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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?"
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
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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."
The irony of managers having offices and the knowledge workers having cubes is that that's the exact opposite of what each group needs. Managers spend their time interacting with others -- making phone calls, interviewing, meeting, etc. They flit from task to task, often juggling multiple tasks simultaneously. They need to be able to quickly communicate with those around them. Cubes work great for this, plus they give some privacy.
Knowledge workers, however, have the opposite needs. They spend their time focused on a single task for extended periods of time. They need to be able to create an environment that provides the right level of external distraction; some folks like to work in silence while others concentrate better with the TV on. They need to control temperature and lighting. They need to have lots of whiteboard space for sketching out ideas, and lots of shelving for the dead tree manuals they need to have handy. Offices are perfect for this.
Unfortunately, I have yet to see an organization that hasn't been afflicted by the office royalty syndrome...
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
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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!
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.
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
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
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 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 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.
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
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
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