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Inside Amazon's Mini Rainforest Work Space Spheres (cnbc.com)
Amazon's indoor rainforest-like office space opened today after being in development for seven years. CNBC reports of what can be found inside the Spheres: The Spheres' three glass domes house some 40,000 plants of 400 species. Amazon, famous for its demanding work culture, hopes the Spheres' lush environs will let employees reflect and have chance encounters, spawning new products or plans. The space is more like a greenhouse than a typical office. Instead of enclosed conference rooms or desks, there are walkways and unconventional meeting spaces with chairs. Amazon has invested $3.7 billion on buildings and infrastructure in Seattle from 2010 to summer 2017, a figure that has public officials competing for its "HQ2" salivating. Amazon has said it expects to invest more than $5 billion in construction of HQ2 and to create as many as 50,000 jobs. The Spheres, designed by architecture firm NBBJ, will become part of Amazon's guided campus tours. Members of the public can also visit an exhibit at the Spheres by appointment starting Tuesday.
This kind of crap is going on everywhere. Here in the Midwest, companies are changing their offices because, "It's the trend on the west coast."
My company bought new office furniture five years ago because "the trend" was to move to smaller desks. Some of the furniture in the collaborative work spaces now has a thick layer of dust because it's gone unused.
Now we're getting a new office layout this year. No more assigned desk! Sit where ever you want. How is that supposed to work?
No desks available? Sit down on the loveseat. (Seriously, this is an office. Not a dorm!) If you don't like the loveseat, there will be an area with different levels, like bleachers, or that episode from Seinfeld.
I just want a comfortable chair to sit on, a place to put my stuff, HVAC, a fridge, a microwave, and a restroom. Half the time that stuff doesn't work.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
Just imagine how much more productive and happy their workers would be if they'd invested $3.7 billion in the salaries of workers in Seattle.
Or, just dumped Seattle and went to the Midwest with that $3.7 Billion where labor is cheaper and the standard of living easier to maintain.
So I've got to ask, when you say "invest" in salaries of workers you mean give them raises right? The problem with handing out $3.7 Billion all in one year is that you have just increased your baseline costs unless you just hand out a one time bonus. One time bonuses are only have a short term benefit on employee's good feelings towards the company. Give them a few months and the benefit is all gone.
So Amazon spent $3.7 Billion on a hopefully better facility to improve the working environment. It might be that this has a longer term effect on how the employees feel about work and it might be just as effective as handing out cash.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You can get cheap unskilled labor in the Midwest. The educated, experienced labor force you need to run a multi-national is hard to find there. The lower taxes and cheaper living in those states come with the trade-off of lower spending on education, infrastructure and cultural institutions all of which are very important to the highly sought out employees companies like Amazon need. Most companies that look into moving into cheaper states end up scraping their plans once they figure out that most of their core employees are unwilling to move to the proposed locations even with generous incentives
When companies start showing off fancy real estate, or initiating a Hunger Games style race to the bottom for cities to be their next headquarters, it's a good sign the next bubble is coming to an end. Sun moved to a fancy new campus and were shortly bought by Oracle. There was an article a few momths ago about how Microsoft is building tree houses for their employees to work in. This is the second tech bubble I've lived through and the end always seems to be a new trend in office design.
I guess I'm old school. but I really don't like collaborative brightly colored preschool workspaces. I want a comfortable private workspace with decent temperature control and access to decent coffee/snacks. Even when I was younger I couldn't understand why people would voluntarily work crazy hours if an employer gave them a "fun" office environment.
The problem with the current office trend is that it's not easily undo-able. You can't easily go back from people crammed around cafeteria tables to even semi-private spaces without showing that it has a direct effect on productivity.
The Midwest is just fly over country to you I guess... Have you even been here? Of course not.
What breathtaking ignorance you have...This is why we make jokes about the idiot liberals on the coasts who think they are better than everybody else, only we do so in private and with obvious sarcasm and just don't blurt out such nonsense as facts. I was raised in the mid west and have spent time on both coasts. There are smart and stupid people every place I've ever lived, in roughly the same mix. I do find arrogance in abundance on the coasts though.
Shall I give you a list of the companies who are moving to my Midwest state or the ones who abandoned the likes of California for humble Texas? Naw... You wouldn't believe stupid little me because you don't think intelligent people live in the Midwest.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
The college towns in Texas like Austin might be an exception -- and Austin is where I predict Amazon's HQ2 is going. Austin is Portland's sister city; they have the same motto, "Keep Portland Weird" and "Keep Austin Weird". I think the assumption is that if you locate where the cost of business is the lowest, the talent will relocate there to work for you -- and be unable to find any competing jobs (See Grass Valley Group for their employee retention strategy; they initially located literally in the middle of a cow pasture in the mountains east of Sacramento. Nope, you couldn't commute to any other tech jobs from there, they were the only player in town!)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.