Sun Discovers Dumb Terminals

Yahoo has a story about how Sun is practicing a sort of floating workforce - many employees have no permanent desks, they just come in and log on to a dumb terminal, err, thin client. Besides being a sneaky way to encourage employees to arrive ever earlier at work, it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun servers - at least for Sun.

Comments

Real brilliant.

[Chardish]

Never mind the fact that employees like to have file cabinets, desk toys, and other stuff to keep them happy during the day, and organized and productive. Essentially what Sun has said in implementing this concept is "everything important about your job is on the computer, or small enough to be carried with you everywhere you go."

-Evan

Re:Real brilliant.

[supremebob]

Not to mention all that you're going to be wasting a bunch of time looking for co-workers if, (god forbid!) you actually wanted to TALK to them in person. I'd see this scenario happening often... "Gee, where is John today? Floor 2, B section? Floor 3, A section? I better give him a call first... Wait, did he say 2B-47A, or 2A-47B? Oops, better call him again..." You get the idea. You would also have to learn where practically every printer and fax machine in the entire building is, because it would vary depending upon where you sit. Either that, or you're going to be walking 500 feet to pick up your printout because you forgot to change your default printer from yesterday. Wow, whoever came up with this idea is quite a moron. It's almost like taking all the bad parts of working at the office and telecommuting and combining them into a living nightmare.

Re:Real brilliant.

[Derkec]

People who would benifit most from being in the same place day in and day out tend to not be impacted by this sort of program. Your engineering types will still have offices with thier names attatched more often than not. People who are frequently out of the office, either working at home or on the road selling stuff and are used to bringing their supplies and notes with them, are perfect canidates. Why have 10 desks for salesmen who are out of the office 50% of the time? Six or seven would probably be enough to go around.

Basically, the folks at Sun aren't morons and won't try to impose this sort of chaos on people who will tend towards order. Instead they take the chaotic situation of people who are either moving around a lot or frequently on the road or at home and try to simplify that experiance. Prior to this system being in place, probably 5-10% of sun's offices were drop in offices. Anyone could use that space. The flexibility that gave folks was so appealing they enlarged the program to a new level for certain groups of people.

Re:Real brilliant.

[bigjocker]

You are so full of it. I can see you have never done consulting or worked at 10's of projects at the same time. This environment is not designed for morons like you, it is designed for people who work in 10's of projects with 10's of different teams.

I work for several projects and it's a pain in the butt every time I have to switch teams; you have to switch computers, make backups, arrange the desktop and check the new computer for sh*t left by the last user.

This idea is just great, I wish my company would adop it.

Re:The way some companies do it

[littlerubberfeet]

Alas, but in practice, Brenda in Marketing NEEDS the graphics card right in her terminal, or else she needs a Fibre connection to the server.......

Yahoo Discovers Dumb Reporters

[ChanxOT5]

Ugh, check out the english on this.

"An office costs about $15,000 per year to maintain, Agnello says, and Sun plans about one desk per employee, including the remote locations, once the system is running, with 18,000 employees, roughly half the company, floating. "

comma hell!

Cleanliness

[Anonymous Coward]

Not for nothing, but I kind of like knowing that I'm the only dude using my keyboard mouse & phone.

What happens to me if the guy who used the terminal the day before had a really flu, or if he didn't wash his hands after using the bathroom.

Pretty disgusting eh?

Imagine finding someone else's coffee stains or bagel seeds on or inside your keyboard?

You'd be finding something new and disgusting every day!!!

Re:"Hotelling"

[krokodil]

The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium.

What a sad picture. I hope future of workplace does
not head in this direction. I hate cubicles! I like nice offices, possibly for 2-3 persons no more, with non uniform furniture. I like touch of personality in the office. I like wooden desks and shelfs. I like table lapms and filing cabinets. I like to be able to turn on music while I am working. I am programmer, not factory assembly line worker for god sake.

Here how I would do: I would allocate each emploee certain amout per year to furnish his office. He can chose whatever he wants from furniture and accessories within this budget.

Re:"Hotelling"

[Peyna]

Well, Microsoft probably has one of the best worker environments. I'm sure we've all heard how great it is, everyone gets their own office with a window, and put whatever they want to in it; not to mention everything else on their campus. I'm sure that works to their advantage. Just having your own office + window probably boosts productivity enough to be worth it.

Re:TWEEEEEEEET

[Cato]

This only works in Windows where you have identical apps everywhere. Unix workstation setups can have all apps installed on servers but run on the clients, meaning that an engineer gets a unique set of apps when they log on to the same workstation just used by a manager.

You probably have to see this to realise how much better it is than Windows.

Re:Sun Ray 1; 100; 150 - Thin Clients

[Manuka]

Coupla comments - I just got a bid on 75 of these units with a server. $460, plus the $40 country kit. They *used* to be $400 total. Sun has actually increased the price on these since they came out.

Also, the RCA port on those is *input*, not output. It's designed to hook in a SunCamera or somesuch composit source. The caveat is that the current version of the server software doesn't support that yet (Real Soon Now!).

The motherboard is actually running a 110-MHz sun4m chip, the same that was in the JavaStations. 8MB of RAM onboard, only uses 2MB, but 8MB was the most cost-effective chip size they could get. For what this machine does, it's still overkill.

As for never upgrading, the first-generation SunRay 1 units would smoke the power supply like clockwork after 9 months of usage, due to overheating problems. Sun has apparently resolved this.

I recently pitched my boss on these, since the vast majority of our users have no need for a full-blown PC, and I spend 75% of my time dealing with desktop issues. That means a lot more expansion before having to hire another IT guy. Initially, we'll be using Citrix on the Sun machine, going back to Windows, but we have the option of kicking Microsoft to the curb, should we want to. The *capital* cost of these over the next several years is less than half that of continuing with a 3-year upgrade cycle on PCs, even after factoring in servers. They really liked the idea of being able to keep their work if the building lost power (sessions live on the server, which should have backup power)

Another poster mentioned the SPOF issue, but SunRay server software works well in a clustered environment, as well as a multi-server environment.

I worked in that office...

[SlashChick]

I'm tempted to post anonymously, but since this is now in my past, I won't.

I actually worked in Sun's San Francisco flex office (the one that is mentioned in the article.) I have a lot of stories, both good and bad, about this way of working. First, let me start with a bit of an explanation.

On one of Sun's internal websites, there is a Java applet where you go to reserve workspaces. People like me who didn't have a "real" office were allowed to reserve 14 days in advance for up to 5 consecutive days. Others were allowed to reserve anything that was left. So it's not as much of a potshot as you might imagine -- I was in the office 4-5 days a week and most of the seats weren't even reserved. You could reserve at home through Sun's remote access, so it wasn't like there was a huge line building up at 7AM or something.

I can tell you the pros and cons, but I'm biased because I absolutely hated it. I hated the formulaic offices, and I hated that personal decorations were frowned upon. But the thing that really drove me crazy was that we were expected to use the UNIX terminals in lieu of any Windows or Macintosh laptop that we might have available. In fact, I was asked to give up my laptop because it looked bad for me to have a laptop on my desk and not be using my Solaris workstation (I had a real workstation because I tested websites on different browsers on Solaris.) The whole thing made me extremely bitter toward the company and was one of the main reasons for me leaving. I feel that it's hypocritical to hire a web developer who is used to using Photoshop, a nice solid text editor, and Dreamweaver, throw that developer in front of vi and the Gimp, and expect that web developer to be as productive as before.

However, if you could get all your work done on Solaris, it worked out well. Most of the non-technical people got used to CDE (!) and were fine with a Netscape window. If all you need is Netscape, Star Office, and a couple of other applications, then sure -- a flex office is beneficial. A friend of mine still works out of that office, but she's not there very often, which is the whole point. She works all over the Bay Area and doesn't seem to mind giving up the development applications of a Windows or Macintosh machine. Then again, she isn't a developer...

I think whether you like these offices or not depends on your personality. I must admit that Sun pulled it off well -- it's a solid implementation. The applet on the website shows you where person X is at any given moment, and you can forward your phone extension anywhere, even to a cell phone or to your home phone, so you're never out of touch. I had a real problem with it because I am a highly creative person who requires certain applications that simply aren't available on Solaris. This, and the lack of office decorations, really threw me out of my comfort zone, and I know I wasn't the only one. Apparently, however, I was in the minority. (I suppose the others who hated it, many of whom were my startup-personality friends, also left.)

I hesitate to just bash on Sun since I know that it was more of a personality clash than a bad implementation, but to anyone who is considering this: the creative minds in your company will hate it. I'm talking about the people with their offices/cubicles decorated with every imaginable sticker and toy -- the ones who treat their office as a second home. These are often some of your most productive and worthy employees, so be sure to listen to their needs.

This article really struck a nerve with me. It brought back all the frustration I had with working in that office. I can only hope that the others like me have had their complaints heard or, like me, have left for greener pastures. To the rest of you -- stick with the small-group (2-3 person offices). That was the environment in which most of us thrived.

-- I left Sun in May.

primarily phone vs. primarily keyboard people

[geekotourist]

I hope that Sun tries out an experiment in potential productivity loss before implementing this:

1. Take a group of engineers / analysts / documentation people
2. find some measure of productivity and satisfaction for that group.
3. Then mix them in with sales / support people, where random loud phone calls and talking interruptions are the rule
4. see what this does to the first groups' productivity...

I'd bet heavily that productivity (i.e. ability to find bugs, model a market, write a well crafted paragraph) goes down. Not hideously down, just enough to make great programmers merely good, and good programmers seek other employment.

Mixing phone people with keyboard people isn't nice. It makes the phone people feel guilty and rude, if they know the programmers, etc. are trying to meet deadlines. (And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt speakers, so Don't Do It. Thanks.) It makes the programmers jumpy- you never know when a beautiful train of thought and logic gets derailed on the "RING, RING...Hi! Glad you got Back to me on those trade show booth color quotes! Teal? Lets talk Blue!Blue Blue Blah Blah..." the next cubicle over. I've been in this situation, and it hurts.

And it ignores that paper is still a useful office object- crisp clear text that can be stared at for more than 1/2 hour without your eyes going numb, easy to spread out and cover with sticky notes...but no, you'll have to clean it up and put it away each night, regardless of sudden deadlines.

I'll bet even more heavily that they did only a Benefit estimate, not a Cost-Benefit estimate, when they came up with that $150 million figure. I doubt they'll study it at all.

Well, as Neal so aptly wrote (but darnitall he was making fun of them at the time, it wasn't supposed to be emulated):

" So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed across it in a grid... So no more partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for [Future Sun]... You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it... And there's the question of interchangeability. [Future Sun] workers, like military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare workstation... you don't have that flexibility if you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn around a desktop..." (Snow Crash, 93 paperback, pg 281)

Re:Sun Rays and remote X

[CoolVibe]

I used to work on Sun Rays too, at this place. Usually I used my newfound mobility with the Sun Rays to get *away* from annoying coworkers so I could get some work done :)

This technology has been around for a while though... I sure digged it. It's really easy when you need help from a collegue: You just rip his card out of the sunray and pop yours in. There, now he's sitting behind your desktop, looking at your problem. Very handy.

Re:Sun Rays and remote X

[MadKeithV]

but as servers get more powerful, and workstations become smaller, quieter, and dumber,

When did that happen?
Did I miss something?

*checks under the desk*

Nope, that machine there is DEFINATELY smarter than my previous one. Smaller, yes. Quieter, not yet a priority, but because of the way I've positioned it now, yes. Dumber? No bloody way. Moore's Law.

Decentralisation is what made the internet so big. Now Sun is indeed the O in Old Economy, what's next, steam engines?

Peopleware

[spanky555]

Sounds like some folks at the top desperately need to read Peopleware. I thought hoteling was an idea whose time has come and gone...trying to treat knowledge workers like factory workers is really, really stupid. The idea that workers might be a company's biggest asset is a really threatening concept to some companies, apparently, and I think that some of this bizarre behavior is indicative of that.

Also, just because it is easy to admin doesn't mean that it justifies this soulless environment.

Mostly used for consultants....

[jsimon12]

This is really for the most part used for consultants, sales and the like that travel a lot and really aren't in the office most of the time. Programmers, sys admins, admins and those that are in the office all the time still have real desks. And if you want to argue with me I work for Sun and I am a consultant and I had a desk the first year I was with the company and was in the office I think a total of 4 days. This kinda office enviunment makes sense if you understand the context it is used in.

Re:The way some companies do it

[mvdwege]

Given that it's Sun we're talking about, I hardly think these are Ye Olde Green Screen Terminals. We're talking X Terminals here.

And since the X Window System is quite able to serve different displays simultaneously, I would think that different workers needing different graphics capabilities is no problem whatsoever.

At least at home my desktop system has no problems serving a 1280x1024x32 display to my monitor and a 1024x768x16 to my laptop simultaneously. I expect Sun to have a little more powerful hardware, but the basic concept is the same.

Mart

Are you a Troll?

[Accelerated Joe]

Adaptability does not equal creativity.

Ignore human factors at your peril

[ajv]

When an office is designed around making the office the primary focus, rather than the humans that occupy it, you have lost. It's not the office that generates revenue - it's the human workforce.

To create shareholder value, you have to make the workforce productive, and nothing - and I mean nothing - makes a workforce more loyal, productive and ready to jump through hoops for you than happiness and belief in their own greatness. This office deliberately sets out to destroy human qualities by dehumanizing the workplace (ie, photos being frowned upon, etc).

Offices such as this have no human response, and in fact, it's like a disgruntled or evil bean counter (ie a human Catbert) wanted to make the most offensive office they could.

I'll tell you a story about why Sun will go broke in the next 10-20 years, and irrelevant in 2-5 years (just as SGI are irrelevant now*). About six years ago, Sun (and several other high end Unix vendors) responded to a multi-milion dollar tender. All the other vendors concentrated on unique features of their hardware (Digital on clustering and massive scalability, etc), software and service offerings. Sun concentrated on bashing Microsoft for 90% of their face time with us. Microsoft wasn't even in the potential set of competitors! And to top it off, Sun was the least competitive of all the bids - slowest hardware, and most expensive.

Sun - you have to focus on making the humans happy. Whether they be your users, your customers, or your employees.

--
* I work in the security industry, and it's been three years since I've seen an SGI in production, and I've been to hundreds of clients all over Australia. I've seen an Aviion and a DG/UX box since the last time I saw an SGI, for example!

I think you missed my point.

[SlashChick]

"While I do respect people who are able to be productive in a strict *NIX environment more than people who need to use something else to get their work done, I understand that Linux is not for everyone."

Perhaps I would have gotten people more up in arms had I mentioned that Linux (any PC-based OS that required your own computer instead of a terminal) was frowned upon as much as Windows and Macintosh were. I said several times that I would work fine if they gave me a Macintosh instead (since the Windows 2000 computer I received from another part of Sun was evidently not adequate.) But my boss pointed out that other people (who were doing email support and not development) were fine with a Solaris box. He couldn't understand why I didn't want to give up my laptop for a CDE desktop and smart card, even though (here's the kicker) he too used a laptop on a daily basis.

When you hire an employee, you are expected to give that employee a standard set of tools. In this case, Sun bought me a Windows 2000 laptop and a Solaris workstation (well, the workstation was a hand-me-down.) Then my boss tried to force me to give up the laptop in favor of being Solaris-only because of the "image" that using Windows gave Sun (trust me, they were doing this to the Mac people as well.) I said no, and I quit.

When you don't give your employee the tools that that employee needs, and try to force their hand in using other tools that aren't designed for the job, then you have a bad match as the employer/employee relationship goes. What bothered me most was that they weren't trying to proclaim that Solaris was more productive or had better tools than Windows or a Mac, but that Sun's "image" would look bad if Sun's web developers used anything but SunRays. I can understand this attitude from a high corporate level, but can anyone seriously (with a straight face) tell me that you have the same applications available to you on Solaris as on Windows? (I'm not even sure if the GIMP was available on their servers.) It's a terrible mentality to push the "eat your own dogfood" attitude so far that your employees quit. I know I wasn't the only employee to leave over something like this, either.

I think Sun needs to rethink its position regarding the tools that its employees use. Sure, give everyone a SunRay. But don't shove Solaris down people's throats as the One True Way. Understand that there are a lot of things that simply don't run on it, and understand that your (Sun's) customers aren't going to want to run a 100% Solaris shop, either. Sun will fail in the marketplace if they believe that Solaris will fill every business niche that Windows fills now, and that is exactly the attitude I see from inside Sun.

Re:Sun Rays and remote X

[Mr. Piddle]

At about, oh, 20 users it becomes nearly unusably slow.

One word: INCOMPETENCE

The system and network administrators at your school should be fired, and people with real brains be put in their place. 16 CPUs and 20 users?!?!? No way in hell. That system is barely loaded! 700 users might be a stretch, but several hundred would be no problem at all (that is, if your sysadmins were competent).

A system that holds 16 CPUs would be one of the bigger Enterprise or Fire servers...do you know Sun uses these things to set world records for transaction throughput? And your school can't get them to handle 20 users??? LOL!