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Inside Look at Pixar HQ
LittleGuernica writes "Aintitcool's moriarty has taken a tour of Pixar's Headquarters in Emeryville, California and it just looks astounding. It instantly makes you wanna work there, or at least pimp up your cubicle... Which they don't have at Pixar, no they have cottages! Looks like Pixar created the optimal work condition for such a creative company, which leaves you no choice but to enjoy your job at Pixar every damn minute you work there."
as if I didn't hate my workplace enough already.
CEO position open or something. Maybe they can use some new overlords now that disney is no longer in the animation...
What a concept! Wow!
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Not to mention the beautiful effigy of a hanging Mickey Mouse statue in the courtyard...
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
I am working the grill today at McDonalds, I hung up some napkins and drink covers to personalize my space. My boss is real mad, he lacks the creative spark that Steve Jobs has...
It's nice to see the Macs, but Yo Steve! When are you gonna replace the rendering farm with Xserves? We want our films rendered even faster!
Seriously though, given that one can easily approach #3 on the supercomputing list with a bunch of out of the box Xserves, one would expect this to happen at some point after the initial render farm has paid for itself.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
..but sitting here in my cubicle of an office measuring no more than 80 Square feet, with plane white walls and no window, I'm jealous. No wonder they come up with off the wall creative stuff and I sometimes struggle whilst attempting to get the creative juices flowing.
Here's the article cache.
Coral seems to have the file: http://aintitcool.com.nyud.net:8090/display.cgi?id =19658#1
Here you go: http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/0b03f1cd74ffa8734 e4dd63a452912b2/index.html/
From what I understand Jobs didn't get his single washroom for the whole building. But I *think* I heard that there is one washroom PER FLOOR instead for the same reason.
I needed my nose rubbed in the fact that I have a shitass job.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
It's a hackneyed, slang term that only appeared recently. There is no "correct" way.
Trolling is a art,
link
There's also some great stuff about that in the second DVD of Finding Nemo.. :)
I remember a time, 4 or 5 years ago, when they used to get all of the scoops. It was really the only site you had to go to get the latest news and spoilers about all kinds of cool movies. Today they are a joke. They are the last to report on most stories, if they report on them at all, and I can't remeber the last time they had a really interesting exclusive about any of the movies I really care about. You haven't been able to register for the talkback for almost a year. McWeeny's latest X-Men 3 "scoop" was something to the effect of "I know who will direct X-Men 3 but I can't tell you". It's nothing like it used to be, which is a shame, because I used to love that site.
"pimp out" = recent? What's your definition of recent? 10+ years to me is not recent. I'm sure the term has been used for longer than that too.
Well, with Steve Jobs, you better, becuase you'll be working there every damn minute of your waking life.
Apple T-shirts: working 90 hours a week and loving it!
"your cubicle... Which they don't have at Pixar, no they have cottages"
:p
Are those like cubicals with a roof? Doesnt that mean that when they run out of space they can just turn them into houses and high rises, by stacking them
I remember years ago going to SIGGRAPH and Pixar had this little booth off in the back. Ed Catmull was there manning the cash-box to where you could buy a videotape of their few animated shorts they had made up to that point.
Ed freaking Catmull was taking my bucks and sticking a videotape into a bag for me. I know, geek worship here, but this is Ed Catmull we're talking about.
Now look at Pixar!
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
"I talked with a couple of guys who were also waiting there in the lobby, guys working with Pixar on an ancillary project. They sounded just as excited talking about the company as I'm sure I did, and it struck me: for hardcore animation fans, Pixar plays the same role that the Beatles must have for music fans in the '60s. We are living in a golden age, watching true giants in their primes, and each new film they put out is a joy because of the incredibly high genre defining standards that they hold themselves to."
Nothing's worse than hearing a line like this and knowing that it's only a relatively few years down the line before the wrong type of management takes over, and the public ends up with just another Disney that churns out the same type of rehashed stories to make a quick buck, and marry it with hurried animation carried on the backs of the overworked "Cottage" dwellers. Pixar is certainly a fine example of a company with more on their mind than the bottom line, and one that understands that happy workers are productive and creative workers, but it won't last. I'm sure we can all think of many companbies offhand that fell from such a height (I believe HP was featured recently on Slashdot.)
As a bit of an aside, Google may one day fall too. We can all hope that this won't come to pass, as Google symbolizes and displays pretty much every virtue that a techie could want in a company and it would be nice to see the proverbial good guys hold their own, for once. Perhaps their hiring practices will help protect against it. Once again, though, all it will take is a bad, short-sighted management and stock-holders that think only of the coming quarter and not several years down the line. Thinking down the line is how Pixar and Google came to rightfully stand on the pedastals that they now do (and hopefully will for years to come.)
is a concept that many companies don't understand. They stress, over and over, the idea of customer satisfaction, customer service, and friendly employees. I worked in retail for nine years and we were told day after day to smile, be friendly, be helpful, and care for the customer. But I found, day after day, that my employer was not willing to extend the same courtesies to me and the other employees.
I believe that if a company's employees enjoy their job, they will gladly serve the customers, help the customers, and extend that sense of friendliness without being prodded and told to do so.
http://www.walkingtaco.com
Wow, what a cool looking place to work, I mean you can make your own space, nice furniture, spacious - OMFG - is that a Garfield doll ?! What kind of mindless idiots do they have working there?
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
If you catch them in summer repeats, you'll see a fun place to work.
To be able to shut out Chatty Kathy who's cell phone rings ten times and plays la-cookaracha and gets louder and louder when she doesn't answer it or Dum and Dummer who need to have a discussion at my desk when Dummer has his own office.
Do they have thatched roofs? Do you get burninated instead of fired?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
because you see more of how great the company is. I'd love to work there as a developer on Pixar Renderman after I graduate.
No offense, and I'm sure that much of the coolness of Pixar emanates from the creativity of the people who work there and the laxity of the 'corporate culture'; however, unless you work there you shouldn't presume that it is 'fun' because of the workplace. It certainly APPEARS to be a fun place to work ;).
:). Makes it easier to empathize with children as an adult if you're not surround by grey cubicle walls, LOL.
I've worked in startups in old gymnasiums in the Mission District in San Fran and I've worked in plush corporate offices with EVERY amenity (massages, shoe shiners, crazy weird stuff...) and job satisfaction was related to the working space for no one at these two companies.
That being said, it certainly looks nice
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I just watched the extras on "The Incredibles" DVD yesterday and it contains a whole bunch of interviews inside the offices. All the "cottages" are clear along with some interesting insight into the personalities there. Nice stuff around, but it looked to me like some were difficult people to work with. The hazards of genius, I guess.
When AppleLink Personal Edition morphed into America Online, some of us making the switch were beta-testers - we got a special disk with the client SW on it, and were to use it for a few months at half price as their way of thanking us, after which we'd get the real disk with the full release / full price client. Another few months went by, then I got a call from the main office, Steve Case called to let me know that the 'full' client was NG and had been still charging us the beta rate, and could I please send them a check for the amount I'd already spent with them in the last oh, 6 months?
Um, no - but I will send you six checks, a month at a time. He thought that might work. I asked how many of us this had affected - a dozen? Yes. Hundreds? Yes. Thousands? Look , that's not the point. So I methodically settled up, and once the full client began to suck wind, I ended up elsewhere...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Well if you're already stuck in a 60 hour work week maybe it wouldn't make a difference, but what kind of hours do these people need to put in to get their stuff done? Are they given all of their amenities so they never need to leave? Vacation? Go outside?
Whenever a potential employer starts racking up the extra 'amenities', I start to wonder what kind of thing they want in exchange.
I'll just take the money, thank you very much.
Opterons have a better bang/buck ratio than any Apple product, and I say this as one who enjoys his powerbook immensly (of course, I also enjoy my Linux boxes, and my Linux partition on my powerbook).
This is Steve Jobs, though. He can probably get Xserves for Pixar at cost from Apple.
Then he'd be stealing from one set of stockholders to pad the pockets of another set. Unless Pixar becomes a division of apple in an official, complete merger, doing something like this would be a very bad idea. There's good reason companies keep separate books (and often separate stocks) even when they are conglomerated together.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
And while we're on the Steve Jobs praise, don't be so quick to commend him on developing the great environment at Pixar. The truth is (as you'll see in the link) that Jobs bought the Pixar in 1995, sold it to become a billionaire and left the original technical founders with almost squat (in fact, he ran off co-founder Alvy Ray Smith). Yeah, this is a guy only concerned about the employees.
The fact is that Pixar had a family atmosphere before Jobs got there and Jobs in fact tried to destroy it. Jobs was the PHB that many so readily (and rightfully) deride, yet for some reason his reality distortion field is such that it allows him to escape much criticism and be hailed as a genius. He may be a genius, but probably not the kind you want to be around if you don't have to be.
The credits of each Pixar film include the names of the babies born to staff families during production.
So, they must get _some_ time off - or now we know what they do with the cottages.
I just emailed my buddy back at Dreamworks (identity protected!) and here is what he said about what it's like at Dreamworks... - The pixar tour site is slashdotted, so I don't know what they have. We have: large offices, with doors, with one or two people per office fountains, park-like areas, waterfalls, lagoon area, courtyards, etc. Southern California weather free breakfast free lunch (relatively gormet, with usually two or three entree options) free well-stocked snacks (fruit, chips, candy, ice cream, etc) free tea, coffee, soda, juice, etc. $20/month health insurance for my whole family free movies, about 2-6 per month, often well before public release lots of gaming options around campus (pool, ping pong, darts, foosball, shuffleboard (table version), street hockey, etc. free gifts from time to time (ranging from shirts and DVDs to digital cameras and stock)
From the article: "switching to Mac OS X and G5 workstations for its production work"
Sig Nature
PHB: We've been saying that our people are our most important asset for years, but our recent inventory shows that's not true.
Dilbert: Really? Where do we rank?
PHB: 17th.
Dilbert: 17th!?
PHB: Yes. Just below carbon paper.
Man, it almost makes you wish they'd just come out and say the truth:
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Argh, one slash too much. http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/0b03f1cd74ffa8734 e4dd63a452912b2/index.html
Stupid slashcode.
Actually, McWeeny's latest X-MEN 3 scoop was that Matthew Vaughn would be announced as the director. Which he was. Today. A week and a half later. We break plenty of exclusive content. I've been responsible for a fair percentage of it already this year. And our traffic (even on days we're not Slashdotted) is at an all-time high. I think the site is better now than it ever has been, and will continue to improve. If you really think we don't have any exclusive content, then you aren't paying attention.