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The Worst Workspaces In Tech
nicholas.m.carlson writes help you feel better about your hovel. Vallywag recently compiled a list of the top ten places to work, but the resulting submissions and exploration also provided them with an interesting look at some of the worst places to work. "What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem 'Internet-y' — come off even worse."
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
When I worked there they found that if they shrunk our cubes by a couple of feet they could get X more programmers in the building.
Nothing like having your restricted little world reduced by two feet. I even had to give up my red stapler.
Yeah, but at least it doesn't Rot the Mind.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
I worked in building D. D for DEATH. I had to unload a van filled with paper from banks. I'd get the truck weighed at the front gate, net to the sign that said "PHOTOGRAPHY IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN". Geee. I wonder why...
Once it was weighed, I'd drive it to building D, and back it up the ramp into the building itself. The building consisted of several ENORMOUS rooms, each one at least 50 ft wide and 30 ft tall. In the room I ws in was an enormous machine that looked like a cross between a cauldron designed by Rube Goldberg and a funnel designed by NASA. On the side of this thing was a hopper. I would dump paper out the back of the truck into the 6 inches of standing filthy water that filled the floor of the place. Often I could see the V shaped ripples of rats swimming through the smelly brown miasmic watery goo.
Against one wall was a stack of paper that went all the way to the roof, which had gaping holes in it. It was summer, and there was no air conditioning, and wearing a mask was very uncomfortable. But wear one I did, for as I looked down the hallway to the other end of building D, the air was thick with the blue haze of asbestos.
I would stand on the paper bales, and toss more paper into the hopper. Once it was full I'd signal the guy who operated it, Mike, and he would press a red button, and I would press a red button, and the hopper would lurch up the side of the vat, and dump the contents into the steaming smelling chemical bath of crap.
Out of the bottom of the vat was a pipe about 14 inches wide. A steady stream of really foul smelling waxy black ooze would slowly extrude from the pipe. Mike would hack at it with a Machete and it would plop into his wheel barrow. H would then wheel it down the hall to a drop point, where there was a 55 gal drum, and he would dump the stinking vile glop into the drum. Once the drum was full of the black gelatinous offal, he would cap it, crimp it, and seal it, where it would then be "take somewhere", likely some landfill near Newark or Edison or Sayreville.
Some of the people who worked there were practically feral. I remember one fat black guy who drove this miniature bulldozer around at a high rate of speed, splashing the filthy stanky water all over the place. He didn't care wher eit went.
My guess is that all those people who worked on site all day in building D are now dead. And that's industrial capitalism for ya. OF course, now we ship that kind of work to China or Indonesia, so we can't see it, so it's OK....
That was the worst place I ever worked.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Agreed. The one picture with the rows and rows of computers appears to be the Hands-on lab at TechEd.
I'm not impressed with either of these articles. My preferred environment is someplace clean and uncluttered. Yet valleywag called the offices with gimmicks the best, and the nice clean offices the worst?
I wish I had a picture of the "office" I and six other consultants were put in years ago. It was the former mainframe tape storage closet. No windows. Six feet wide, with a table along the wall. When the guy at the end wanted to go to the bathroom, everybody had to get up and let him through.
Since when is utilitarian a bad thing? I think the lists should be swapped. I can't work with a laptop and papers on couch in bright sun with other people sharing that same space and jabbering on and on with no barriers to sound.
If you don't like a gray cube wall, put something on it! And why are desks and privacy walls the enemy?
Maybe if you're in sales, you'll like the open architectures and bright colors, but all I want is to have the equipment I need to do my job properly.
Some open plan offices have sound dampening systems; loudspeakers that play white noise at a low level. You couldn't hear them, but you couldn't hear the person three desks away either.
I once stayed in a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in Pittsburg that had piped-in noise. At each corridor intersection or bend, there was a speaker. But it wasn't white noise. It was machinery noise - a faint background of whirr, chunka chunka, hiss, whirr, clank. At first I thought someone had just left a microphone open somewhere, but after three days, I realized it had to be intentional. Maybe heavy industry people find it peaceful.
That's very Pittsburgh. I was visiting some robotics people at CMU, and they had desks in a room with a big air compressor. Every ten minutes or so, the air compressor would start, run for about thirty seconds, and shut down with a big hiss. It was too noisy to talk over, so everyone just waited until it stopped. No effort had been made to muffle the thing. This was accepted as normal.
I'd like to see what happens the first time they try that on somebody with either kidney or bladder problems.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
Intel does the following:
Hires multiple development teams, in offices in different parts of the world.
Assigns the same project to the various teams. Teams do not know about each other.
One team shows a likelihood of success, the rest of the projects are cancelled,
employees are terminated.
It's happened to more than one colleague of mine, one of whom was forced to participate
in this at the corporate management level.
When I worked Bresnan Communications they did just that to a woman I worked with and came up with a new policy that all bathroom usage must be done on breaks and we would be monitored to be sure we were not taking time outside of them for breaks. I refused to sign the policy. They kept bringing it to me. They told me I'd be fired if I didn't sign it. I asked why they needed me to sign it as I would be held to it as a condition of my employment. They simply told me have it signed by the end of the day and then came back and had a supervisor stand over me while I signed it. I signed it and put "signed under duress" below my signature.
I worked to try and organize with the Communications Workers of America. That idea fell through when someone was told that I didn't trust at all. I finally ended up giving the company the finger and moved a good portion of the way across the country. After leaving they found a copy of the source code of some SNMP network management software I had written. I wrote it on my own time to assist the staff as they wouldn't pay Motorola and Arris for the tools we needed to do our job. They changed the graphics to their logos and renamed it Bresnan something or other. After hitting the coast I ended up finding a job working as a systems analyst for a labor union [other than CWA] and am part of a staff union that is represented by CWA. Being union represented isn't perfect. But it really beats having to deal with things like the BS that went on at Bresnan Communications.
That picture of "Microsoft" is a demo lab at a conference. The article actually has 0 pictures of a typical work-space from that company. Makes me wonder how accurate their other ones are...
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Let's see... at my last job, I wrote code... 9 hour day, two 15 minute breaks and an half an hour for lunch. Somewhat standard, I assume. The kicker was, you're working in a small converted warehouse. No windows. Attached to the warehouse is a garage, in which we received deliveries of live birds packed in cardboard boxes. The owner owned a hunt club elsewhere, and often had the birds delivered to his web development warehouse. Did I mention the bugs in the office, "break room" and bathroom?
Previous to that, I worked at a well-known personnel test making company. While as I understand it things are much better there now, I spent my first year sharing a closet with my supervisor. That was our "office". Oh, and I'm not talking about a small office, I mean a closet, with two narrow folding tables in it, cinder block walls and florescent lights. And it's not like we were out on the floor all day... we were working from workstations in that closet nearly all day, every day. Maybe a year later they moved us to a cubicle-walled area that had natural light. I thought I had it real good then. It was pitiful compared to any single one of these photos.
Oh, and when I walked out of that closet we worked in, there was a half demolished wall outside the door, on which the service point for where T1's and analog lines and such came in. They didn't want to remove the rickety, broken wall because the service terminals were mounted on it. That would cost money. Nevermind if the thing falls over one day on one of your employees... or they keep tearing up clothes and such on the exposed, galvanized studs and screws hanging out of it.
Upstairs people worked in your average, depressing cube farm, with the president's beautiful office overlooking them, with his dad's office (complete with private bathroom and fireplace) on the other side. In between the two were a bunch of other nice offices, mostly occupied by family members of the owner (read: vp's).
From their lovely offices, they annihilated that company... all the while reminding us that the economy was to blame. Pay no attention to our $19,000 telephony SDK's sitting unused on the shelf because they don't work with what we have and a sales VP decided it was necessary to have. Nevermind the 10's of thousands we spent on a crap CRM solution that never worked right (purchased by the president, personally). Nevermind the VP's sleeping with their inept employees, and firing the productive ones.
So glad I left those shitholes... and wish the folks over at valleywag were forced to make ends meet by working in one of them.
What's more interesting is the pervasiveness of Macs in the pics of the various companies, I think there's only one or two profiled orgs where Macs cannot be seen.
Okay, I'll give a pass to the second half: "utterly boring" is an opinion... but how is utilitarian a valid criticism of a work area? Do they know what the word actually means? Would anyone really be happy working somewhere that wasn't utilitarian? How would you get any work done?
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"