when a tech company builds a new campus, that's it. All downhill (further downhill).
Facebook Designing New Campus
21–30 of 53 posts
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#22Every time I'm reminded of just how many programmers Facebook has it bothers me that he missed such a cool opportunity. He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much. Imagine if the budget for this 5000 person building…
I've wondered what it'd be like to have a company that capped its growth at around 500 people, but made damn sure that those 500 were among the brightest in the world. Would it be an innovation think tank? Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done? Or would they just automate all the drudge work away? I imagine it might be a little…
Theres also Valve Software (read their lovely handbook! http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf). They (to my knowledge) only hire folks who're at senior grade in terms of their skills. Also Valve software just generally sounds like an amazing work environment.
aside/caveat: I'm aiming to create just such an organization (operationally structured a la Valve) in terms of caliber of folks in NYC with WellPosed. I'm settling for nothing less than having an organization dedicated to building tools/products meant to make innovation happen faster on our wee world. I'm starting with fixing machine learning / numerical computation, BUT done right, rather than automagic bullshit everyone in "big data" keeps jerking off to the press :)
It looks like I'll be able to get things off the ground sans investors too (which is kinda key for what I want to do forever). Any NYC area senior grade awesome folks who like work broadly deep across math, cs, engineering things nicely and sane work expectations etc a la the organization referenced above, shoot me an email and chat, Please
I'm working to create something special that I want to last forever, and I need the most amazing people on the planet to make it happen :)
(pardon my reply turning self promoting, but I'm deadly serious about what i'm doing, and its exactly that sort of place i'm aiming to create)
(also: your hypothetical lots of smart people not getting anything done is called a circle jerk, not a business that could successfully recruit amazing people and retain them.)
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#23Every time I'm reminded of just how many programmers Facebook has it bothers me that he missed such a cool opportunity. He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much. Imagine if the budget for this 5000 person building…
For those of us who aren't those 10x programmers though I appreciate the opportunity to work at a company like Facebook...
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#24Hope it holds up better than the MIT Strata Center...
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
My visceral reaction to the idea of one giant room was "Rad". Love open floor plans. I'm really curious what the final interior plan will look like; presumably it's not some huge airplane hanger of openness but some clever way of staying open-while-interesting. Like you, though, I'm just excited at the prospect of larger companies doing something different. Should be fun to watch.
They (Facebook) should really look at what research has found before they jump feet-first into having an open floor plan. It's not like they've just invented it! Open floor plans were invented as a way to cram more people into less space, thereby minimizing cost of office space per employee. They were not invented to improve productivity.
Facebook offices have always been open plan. I personally like it. It can occasionally been frustrating, but overall the benefits outweigh the negatives for the way we work. I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs.
Many people work from home or camp out in a small meeting room if they want privacy. There are also over ear head phones available for free all around the campus.
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
They (Facebook) should really look at what research has found before they jump feet-first into having an open floor plan. It's not like they've just invented it! Open floor plans were invented as a way to cram more people into less space, thereby minimizing cost of office space per employee. They were not invented to improve productivity.
Facebook offices have always been open plan. I personally like it. It can occasionally been frustrating, but overall the benefits outweigh the negatives for the way we work. I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs. Many people work from home or camp out in a small meeting room if they want privacy. There are also over ear head phones available for free all around the campus.
Wikipedia has an article that links to a lot of the research on open plan offices (and other configurations):
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#27I wouldn't say that this is the worst possibly use of Facebook's money, but I would rank it up there. Building a new HQ is largely an exercise in vanity and boasting. There is almost always an existing building that would serve just fine, otherwise. "The largest open floor plan in the world"? Oy. I hope they hire some good acoustics folks before they finish the planning stages.
It's amusing to correlate "new campus" with "stock drop" in the history of Silly Valley. Atari, Apple, Sun, Cisco . . . these companies all had significant hard times about the time they started large new sets of buildings.
SGI built a new campus (now the Googleplex) in 1998, the same year they announced they were switching from their own MIPS processors to Itanium and shipping Windows NT workstations. In 2005, SGI was delisted from the NYSE.
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#28I wouldn't say that this is the worst possibly use of Facebook's money, but I would rank it up there. Building a new HQ is largely an exercise in vanity and boasting. There is almost always an existing building that would serve just fine, otherwise. "The largest open floor plan in the world"? Oy. I hope they hire some good acoustics folks before they finish the planning stages.
I think it's money well spent. Facebook is one of the principle belligerent powers in the War for Talent. They're going to lose some ground in that war after the IPO. A stunning campus could help minimize that loss.
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've wondered what it'd be like to have a company that capped its growth at around 500 people, but made damn sure that those 500 were among the brightest in the world. Would it be an innovation think tank? Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done? Or would they just automate all the drudge work away? I imagine it might be a little…
Theres also Valve Software (read their lovely handbook! http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf ). They (to my knowledge) only hire folks who're at senior grade in terms of their skills. Also Valve software just generally sounds like an amazing work environment. aside/caveat: I'm aiming to create just such an organization (operationally structured a la Valve) in terms of caliber of folks in NYC with Wel…
Ahem. Rather than automagic bullshit, could you just do machine learning which handles multiple data-types.
That would be a big change for the ML crowd to have to deal with real world, multiple typed, dirty data. Earthshattering, I know. (Yes, we've already spoken by email. Best of luck on your adventures)
Re: Facebook Designing New Campus
#30Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!
Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!
Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!