Slashdot Mirror
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.
with the real doll, eating a sandwich playing wii....
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.
All these neat looking open spaces and cubicles are my worst nightmare. I've managed to spend my entire career having my own private offices and my worst nightmare is to ever have to work in an open space or a cubicle--listening to every asshole in the office, having everyone looking over my shoulder, etc. THAT was one of the big things what made the fictional "Initech" such a terrible place to work (remember Peter having to listen to "Welcome to Initech. Please Hold." over-and-over again all day? Nothing builds morale like private offices. Open spaces just turn everyone into Less Nessmans (if anyone still remembers that reference).
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Google's Zürich offices also have a fireman's pole.
.riiiiiiiight.
. . . . . .
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.
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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).
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.
You've forgotten perhaps the #1 benefit of working from home...
NEVER NEEDING TO POOP IN PUBLIC PLACES!!!
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.