My gym (inside the office). My office is a small room in my rented home and I've divided it into two parts (a work area and a gym area). I have a long bar (with weights, of course), a few dumbbells, yoga mat, jumping rope and a fitball. I could exercise throughout my workday, literally few steps away.
Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
31–40 of 48 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#32free food. every.day.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#33White boards are excellent. So is an espresso machine and/or Chemex. As others have also said, nice chairs and monitors are really, really cheap relative to the cost of employees and office space. Get Aerons or Embodies (I'm now using an Embody), which go for about $900 and $1200, respectively. Read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper... . Note this excerpt, which is long but posted for…
>So upgrading them to an Aeron chair literally costs the same amount as you’re spending on their toilet paper,
Assuming you're still in business ten years from now. Sometimes this is a reasonable assumption; for a startup, probably not.
Granted, it is still a fairly small percent of the cost of an employee. But in early days, there may still be better things to spend that money on.
edit - of course, what I forgot is that if you're starting an office, it's probably not "early days" and the ten years thing becomes a lot more reasonable.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#34White boards are excellent. So is an espresso machine and/or Chemex. As others have also said, nice chairs and monitors are really, really cheap relative to the cost of employees and office space. Get Aerons or Embodies (I'm now using an Embody), which go for about $900 and $1200, respectively. Read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper... . Note this excerpt, which is long but posted for…
I'd love to hear PG chime in about the chairs. He's been negative on them in an article or two. I think I agree with Joel here. I'm a frugal bootstrapper - I always turn off the heat before I leave my apartment. But cheap chairs can be bad for your back in the long-run. Long-term back problems are a pretty bad trade-off for a thousand bucks. And from looking at the market, it seems like a bit of an either/or scenario: you either get something super cheap, which is bad for your back, you get something mid-range, which falls apart quickly (what Joel was talking about), or you go with something expensive, which lasts for a long time. Either you go all out, or you get a bad solution. I think the pricey option is a pretty sane purchase here.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#35Nothing. I hate it.
If I may, a case study of how to make a shitty office:
* Find space based mainly on price. Who cares if it's nearly a different city from where your whole team lives?
* Don't worry about natural light (or even worse, due to whatever circumstances ensure that only some people get natural light)
* Take whatever furniture is lying around.
* Everyone gets the cheapest refurbed machine you can find. If it was good enough for some office worker in 2002, it's good enough for your dev team now!
* Don't get anymore space than you need. When a new hire arrives, they can set up their 'office' in the storage/server room.
* Some cheap-o phones and Skype over a residential-grade DSL line is all you need. It doesn't look bad at all if you start every conversation with "H-hello? Can you hear me? I'm using Skype and-- oh there you are"
EDIT: formatting
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#36Natural sunlight. Parking 6ft from the entrance. FIOS internet. Walkable, safe, upbeat neighborhood. High resolution monitor. Excellent keyboard. Good chair. Quiet and secure building. If I had two requests: private bathroom and private kitchen area.
I have to agree... the one thing I desperately want is natural sunlight. I work on the bottom floor of a complex that faces an atrium, so it's like living on the bottom of the rainforest. I get very little light and have no view. It's kind of depressing without a view. I was at a friend's place in Berkeley yesterday and they had a great setup with natural light coming through on all sides of the house: http://picplz.com/user/stammy/pic/hxzl/
The first thing that came to mind is how much better (not sure if that is the right word) I would feel if working in a naturally lit place like that (with a nice view to boot).
The second big thing would be a hi-res monitor, ex 27-inch ACD. That combined with virtual desktops makes a world of difference, even compared to 1920x1200 res.
Third, I would want a decent kitchen area. I don't want to have to go out and eat all the time, because most places workplaces go to eat out at isn't healthy or doesn't have the option of healthy food. I'd much rather have a fridge full of stuff I can cook a quick 10 minute meal with. Working on a startup and eating healthy are not mutually exclusive. And on that note, office space near a gym for the walk back would be nice.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#37Natural sunlight. Parking 6ft from the entrance. FIOS internet. Walkable, safe, upbeat neighborhood. High resolution monitor. Excellent keyboard. Good chair. Quiet and secure building. If I had two requests: private bathroom and private kitchen area.
I have to agree... the one thing I desperately want is natural sunlight. I work on the bottom floor of a complex that faces an atrium, so it's like living on the bottom of the rainforest. I get very little light and have no view. It's kind of depressing without a view. I was at a friend's place in Berkeley yesterday and they had a great setup with natural light coming through on all sides of the house: http://picplz.…
If you find this place, please, please let me know. I'd take a 20k pay cut to get out of my cube that opens on a fairly busy hallway, no natural light, uncomfortable imitation "mesh back chair" and mini-fridge with a k-cup machine for a 70 person work group.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#38White boards are excellent. So is an espresso machine and/or Chemex. As others have also said, nice chairs and monitors are really, really cheap relative to the cost of employees and office space. Get Aerons or Embodies (I'm now using an Embody), which go for about $900 and $1200, respectively. Read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FieldGuidetoDeveloper... . Note this excerpt, which is long but posted for…
I'd love to hear PG chime in about the chairs. He's been negative on them in an article or two. I think I agree with Joel here. I'm a frugal bootstrapper - I always turn off the heat before I leave my apartment. But cheap chairs can be bad for your back in the long-run. Long-term back problems are a pretty bad trade-off for a thousand bucks. And from looking at the market, it seems like a bit of an either/or scenario…
One other observation: if you don't have the money to buy new, buy used. There's a place called Anderson's Office Liquidators in Tucson that sells Aerons for $500. Aerons last a really long time -- which can be useful in the resale market.
I think you have to be "a frugal bootstrapper," but there's a key difference between "frugal" and "stingy" or "foolish." Good chairs are an obvious place where that difference plays out.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#39Awesome! Another South African on HN. Not in the US but I think our guys have gotten a lot of things right (Cape Town software house): 1) The view - I'll be impressed if anyone can better this - the flat side of Table Mountain on the one side, the sea on the other, at night the lights of Long Street stretch out in front of us, and a good view of the stadium if that's your thing. I think that's just luck of the draw t…
If only you could pop down to muizenberg to catch a few waves during lunch I'd say you have the perfect hook up.
Re: Ask HN: What do you love about your office?
#40One thing I've always wished for but never had.
Quiet time: One hour every day where no one can schedule meetings or call their co-workers. One hour of zero interruptions. Most tech people I know work after hours or from home, just to get this.
I'll spend 30mins in the morning carefully writing an email to detail the current status of my project. Then I'll get four or five 5-15min drivebys interspersed throughout the day to ask about updates, estimates, timelines, changes, or other projects. Part of the frustration is not even knowing if I can start a complicated task before someone comes in to derail it.