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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.
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.
Here
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
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
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.
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