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.

[Bios_Hakr]

Think more along the lines of computer user. A worker can have his own desk, and his own thin client. If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it. If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it. Same for presentations.

And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?

I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".

Re:Real brilliant.

[nathanh]

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.

Not even close. The login process for each dumb terminal (with the swipe card) automatically sets your default printer to the nearest printer. It even routes your phone number automatically to the handset on your desk.

The brilliant bit is that you can pull your swipe card out, move to a different desk, put the card back in, and your entire desktop reappears without a single application lost. And your phone moved with you!

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 just click on the username and it shows the floorplan with John's current desk location highlighted.

Wow, whoever came up with this idea is quite a moron.

But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.

You're always sitting in close proximity to the people you're working with. A traditional desk-per-user system means you're always walking up/down stairs or between buildings. This new system means your desktop moves with you.

The downside is that your pens and manuals don't move with you. In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases, which is convenient for techs who spend most of their time onsite. It does away with the "damn, I left the important list of instructions on my desk back at work".

Re:Real brilliant.

[istartedi]

Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.

The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.

Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.

I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.

Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).

Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.

If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.

Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.

What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.

Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.

The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.

However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.

Re:Real brilliant.

[anothy]

I worked in a lab at Bell Labs where we formed a setup somewhat similar to this. we wanted it, and had to fight some to keep it when we moved, but we really like the model. basically, we had one large lab that we all spent the majority of our time in. before our move, everyone had an office, as well, but when that corridor was torn down for renovations and we had to move, we gave up our offices [1] to be allowed to tear down walls in the spot we were moving into to turn three mid-sized rooms into one large one. we set up desks with Plan 9 terminals (where there's nothing but a boot loader and swap space on local disk) around the perimiter of the room, a nice conference table in the middle, and a television (for demos and such) and couch at one end.
[1] for a group of 6-8 people, we kept two offices. this was really useful for when you were doing work that required serious concentration, or if you had to make a private phone call. they were seldom used.

the setup worked great. there were typically 4-6 people in the lab. the theory of being able to pick any terminal did slowly evolve into people having a "normal" terminal, where people would leave manuals and such. evey once in a while, you'd walk in and there'd be someone passed out on the couch (if you were a loud sleeper, you used one of the offices, which also had a couch in it). we had one guy who telecumuted from halfway across the country, and was on-site for one week a month; after the second visit or so, he stopped getting a hotel and lived out of the office (thankfully, we had showers in the basement). whenever someone walked in who wasn't normally there who wanted to show/ask us something, or who we wanted to show/ask something, she'd just log in and go.

your reaction was not unheardof among people neighboring our odd lab. but you're describing very much a worst-case scenario, and is impacted by a number of factors, probably most strongly by how management (we pretty much managed ourselves, basically appointing one of us as an acting manager) treats it. in our lab, personal decorations were encouraged (everyone was expected to bring at least something in, and people hung a flag of choice around the perimiter of the ceiling - the lab quickly got the name "the Flag Room"). management needn't force people to move around, but should encourage people to sit by whoever they're working with at the moment. if you work with the same group of people on a long project, it makes sense you'll sit near each other for a good while. management should tell people not to do anything that prevents people from logging in at that terminal, though.

the results of this sort of environment are that you form a stronger community with your co-workers, and you get all the beifits that go along with it. your code (or other work) is of better quality, because it's dramatically easier to say "hey, what do you think of this?" than it is when you even have to go to the cube next door. the two private offices recognize the occasional need for real privacy (which cubes don't give at all, despite the illusion of). you form a social bond with the people you work with, too, which is just sort of a nice side-benifit. and you tend to be right next to the people you're actively working with, moving to another lab to work with a different set of people (although there were only two like this in the building i know of).

We had this when I was a kid...

[bubblegoose]

they called it musical chairs

LOL!!! Dilbert !!!

[Jucius Maximus]

Dilbert comic from 1995 January 09.

Scene: A staff meeting is in progress...

PHB With Diagram: We're taking away your cubicles. In the new system you'll sign up for whatever cube is open that day.

PHB: It's based on the model of public restrooms. But I call it "hotelling" because it increases my chances of getting tips.

PHB: Each cubicle will have a computer, a chair, and a roll of note paper ... take on and pass it around. [Hands out notepaper roll which looks like toilet paper roll.]

Sun Rays and remote X

[doorbot.com]

A friend of mine works at Sun and gave me a tour a little while back. The building itself was an interesting structure, and of course the computer systems were an experience in themselves.

The server rooms, conference rooms, and most offices had 24" monitors connected to Sun Ray 1 machines. My friend showed me how he could put his smart card in, and then it would ask him for his password, and he was logged into the exact same desktop that he had in his office. So whatever he was working on "followed" him around. Granted, it was just a remote X terminal, but I thought it was cool.

And I'm sure there's those of you who say, "it's been done before" or "that's old tech" but as servers get more powerful, and workstations become smaller, quieter, and dumber, it was cool to see this "old tech" being put to (damn) good use.

While my friend did have his own office, as did everyone else at that particular campus, it could be an interesting management experiment (if you want to call it that) to rotate people's desks around... maybe every month. That way, if people have a problem with coworkers, you can separate them, and that way everyone can get to know everyone else... and the new people don't feel so alienated. Of course, when you have roaming profiles, or dumb terminals, that makes things that much easier.

Re:Sun Rays and remote X

[mattdm]

They're not remote X terminals. They're remote frame buffers -- they don't even have the brains of an X term.

We already do this at my job...

[The-Bus]

...but it pisses everyone off because I'm the only one doing it so I leave my crap everywhere.

Chiat/Day Experiment Link

[pgrote]

If you're interested in what happened, people working out of the trunks of their car, check out this overview.

Wacky Stuff ...

Chiat/Day Experiment

Show up early, get McNealy's office!

[GGardner]

"'You come in early, you get a good a parking space, you get a good office.' Chief Executive Scott McNealy has summed up the iWork program. "

How early do I have to come in to get Scott's office?

"Hotelling"

[Big Sean O]

I've heard it called "hotelling". One implementation I heard about had a 'locker room' where you could store your personal effects. They got around having filing cabinets in each office by having a central bullpen for all the filing.

Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.

A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.

There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.

I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.

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.

Horrible Idea!

[night_flyer]

its like low income housing as opposed to a nice apartment complex.

most people take care of a nice apartment (there are exceptions) but low income housing is almost always in shambles.

if you have your own workstation & cubicle/office you will have a sense of pride, like you would if you rented a nice apartment. you take care of it and it takes care of you. the people that had it before you more than likely took care of it and the management knew what was wrong with each unit and who the trouble makers were.

the first come first serve grab a PC would be like low income housing, you would have very little chance of knowing what kind of person was there before, much less the time before that, the management doesnt really care, or is off site and there is very little pride in where you live.

SunRay

[Torg]

First they are not dumb ternimals, far from it. It is called a SunRay. If you want to know more about them, try http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/. Amongst other things you can take your SunRay card, pull it from your terminal and go put it in another. As long as the SunRay is on the same system you get your exact desktop back. With SunRay you also dont waste the vast amount of computing resources in your workplace. Don't take my word for it, go ask distribted.net. And that is just for wasted CPU cycles.

Second it is called Flexable Field Office. This means that you do NOT have to go into to the office to work. It is BECAUSE of this meany of the Sun workers were NOT in the World Trade Center Last September 11. You also do not have to be in your home town to go to an office to do work. Where it made sense, some employes kept their offices.

Ever wish you could telecommute?

Yes Sun even pays for its workers home office equipment and Internet access so they can work.

And Sun saved money doing it.

Sanitation ?

[Srin Tuar]

Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.

Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)

Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.

The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.

TWEEEEEEEET

[infonography]

Foul called on account of driveling.

I interviewed at Sun in '98 these where everywhere

This is neither new nor interesting from a UNIX user's perspective. Only in the Windows world do you really really need a workstation of your own. The model they where using then was the JavaStaion these have been around since 1996 http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9611/sunflas h.961114.html

A thin client (Oracle/Larry Ellison propaganda aside) is a jumped up X-Term with a disk drive and maybe a local hard drive or large removable media. If you have a really skilled SysAdmin staff (I imagine Sun does) you can run all your regular UNIX customization & Window Makers on this, Gnome, Enlightenment, and even play Quake where ever your at in the whole world. Your not tied to hardware with can be stolen or virus'd

So the workstation is $500 a pop, the CPU isn't just a local P-4 or something it's the front end for some big set of Mid-range or higher box like a Sunfire or SunCat or some other UNIX or even Microsoftie server.

when somebody tells me about how cool their new Dell is and how well it can crunch that Excel, I just smile, I can have screensavers that are actual Fractals in real time. Wine sessions that out run the latest P4

Ok, so the one you saw has got a little Grey Flannel Suit look to it, but you have to remember it's a company system. Sorry to be L33tist but if the bulk of your contact with a computer is 9-5 your going to have fish as your screensaver and a picture of your kids as your background.

As we progress with the routine technical advancement your going to see a things like SUN 450 Enterprise w/Quad 480Mhz processors showing up on Ebay for $500, Likely in about 18 months

Schools and small businesses are going to start wondering why they are being nibbled to death by Microsoft and Apple and the various shadowy and dodgy hardware vendors (Compaq, Dell, Packard Bell) and switch into where this setup is more common it will look more like the NAVI from Lain

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)