Slashdot Mirror
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.
they called it musical chairs
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
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.]
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.
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
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".
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
"'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?
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.
My father is a blogger.
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.
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!
You just click on the username and it shows the floorplan with John's current desk location highlighted.
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".
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
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.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!