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.
“Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
81–90 of 468 posts
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
Parking-- problem is, when you have to source it yourself you can end up working for a company where there is not enough parking in the area. Spent a year dealing with this, couldn't get a spot to rent on a monthly basis, there was more demand than parking supply in the area. The company got a deal on the office rental and so ignored this. Them having to source it forces them to take it into account. Convenient to tr…
OK, so rule zero really should be "don't work for idiots, assholes, or idiot assholes" -- that covers a lot of things.
Perhaps rule -1 then might be "you can't always predict who the assholes are."
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#83The funniest thing about all of these "office design" photos that I see of big companies.
"Where does the actual work get done?" Why are those photos never included.
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#84Pretty 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 them are terribly designed.
The worst problem, common to almost all cafes, is that a place with a capacity of ~40 people or so will have two single-user gendered restrooms. By this I mean there is a label or picture on each door indicating "Male" or "Female". This is a problem for a number of reasons, including that it creates issues for trans and genderqueer people, but also that it inevitably creates situations where there is a queue for one restroom (because of a user who is taking their time, for whatever reason) while the other is empty. Of course, someone could jump out of the queue and use the empty restroom, but there's a social norm that we generally must abide that forbids this.
Another inefficiency is that faucets for washing up tend to be locked in the same single-user room as toilets. This causes backups when a person needs to use the faucet but someone else is using the toilet or vice versa. Plenty of people just pop into a single-user restroom to adjust their hair or wash their hands or whatever.
In something like 9 years of working consistently out of cafes, I've seen just two that have what I consider to be well-designed restroom facilities: the Starbucks at Main & Olympic in Santa Monica, CA, USA and Sightglass Coffee in SoMa, San Franciso, CA, USA. Each have an open, shared sink area with a glut of faucets and two to four single-user toilets behind locked doors opening out into it. I've never seen a line for the restrooms at these cafes, although I don't know if that's because of good design or because no one wants to use such weird restrooms ;-)
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#85Coming soon, company-owned archologies[0] so you never have to leave your dot-com bubble. [0] http://simcity.wikia.com/wiki/Arcology
Don't worry, Google is working on it: http://singularityhub.com/2015/03/11/googles-new-headquarter...
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#86What I find most strange about all of the photos of office design for "big companies"
Where does the actual work get done? Why are those pictures never included?
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#87What I find most strange about all of the photos of office design for "big companies" Where does the actual work get done? Why are those pictures never included?
> What I find most strange about all of the photos of office design for "big companies"
> The funniest thing about all of these "office design" photos that I see of big companies.
Are you A/B testing your comments?
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#88I 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'…
Facebook's engineering culture is a hindrance at this point. They're not a tech company, they're a social network. Their UI is really so-so considering that vast resources they've dedicated to the platform. Any product-oriented company needs to be driven by UX, not tech.
Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#89Re: “Today we moved into our new Facebook building”
#90I 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?
Yeah, no kidding. I started thinking, "What makes you so fucking cool and unique to deserve all of this? Have you seen what people in India have to put up with to get a tech job? Why do you consider yourself better than them?"