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Let me take you through my dream office

blog.coderbyheart.com

111–120 of 157 posts

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#111

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…

"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most". In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else just suffers.

I said some because if I had said all or implied all I'd have gotten lots of "but I love open offices" responses and they do exist.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#112
post #99
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use it in Germany quite regulary. It's the experience level in the middle between senior and junior.

Perhaps you live near Netherlands? Here in a German speaking part of Switzerland I never heard that word.

Rhein-Main region.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#113
post #83
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a junior, a medior and a senior 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?

We use it in Germany quite regulary. It's the experience level in the middle between senior and junior.

What would be a good description of this, then?

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#116
I worked on the Cloudflare London office with a few other colleagues and an external architect firm who were tasked with making it a reality.

The proposed dream office would not work because:

* Teams are not always 3 or 6 and they grow and contract constantly

* Unisex bathrooms are fine for guys, not for anyone else

* 1 shower is never enough

* The airflow and temperature hasn't been thought about

* Growth hasn't been thought about

Also, in the comments someone suggested a proper stove in the kitchen. Let me dampen that immediately, fire regulations and other rules probably state that you cannot have an open flame or other heating devices outside of a very small selection or well-controlled items. You also probably are not fitting the electrics for this.

Unless your company size is very stable (WRT growth), you are going to have an open plan office.

It is the only way to deal with "fit more desks here", "change the layout like this", "that team is now growing faster than this team, swap their locations around".

Things we focused on:

* If we're going to have open plan (urgh), can we make it visually organic and not a battery farm (mis-align things, introduce space, randomness, natural materials, etc)

* If we're going to have open spaces, can we control the lighting so that it is flooded with natural light, we have zero strip lights and each area has control of their lighting (big windows, with blinds, dim lights over work areas, desk lighting people can control, LED strips for even lighting over walkways)

* To keep it habitable, we pump far more regular air than most places would, and we only aircon a little when it really is outside of a comfortable range

* If we're going to have communal spaces can we have them cosy and quiet (read "A Pattern Language", we purchased a lot of old Danish furniture and furnished small spaces like a little living rooms, very comfy)

* If we're going to have a town hall space / auditorium, can we limit the noise or impact on the rest of the environment

* If we're going to have a shared kitchen, can we make sure people can sit with most of their team (bench tables beat small tables, as the latter constrain you to 6 people and a team may be 7)

But it is an office, there is high growth. In the current London space we started with 60 people and now have just shy of 100, and it is the same space and we're not yet sitting on top of each other. That is only achievable by having open plan and not filling in space with desks until you have to, and by moving people around when you need to.

The ideal office shown... would be lovely. But to have that, you cannot really have any growth, and I bet the air would stagnate in that space pretty quickly.

Things we got wrong:

* Not enough of the right sized meeting rooms. We put in 4 x 2 people, 2 x 4 people, 1 x 8 person. Later had to add 2 x 6 people and another 1 x 8 person.

* We are starting to feel the noise levels, this really is about how sales grows fastest at a certain point in the life of a company and sales are inherently noisy by comparison... we've moved engineering away but this still means some staff who are not in sales are impacted by sales noise.

Things we got right:

* The flow around the office is really nice, people interact without being forced together or too far apart

* 3 showers for 100 people is enough that no-one waits long even when a quarter of staff are cycling in the height of Summer because we don't dictate a start hour to all staff (only those covering shifts)

What you build is according to needs, but growth dictates almost everything. You may not even stay in your new fancy office for more than a couple of years if your growth is that good, and this is going to dictate your spend.

Ultimately for it to make sense to design an office, the amortized costs need to be competitive with hiring space from Regus or something. If you've gone too far down the path of a design that involves putting up internal walls and spaces that need ripping down to handle growth, then the project is probably doomed to fail.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#117
post #78
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so I would ask an architect: build me an office that can scale. What would they answer? 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 fill…

An open plan office, starting with 50 desks, can grow to 75 or even 100, by gradually increasing desk density. You cannot evict ppl from floors you own on the spot. Growth is hard to predict. Hence the dream office will stay a dream unless you are working for a no-growth company doing the same things all the time.

An over-crowded open-office is even more productivity destroying than an open-office of a "normal" density.

Plus, like already said, you can increase density (at least if the target is not overdensity) in other configurations...

Maybe it's more difficult to over-crowd if you don't have an open-office, but that's a feature, not a bug.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#118
post #116

I worked on the Cloudflare London office with a few other colleagues and an external architect firm who were tasked with making it a reality. The proposed dream office would not work because: * Teams are not always 3 or 6 and they grow and contract constantly * Unisex bathrooms are fine for guys, not for anyone else * 1 shower is never enough * The airflow and temperature hasn't been thought about * Growth hasn't bee…

Oh, and sound.

Sound is so hard to model, control, reason about.

Every assumption you make about how sound works within a space will be wrong, and small spaces like meeting rooms are even harder to get right.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"some" developers? I'd guess that's in fact "most". In my experience the only people who like open office are those whose job is to talk all day long. Sales guys, visionaires, busy bodies etc. Everyone else just suffers.

This evergreen topic comes up enough that there will always be multiple sides to this topic. I've gone so far in past threads to imply that other devs were "wrong" about being more productive in open office plans, and got bashed for that. "Don't tell me how I'm more productive", etc. There may never actually be hard data on this, because it's, at core, likely very hard to measure, but I'd love to read some research/f…

I think there are at least two different kinds of productivity. One is the kind where you need to progress through a non-trivial body of work with a well-understood end-state. Your primary, if not sole, output is code. This is probably well suited for private offices and remote teams.

The other is where you're solving a problem that isn't in the first order a code problem. There are typically humans involved in these kinds of problems. Most instances where the problem is defined as "building the right thing for the customer" where part of the problem is coming up with "the right thing". This works well in open plan offices where multiple people can quickly give input/get feedback. Remote working is probably not a great idea. Most work in early startups is probably in this category, and that also offers a model to explain why open plan offices are so common in not-startups-anymore: these companies are very eager to retain the energy of their early days, and a lot of that energy is tied to the collaboration of the open plan office, even if not necessarily suited to the workloads of the more mature company.

Tl;dr: when people speak of being more or less productive under certain conditions, a lot probably hinges on what kind of work they are doing.

Re: Let me take you through my dream office

#120
post #112
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps you live near Netherlands? Here in a German speaking part of Switzerland I never heard that word.

Rhein-Main region.

I work with an English guy who's been in Amsterdam for a few years now and he often says "medior". He usually corrects himself to "middleweight" after a few seconds.
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