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“Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

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Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#141

Post by pbreit »

moe wrote: post #81

a single room that fits thousands of people. What a nightmare. These "glass palace" offices may work for bankers or marketing teams. For programmers you could just as well plant their desks into the middle of a mall.

I dislike open offices but when it's this big it actually can work because all the noise just becomes white. In a small open office, you pretty much have to be silent but in a big one, you can speak freely. We (PayPal) had a big open office like this in Omaha and it actually kind of works better than some might think.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#142

Post by jordigh »

nilkn wrote: post #124
jordigh wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what a slippery slope argument is. I am not arguing that some event must follow inevitably from the other without presenting an argument for why this follows. Anyway, what bugs me so much is the entitlement. Sure, maybe you can find a job like that. But what makes you think that you deserve it? And yes, there is a problem with being entitled. The world is already too full of selfish assholes. I really woul…

I suppose I really don't understand your argument. You're suggesting that someone in a position to strive for more shouldn't do so because there are other people who aren't in such a position? If nobody tries to raise the standard, then it will never be raised. Based on his other posts, this guy is the CTO of a small startup. Maybe in a year or two he'll be hiring and providing these benefits to others. How's that a…

That's the thing, our jobs are already super easy and super low-risk compared to the chimney sweeps of yester year. We sit down and just write stuff down on a computer. There's no heavy lifting, no angry foremen, lots of job security, frequently there's even some time for personal projects on the job... everything is already mostly awesome. We have already achieved a society of leisure. It already is the future. We do almost no work. Most things are automated and easy. We already have George Jetson's job.

And despite all of this, no, not enough, now we must campaign for no more than 2 mandatory meetings per year?

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#143

Post by Osmium »

> Our goal was to create the perfect engineering space for our teams to work together. [...] To do this, we designed the largest open floor plan in the world — a single room that fits thousands of people.

Almost reads like an Onion article. I'm sure that they thought this through though before spending so much money.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#144

Post by geofft »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #84
deeviant wrote: post #6

Pretty soon, offices will be filled with chairs the fit two and three-person keyboards. I don't even want to think about how the whole "open office" philosophy will influence future restroom design.

Okay, this is not really on-topic at all. But someone has finally given me the opening to rant about the state of public restroom design :-) I spend a lot of time working out of cafes, both for my job and when I'm working on some personal project. ~4-8 hours a day in a cafe plus a coffee every 90 minutes or so and plenty of water means I have a lot of experience with coffee shop public restrooms. And almost all of th…

Where are you based? San Francisco "strongly urges" single-occupancy restrooms to be unisex. I've worked out of a fair number of SF cafes and I think this is noticeably less of a problem there than in other cities.

http://sf-hrc.org/compliance-guidelines-prohibit-gender-iden...

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#145

Post by bitL »

MCRed wrote: post #56
boomzilla wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May I ask if you are working now? If yes, are you hiring?

A lot of this was fixed by working remote, and being a founder of the company. I'm CTO of a very small startup, and we're experimenting with an organizational structure based on the causes of this list and a bunch of other stuff-- found a CEO whose really all about the love- there is no other word for it. We're not hiring yet, unfortunately.

Why didn't you go the co-CEO route instead? From my experience CEO has a tendency at some point to dominate other CxOs for whatever reasons (usually business guys view tech as inferior).

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#146

Post by jacquesm »

ctvo wrote: post #74
MCRed wrote: post #45

I will never work in an open office plan. It's one of the items on my "prima donna" list. Despite the name I'm pretty serious, and while some of this list represents things that others might not be able to avoid, or even agree with because they are personal preferences, all of the items are the result of bad experiences or missteps I've experienced directly at a job in the past. I know some may object to these. That'…

Really? All of this is on your list? If I asked for 3 mandatory meetings a year you're NEVER going to work at my company? How do you go through life being so rigid on such relatively trivial issues?

> How do you go through life being so rigid on such relatively trivial issues?

At a guess: after spending enough of that life to realize that those 'trivial' issues can make all the difference between feeling good in the longer term or feeling miserable.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#147

Post by foobarqux »

MCRed wrote: post #55
jonknee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small nitpick regarding #2, Jeff Bezos is technically proficient (engineering degree, he was a quant on Wall Street before Amazon).

This item is a matter of opinion (as is the whole list) but having worked with Bezos, he doesn't meet my bar.

Can you elaborate? Your previous example was that he deferred a ticket until the last minute. Is there anything else?

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#148

Post by pbreit »

some1else wrote: post #8

Here's an article with a bunch of sizzling Instagram shots from people who got to take the first look: http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/web/news/a14830/face... I'm really impressed by how non-gimmicky this Gehry building looks on the outside, and it seems like they really did a good job designing whatever space isn't consumed by the open plan.

One thing I like (and is so obvious) is to use the roof. It's insane how much wasted space exists on building/office rooftops.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#149

Post by fsk »

MCRed wrote: post #45

I will never work in an open office plan. It's one of the items on my "prima donna" list. Despite the name I'm pretty serious, and while some of this list represents things that others might not be able to avoid, or even agree with because they are personal preferences, all of the items are the result of bad experiences or missteps I've experienced directly at a job in the past. I know some may object to these. That'…

I don't know why equity would be a dealbreaker for you. There is some $X where getting $X extra would make up for no equity (considering equity is usually worth $0).

Instead of equity, you could ask to be paid $20k more, go to a casino, and bet it all on one spin of roulette at 36:1. If you win the first spin, let half of it ride on another 36:1 bet. That would give you a better payout distribution than is likely from equity.

Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”

#150

Post by pbreit »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #12

I'm not going to get into the debate of open floor plans vs individual offices since most people already have their opinions and I see pros & cons to both. That debate aside, I think that roof top green space is absolutely awesome. I would love to see more of those being built into new buildings.

Such a massive waste of space (not Facebook, others). Rooftops could easily house grass, solar and parking and yet is pretty much always completely wasted.
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