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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.
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.
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
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)
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
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"
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.
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.
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!
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')
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.
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