A wonderful office
Joel Spolsky has an interesting writeup of his company’s new office. Some interesting architectural design choices with otherwise underappreciated decisions for the programmer in mind. During my internships at U.S. companies, I always had a private desk, and it definitely made for productive output. Now I’m starting to think the Japanese communal approach can only be extended so far; almost every building at work uses only shoulder-high cubicles for example. Yet another testament that corporate Japan needs to realize a manufacturing-mentality doesn’t extrapolate well to the creative sphere (hacking is, after al, an art).
September 26th, 2003 at 5:52 am
This is an awesome office; I highly enjoyed reading about it. I firmly agree with the author that an office should be as nice as possible – you do spend all day there! I think that you have the largest chance of getting truly nice digs by working for a smaller firm. When a firm gets too large, it become somewhat impractical to put everyone up in such a nice space. Maybe.
September 26th, 2003 at 11:26 am
i dunno. M$ is pretty _big_ and you prolly had pretty nice digs, right matt? and that was just for an intern too.
I don’t think it’s a matter of “size of the company”, it’s whether people “up there” know the people “down there”.
read “Peopleware” by Tom Demarco. excellent book on this stuff. basically THE bible on how to make a good work environment.
September 27th, 2003 at 8:55 am
I think the problem is that these are the kinds of expenses that are hard to quanity and therefore justify when running a business. Paying extra cash for a debugger that your programmer will use 15 hrs a week has clear benefits; it’s less clear what the gain of giving him a window is. Joel is in the position of having once been that programmer, so he intuitively understands the benefits and places more value on then than would, say, an MBA who has no idea about what the mental experience of programming is like.
September 27th, 2003 at 9:49 pm
sorry belvin, gotta disagree with you there. productivity is almost impossible to “quantify”… but but you can certainly quantify staff turnovers. guess which company on the PLANET has the lowest turnover? guess what every single employee has in that company?
the answer to the first is SAS. the answer to the 2nd is left as an exercise… :)
also, would anyone here EVER stay in a hotel room WITHOUT a window? (regardless of the view) has anyone ever seen a hotel room without a window?
September 28th, 2003 at 12:01 am
Andrew, if it were as easy as simply looking at one company and their low turnover rate, corporate culture must be very stupid for not copying them. Corporate culture is arguably stupid in many ways, but I think you miss a point. Look at Japanese companies — they probably have some of the lowest turnover rates of any nation. Is it because people love to work there? Only a fool would think so. It could be culture (life-long company commitment), it could be fear (greater difficulty, esp. in Japan), etc. etc. blevin has a very good point. It *is* difficult to quantify happiness, contentment, and other such emotional traits. Only empathy can really bridge the gap, and that almost always stems from past experiences. Jim Goodnight (the SAS CEO) knows how to read statistics, and has been involved in the academic field for what seems like a long time. It’s through his past experiences and efforts that he’s able to find a solution that keeps his employees, and he goes out of his way to do it. Same with Joel.
September 28th, 2003 at 12:32 am
my bad. i completely forgot about “japan” here. where i did stay in a hotel without a window. a capsule hotel.
don’t think that this stuff about offices and stuff isn’t highly documented… (hint hint: peopleware spends 1/2 the book on office space alone) but that’s not even 1/2 of the problem when you have it solved. it’s nice to have a great office, but wouldn’t it be greater to have a nice boss?
peopleware is required management reading at M$. Surprised you didn’t find it like Joel did.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000237.html
fyi, it’s in japanese:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/exec/obidos/ASIN/4822281108/qid=1064676634/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_2_1/250-5242945-4681021
the REAL question is, how do we get OUR BIG boss to read it?!