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.