care, or in bed. I enforce a break (except for support pages) between leaving work at 4:30 and when the kids go to bed at 8pm. I can get a surprising amount done when the house is quiet.
There may have been a point when I started this post. I'm sure there isn't now.
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E_NOSIG
When our company moved into a new space a little over a year ago, the new building has a White Noise System -- amplified speaker above the ceiling tiles that play *static*. Personally I find it very annoying, I can supply my own white noise with music on the radio when and if I want it. Luckily the amplified speakers have volume knobs.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Nice jeans, sneakers, and a decent shirt (3 button) is the norm around here - I'll put on khakis if I have a meeting with an important manager, but heck - jean shorts are commonplace in the summer...
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
>Can't fill a niche in the Linux software line? Then go help at www.beunited.org, where every developer counts.
.sig...
That's his
--
"It's tough to be bilingual when you get hit in the head."
The rent-a-geek in the cube next to mine had a cellphone that played annoying music every time he got a call. I got a Taco Bell toy dog that sings the opening bars of "Chances are," and I squeezed it every time his phone rang. I acted like it was a Furby-like response that was picking up on his phone's frequency. His contract must have run out, because he disappeared. (Probably got a better job from one of those calls.)
You can't really "see" 60 Hz (unless your eyes are really sensitive), but it does take its toll. If it didn't, why do you suppose monitor designers bother to even offer refresh rates higher than 60 Hz?
I know I can't tell what the refresh rate on a monitor is by just looking at it, but after an hour or two, I really know. If I have a splitting headache, it's 60 or 70 Hz, if I have a mild headache, it's more like 75 Hz, if I'm fine, it's 80+.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Funny that - Levis wanting people to do "casual fridays" - hmmm. Doesnt' casual include kakhis (they make em), and casual button down or polo shirts (they make both of em). That's like Armani saying a study shows people work better in expensive suits ;-}
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
While what you read may be correct, there are a few reasons why such buildings tend to few in most places:
1. Zoning Codes - yeah, bureacracy. Maybe it is simple something saying a building can only be a certain height in an area, but this stops most.
2. Ground Makeup - tall buildings tend to need a stable foundation - solid granite for most large tall buildings - otherwise they will sink, tilt, or do other nasty things which can make for a bad day.
3. Cost - I imagine, up to a point, most tall buildings cost the same as squat buildings. But at a certain point or height, the cost probably rises near exponentially - duing to technical reasons and need to hire skilled workers to build the thing.
However, I agree with your other points. Personally, I would like to see a cubiclized office, but with the cubicles made with real walls, etc. Then, on one wall - have it be a multiple LCD display (or maybe a projector system mounted in the ceiling), showing live outdoor views as the background for X - voila, no need for real windows...
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I was once "situated" in the computer/printer room at one company I worked for - it was placed right at the front of the office, with a huge glass window looking in - so that visitors could see the computers (ooh, ahh! Impressive), and me (of course) working diligently. About this room:
Standard room - but wired like crap. At the time, my desk had a VT100 terminal, and I was sitting next to a Genicom 3820 line printer. Behind me, within touching distance, was a Genicom 4440 line printer. These printers were in constant use. Next to that, was a Prime computer cabinet housing the modems (constantly being dialed out on), a huge fan-cooled power supply, and a 9-track hand-loaded, vacuum column tape drive - plus a variety of various machines we worked on. Needless to say, it was INSANELY noisy. To top it off, it was air-conditioned - to about 50 degrees.
I support the EFF - do you?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
You know, I actually worked at a startup where we were all stuffed into this tiny little garage. I complained because my desk was against the garage door that faced south. Mmmm, 120 degree Arizona heat. Right now I actually miss that. We were allowed to listen to music without headphones, we all just agreed and took turns listening to what we wanted. We actually talked to each other and cared about what the other guy/girl was doing. Too bad I'm stuck here with a bunch of people that don't give a crap about the people they work with and attempting to have an intelligent conversation with any of them is about as enjoyable as having your wisdom teeth removed a la Vise-Grips. I envy those of you who work for companies that recognize the fact that happy employees are productive employees. The president of the company I now work for believes that the more sparse the working environment the more productive the employees are. The less distractions (ie: family pictures, comfort, etc.) the more work that will get done. I can't wait until we all have to bow down before his excellency and salute his astute business skills. Of course, our stock very regulalry reflects his skills at running the business. You'd think the BOD would do something about it but I think they were all hand picked by him so there probably isn't any hope. It must be time to update my resume, I hate this more that I thought. Thanks for listening.
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In case anyone is wondering I did wind up getting an eclipse light. It arrived this morning via UPS (gotta love living close to thinkgeek).
The lighting provided is very nice. There is no screen glare, a moderate pool of light on the computer desk, and quite a bit of extra light that hits the ceiling and illuminates the room.
I really like the light quite a lot, and there are only a few things I can complain about, none of which I consider severe:
The mounting of the unit leaves a little to be desired. It needs to be double-stick-taped to your monitor, and doesn't stand well without. This gets to be a problem when experimenting with positions to put it in. The thick cord sticks directly out of the bottom of the body, and does not get much clearance to bend in (it has to fit between the lamp body and the monitor top) when the lamp body is not leaning forward. If you don't have the base taped down yet, the cord tends to push the lamp over.
It would be really nice to see this unit have a more substantial base so you can experiment with positioning more easily, and have the cord come out of the back of the body, not the bottom.
My other complaint is about the start-up. The lamp flickers pretty violently before becoming stable. No-flicker lamp starting is a pretty common fluorescent technology these days... even turning it off for 20 seconds and back-on half warm will cause a 3-4 strobe flicker.
Use of a warm-white fluorescent tube might also be a welcome change, but that can always be changed by the end user.
-Matt
My company provides ear plugs. I think they are required (OSHA) to because the lab gets so loud, and I've only seen them in the labs. but I just grab a packet of ear plugs and head to my desk.
Blissful silence, yet I can (just) hear a phone ring, a system beep, or other interuption when I need to.