Building a Better Office

xjrfx asks: "I'm in charge of setting up a new office for my company. I want to make the place as worker friendly as possible, comfortable enough that long hours don't seem like banishment to a beige hell. I was hoping to get some input from Slashdot regarding past office experiences, good and bad. What amenities/factors cause you to love or hate your office? If you could create your perfect office how would it work?" "Did you feel schizoid in open offices or claustrophobic in cube farms? Were you ever forced to be in an office when you would have been more productive on the road, or conversely have you ever had to leave the office to focus on the task at hand? What's more important; a foosball table or a fancy furniture system? Do you want the same desk space for your duration of your employment or do you want to move around depending on your projects?

Our office will be 40-45 people (15 engineers, 7 creative types, 15 biz dev/sales, and some support staff and part-timers as well), but I'm open to opinions from people from much larger or smaller offices."

Comments

An atmosphere for great coding

[SIGALRM]

If you could create your perfect office how would it work?

I'm a fan of Joel Spolsky's writings (see Joel on Software), so I was fascinated to read about the office space he has designed at his company, Fog Creek Software.

I like what he's built here because the emphasis is not just on catering to developers, but providing an atmosphere where great coding can thrive.

Re:An atmosphere for great coding

[ron_ivi]

Of course you could have linked his article talking about the office design

Re:An atmosphere for great coding

[nonstranger]

I think Malcolm Gladwell (of "Tipping Point" fame) offered amazing insights in an article from the New Yorker a few years ago. (Now on his site.) It's a great read, but his main point is to compare the office to a well-functioning urban neighborhood... Greenwich Village in NYC being the example drawn from Jane Jacob's urban-planning classic "Death and Life of Great American Cities." There are a lot of specific ideas in the article about what makes individuals happy in an office environment(the thrust of most comments here as well) but the really interesting stuff concerns the way that an office's arrangement influences how people interact... and how that in turn influences the office's ability to share information and support creativity. I've referred several people making office-layout decisions to the article, to great effect. It's not coder-specific, but very focused on creativity... so to the extent that you are concerned about creativity in your coding environment, it is likely to have great information for you.

read "peopleware"...

[holden caufield]

by demarco and lister.

Any suggestions I would give are probably covered there.

No Cubes, Lots of Windows

[N8F8]

I once toured a nify building in Melbourne Florida owned by Encso. Each floor had a ring of offices around the outside and a communal lab in the center. Everyone had plenty of windows and they a shared area to work together in.

I've done this before.

[jgerry]

I designed and implemented an entire office for 70+ people during the dot-com days. I did it on a reasonable budget and it made employees and management happy. Quick bullet points:

• No flourescent lights. Halogens are great. Hang them from the ceiling and put a dimmer on each one. Different employees like different amounts of light -- give them a choice or expect to see developers climbing on furniture to remove unwanted flourescent tubes
  
• 4 network drops per employee. Use them for phones too, reconfigure as necessary in the wiring closet. Cheaping out here will make your life a pain in the ass later. Plus the ugliness of seeing hubs and switches on everyone's desk. It costs marginally more up front -- pay for it!
  
• Furniture. Pick 2 or 3 good task chairs, have furniture people bring in samples, and let each employee choose which he/she prefers. They'll feel involoved in the process and also won't try to steal each other's chairs. Don't buy cheap $100 chairs either -- your valued employees cost you a ton of money, spend $300-$400 on something they sit in all day, every day. If you're buying cubicle systems, make sure they're modular and reconfigurable. Many aren't. This will allow you to totally reconfigure your space by buying extra pieces instead of all new cubicle systems.
  
• No draconian network spying policies. Tell employees they are expected to work and not play. Let them be in charge of themselves. Also tell them that although they won't be spied upon in general, any suspected or unusual activity may get them canned. This is usually enough to stop most of that activity. Sure you have to block certain things (P2P) but genrerally leave employees to themselves.
  
• Free sodas / water / coffee / snacks. Keeps employees from spending time running around buying food and drinks. We spend upwards of $1000/month buying these things for 70 employees, but it kept them productive and happy. It also keeps them from taking 30 minute breaks to walk to Starbucks. Money well spent.
  
• Let employees expense a reasonable amount of money on books and training. We had a $500 up-front expense level for new technical employees + $100/month for books, etc. Let them keep these things if they leave. Think of it as just a (small) cost of doing business.
  
• Provide good common areas and conference rooms. Cover every available wall with whiteboard material. Don't spend tons of money on videoconferencing and plasmas TVs unless you absolutely need to. DO spend good money on real conference speakerphone systems.
  
  That's about all I can think of off the top of my head. My current place of work provides none of those things and I really hate them for that.