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Tech's Top 10 Workspaces
theodp writes "Looking to escape your Initech-like surroundings with your next job? Valleywag has culled its picks for Tech's Top 10 Workspaces from Office Snapshots, where you'll find plenty of other Best-Places-to-Work contenders. So how does your Cubicle measure up to the competition?" Pixar, Netflix, and other places. Makes the Slashdot Fortress look like a hovel even though we replaced the dirt floors last month.
Most of those office spaces look cool and hip, but not very comfortable, productive, or private. Sitting in a windowsill with a laptop looks like fun for about 5 minutes.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
The place looks COLD! Who designed it? The same guy who did Blade Runner's interiors?
6 apart still has mostly a cubicle-world look; the "oh gee we have a place to stash your bicycle, and a couch!" don't change that. It takes more than a few "exposed brick" walls to "give character."
Pixar looks interesting - but how come everyone chooses couches that don't look like they'd be all that comfy to SIT IN???
I don't know - they still all look awfully "corporate".
Kevin Smith on Prince
I work from home when I am not travelling. Granted, I travel 1-3 weeks out of each month (average is maybe 3 days every other week), but when I am not travelling you can keep all your fancy high tech offices. I have it far better in my high tech home office.
Plus there is nobody to tell me I can't have a beer during afternoon conference calls.
I wonder how the others look like.
A lot of them look like you'll grow RSI within one month. I actually prefer my own office with an ergonomic setup, a proper adjustable office chair, large windows and a door.
Even at the places that work on 'cool' things, you will find that it is very similar to what you describe and very unlike the movies. The latest fighter planes don't get built in a facility that looks like some hobbiest's garage. Of course, when you are trying to sell those things, then all of a sudden out jump the minority report displays, the flashy graphics, and the promo videos.
The movie stuff only exists in marketing.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
1. Most/all are in big cities. No thanks. 1-2 hour commutes to travel 30 miles? Meh. Give me a less-comfortable area in some non-generic suburbs.
2. All-indoor jobs. I'd wager that the best "workspace" isn't indoors. There are days I envy park rangers. Yeah, you can make an office comfortable, but keep in mind that it's STILL an office.
with a door, that can be locked. And a culture that says it's ok to do that. It's like heaven, without all those virgins....
I remember reading an article on Pixar's HQs a long time ago, and one thing that stood out to me was that there's only one pair of bathrooms in the entire complex. This is to encourage people to run into each other and interact more frequently. I'm sorry, but that would just bug me. When I need to go to the bathroom, I don't want to be interrupted to have a conversation, nor do I want to hear other people yapping away while they do their business. But I guess that's just me....
Oblig urinal joke: "I hear this is where all the dicks hang out."
This guy's the limit!
The "style" of the furniture in an office doesn't mean crap if the people are assholes and the policies oppressive. This article is about as asinine as the one a few months back attempting to explain why techies never make it in the boardroom... and proceeded to list off ten fashion faux pas.
/.
Gebus! Some people just don't get it.
Our friends at Slashdot really should re-title this piece as "Top 10 best looking tech workplaces"... otherwise, they're just being terribly disingenuous.
Shame on you
Open Plan for the win.
Ugh, I don't like cubicles much, but I loathe "Open" designs.
They work well in living spaces where you feel safe and comfortable, and make optimal use of soft lighting to relax.
In an office environment, I want by back to a nice solid wall, only one easy approach vector to my side of the desk, a comfy chair, and a coffee pot. Outside that, I really don't care (though the fewer old-style fluorescent light tubes - Up to and including "total darkness" - the better).
I think smart employers would treat their lower level employees like their mid to higher level ones (i.e. design your own office). Even if it was just to bring in your own furniture, I think there might be too many places out there that have a "take it as it is and don't touch it" attitude with their office space.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Count me out for Open Designs.
They work well if you're ten people. They feel like sweatshops when you're 80. They're loud, lack privacy, and its too easy for people to yell across the room or walk up to your desk instead of forcing them to think about whether they really need to initiate the communication in the first place or if its something they can figure out/live without in the first place.
Open Concepts are music to a companies' ears. They're cheap as hell. Designers/artists/loud people love them. But engineers who can't do math while listening to music on headphones rightfully hate them.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I agree. I hate big, open floorplans. I'm not a huge fan of cubicles either, but at least they give some degree of privacy and isolation. A big open space just has too many distractions for me. People walking by, conversations I'm not interested in, etc.
I've worked at Initech (except we called it "Motorola"). I've worked in a private office with real walls and a real door. I've worked in a big bullpen. For me, the best environment is working in a real office (with a door and walls all the way to the ceiling) with about four other people who are working on the same project. We can have relevant work conversations without having to all pack up and move to a conference room, and without having to hear the guys next door who are working on something else.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
Looks like they've ranked workplaces according to this rubrik:
1) Proximity to bay area.
2) Superfluous amenities such as office fridge stocked with beer and milk*, free haircuts, sex swing chairs, steampunk decor, etc.
3) Is a trendy Web 2.0 company. Sorry non-interweb employers, you're out of luck.
* Who the hell drinks milk at work anyway? Flatulence ahoy!
I worked for an employer that had some of the amenities that would help them rank in the top-10. Among them were an outdoor volleyball court and basketball court, pool tables and a chef in the cafeteria. Luckily my work hours were flexible and I didn't work more than 10 hours a day. I know some had to work longer, but they didn't seem to mind because of all the conveniences and "fun things to do" while at work. You could, on occasion, take a 5-min break to play basketball.
I've read some major employers in the US such as insurance companies, have salons, barbershops, daycare, grocery stores all in the building. While immensely convenient (there's no denying), and as impressive looking as these offices are (looks better than most people's homes), I believe that these are all simply intended to keep employees at work as long as possible. It may be obvious to some, but I think some are in flat-out denial.
I just wanted to limit my post size. Of course, this depends on perspective. If you really like the job, or the convenience factor, then sure its a good thing. I wouldn't have minded working a few extra hours (and did on occasion) at that job so it does work. But hours in my job were capped (more a company policy) and when the 10+ hours were needed it was a demand, again I didn't mind at all even if not paid the overtime. The problem becomes, well we're providing this because we 'demand' that you work 16 or 18 hour days. So of course, you'll need all the amenities at the office. But working all those hours are sure to leave burnout, employees quitting, low retention and lower productivity per-employee.
My opinion is that if the employer is at the very extreme, with emphasis on the very long hours being the factor, then instead of the conveniences (chef, swimming pool, salon, ultra-modern decor, shopping esp. when most of it is free) they could certainly afford to hire more employees.
My big objection to open workspaces is the lack of noise control. As a creative worker (software developer), I get most of my job done by switching back and forth between two modes: discussion mode and focused mode.
Discussion mode is typically animated and noisy; happens at random unpredictable times; most frequently involves the same one or two people, occasionally involves others; often needs a whiteboard; etc.
Focus mode is the rest of the time, mostly happens at my desk, and I need quiet in order to be at my most productive. No music, no white noise, no intercom, no fax machine beeping that it's out of paper, no cell phones with hip-hop ring tones ringing at full volume, no animated discussions happening "right over there".
IMHO, open office plans are the worst of all worlds for creative workers. When I'm in discussion mode, I'm bothering everyone else. And because everyone else needs to have those discussions too, it's nearly impossible for me to really get into focus mode. I don't need to be alone in an office, but the ability to close the door around two or three or four people who can be noisy without disrupting others or be quiet and get some creative work done is not optional, it's essential. If you can't do that, you just turned down the productivity knob by some significant fraction.
Or they read him and found his advice useless.
1 have a huge amount of income and no investors to satisfy.
2 have a landlord willing to bend over backwards for you
3 take your vast sums and spend them on an architect.
4 take lots of pics and brag about how smart you are.
What he doesn't talk about are the crappy borrowed offices he used when they actually developed their product.
That's before one goes into the less obvious problems with his "everybody gets an office" model.
What about collaboration? I leave my office and go to yours? You leave yours and come to mine? Neither is very conducive to his vaunted hallway usability tests. (Wait, a blogger's advice isn't internally consistent! Not that!)
While the Slashbot loves the "everyone is stupid but me" mentality, these are actually not easy problems to resolve.
Hint: If our needs were solitary workers who can be left alone in their offices, we would send the work to Raj's office in Bangalore for 1/4 of your salary. The reason we don't is that we need you and your colleagues to solve these problems. And that requires both concentration and collaboration.
This is coming from someone who looked at private offices and decided that would kill our small team collaboration work [maybe offering better, but maybe not] and would cost us a ton of money.
If that's your opinion then I'm grateful that I don't have to work for you.
You have either found an amazingly rare breed of programmers (those that function well in a noisy environment) or you simply have no idea how programmers actually work. I strongly suspect the latter.
Read up on some of the comments from the "trenches". We don't make up this stuff about "conversation mode" and "focus mode". We don't ask for offices with doors because we like status-symbols. We ask for them because we can work better that way by pretty much every metric.
How did you come to the conclusion that separate offices would kill your team's collaboration work?
Do they literally yell across the room "Joe, can you review my last checkin?" or spontanously summon flashmob meetings?
Yes, working in one big room can work well for up to maybe 10 people. But I have witnessed time after time that it simply doesn't scale beyond that.
People have a natural tendency to take the shortest path to solve their problems and when the shortest path means walking (or yelling) across the room then that will be used. No policy helps that. Furthermore there's always a "new guy" around asking a constant stream of questions, there's always some important gossip to exchange and there's always someone walking around behind your back.
As much as we like to deny it, we're still animals. You can not defy psychology. Someone talking or just walking behind your back *will* disturb your concentration. Most of the time you don't even notice because we all have developed filters against such distractions. But keeping those filters up constantly costs energy. Energy that can not be used for productive work anymore.
In each new economy "loft" that I have worked in so far there were some people who'd regularly come in very early, stay in when everybody else went for food,
or stay very late. When asked about that they all had the same answer: "These are the best (read: only) times where I can actually get shit done."
So, for god's sake, if you want to get the most out of your employees then give them choice. Some people *like* to work in a big-room, maybe because they're really that rare breed or (my pet theory) because they think they can make up for their slacking with socializing. But most tech workers, and programmers in particular, will happily take the office with a door and will thank it with a highly improved performance.