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The Bionic Office
hondo77 writes "Joel Spolsky has finally moved Fog Creek Software into their new digs. Read about what went into the design of "the ultimate software development environment" from your (my) cube and drool."
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Looks like a great set-up, but you'd have to start your own company to have a set up like this. Who on earth would pay for such an office? Not that I'm bitching, my office at work is great, but jesus H. christ those offices look like Futureland on crack.
Where does bionic come in? I presumed bionic was an electronic or electromechanical supplement to an individual or being. Not an environment.
That said, these are pretty cool digs and I agree completely with this statement from the article: Hey, this is my job; this is where I spend my days; it's my time away from my friends and family. It better be nice.
I have a couple of windows I can look down on the city in the valley from my workstation. It's pretty nice to get natural light and to be able to focus on something farther away than the computer screen or the lab bench from time to time. Looking out over the valley, I've seen U2's flying up the valley, I saw the space shuttle on the back of its 747 take off from the airport on the other side of the valley and I've seen a cool tornado.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
One thing I've noticed, of which this article is a very good example, is how most everyone who hires software developers claims to be hiring (or at least looking for) the very best of the best.
Yeah, I wonder about that myself. I've heard that "10x as productive" programmer idea before, and while I've definately seen a continuum of good developers and awful developers, I've never met THAT guy. Or gal. And I wonder if that person does exist, finding an ubercoder like that who can also deal with people and the real world...they must be even more rare, a real lottery win.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
Here's another one
Pandemic Studios took over this office after a dot-bomb spent a million dollars on the ceiling and then went bankrupt.
Oops.
Reading this article just made me wish I had my own cubicle. I'm supposed to be dreaming of having my own office, instead I dream of having my own workstation and my own cubicle, and wondering what it's like outside right now.
My previous employeers had great perks and working conditions, I didn't realize how good I had it, I left one for a better opportunity, that better opportunity went bankrupt, and now I'm here. Oh well, at least I have a job.
There is no dark side of the moon really, matter of fact it's all dark
Ever worked in a cube farm, no daylight, no quiet, chatter all around and always feeling somebody watched you from behind?
Preferably close to a manufacturing area, not only the white noise from computers, but whatever droning sound is being generated within 20 meters doesn't leave you alone?
And when by pure chance electricity goes down once, the most noticeable thing not being the darkness, but the quiet?
I'd kill to sit in an office like that!
I worked for a place with all these amenities plus the view was of the ocean. That's right...we were 6 feet from white sand and blue waves.
At first, the space was incredible, the free drinks, groovy toys, and high-powered colleagues were great. Everyone got along and the work being done was of the highest quality. Everything was humming along.
What the struggle became however was burnout. While it seems really groovy to have all kinds of cool things they were all just ways to keep us there rather than being at home with our families. Sure we would frag a little, have a beer, and hang out for an hour a day. We'd also end up leaving the office well after most of our families had gone to bed.
There's nothing about this article worthy of my praise. This is old hat and not as well thought out as it's made out to be--in the end this crew will be no more or less productive, happy, or able than all the other companies like mine that failed doing the same thing.
Of course we torture people, we need the information --Gen. Pinochet
The best programming environment is one where you can be left alone to do what you do without idiots bothering you. Interuptions take a long time to recover from, even those for good reasons.
The best programing environment is one where for whatever reason I can zone out and STAY zoned out until I have accomplished something that is ready to be tested.
When I can put up a sign outside my door that says "Stay the Fuck out, unless the world is coming to an end", I will find a way to work for them, and I'll take care of the inside furnishings myself.
When that workplace is established, I might work for almost nothing but Pizza money.
Joel is probably one of the only people that can attract the top 0.1%.
Reasons:
1) high visibility with his blog & columns in various magazines
2) Downtown NY & salaries to match
3) Office with a door
4) Boss is a programmer, not an MBA
5) smart coworkers
6) 6 weeks vacation
7) lots of other stuff, read his site
I might be wrong about that 6 weeks vacation thing, the only reference I found on his site was when he was talking about hiring European developers.
Note to managers: 6 weeks vacation is an absolute kicker of an incentive. It's cheap too. If you can't keep a company going without "key personnel", you've got bigger problems, and I don't want to work there.
Bryan
Makes you whether the industry is vastly deluded as to the actual abilities of those they hire...
Maybe, but not in Joel' Spolsky's case I wouldn't think. He's apparently a fan of Phillip Greenspun, whose writing he links to in the part about a coder needed a nicer workspace than his home.
In that same article, Greenspun links to this article from The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which addresses that very thing. Article is titled:
computerlady - a brand new Slash-daughter - alone, but no longer invisible, in the
Yeah, my ultimate office wouldn't even have a computer in it. Except for the air conditioner and the customer list the paragraph above describes my own shop. I just wish I could pay off the mortgage so I can go build something tangible. Compare these two careers: "Here are a couple million random zeros and ones. Put them in a specific non-random order and you've created something of value" OR "Take that wood and, through your own effort, creativity and skill you create a musical instrument that is not only beautiful to look at, but it sounds wonderful and brings joy to all who play it and hear it."
Yep, my ultimate office has nothing to do with software or computers.
Fast forward..
So I'm one of the few people in the group with a college degree (yeah, did my time at CMU...) There are a couple of the superstars who've got some major chip on their shoulder about that fact. They knew too much for college. I've worked with those types before, worse, they think they are superstars. Degrees don't mean much, I've meet plenty of people with them that were idiots. I take notice when you don't have one because you think or know college can't teach you something. It's just a heuristic I have for my bullshit meter. Turns out they are always proving something to somebody...
I've been given lessons from these superstars on various issues. I wrote a few things that are part of the Linux kernel now, so I'm the expert on it here, one of them came up to me and told me that wait() was broken, asked if I could fix it and went to lunch.. on a kernel used by redhat on possibly millions of machines. Turns out he has a screwed up signal handler, been there and done that. What I don't understand is how you entertain such a thought, I mean wait() is used by everything and some very very talented people work on Linux. You have to be some kind of a superstar to get that far in to that thought excercise, when it looks like wait is broken I usually start rechecking my code, my build environment, etc... I won't tell you about the conversations we've had on the scheduler and such, not really conversations so much as them telling me how it and priorities work; I guess they boned up on some beta kernel release I never saw and never got released or something because they were fairly far from the truth, Linus must not have thought the super AI human reasoning code that magically decided how to change priorities on the fly was ready for primetime or something...
Then there is out network and our production environment... They are so good that they don't need to ever plan or anything of that sort. Likewise, rather than locking a machine down and change controlling it they rely on their quick hacking and response when people bitch about stuff not working. Each machine has it's own hand mojoed up firewall configuration and the routing is something that isn't fully understoond by anyone, I guess it's some wizbang security feature to device route rather than figure out a netmask... Turns out some devices can't talk to various other devices becuase they are masked off, so I guess that's good, all machines don't need access to the DNS anyways.
I don't think I've ever seen these guys crack a book open or ask anyone for help. They are all alpha geeks. We through out our openldap server and went back to /etc/passwd because it was determined
that openldap was shit. Funny, I know there are some very very large
implementations running certain ISPs, like Sprint's ISP service uses
it. Shit, it took me all of about two hours to set it up for the home
LAN and get all of my machines using it and it's really damn cool. I
guess it's better to have a different login everywhere though. If
it's centrally managed then there is a single point of failure...
I could tell you about our enterprise product and it's performance and scaling problems but they all read so much slashdot that they might figure out that I'm talking about our company. Needless, it doesn't work, not really even close to be honest. We've never had a smooth release. We don't plan or engineer anything. We've never made a solid design that was more than a few pages with pictures. Deadlines are readily missed and it's never anybody's fault because "we push hard here." I think it was Gordon Moore that said if you never fail you're not trying hard enough so th
I've heard similar comments in conversation before. Kind of spooky really. When I'm asked to rate myself (typical 1-10 crap) I always give them a disclaimer first. I think a 10 in anything is that guy in the corner office that doesn't shower often, has no social skills at all, nobody likes to visit with, and all he/she does is write code... all.... day... long. I don't ever want to be that person (or deal with them).
The idea of having a rating system is pretty funny though. Maybe we could use a similar function like the AP uses for the top 25 college teams. Your score goes up if the project is run by an incompetent manager, you get one more point for each scope creep that marketing decides to throw in, a bonus for actually having a PHB....
Saying Android is a family of phones is akin to saying Linux is a family of PCs.
And that's great for you. But, your story is a prime example of someone who's working on software for reasons other than truly loving it. The very comparison you lay out as the choice screams that. If you view writing software as putting random ones and zeros into a specific order rather than solving intellectual problems, you probably should do something else. I so thoroughly enjoy solving programming problems that when my wife is out of town, I work 16-20 hours per day with a big smile on my face. I wake up in the morning excited because as I was waking up, I thought of an interesting solution to the problem I'd been working on. When my wife asks me, "What are you thinking about", the answer is almost always something related to the program I'm working on at the moment. In short, this isn't only what I "do", but what I would be doing even if I wasn't paid for it.
My dad and brother are big into the "built it with my hands" type of euphoria, but it's never done anything for me.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things