Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
If at all possible, give everyone their own office. I feel 100% more productive now that I don't have to work in a cube.
-- Bryan
Even if it's a crappy view over looking the slum of town, windows make the day go by so much faster. If windows aren't in the work area, maybe pictures and paintings of the outside world would help.
I've been working in a basement office for 2 years now and there are some days where I wish I could just look out the window and regroup.
Next comes the offices. If you've got programmers, give them the offices, and let the directors and VPs, who are never in their offices anyway, have the cubes. Programmers need peace and quiet, and the ability to hang a "stay the hell away from me" sign on the door.
A past company I worked at had several good sized conference rooms, which is normal.. However, every wall in these rooms was a giant white board. Also, several un-official meeting areas had white-board walls too.. That was dang handy for trying to explain things to people at impromptu meetings. And please, take one Conf. room, and put a couch, TV, and comfy chair or two in. makes meetings much more relaxed and productive.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Are you actually building an office? That is, will you have a say in where walls and offices are constructed?
I am a fan of a floorplan that has offices at or near the center, cubes around the perimeter, and lots of windows. More light gets in that way and those without a walled office don't feel so much like a lower class of employee because they will be closer to the windows.
Also wireless and meeting spaces / conference rooms of various sizes encourage people to move around and collaborate.
Windows (the kind you look through to see the outside world) are nice, too...
Eh. Do everyone a favor and HIRE an interior designer. They don't spend 4+ years in university for nothing. There are plenty of design studios out there that specialize in workplaces. Look one up, they will open your eyes too all sorts of things that you would never of thought of.
Many times they will also point out sources for fixtures and whatnot that are much more economical than the places geeks would go. And no graybar is not the place you buy your overhead lights. Oh and they are all current with the workplace safety / egonomic regulations as wekk.
That would be a real treat for co-workers with dog allergies, dog fears, or a love of a clean couch to sit on! Yup! Nothing beats a dog!
The comfort and happiness benefits of being able to sit down when you visit a colleague's working-space are great and few offices cater for it.
If you have an impromptu meeting, do you want to be standing or sitting on the edge of a desk?
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
A Gamespy article has a nice quote predicting their downfall: Work should be a practical place to get things done - cubicles are reasonable balance between cost, privacy, and personal space. Having meeting rooms, bathrooms, and a kitchen is also nice. The traditional approaches to work spaces are done because they work well enough.
Beer fridge or a kegerator means happy employees.
- Having natural light instead of flourecent is GREAT, but it's not always an option (raining outside, winter daylight hours etc).
I honestly believe having the sun shining in your office has a huge positive impact on office morale than sitting in a damn cubicle with flourecent lights humming over head.
- Having non-overhead (and non flourecent) lighting whenever possible. I hate overhead lighting. I REALLY hate overhead flourecent lighting.
- Allow me to control the light in my area somehow. I like things around me a bit dimmer when I'm working on an important file or project.
Left 4 Dead Gaming Group - http://www.l4dgg.com
Aeron chairs??? Those things dig into your legs! OW!
Oh, and cubicles (it's NOT "cubes") offer the illusion of privacy. In fact, they do nothing of the sort. Everyone can spy on you, and everyone's sound bothers you. Big open rooms are a nightmare -- "grand central station" springs to mind. No, give me a separate, enclosed, real, no-foolin' OFFICE of my own every time. With a door I'm allowed to close, too, thank you very much.
One thing you didn't mention: quit it with the fascist network policies. This encompasses everything from logon scripts that overwrite your preferences in the registry to not having access to your own C: drive to "Unacceptable Use Detected" internet intercept screens. HANDS OFF, please. If you don't trust me to do my work, how do you trust me at all?
[Exhales] Sorry. Bit of a rant there.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Don't even think about doing this without reading "Agile Software Development" by Alistair Cockburn . . . even if you aren't doing software development!
In any office, communication efficiency is the most important factor in productivity. My father works at a college, I work in the financial industry, and my brother is a filmmaker. In all these diverse industries, communication is the essense of getting things done effiently (obviously, _just_ getting things done _just_ takes bodies).
Now for some personal preferences: I like to have a personal private space for photos, plants, doodling. I like to be able to arrange the space as I like, including the furniture. I like to have privacy in the space so that I can veg when I need a mental health break, or so that I can concentrate when I'm in a bad mood and don't want to deal with people. However, I also really enjoy working in an open area with other talented people. The open area must have lots of whiteboards, good network access (802.11g is good enough), lots of stationary supplies, large work surfaces, and ideally a good relevent reference library handy (easiest to populate this with suggestions from the people working there). Much as I like some natural light, too much can ruin work in the morning or evening when the Sun shines directly into a space - one way to solve this is to orient most windows to the North. A good number of real air-cleaning plants is a good investment too since humans are naturally in a better mood when exposed to nature.
Hope that helps.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
But let's just cover a couple big ones:
You spend about half your waking life in an office, and therefore you shoudl expect some level of privacy and a decent standard of living. The biggest infraction against this that many modern offices make is the "cube farm".
Cubicles are a great economical alternative to traditional offices, but you must give people ample room to breath, and ample privacy. 2 foot by 4 foot cubes with waist/desk-high walls is BAD. 6-8 feet on a side and walls that are neck to head high on the average employee is GOOD.
Additionally, it helps to provide ample privacy rooms. These are small conference rooms (actual rooms with doors and (possibly translucent glass) walls. They don't get booked for meetings, they're designed for impromptu use. When someone needs to make a telephone call that's personal in nature, or a couple people can see their discussion is getting a bit heated for cubeland and needs to be hashed out in private, or small impromptu team meetings, etc. This keeps distracting drama-rama out of the cube area, keeps people's privacy better protected, and prevents the distracting small team meetings in the cube-hallways that annoy everyone nearby trying to work.
Good quality white-noise generators help a little bit on the privacy and distraction fronts as well. Just enough to drown the distant din, but don't turn them up so loud that people can't willfully talk to the guy in the next cube over.
Lighting. Your employees use computer monitors. This means you don't want the outdoor light coming in through windows causing glare on their monitors, and you don't want nasty flourescent lights wreaking havoc in the eyestrain dept (hint: flashing light + flashing computer image = fried eyes). There are flourescents out there that are better than average for this, but the ultimate is anything that doesn't have a flashing frequency like flourescents do.
Hmm this comment is getting long, I'll be back later.
11*43+456^2
I work in a 96,000sqft office building that has over 900 employees working at any given time. For 3 years we had beige walls, carpet, desks, chairs, and computers.
Finally, they took our suggestions and painted the walls. We got bright vibrant colors, you wouldnt believe how mood boosting having color is. We also have alot of windows.
I'd quit the minute they let you bring a dog in the building. Hate the animals, can't stand them. I freeze up if they get within a few feet of me. Work would be a living hell. The reason you're NOT allowed to bring animals is that despite how much you love your pet, nobody else there like the fucker. And we don't want the distraction and hassle of dealing with it when you lose control of the dumb animal. So leave your dog at home, I'll do you the same courtesy and leave my pet guinea pigs.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
...to everyone when you don't have to spend 30-60 minutes each way each day to cram your way through freeways with insufficient automobile bandwidth.
Just imagine if everyone who could work at home did work at home. The few who did have to commute would fly along on a nigh-empty freeway.
And all the fuel saved...and the environmental improvement...and the lessened dependence on foreign petroleum...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Get a decent amount of huge green plants. They are generally very easy to keep alive and make the rrom much more friendly. They do a great job as seperators between desks so that you don't get the feeling to be under observation all day. The green is easy on the eye and people relate to them over time. I know it sounds funny, but it's true! ;-)
One office - one person. You need your own creative space where your door can close, because IT people walking around with 2-way radios and electrical contractors in the hall and people from QA babbling in some foreign language and assholes from sales who can only use a phone hands-free with the door open and the general buzz of the coffee area and the spinning up noise that the laser printer makes will all distract you fairly effectively.
Gymnasium. Fit, relaxed people think better, it's a fact.
Car parking. Enough of it, close enough to the building.
Free sodas, water and perhaps pastries one day a week say "we value you" loud and clear. Fast internet connection is just not optional. Aeron chairs are perhaps too expensive, but if one person gets one then everyone should.
Apart from all that see "Peopleware" by De Marco & Lister, for good coverage of things that management often don't consider until the padlocks are on the front door and everything is being sold at auction.
Hmmm, a bit over the top. One of the office workers here brings in her dog. It just sits under the desk and disturbs no one. Of course the dog's owner is blind.....
Bringing one's dog to work is fine.. until you hire somebody who is either deathly afraid of dogs, or is merely alergic to them.
Oh yeah, and all of the really stupid pet owners who can't control their animal, nor clean up after them, doesn't help your case. Usually ends up being part of the lease agreement.
Which is really too bad, because that would be nice.
Gentoo Sucks
This of course doesn't work too well if your building is *really* big. More smaller buildings ( or wings ) are better than one big brick with a windowless interior.
People working on the same or similar projects get adjacent offices. Offices should be large enough to not feel cramped but too small to even *think* about putting two workstations in. Each office "ring" like this should have at most 15 or so offices- and should mirror your teams. This is a good design for creative professionals to work in.
You have teams with more than 15 members? Who manages that team, and how well? Think about subdividing it. Really.
If you can't, for whatever reason, give people real, individual offices, you're probably better off with big, open, space rather than thin walls that block light but nothing else. Cubes suck, period. If you have the luxury of designing your space from the ground up, design it so people can have real offices with an informal gathering space right outside every team member's door.
Thats an exceptional situation. You're talking about an animal thats highly trained by professional trainers (I'm not sure howlong training a seeing eye dog takes, but I'm fairly sure its over a year) that without which the owner would not be able to function. He's talking about taking his pet dog to work.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
- The ability for multiple lighting zones. I prefer to work in the dark with nothing more than the glow of my monitor. My boss likes to have all the lights on and all the shades wide open. Plan for this.
- A library of good source materials and reference manuals. Having a 3-copy-O'Reilly-library would be much more cost effective than 15 people owning the same book.
- A place to sleep for an hour. If I had a place to sleep for an hour in the afternoon I would have the motivation to work until 8pm every night. Otherwise, I'm gone at 5 on the dot.
- A good calendaring system, office directory, and CRM system.
- Ergonomic keyboards and chairs.
- A bike rack in view of the front door/receptionist. Monitored areas are less likely to be burglarized.
- Allow everyone to put their own music on their machine and share it out via the iTunes sharing feature. This is what we use at work. This allows people to keep their own music, but check out the tastes of others without doing anything illegal (at least without intentionally doing so). Music is a key feature of my work.
- Make sure everyone has comfortable headphones for their music. No speakers.
- Any 'piped-in' music should be low enough to be background noise. It should never be allowed to be heard on the other end of telephone conversations.
zork% mv *.asp
283 files eaten by a grue
service dog != annoying shih tzu
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I too am currently designing the 'perfect' office. I was given the task of designing the new design studio for our company. It also had to include a showroom for our products as well as a meeting room for customers and sales.
I found the most important thing was consideration of the use of space. One can not design an enviornment without getting input directly from the people who will use it.
What one person likes or finds friendly, another may find annoying or unfriendly. Simple things like are corridors or pathways wide enough for two people to walk side by side or pass eachother without one having to give way to the other. Or, are ammenities that are used on a regular basis easy to reach yet inobtrusive, such as the printer. Will there be regular informal meetings that require a central table or private rooms?
Aside from all the suggestions of windows and no cubicles, walk through patterns, work flow patterns and usage patterns should be researched first and once those are as correct as they can be, making it bright, or pretty or anything else is easy, at least the space will be useable. Oscar Wilde said "Uglyness is the result of someone trying to make something beautiful, while beauty is acchieved by those who aim at making something useful".
I fortunately have a background in design and thinking about the little things has become second nature to me through years of experience. My best suggestions would be to hit the printing room and grab a package of A4 paper and print out a floor plan of just walls and things you can not move, then draw in bulk areas of work space slowly refining them over a number of drawings. These don't have to be pretty drawings or even useful to anyone other than yourself. Just try to see what goes where, who does what and how your paths make life easier for the majority.
If you need to get final approval from someone, please for your own sake, only give them 3 - 5 semi final top view drawings showing no more than boxes for desks and outlines for everything. Then let them choose the one they like the best before going gung ho choosing floor covering and paint colours.
The worst thing you can do to yourself is give them too much detail and too many choices as they will ineveitably pootch screw the whole thing by taking bits and pieces from each and move them around causing you to think ' if they were going to be this nit picky, why the hell didn't they just do it all themselves?'
Take your time and back up your stages with written explanations or notes as to why you did something the way you did and how it makes for a good work enviornment.
Best of luck I have been on this for the better part of a year and we are still about 3 months from choosing a final design. As I work for a Japanese company, once the final design is chosen, I doubt that it will take more than 1 month to complete the build. But there is the nature of Japanese firms, total consensus before any action, then swift action. What a nightmare up to action but damn inside a week everything gets done and it is a sight to behold.
Hope this helps.
flinging poop since 1969
What he said. User-controllable lights are a must. Ask people about their light preferences, and group your people accordingly.
If you work with papers on your desk all day, or a telephone and a Rolodex, you're probably a "light person". If you say things like "I hate a dark office! I can't work in a cave!", you're a light person.
(Light Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC under the desk with 21" monitor with fingerprints all over the screen, the contrast and brightness both cranked all the way up, but running at 640x480x60Hz, and that's just fine with him because all he uses his computer for is PowerPoint slides)
If you work with a CRT all day, and use IM and email, you're probably a "dark person". You can't work in a lit room, you need to see your screen. If you say things like "Fuck, I hate the glare! I can't see a goddamn thing in here!", you're a dark person.
(Dark Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC with the cover off and assorted computer guts splayed all over the desk, and a 21" monitor that gets a daily spritzing of Windex every morning and has the on-screen adjustments have been perfectly tweaked for razor-sharp convergence at 1600x1200, because every fucking pixel counts - not just when using Photoshop or paging through reams of code, but when fragging his cubemates at 5:01 pm!)
Group the dark people together and the light people together. Don't believe the bullshit from light people about how a "dark office" makes people sick and unproductive. Don't believe the bullshit from dark people about how a "light office" makes it impossible to read the screen. Just acknowledge that these two types of people are different, and provide adequate space for both.
Seriously, I hate those fucking things. Drab, immoralizing grey-colored pieces of shit plastic that offer the illusion of privacy. You realize quickly it's an illusion whenever someone walks by and stares over your shoulder at whatever's on your monitor. Or depending on how they're facing, people peek over the sides and gawk while rambling about stuff you really don't give two shits about. And the minute you try to personalize them by bringing some *gasp* COLOR into your miniture world via posters, you get bitched at by management for inappropriate material. Wow, an 8x11 of me snowboarding in CO is inappropriate? Good thing I left my Barely Legal in the car.
As someone else already posted, L-shaped desks against a wall in an open environment is awesome. Take down the barriers, you MBA fucks! If someone really needs their own space, give them a personal office. And while you're at it, put as many windows in as possible. And hire an interior decorator...just because you furnished your house for under $400 with piss-stained Goodwill furnature, King of Decore you are not.
Make the place friendly, open (with as much natural light as possible), and comfortable. Granted the dot-com is dead and not everybody gets to play with pinball machines and ride segways around the office...but that doesn't mean your office environment needs to be modeled after Office Space.
"Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned for SEGA. ..."
I like being in the same room with others on the same project.
The "everyone in the same room" philosophy works wonders. At our office, it's one big room. Everyone has identical desks and nearly identical computers - the boss sits among us (if you were to walk in, you'd have no idea which was the boss's desk). No cubicle walls. It makes for a very egalitarian work dynamic - without cubicles or offices, everyone's equal. Communication is a snap, we can just talk across the room with each other. If we absolutely have to see what's on each other's screen, simply walk across the room.
What's best is it basically eliminates the need for company meetings. If everyone works in the same large space, I've found that everyone's on the same page on projects. There's no need to organize everyone into one central place like a boardroom for a meeting, because everyone works in the same shared space to begin with.
Of course, we're a small company (about ten people), but my boss has always said that if we grew to be 100 people, he'd like to have the office set up the same way.
I've worked in a cubicle setting, an office setting, and a one-big-open-room setting, and the latter is by far the best at buliding co-worker comraderie.
Back when I was testing software last summer, the place I was working was up on the third floor, and more often than not you'd take the stairs to get up there. During the incredible heatwave in London at the time, the A/C decided to pack in, and the company who we paid to sort it out never did (until we threatened legal action). Seriously, productivity drops off very quickly in temperatures of 30C+, so make sure the A/C is up to scratch. On the bright side, at least the department manager bought ice creams for everyone every lunch break!
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
worker friendly - long hours. Surely you must see the inherent contradiction?
No. You missed 2 very, very important words:
Coworkers choice.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
In a small company, it's reasonable to say "either trust me, or get rid of me". I used to work in a 5-developers-and-a-secretary company that was like that, and nobody abused the trust.
In a larger company (the one I'm in now has about 2000 employees), you have to assume that there WILL be employees who will be stupid, who will be malicious, etc., etc., so you probably NEED to have some central control.
And that is one of the reasons why I GREATLY prefer working for small companies.
A what if most your work force doesn't code?
I think an office has to reflect the work being done so it can better facilitate productivity.
I think there are some universals:
1. Climate (too hot or too cold and it distracts people)
2. Navigation - people have to get around, to other workers, to printers, the mail room etc
3. Lighting - avoid eye strain
4. Infrastructure - whether telephones, computers whatever, make sure people don't have to work to gets things hooked up
5. Layout - avoid short cube walls, the noise from conversations and telephone calls will irritate the most easy going easily
It doesn't have to break the bank, just put thought into things and keep your options open in case a decision back fires it won't take months to correct. I also recommend varying carpet and paint to break up the sight lines.
If the dog is well behaved, and no one is deathly allergic to or afraid of the dog, there should be no reason why it can't accompany its owner to work. Without all these criteria satisfied, no dog. If the dog helps you code or do whatever it is you do, then great.
To the people who are whining: grow up. The dog isn't going to eat you, shit on the floor, or anything like that.
+1!
We just moved offices into something a bit nicer, and since it's only the three from the dev team in here we can have the lights off and the only light either sneaks in from the door that connects us to the rest of the building, or the nice big window that lets some of that "natural light" stuff in.
Of course, if you have a dark office you have to deal with the crap of people constantly wandering into the office with witty comments like...
"wow, dark in here"
"you guys like the dark or something"
"this must be where the mushrooms live"
"wow, it's dark in here"
et infinitum
I really want a 1,000,000 candle spotlight to point at the door in cases like this. It's fine for the first few times, but after the 50th person who wanders in with a "dark in here isn't it" comment, you really want to kill someone.
nothing like slammin' a push shot to make your day a little brighter.
No! Closed doors do not discourage collaboration. Instead they encourage people to use email (where the individual looks when he's ready!). They also encourage thought - in shared office space it is too easy to open your mouth and shout "hey what's the second argument to fopen()!" but if you have to get up and open someone's door to do it thought will soon unearth an easier way to answer the question.
More effort to disturb another programmer is good. Very good. Collaboration needs to be done in such a way that individuals can focus - studies (see "Peopleware") have shown that interruption reduces productivity for on the order of 20 minutes.
Seriously, unless you're trying to maintain some sort of artificial professional distance between you and your underlings (or superiors if you're a secretary), consult with your users. They know if they work in pairs, trios, have cross-functional needs (2 engineers, 1 creative on any given team), or if all 15 engineers work alone and only need to talk with sales every month, while the creative guys are the support for sales.
Start by evalutaing the space you have, and the company needs. Make sure you have some expansion room if you think your company can become healthy inside of 5 years. Make sure you don't have to turn the break room into an office if you hire that 16th engineer. If your company (or division, or branch, or what have you) necessitates customer NDAs -- or might ever, don't go with any kind of open cubicle arrangement. Even if you do lots of intercommunication, enclosed single or double offices provide a degree of privacy that makes the employee feel trusted. Consider making your offices or spaces such that nobody has to sit with his or her backs to the opening (door or otherwise). There are plenty of metrics for productivity that don't involve sneaking up from behind someone. I've seen studies inside of my company that concluded cubicles didn't save the space anticipated once you factored in the space requirements of break out rooms so people could actually have some discussions.
Furniture is less important. Give everybody a whiteboard and handle ergonomic needs as they arise. Consider using LCDs (if color realism isn't necessary) for clarity and space efficiency (energy savings are exaggerated, although measurable). Have some flexible policies regarding people decorating their own spaces, and you're probably set. Some people covet windows, others loathe the day-star entirely.
As with any problem, a customer is involved (this time, your workers). Consult with your customer and make sure you understand the problems they think you'll solve. Listen to their suggestions on how to solve the problems, but make no promises until you've worked something out. Julius Caesar always asked even the lowliest of troops for advice before a battle-- he always had other plans in place, and the troops' advice rarely had any impact at all, but the illusion was that he cared about their opinions. Because they felt like their opinions were valued, they fought harder and won many battles that they should have lost by all accounts. If your workers feel valued, they will work harder for you.
Maybe it won't be as important to your company, but treat the grunts (coders, graphics people) as though they are at least as important as your sales people. I work in the advertising department of a large, death star owning, cable company... cough Time Warner cough cough. The culture has developed into a very lopsided mess that makes it very difficult to be a team player. The physical space is designed for paper-pushers... bright overhead lights, normal walls don't go all the way to the ceilings, too many cubicle walls, creative people located too close to administrative types... Even in an imperfect world, you should be able to provide different atmospheres for your "departments". Sales, customer service, administrative personnel, and the like can have their brightly lit "office" space. We rasterbators like to have a space where you can put stuff on the walls, play music, and literally "think outside the box". Likewise, dress codes and break schedules should be a bit more flexible for the people who need to get into any kind of creative "groove". Nothing puts the hurt on my right lobe like sitting in a bright white room, wearing clothes that are uncomfortable, listening to the demented ramblings of sales people trying to "upsell" a client. Fortunately, I have taken over an unused TV studio for my space. It's overkill, but having a 25x40 office where I can close the door and make as much noise as I want is much less stressful. Plus, scrubbing through chunks of video repeatedly has a tendency to make non-vidiots nearby want to hang themselves. Also, don't do what we did... Our fearless leader (all the way at the top) spent $23 Million on just HIS office in NYC. Meanwhile, the poor bastards creating the company's product out of thin air have had our salaries pretty much frozen. To add insult to injury, the completion of said office made all of the big news networks, Newsweek, most of the industry rags, and our utterly pointless company magazine. Nothing will demotivate the people who pull your product out of their ass faster than unbalanced compensation. That said, I'd like to apologize for using "think outside the box", "upsell" and "groove" in this post. See, I told you I was located too close to the office drones... Time to sharpen up my demo reel. Oh, and for the love of God, make sure there's free coffee. I think my contract actually states that I'm allowed to kill one coworker every 30 minutes until there's a pot of coffee on. Also VERY IMPORTANT: Let your people have some input on what equipment they're going to have to use! Letting middle manager/number cruncher types try to select CGI gear is like having my grandmother help you shop for porn... Not that her taste is bad, it's just that she's probably not real up to date on the good stuff. Nothing says "Your job is unimportant and the appearance is even less important" louder than trying to convince the art department that $75 worth of software from Wal Mart (I shit you not) is going to do the trick... Direct quote after I picked my jaw up off of the floor: "What's the problem? It says here that it comes with 250,000 stock photos...". I'm sure that, to some degree, the same could be said for all departments, but it's particularly important to properly equip the people who make the product and its image.
Someday a real rain is gonna come...
Some people have suggested a full gym, but just having a shower in the office is good enough for most people. I like to work out or run in the morning before work and it saves tons of time when I can come in and take a shower at the office. It's also great for people who exercise at lunch or bike to work.
Hire a pro who has done offices you like and even more important: are liked by the people who work there!
It is possible to design GREAT looking offices that win design awards.....that are counterproductive. I refer you all to the wonderful book: "The Design of Everyday Things" by Donald Norman for examples.
I once hired "professionals" who designed aworkspac that was both inargueably ugly and difficult to use; it was an expensive mistake but the folks we tried after that did an excellent job with a difficult space. Quality varies.
The office I am in just switched from Folgers to generic, which I would call a step in the wrong direction.
If you care about your employees/co-workers, you buy the BEST you can budget.A large group of the disgruntled pooled funds and bought an auto-brew, auto-shutoff 12 cupper, 'swiped' a rackmount UPS/battery/power conditioner, and set it up in someone's cubicle.
Each week, someone brings in a different type of coffee. (Today's blend was Royal Kona Christmas Rum...mmmmm...)We'll never drink that generic kark again!
For an individual or team that requires more space, you can easily join two cubicles into one or rearrange the cubicle walls.
Cubicle walls are a LOT cheaper to implement than hard walls.
If you use tall cubicle walls, at least 7 feet, you gain some advantages:
Privacy - employee can confer with others without being distracted or distracting others (it's amazing how much noise you can put up with, but it doesn't take much visual input to distract you)
Wall space - employee can hang personal artwork, and have more space for shelving and storage
Pride of ownership - employee feels "this is my space" instead of "my boss lets me work here and is looking over my shoulder"
Add in a door for extra privacy
And it's still cheaper than hard walls.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
Exactly how do you act around people then? Lighten the fuck up, dude. We have one guy at our office that brings his pug into work every day, and everyone loves him. He's like a little person only not as obnoxious. Several other people also bring dogs in on occassion, and no one minds. Only two of them have to be confined near the owner aside from potty breaks, but most of them just wander freely and look to be petted or find a nice place to take a nap. Look at it this way: a dog or a cat isn't ever going to decide to walk into the office with a semi-automatic and start killing people.
Work from home can also be MURDER on collaborative projects. I work at a company with several work-at-homes, and me at the office. The most common phrase is "has anybody heard from X?", where X is a work-at-home in the middle of a big project. X of course is deep in their work, and what they're doing has no bearing whatsoever on what we need. Instead, they're working on prettying up what THEY think is the bad part of the program. This happens even with very tight design specs and good communication...it's just really hard to get inside somebody's head on a collaborative, customer driven project if you're always two hours away. It's even harder to work through QA.
And then there's the stress put on me, the non-work at home. Besides my own projects, I also have to pick up all the support calls that trickle into development, go to all the meetings, and be the beck-and-call man who hears complaints and looks into the feasibility of repairing them even if a problem isn't my fault. I'm lucky if I get half as much work done as the other guys...and then I get to hear stories about how so-and-so's project was completed before mine. No shit -- that's because he doesn't drive 30 minutes to work every morning and wasn't squeezing in two or three overtime hours per day just to get his regular work done around the other work.
Incidentally, I hate working at home. Home is where my dog is, home is where my project car is, home is where my record collection is. I don't want to be working here...where do I go when work gets too hectic and I need to relax? The bathroom?
Hey freaks: now you're ju
"Most people LOVE animals"
I think that's part of the problem.
A few times people brought in their pet dog where I work (I work at a small private company, so the environment is pretty lax; sometimes, a little TOO lax, IMO). The dogs were surprisingly well behaved, but it was my fellow co-workers that could not STFU. They soon became the distraction, not the dogs.
You couldn't be more right about productivity going down. People were always inclined to take a break more than usual (on top of all their cigarette breaks) to 'visit' the dog, which usually lead to small talk. And don't get me started about co-workers bringing their babies/kids. They're worse than the dogs in the distraction department. Thank goodness this is only once in a few months. I cannot imagine it being like this every day.
I love kids (can't wait to have some of my own) and don't mind dogs, but I believe they have no business (no pun intended) being in the office. It's too distracting.
It's the people there, and their attitude.
The most comfortable chairs in the plushiest offices with the most fantastic views where the people are backstabbing political lunatics will never measure up to a place where the roof leaks, the furniture is broken-up with a partially-blocked-by-a-dumpster view down the lane where people are honestly caring about each other.
I speak with the authority of one who once had such a thing, and now cannot even see a window.
I have to agree. That was the most amazing office design I have ever seen.
:
:
Key elements from a 'techie' perspective
#1 : Able to see outside, double points if you can see green things outside.
#2 : Sunlight, triple points if you can block it when you want.
#3 : Ability to close the door. Nothing improves productivity like being able to shut out the world.
#4 : More 110v outlets providing clean power than you possibly imagine ever using. Triple points for UPS.
#5 : Cable routing ductwork.
#6 : Room for more than two computers, including network jacks and table space.
#7 : Whiteboards, lots of whiteboard space.
#8 : Bookshelves, lots of bookshelves.
Want some other tips
Find out what the individuals drink. Make it available, free. The wholesale cost of a six pack of soda per day is inconsequential compared to the cost of building and staffing that office.
Real hackers don't want to socialize with other people. Collaborative coding can happen in their offices, but the real producers could give a damn about a foozball table or artwork by famous painters. True hackers don't participate in group activities or group sports.
Caffeine. Lots and lots of caffeine. More caffeine than you think a normal human could possibly consume.
Twin 18" LCD monitors hooked up to a twin-headed video card - will give a coder about 90% more real estate than a single 20" LCD while costing about the same.
Most new computers come with a $6 keyboard and a $3 mouse. Throw away both, get him a high quality rig.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
Since it's likely they will be dealing with photography, pantones, and printed material, 18% grey walls would be ideal, with 5500 degree industry standard lighting.
When I had a multimeda company, our main common work area had tall, deep tables. They were tall so that we could comfortably work on the computer while standing, making it easy to go from station to collaberate (we had tall drafting table style chairs so we could sit). They were deep so that we had pleanty of room for the monitors, keyboard, and large Kurta/Wacom Tablets.
I, and I'm sure many others, would agree that flourescent lighting (the standard stuff anyway) can be a pain in the ass. The artificialness and 60 Hz buzz in poorly wired rooms can lead to all sorts of strain.
For not too much more, however, you can get the office properly wired to avoid any such 60 Hz buzz. Installing "Happy-Lights" that more closely reproduce natural sunlight is a HUGE PLUS. So shop wisely for the lights and you can find some pretty relaxing spectrums that not only keep people happy inside longer, but allow them to see better as well.
One think lacking in most all workspaces is a quiet place to get some shut-eye on your lunch break. A 30 minutes nap can do miracles in productivity and morale.
:)
Mind you, private offices with a door you can shut, lights you can turn off, windows with blinds, a couch, and "do-not-disturb" sign could do as well
All great points, and I'd add:
..those 15 engineers? They're creative types too. :-)
#9 Furniture you can move around
Get good quality chairs and furniture, but for God's sake, don't get the modular stuff you can't move. Moving cable up and down behind stuff that's up against the wall with a 2 inch clearance is a pain.
If you get laptops for folks, get them good quality laptops. A laptop that isn't up to scratch is almost worse than not having one.
Don't get a public frig, unless you have someone assigned to clean it. It'd be better to just get those individual desk frigs; they don't hold much, but at least everyone would be responsible for their own.
Btw,
The biggest thing that irritates me if fluorescent lighting.
I mean, it literally irritates me, physically. The strobing is somewhat noticeable, the tone of light is somewhat painful, and worst of all, over time it gives me a headache. My eyes will get exceedingly tired, and I'm unable to concentrate when that happens. I need me eyes to work.
I've heard that prolonged fluorescent light exposure can lead to other health complications as well, but I don't know what.
I'd strongly suggest natural lighting if at all possible, and if not, opt for low-key ambient lighting around the perimeters of the floor/wall/whatever. Also, have lighting which doesn't cast direct light, but shines light on walls or the ceiling - such as those lights-on-a-pole with the upside-down light cover (not sure what they're called). If at all possible, have natural lighting: tinted skylights, open windows.
The stress of a CRT/LCD on a person's eyes is bad enough. Don't add fluorescents.
- someone with sensitive eyes
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
cheers to the twin 18" LCDs - I had that at my last job and it was very nice. The best part is that they don't take up as much desk space as CRTs.
On a related note, make sure everyone has properly adjusted monitor stands. I ended up with about six phonebooks on my desk at one point to hold my hardware up and it's just annoying if you have to shift stuff around.
...actually...our boss supplies fruit...pretty much as much as you can eat, and we always have filtered water chilled in the fridge...I love caffiene...and I've worked places that supply free cola as well...and I've gotta say, it's great working for a boss that thinks two steps ahead of me and knows that while I may work insanely long hours on caffiene, I'll still be working for him in 10 years on fruit/water.
Might I add to #3:
Don't place the furniture so that the person in the room will be facing away from the door. That is not only inconvenient, but extremely uncomfortable on a psychological level. I've had to live with facing away from the door for most of my life but I recently re-arranged my study so that I can see the door from behind my monitors. SO much more comfortable!
Plus, making sure the sales team can get the customers to and from meetings without having to go past the programmers reduces a lot of pressure from above, in the form of "tidy your desk", "wear a tie", "stop calling Windows a retarded pile of goat droppings every time something crashes" and so on, since the customers won't be encountering it :)
Never mind Spamassassin. When's Spammerassassin coming out?
There's a reason why ESR came with that idea. Code only happens when you sit at the damn keyboard and type it, not when you're spending 7 hours a day talking to everyone you can find in the building.
Coding is inherently a _very_ boring activity, if you're a total extrovert. And I can see it around me every day. The ones who produce good code and lots of it, are the ones who can shut up for hours straight and just program.
This doesn't mean being a complete hermit, and unable to communicate at all. Sometimes, yeah, it's necessary to talk to someone else in the team. Sometimes you have to convince people of your vision of the architecture. And the occasional chatting pause at the water cooler or smoking place is OK, too. (Noone is 100% introverted either.)
But in the end, to actually have a program by the deadline, and earn your 8 hours a day pay, you damn better be able to spend at least 7 of them actually coding.
On the other hand, the least productive two, the ones who haven't actually produced anything in two years straight (not a joke), are also the most social people. Not only they'll talk to each other for hours, they'll even turn any communication with other team members into a 2 hour negotiation.
To get any of them to actually fix their own bugs, it turns into something resembling a negotiation with terrorists. You first have to explain to them why you want that bugs fixed, why you can't possibly live with their function returning the wrong result, listen to their view of why it's OK, listen to their grandious view of their architecture and why it shouldn't be changed (even if it returns the wrong result or crashes), etc.
Not only they're not producing anything in that time, they're also keeping other people from producing something.
When such people get promoted, it's even worse. They end up calling endless pointless meetings, just because they're bored. The kind of meetings where in the best case you spend 2 hours learning that nothing is new and worth discussing, and in the worst case you spend 3 hours hearing about their vacation or their kids. The kind of pointless meetings that keeps a whole team from working, just to entertain a bored PHB.
Either way, please do realize that some people would rather concentrate and work than listen to you. Hence the request for doors.
The absolute worst environment I've been in, was one freaking big room with 20+ people in it. No walls, no cubicles, just a ton of people in a cathedral sized room. And with the accoustics of a cathedral.
At any given time you'd hear at least two different conversations, one co-worker slurping tea in the loudest possible way, one idiot listening to music on his speakers (I bought him headphones, but he said he hated headphones and continued the noise pollution), 2-3 idiots taking a break to play Counter-Strike (at least one of them on the speakers, on a bad day also with a subwoofer), etc.
It was such a noise cacophony that it was plain old impossible to concentrate on doing any work. Eventually I started listening to loud music on the headphones just to cover that disruptive ambient noise. Of course, that was a bit of a distraction in itself, but it still beat listening to the equivalent of coding in a railway station.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Chinese think it is unlucky to be facing with your back to the door of the room. It also shows you to be of low standing. It is bad feng shui, so re-arrange your desk to face the door. You'll notice the VP and other higher officials all face the door - you should do the same.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
But in the end, to actually have a program by the deadline, and earn your 8 hours a day pay, you damn better be able to spend at least 7 of them actually coding.
Yikes! If all my team did was program 7 of 8 hours a day I'd fire them. I can hire any code monkey to write code. I'd estimate our best team members probably code at most 10%-15% a day. I'd put more of an emphasis on good design and analysis any day.
"Our office will be 40-45 people (15 engineers, 7 creative types..."
Man, I hate when people make this kind of labeling.
Why the hell engineers are not considered "creative types"? Only people working with Art can be creative? And don't "creative people" have other qualifications, except this vague term?
I know plenty of engineers who are just as creative as any other creative people from other areas. And I also know lots of "creative people" who are not creative at all.
-- SouNerd.com
Windows.
I want to be able to see outside, to see sunlight/weather/moonlight/whatever. No "sun-like lamp" is ever going to replace that.
-jls
Techno-pagan
My horrible experience should be a warning to others...
- Only managers could get big cubicles with window seats. Therefore, the managers that did basically nothing all day could look out the window. It was, however, a blessing in disguise, since the windows were so cheap they froze and cooked you in the winter and summer, respectively.
- No internet access to the average developer. I think we all know why this is bad.
- Low cubicle walls. These allow noise pollution to surround you. And the best part is when the person that answers the incoming phone calls is in the next cubicle.
- Cheap motivational posters. We all know these are not worth the paper they are printed on, and they imply that management doesn't respect the intelligence of the employees.
- The printer (notice that *printer* is singular)being located on the other side of the building.
- Cubicles are an adequate way of dividing up office space, but if you are going to put > 1 person in a cube, let those people agree on thier cubemate. Nothing is worse than spending 8+ hours a day with a person you cannot stand. Notice I didn't say to allow people to choose cubemates, but approve them.
I for one welcome our new [insert main topic] overlords.
Every desk I sit at is just a bit wrong for arranging keyboard and mouse comfortably. The desk is too high, the chair armrests are too high or too low, the chair height is wrong, or there's just not enough space on the desk for keyboard/mouse/papers/pens/phone etc. Put the keyboard and mouse on the chair armrests and make the height adjustable. Productivity goes through the roof when you're not constantly shifting stuff around trying to make typing/mousing comfy.
Things are more like they are now than they ever were before.
A nice common room with comfy sofas! A Fiesta on some days is a MUST! even if its a 30-40 min relax! This HAS increased post-noon productivity (coding) at our office. No i aint from Italy nor do i work in an Italian comapny;)
I can deal with a lot of adverse conditions as a developer but there is one thing most companies I have worked for don't seem to understand. As a coder, I spend 8-14 hours a day in front of the computer and while I don't mind dropping money on a decent keyboard ($100 will get a good one) I don't want to drop $1000 on a 21" monitor. I don't even care about an LCD, I would just like enough screen realestate to be able to read multiple files next to one another or see a complete code block without having to scroll.
You'd be surprised how much a bad screen resolution will cost you in wasted hand movement between page-up/downs or mouse scrollbar adjustment.
For some reason, the management types that only use email and word processing don't think 1600x1200 is a worthwhile investment. I, however, find it the minimum workable resolution.
Let me guess... anything that doesn't involve 7 hours of meetings a day and colourful power-point foils, doesn't count as design or important to you?
Guess what? 90%+ of programming _is_ design and analysis, even if it happens in front of the computer. The routine mechanical parts are already handled by the compiler, IDE, plugins, standard libraries, frameworks, etc. That's the easy part.
The hard part is taking a problem and splitting it into an architecture and algorithm that solves the problem. Preferrably also in a way that's robust, easy to maintain, and easy to change when the client comes and says that now he wants something different. Those don't happen by themselves. That's what programming is all about: mostly design work.
Of course, if the respect you have for programming work is summarized by the words "code monkeys", you probably do get monkey quality at the end of the day. The pipe dream and marketting fraud of the last 20 years straight was that somehow you could buy a silver bullet that makes any monkey able to write a good program. Never happened so far.
Of course, it still doesn't stop idiots from trying. When you read statistics like "68% of Java 'programmers' don't even know Java" or "3 out of 4 programmers can't actually program"... well, you know who hired them. Someone who thought that it's all monkey job and hired the cheapest monkeys.
Of course, then the programming takes ages to finish, is awfully buggy, is an unmaintainable mess, and 2 years later ends up scrapped and programmed from scratch all over again. But hey, this time we have a silver bullet +1. It surely can't go wrong again this time.
Either way, I'm not saying there isn't a time and place for meetings, documentation, and drawing a grand diagram on the whiteboard. There sure is. And there sure is a need for people who, yes, mostly do analysis and architecture design. Yep. Please do hire those.
But at some point, _someone_ has to sit down and implement it. Someone like me. Call him a "code monkey" if that makes you feel somehow superior. But someone has to do it.
You can't have only meeting-happy people sitting around and showing off colourful powerpoint foils, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and have the program auto-magically just materialize sometime before the deadline. Someone has to actually sit down at a keyboard, and implement that grandious architecture and design sometime.
And at thet time, they better have a door they can close, so that they can concentrate on that work. It's a mental exercise, not just mindlessly typing like a secretary. If they have to listen to 5 others in 2 different conversations about their vacation, trips, car, and whatever else, it's damn hard to think about converting that spec into an algorithm.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.