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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."
I think some of these people doing this review are a bit spoiled. They are used to their private cubicals, posh offices, etc.
At least most of the people in these environments have new workstations, a monitor or two and some deskspace.
The don't show the tech business running out of a cockroach infested hotel room with 10 year old computers using dial up to connect to the net.
Aperture Science. Despite the nice, clean looking test chambers, the rest of the facility is quite a dump.
There's also an AI who flooded the place with a deadly neurotoxin...
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
The List: -Yahoo
-Mozilla
-Mahalo
-Google
-Microsoft
-LinkedIn
-Jajah
-Facebook
-DoubleClick
-Adobe
I find it funny how they say Google is one of the worst places to work, yet everyone seems to want to work there.
Where is the TPS report driven office with a lot bosses?
We're number one! We're number one!
Oh wait, wrong list.
Neatorama shares Office Snapshots Web site that has a collection of interior office photographs of various popular/well known companies. It is generally from Web/Tech companies.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
As a college dropout (A's in CS, fsck philosophy), it was tough getting my foot in the door. One mistake I made along the way was letting a risk-taker scare me off with stories of sometimes having to work in boiler room type surroundings.
If it's good work, the atmosphere becomes almost invisible. Some of the best companies in history started in a garage and some of the worst started atop skyscrapers.
From the comments: I have worked at Microsoft in Redmond for the last 7 years. Of the Microsoft photos, only one of them looks like an actual Microsoft workspace in Redmond; the one in which there are several people crowded around what looks like a coffee table. And even that one is not a typical office or conference room. It looks like a makeshift conference room. At least two of the photos are of the Orlando, FL convention center where Microsoft has an annual event. In reality none of the photos are typical of Redmond, where most employees have single-occupancy private offices.
For a minute there I didn't see the person behind the desk in this picture, and thought Google greeted visitors in their lobby with just a PC, with a browser opened to their home page, maybe as a portal to a special internal "Google campus" search database that could tell you things like where Joe Blow sits or when the gift shop closes. Receptionists soon to be obsolete.
Attention zealots and haters: 00100 00100
But they're a helluva lot nicer than the shitty 'Valleywag' website.
I wonder what their offices look like.
Sig this!
I hope all of those Mozilla developers shower.
"Live as if you'll die tomorrow." Ridiculous. You could die later today.
Three middle-aged women talking non-stop about their kids, their husbands, their soon-to-be deceased parents, and did I mention their fucking kids?
Thank God for Mr. Sennheiser and his noise-canceling headphones.
What?
Grey cubicles at Google, seriously?
I had a boss who worked for a company that referred to the owner of the company as "Lord Vader" because she was utterly insane. It had a turnover rate that was prettymuch total on a yearly basis.
I had to work once a week for a while in a warehouse in a metal chair with no one else around and an ancient piece of computer technology.
There is at least one game company that seems to have a vested interest in driving its employees into the ground and treating them like children.
I know another place that had computer technology that was so out of date it could barely run the software we were developing.
I am not sure if any of these constitute the "worst" places to work, or even how they rate to the companies listed in the article, but surely there are worse things out there than the horror of grey cubicles.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
When do we get to see "10 Worst Slideshows on the Internet?" Those Flash TiVo ads made me dizzy.
Dark Reflection
My least favorite workspace is the Visual Basic 5.0 workspace. The interface is cluttered, the grids pacing is too small, and the menu system sucks.
*rimshot*
I think the ten best story posted a couple days ago shows work spaces that are pretty much interchangeable with those shown in this one. I'll repeat what I said then: a private office is better than any workspace listed, now in either list.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
None of the "Microsoft workspaces" pictures are typical Microsoft offices.
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.
None of those places are that bad. I've worked in plenty of worse/less conducive to getting shit done places than any of those. Hell, even the Mozilla folks look like they've got actual desks as opposed to, say, folding tables and chairs. And I've seen way dingier, more depressing cube farms than anything in that list.
Are you kidding me?
I don't think these people have ever seen bad workspaces. Adobe is "unfriendly"? They have lots of light, lots of space, good furniture, palm trees... oh yeah, they have a fsckin' basketball court. Piss poor facilities, obviously.
Of all of the "bad" choices, only facebook's could possibly deserve to be on that list, as it looks like a high school cafeteria with monitors. Otherwise... I'd say the problem is that the tastes of the Valleywag people are ridiculous.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
These are the worst workplaces? Maybe in California. I've worked in much worse. My current employer (whose CEO is among the top ten best-compensated in the US) has me working in a building in which every time it rains, the roof runs. (Not leaks, the water runs down in streams.) They keep trying to find bigger buckets.
We do have our own cubicles--made of what appears to be moldy cardboard—and they match the carpet exactly. We have nothing like a kitchenette or breakroom. If you want coffee, you have to go get water in the restrooms. Of course, the sinks are always overflowing because some stupid jerk empties the remainder of his breakfast mush, ramen, smelly fish stew, or whatever into them every day.
The lighting is typical 1950s era: harsh overhead fluorescents that would quickly blind you if you tried to work with a monitor under them. So we ask to have them turned off. They are glad to do this, because it saves on electricity bills. The drawback is that this leaves our environment utterly troglodytic ; the advantage is that we can't see our environment).
It could be worse, of course—I could have been working in the building that sank. No, it didn't sink completely—it's just sort of The Leaning Tower of Dallas. (Actually, it's in Irving, but who's heard of Irving?) The good thing is that they managed to get most of the people out (a triumph of organizational genius, considering that the sinking occurred in a mere decade), the bad news is they moved them in with us. Our warren of cubical cells is now so overcrowded that collision is a serious factor in deciding whether or not to go to the bathroom to make coffee.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
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.
In 2006 when I started at Dell we had one 15" tube monitor.
We did not have cubes, we had this abomination called a pod.
The pod walls are 18 inches higher than the surface of your desk.
The person sitting across from you can be heard just as
clearly on your phone as you can.
Dell would not pay for noise canceling headsets.
Dell uses a Compaq ie. HP mainframe to run their ticket system.
Now that is some damn irony.
It took me multiple weeks of begging to receive my very own
company purchased pen and notepad.
They monitor to "the second" how long you go to bathroom and
it is part of your evaluations.
Emails to customers are expected to be done between calls,
or while waiting for reboots, or when there are no calls.
You have to get permission to work overtime to get aforementioned
emails done outside your 8 hr shift.
Yet...they constant ask you to work overtime to take more calls.
On overnight shift they ask you take "platinum calls" ie. MCSE
required when you don't have even an MCSA.
To be honest that is a contract violation.
This is not for Desktop or Workstation Support, this is for
Server Support.
So for me D[h]ell will always be #1 worst place to work period.
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
For me, the worst places are a lack of natural daylight (either an open plan office layouts where the window blinds were kept closed to stop the programmers from being distracted), or private cubicle rooms with no windows. Not having seniority to have a window meant you didn't have seniority to see any daylight during Winter.
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.
Noise is definitely a major factor. The worst environment I had was to have someone from sales/marketing two desks away, constantly shouting down the telephone line to remote customers.
Consider yourself lucky, if you have partition walls you can decorate, natural sunlight, a window you can open/close, a quiet room shared with maybe one or two other people. Having a cafeteria with a choice of ethnic meals is also a bonus.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Those cubicles at Yahoo! NY are the exact same kind REI "upgraded" to a couple years ago during a remodel of the call center. They wanted it to "match" our Headquarters more (from what I hear though, they have much better offices and it's not all gray.) I hate these cubes with a passion, I really miss our old set up here. Phone reps were set up back to back roughly, was a little louder, didn't seat as many people, but damn it was a much more fun place to be. At least I can still wear jeans for the time being...
I'm sorry, sir, but your entry is disqualified. The heading clearly says "Worst workplaces in tech". What you describe—though it involves fearful mechanical devices, noxious chemicals, unspeakable offal, reckless driving, and odious vermin—is not "tech" according to the conventional notion applied here on SlashDot. How many computers did your "workplace" have, eh?
Now, if I had known that non or low-tech workplaces were eligible, I might have trotted out some of my more lurid mini-careers (such as repainting cans of Agent Orange for the U.S. Forest service so that people wouldn't know what we were using to keep the roads clear...this was the same "workplace" in which my supervisor set my boots on fire with a drip-torch while I was wearing them, but that would be no more germane than your entry.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
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.
Intel is famous for their workspaces. They pioneered cubicles in the early 1970s. They have some of the world's biggest single-room cube farms. They actually built new buildings, from the ground up, with 1-acre rooms of tiny grey cubicles. Vast amounts of money were spent to create this Dilbertland. The cubicles are so tiny that two people cannot physically sit in one and talk; one has to sit out on the aisle and block traffic. They look like library carrels. This isn't a call center; it's where their engineers work.
Klutz Press has a "fun workspace" - the partitions are made out of corrugated sheet metal. The building (a warehouse) is made of corrugated sheet metal. Lots of toys in the reception area.
Softimage LA went through a period where everything, including partitions, was curved and on wheels. You could fold up the cubicle of someone who was out and push it to the side.
Sony Pictures Imageworks, an animation shop, is a typical cube farm surrounded by offices. Except for the art department, which has a big open space with drawing boards.
Silicon Valley law firms tend to have rocks. Big rocks. Polished stone surfaces. Rock gardens. And, for some reason, glass-enclosed conference rooms. Traditional law firms used to go in heavily for wood paneling, but the "high tech" law firms wanted a more modern look. The overall effect is upscale mall, but whatever.
We all knew bullpen style would become standard, but who thought it would go as unnoticed as it is? You'd think bullpen style was always standard based on the writing.
You could be working at a company you were moved twice in one year, had your stapler taken away, be forced by your boss to share your cube with storage that takes up almost all of your space, have your paycheck suddenly stop coming, and finally be moved to the basement with the cockroaches.
I've been through the Microsoft campus before. It's a really nice workplace- and that was the old building. I even got a free can of "Windows Vista" to drink.
But seriously, whoever wrote this article must work in some sort of golden castle atop a cloud. They need to go visit a the IT department of a financial institution every once in a while to "keep it real".
This has got to be the lamest article in a long time. It keeps alluding to pictures, but doesn't show them. Sometimes it doesn't even describe the pictures. The only picture the article has is of a guy laying back, possibly sleeping, in his cubicle.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
I work support for a MAJOR cable news station. I can't really complain about my space at all. I have a corner area, about roughly the size of 4 typical cubes but completely open, and surrounded on two sides by windows. My personal area has an Apple cinema display for my Mac, with two side displays for my Ubuntu and XP boxes. I have a phone which no one except our call center can call into and complete admin rights on the network, even equal to the system admins. My security badge gets me into practically every area of the building and I regularly get to hang out and converse with not only the On Camera Talent, but various cool people who make it all happen. What can I say?
Hey at least you guys could fill out an Air Waybill :P From the cargo agent side, I'd have guessed that DHL Danzas had the retarded management scheme.
Once upon a time, I handled Cargolux out of SeaTac.
Really ? That is how we have decided that the mentioned work places are the worst to work in ? A few random photographs of the workplaces ? This must be one of the worst excuses for a 10 list that I have seen.
The workplace/cube is certainly one of the ways to measure the top-ness (sic) of a workplace but just that ? Come on people, we all know that there are a lot of things which into making a great workplace. The dimensions and colour of your cubicle is probably just one of them.
The hot chick on the phone automatically eliminates it from the list.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
http://flickr.com/photos/barl0w/2459053420/
Somebody's got some high standards, eh? If they want a real bad environment, I'd happily invite them to my IT department. We're in a little cinder block room in the ass end of the builing (a room that sued to be a utility room so there's water/power mains running through it). We have no offices/cubicles; just workstations from the 70's. And the best part: we have no heat... In northeast Ohio let me tell you, nothing sucks worse than coming in at 8 in the morning to a 40 degree (F) office space.
<gir voice> I love this sig... </gir voice>
anyone wondering where on earth these horrible conditions came from, consult wikipedia for the history of the company. they went bankrupt in the 80s, following the massive asbestos strike in french canada.
They didn't mention any of the smaller tech operations in Pennsylvania. I mean, sweet suffering Jebus! Who wants to work in Pittsburgh or State College, Pennsylvania other than rednecks and KKK sympathizers?
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Also, http://valleywag.com/photogallery/Microsoftheadquarters/1001409798 is the Washington State Convention Center, in Seattle not Redmond.
At least http://valleywag.com/photogallery/Microsoftheadquarters/1001409785 is actually on campus (Building 33 if memory serves, which I bet it doesn't) and more than a few people do work on laptops out in the open like that (since main campus is pretty crowded and you're lucky to get a solo office without 3 or so years of seniority).
This is the most accurate look at the offices (buildings 16, 17 and 18) albeit not the lifestyle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N24TWrtlJEU
A12A.713 is the root of ASC('evil')
They've obviously never been in a Cisco building. I was once in one of the Milpitas Cisco buildings and everything inside was pumpkin orange, the walls, ceiling, floor and cubicles. I was only there for a couple hours and just that was enough to make me feel a little cuckoo. At least gray cubicles don't burn one's retinas. Glad I wasn't interviewing or I may have faced a delima: are the stock options worth colorblindness and possible monochromatic psychosis?
The only one I have visted was Microsoft - and it looks nothing like that. At MS everyone I met or talked with had their own offce including lowly devs and testers. And one of those pictures was clearly from some kind of a conference. Talk about lame.
I have no reason to believe any of the other pictures are accurate either.
It looks like this journalist was either too lazy or underfunded to actually do real research, and too immoral to admit it.
Looking at ValleyWag is clearly not worth the time of day.
Of course so is my spelling :)
someone where i work decided it would be a good idea to make hand turkeys to decorate the place for thanksgiving. fucking hand turkeys. when i pointed out that the last time i made a hand turkey was kindergarten, i was told i was a spoilsport and accused of thinking i was too good for the place. so objecting to an activity usually reserved for kids in daycare makes me an elitist snob. where's my rocket launcher...
You can add almost any government office to that list. The ones I've worked in range from bland and sterile to hideous. The good ones are merely sterile. Endless gray cubicles and rarely anything resembling an amenity.
Actually, the best office on a military project was when we were stuck in a warehouse while the Navy remodeled the regular cubicle (which they call 'pookas') hell. We could push our desks around and arrange them the way we wanted. There was a bbq outside the back door and we could have our own mini refrigerators and coffee makers. It was also a good long walk from the main building so there wasn't any foot traffic through our office. In the main building there were so many people trafficking through our work space and idiots dialing with their speaker phone that trying to write code in that atmosphere was like trying to write music in a bus station.
If I had to choose between some of those offices and a government office, many of those on the worst list didn't look too bad. Even if it looks like a dump, if you can customize it to your own taste and arrange your work area so it's quiet, that's an improvement.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Half the places on the "worst" list I see consistantly on "best" lists. No more Vallywag links, please?
Hi, my name's Mike Rowe. Today on Dirty Jobs we're going to be sitting in a cubicle all day working for Microsoft. I feel dirty already just thinking about it.
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of damp gravel, work a twenty-hour day at the mill for tuppence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
yes. that's all I'm going to say in all comments from now on.
I smell a rat here...
This photo is actually the loby of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center. Most of the other "Microsoft headquaters" photos look to be taken there as well.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
Corporate names elided....
.1 mi to my cube). Although most of us were from elsewhere (including the Canadians), with families elsewhere, we also had *no* 'Net access at work (oh! one consultant took advantage of it!).
In the mid-nineties, I worked for a now-swallowed Baby Bell in the midwest, in what was going to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. Upper management's lack of planning, and an "architecture" team that gave Promulgations to all the other teams, resulted in most of us doing regular days of 9-9.5 hours, and a heavy dose of 10, 12, and occasional 16 hour days. (One young consultant once put in, and I am neither making this up nor exaggerating), 119 hours one week. He was working for another consulting company than Andersen within a year....)
The first half of '06, I worked for a home improvement place, which shall remain nameless, but was neither Home Depot nor Menard's, in the middle of nowhere, NC. 95 mi. to the airport in Charlotte... and consultants a) had to enter from the main entrance, not any of the side entrances (and the company had literally take over a large mall - it was, measured, just under
Oh, yes, Real Employees had a normal 8x8 cube. Consultants had to *share* one. Coming soon, the old Dilbert bit about Velcro (tm) on our backs, and put us on the wall....
mark, whose last manager "bragged" that he had a stack of pre-signed forms
that anyone could snag to complain about harassment by him (what
do you expect, he was a Texas Aggie )
I had read the 'Best Places' a few days ago and felt that most of them were somewhat nice but still nothing great. When I saw this today I had to compare, and I was not disappointed.
/. standards.
This and this are considered 'the best'.
This and this are considered the worst.
There's not a whole lot different between the open table, no privacy of Mahalo/Gawker and the cubicles from Yahoo/Six Apart. Yet one set is at the bottom and one at the top. Right. And the attempt at knocking Microsoft is low, even for
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I mean I agree with it and all, but surely you could have said the exact same thing about half the stuff that ended up on their Top Ten Best list too...
"Flag on the moon. How did it get there?"
Out of my office window, I can see my dock, my boats, Puget Sound and the San Juans.
Whenever its nice out, I always come down with a case of eye trouble. I just can't see working on such a beautiful day.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would not even get through the first interview though. Even though I'm very skilled, my medical records automatically disqualify me for any job in the tech industry. I've gone through almost a hundred interviews and not one would consider me. I know this would send my karma into the negative realm but just need to make my say.
Not sure which domain I have to unblock in NoScript to see the pictures (unblocking the home site didn't help). Not going to bother...
This slide show could easily be up for the Top 10 Worst web slide shows. You can't click through from beginning to end and see all the companies. Besides, these places aren't even that bad.