51–60 of 157 posts
A microwave creates enough nasty smells, and he wants a full kitchen?
I've worked in places where people can't be trusted to wash their mugs and cutlery, though, so it wouldn't work everywhere.
Decided to change job recently, applied for two, went for an interview at the first and they offered me the job. I took it on the spot despite the other place paying more. One of the reasons I took it on the spot was when asked where I'd prefer to work and I said somewhere quiet he said there are offices upstairs, take whichever one you want. That was the major deciding factor (among others), I know the other place i…
Nice designs - I like them and would certainly consider some of those ideas in any future office fitout of mine. However, I am unsure about those walls just inside the doorways that act as a buffer. Why not just have a door (with a glass window, the wall with the door doesn't already have a window)? That way, the team working in the room can simply close the door when they do not want to be disturbed, or open it when…
And I would add a red / green LED to the door knob which signals if you are free to enter.
The wall inside also serves as a stand for the (heavy) flatscreen and has a coat hanger. I think it adds a nice cosy touch to the office, you you come in an e.g. take off your shoes.
Good effort! Although you can't please everyone. I think you should mention cost. The rectangle is about 20m x 16m = 320m2 or about 10,7m2/person. And the ceiling is about 3.5m.
One sad thing that this article (I think inadvertently) illuminates is how hypersensitive Americans are about mundane parts of life like using the bathroom. Markus' office design works over here in Europe because [I'm fairly certain] his crowd invests heavily in a healthy social culture at work, as opposed to a nervously litigious (i.e. immediately defer to HR) culture as is so common in the US. Personally, I think M…
Primarily the TVs are used for sharing screens, and team metrics. So they are mostly used for data, rather then communication.
Decided to change job recently, applied for two, went for an interview at the first and they offered me the job. I took it on the spot despite the other place paying more. One of the reasons I took it on the spot was when asked where I'd prefer to work and I said somewhere quiet he said there are offices upstairs, take whichever one you want. That was the major deciding factor (among others), I know the other place i…
I would be interested to hear what hardware you will buy. What's your ideal hardware? Just a MBP or something more interesting?
Current plan is Ryzen 1700(possibly X)/32GB DDR4 (2x16GB, board supports 4 slots so can upgrade if needed) (going to need a lot of virtualisation capability to handle dealing with multiple legacy systems, windows for interop and 8 cores with 16 threads at that price is a hard match from Intel), 500GB SSD with 1TB WD Black and a pair of decent monitors, comes in about half what the tricked out iMac comes in at, RX550 (I don't care about 3D but I want to be able to drive the screens without onboard graphics and ATI will support the RX550 for some time since it's new and the linux drivers are excellent these days for ATI).
MS Ergo 4000 keyboard and a decent mouse.
I asked the boss and he said "I don't have a clue on hardware, just send me a shopping list link and I'll order it".
I think I'm going to like this new place :)
Given the budget is top of the line iMac I could have gone to 1800X and 64GB of RAM but why kick the arse out of it and I'm into diminishing returns with either of those. Current systems are 32GB desktops and I rarely wish I had more but I do find the i5-xxxxK's limiting since once you load a couple of vagrant machines, an instance of Windows for Edge testing and Intellij things start to slow down quite quickly, it's not an IPC thing (the cores are fast enough, just not enough of them).
I'll move to a standing desk but I'll built that myself since I know exactly what I want (I built my current one) down the line.
I did consider a good Thinkpad with doc/screens but since I'll spend 95% of my time in the office the trade off of performance/comfort for the 5% of the time I'll be in a meeting made no sense, basically any cheap thinkpad or similar will do for meetings.
I know some people prefer not having to sync between machines and just pick up and go with everything but work is for work, everything else is for not work.
I put a fair amount of thought into the hardware, since I'm in-house developer #1 at this place I'll be an army of one for a while, I wanted a machine that was fast enough to be to do multiple things while I work, I want to be be able to run integration and unit tests while continuing to work (at least locally until I tame the main codebase and get it under proper CI).
It's a fun engineering challenge because their underlying business is complex and highly bespoke and their existing 'main' system was written over many years in a style that was obsolete when it was written.
I'm seriously looking forwards to it and they are nice folks.
As a technologist working at a company that helps businesses design & build office space, one item I notice always lacking in conversations about office space is growth. The article brushes off growth by suggesting you just open a new office when you've grown. This suggestion lacks understanding of how growth happens. It's rarely an instant doubling of headcount. Most organic growth creeps up. So let me invade your "…
We have shitty offices because there is no solution, so allow me to at least say: if you want me to work in your office (which I think is not necessary at all) build me one, that suits my productivity and not the constraints of the real estate market.
Realistically, as a company you would start with one floor, and once it fills up, rent another in the same building.
Companies here are doing this and lending more floors then they initially need and are subletting them, so they can move in later.
We could rent an ware house and build offices out of shipping containers. That could be done.
Cool post. A few issues I see: - 30 people team?! I find 10-12 or so to be the max size before things descend into chaos - 3 person office seem like a wrong compromise to me. If you want to optimize for focused time, individual offices are best. 2 people offices can be alright, but you'll necessarily have moments when someone comes to talk to your coworker for 30 minutes about blablabla. If you want to optimize for i…
> 30 people team If it's a product team, you can easily have a company with 4-5 teams (design, development, marketing/sales, support, content) so it's not to uncommon to have a team grow to that size. And this size is still manageable, if they are not all doing the same. For me 30 is the max, I prefer it smaller, too. > 3 person office For me that's the ideal tag team: a junior, a medior and a senior working hand in…
first time I hear the word medior. It's a fun neologism, but it's technically very wrong in Latin: senior and junior are comparatives (older and younger), so medior would be more medium?
Architect here. Distraction is an issue for us as well. My ideal office would be along these lines too. Mostly it's just construction and rental cost that prevents it; open plan offices use much less floor space and are simpler for things like HVAC and fire evacuation. If you want to change this to an enclosed layout you need to reconfigure all these systems. Most office space is built speculatively by developers and…
We have shitty offices, because they are build to suit the real estate market not productivity.
But there are examples which are horrible by design, and not because the property value was important: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30... (first pic)