Let me take you through my dream office
blog.coderbyheart.com
blog.coderbyheart.com
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 is open plan.
I'll take slightly less pay to sit in a quiet office and work over an open office.
(Other things I liked about the job where flex time, I buy all hardware I need myself, they pay for conferences, training courses, no phone on the desk (I asked for that and they said no problem), an interesting complex problem (I like enterprise stuff) and they are strongly focused on building out some proper in-house technical skill and replacing their creaking systems, I get technical freedom, I can use whatever I want on the backend and I'll be assembling a team as they bring stuff back in house and final kicker it's 10m walk from where I live so no commute).
Since both places pay more than enough for me to live comfortably in north of England I'll happily take the slightly lower pay (in the short term) for the above.
I don't think employers still understand how much some developers loathe open offices, it's not a 'prefer' to, it is a 'won't if at all possible'.
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.
Currently typing on one of these. I hate the loud clicking noise though, especially with co-workers around me. Are there any similar but less noisy versions of it?
The 4000 isn't really that loud (I found it was louder with the front edge on as it creates a void space under the keyboard like a speaker) especially compared to the mechanical I was using before.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/accessories/en-gb/products/keyboar...
I know people who've used those and love them, I personally didn't too much like a laptop keyboard the travel feels wrong.
The only caveat is you can't do things modify kernel params etc... but that's usually ok for my use YMMV obviously. Also they don't update Atlas with new images so you need to build your own but that's really easy[2].
1. https://github.com/fgrehm/vagrant-lxc 2. https://github.com/obnoxxx/vagrant-lxc-base-boxes
I wasn't aware that it had gotten as good as those links look so thanks! :).
Interesting. Something like that would be absolutely impossible here in Germany. I recall that we weren't allowed to buy any furniture from Ikea because office furniture must be certified to a certain level of fire-resistance, and Ikea doesn't bother with those certifications. There are dedicated vendors for office furniture for that reason.
Small/Medium companies here don't really care about that stuff in fact I don't think anywhere I've worked has ever considered that stuff.
This was the one I built where I am now http://imgur.com/a/H7fxb
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.
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/findings on this issue more.
I'm in a coworking situation now, with a private space, and I'm always more productive in the private space. But I do relieve some stress and get energized by interacting with others in the common area. And in previous jobs, there's of course always times when you need to talk to colleagues about project issues, and that's a requirement.
To the folks (devs) who insist that they are "more productive" in open plan offices, I wonder if the rest of the folks in the room with you are equally as productive, or if the productivity is just being shifted from some people in the room to others.
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.
Well except one place where the people in the office where just horrible (really toxic culture largly down to the 'office manager' been about one step short of invading Poland) so I just did as I pleased (wandering in at 10am wearing flip flops and combat shorts), I was pulling 60hr weeks so the boss didn't care and she hated me anyway because she had to do payroll and knew what I was earning, I was knackered from day one on that job.
What I don't hear is the root cause of the angst. Is the sales team overpromising? I don't know. But when something's not ready for their demo it gets quite loud.
Investing in people at the end of they day has to make sense, otherwise other companies will out compete you. When it's hard to determine people skills, work varies highly in intensity, projects fail for any number of reasons, people don't stay very long at even the most "comfortable" companies etc. the personal productivity of any employee becomes marginal, at least in the lower ranks. This is true for most "craft" industries like newspapers, fashion or design.
But with a huge caveat:
I can largely turn off other sensory input. Some is nice: a breeze through the window, a buzz of others around, nice light and open plan but not vast open plan; no one is no more than 4 desks away from a window (a proper window that can be opened and that has some kind of view). And cubicles shouldn't have huge walls; can see the face or top of the head of the person next to you.
Also: Lots of small meeting rooms dotted around with almost assured availability of one at little notice. It could be for a sensitive call, impromptu conversation, or just to sit in the dark working something out.
I couldn't survive normally in one, nor in the other. However I default at open plan. If others want to default the other way, that's good too. There should be options.
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 "dream" office with a bit of tough reality. Everywhere you imagined 3 people, 6 months later, put in 5. Then 4 months later, every available "single quiet" space, replace with a full time desk. Then in 60 days put a few part timers and interns out in common area, permanently. Now hold the line for a couple years while we find affordable space to relocate everyone to.
Your dream space becomes just another overcrowded, noisy envitonment due to the realities of cost and efficiency that drive every business.
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.
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.
But focussing on how to grow might help. If I stick to the max 30 people rule, I will soon learn that I can do a lot with 30 people.
And if not, why do they have to be so closely integrated? Communication gets hard anyway in such a large group. Why not grow to 40 and then split into 20+20 and make the two teams two separate businesses, with their own office and at the same time reducing the width of the communication channel between the teams.
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.
Unless you are in a really unattractive area the chances the there is an empty floor in the same building just sitting around waiting for you is quite unlikely.
We could rent an ware house
I certainly don't want to work in the parts of town where warehouses are easily available no matter how nice the office. I would much rather walk/bike/short bus ride to a slightly crowded office in the center of town than drive to an office out in the middle of nowhere no matter how nice, but that's just me.
Top management started looking at more space a long time ago but it's hard to come by because we're smack in the middle of downtown in major city and a lot of the people working here are really enjoying the easy access to public transportation and general life of the city. Location was part of the reason I accepted the job myself.
We just found some additional offices though, so all is well again :)
1. Accessibility. Offices have to comply with the Americans with Disabilities act. This includes requirements determining how wide passageways have to be. So having a wall immediately in front of a door as you enter a room is problematic. You need enough space between the wall and the door for a person in a wheelchair to enter and turn around. This creates a lot of wasted space compared to not having the wall there. Likewise the study corrals in the quite space room are way too close together, the bathroom doesn't have a handicapped stall, if you have showers, one or more of the shower stalls will also need to be accessible.
2. I'm not sure how well the unisex bathroom would fly. There are code requirements for number of toilets / urinals required based on occupancy. Usually it ends up cheaper to separate the bathrooms since some of the requirements for men can be addressed with urinals, which are going to be cheaper.
3. There's a reason most offices don't have a stove. Once you put a stove in a pantry it becomes a kitchen - a commercial kitchen. This brings a host of other requirements for automatic fire suppression over the stove. Exhaust hoods over the range. Makeup air to replace the air pushed out by the range hood. Grease traps, all sorts of things. Not that it can't be done, it's just expensive and most companies will not pay for it.
4. Space requirements - the design is very space inefficient. While it's nice to have a big room shared by 3 people, it's going to cost a lot in terms of rent. Offices are leased in terms of $/sf. Every extra square foot that isn't being used is costing you money. The main reason companies like open offices is that they can cram a lot of people into a minimum amount of space. This would be really nice and a wonderful place to work, but it will cost a fortune.
I don't. This seem like a smaller version of an open office. Everyone has someone in their field of view, plus there's a TV and large glass windows with couches directly outside of them. That seem like a great way to get a little bit distracted all the time. Three people in one office is usually much worse than two people in a smaller office. Since if one person does something distracting, they are distracting the other two people. And when two people want to talk about something they are distracting the third person.
What the author describes seem more like "not having to go to meetings" or "not being bothered by management" than actually being able to work undisturbed for a predictable period of time.
This of a beautiful garden when many spots: open sun or shady, in a glasshouse or in an airconned glass covered veranda. And "office workers" just find themselves a spot!
Besides that I also thing standing desks are a must. This is the least you can do to mitigate early death by desk-job. On top of that I think that under desk treadmills are another huge step forward. And a spot where you can do a few stretching exercises (with a pull-bar) is also not a luxury in my opinion.
I have a patio in my front yard at home and sometimes on the weekends I try to bring my laptop outside to work on my own stuff while my puppy is tethered, and it's almost impossible to see anything on there, especially if the sun is out at all. Bring on the e-ink!
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)
In other words, unless you're Sebastian Thrun, Chris Lattner, Lars Rasmussen, Cliff Click or Guido van Rossum, your company doesn't care (and rightly so) about your lost productivity because it just simply doesn't matter.
Gentlemen whose names listed above, I am certain, can have any office they want.
It offers no insight in studies how much a single office improves productivity and how that affects overall revenue of the business. I'm convinced it's more then three times of the lease for office space.
And keep in mind that open-plan offices are turning away candidates (see comments in this thread). They are losing talent for optimizing for real estate usage. This needs to be factored in as well.
Clarifying my point: the office is time shared within the company. Different teams would have different days /in/ the office.
1. the author's estimate for non-commoditized software development is ridiculously low (0.1%)
2. even then, those 0.1% are at the risk of not getting private/shared offices. Do you want that for people working on medical devices or other fun critical stuff now embedded in your everyday life? Well, too late. They are working in shitty environment right now, I know that because I'm one of them. Maybe one of the reason they are, is because a "manager" read that kind of blog post which comfort them to be happy to do absurd economies.
3. you can have shared office room with multiple people per room. Even somehow big shared office room, if some trade-off are needed (although around 10 people should be a real max, otherwise above that there is no real difference with a big open-office floor.
4. if you want to do an economic analysis, even if the surface hypothetically needs to triple (which I don't believe for a sec, see above), you need to compare lost revenue per developer (or other interesting figures in case of not yet profitable) -- and think about non-linear factors -- to the cost of extra space renting (mostly linear). "Pay[ing] almost three times less in office rental costs" (which again, I don't believe) is not a business goal.
The lost productivity of a single person might indeed not matter much if the corp is big enough, but since everyone is sitting in the open-plan office, we're actually talking about maybe 10-20% productivity loss across all employees, which even for a big corp is quite massive.
Say about 12m2 (130sqft) per person. In London roughly £50-£100/sqft/annum. £6500-£13000 rent per person. So for e.g. Google in london are pretty central and are probably paying >£10000 per employee in rent assuming they are open plan.
Closed plan
Another article quotes triple the area. Sounds about right. So £19000 to £39000 per person per annum for the closed plan office.
Obviously this is going to be different if you set up in a new campus in a rural location, but tech companies seem to converge on areas with very expensive real estate SF, NY etc.
How do these numbers stack up with the productivity gains you would expect to make?
- 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 in person collaboration, pick a studio/lab like layout for the whole team (topping out at 10-12). But 3 people is just an odd middle of the road approach that's too awkward in practice, in my experience.
- The wall covering the door is a good idea in theory, but in reality it would probably mean distraction every time someone knocks at the door. How does the visitor see whether the person they want to see is in or not without entering and potentially distracting everyone?
- Bathroom stalls would work if they were fully closed stalls, European style. If this is in the US, then it'd get really awkward as you hear loud farts next to you and recognize the shoes of Jerry from accounting. Individual bathrooms would be much better.
- Those "quiet time" seats seem awfully tight, and the library inconveniently narrow.
Joel Spolsky built this type of office: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/
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 hand is great. In general I find my to be the most agile in teams of three. 3 opinions are a choice, and you can quickly find input if you don't have to stand up to move.
If I'm in the office I want to use that opportunity to be in close contact.
> The wall covering the door
You can peak through the window left and right of the door to see everyone in the room.
> Bathroom stalls
Good point, I'll just update the design (similar to the shower)
> Library
Yes, you could be right.
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?
It's the experience level in the middle between senior and junior.
Sprint planning: in the town hall if the sprint involves most of the team, or in on of the offices. A three people office can accommodate a small sprint team of 6-7 people.
Project brainstorming: In the town-hall, in the kitchen, maybe outside when taking a walk?
Private meetings: In most cases, the privacy of the corner seating areas will be enough, but I think most of the times at least small office will be vacant, because not everybody is in the office all the time.
Both of these are things that are best avoided.
A church seems appropriate to practice that kind of cult.
What I would add, black out blinds on all outer facing windows. I don't see a refrigerator or a coffee machine/water/drinks.
What I don't like.
I would say rather then a white board, do a white wall.
Is the TV screen really needed? Its so easy to just teleconference on your monitor.
Stand-up room needs to white board space for sure! Maybe use a projector instead of a the monitors?
Cant say I care for the bathroom RIGHT next to the kitchen, personally I would prefer those on opposite sides of the room.
I think the wall leading into each office takes up a ton of space, and adds little value. How about a sliding barn door style door instead.
Last and most controversial. Get rid of the laptops and give everyone a desktop machine. Create a laptop pool for people who want one when out of the office. Use VMs to get your environments on them quickly. Plus I LOVE two large monitors, but I do a lot of UX work. Code on the portrait monitor, browser in landscape.
Thx for sharing!
> Wouldn't you expect some employees to always take the laptops home
Maybe, but there's two issues here - they're either taking them for personal use, or they're taking them to do (additional) work on. In the majority of cases, you probably don't want to encourage either of these (in the same way you wouldn't encourage someone to stay in the office till 3 am).
There's probably a group (on-call, not always in the office, etc etc.) who would be better served by a docking station but speaking from the experience of working at a place where everyone gets a laptop, there's a significant majority who have either never or very rarely needed to take a computer out of the office in years but took the more expensive/more difficult to repair/more likely to fail hit anyway.
And I agree with tolien on keeping work at work in general (and everything else he said). You need a few laptops for people to take to clients and demos (depends on your business).
VM's make it incredibly easy to restore/set-up any kind environment quickly. And with everything in the cloud, you have almost instant access to code and docs.
Clearly it all depends what kind of business you're in, and how often adverse weather like that happens and how long it lasts (I'm speaking from a UK perspective where every few years there's two flakes of snow which cause carnage but have usually melted within a few days...), but if the result of a disrupted commute is that the HR people can't get to their email for a few days, the world isn't going to stop (see also: bus factor).
There's always remote access too - Citrix/SSH/RDP/VNC into your machine from afar, avoids having to install crap on your personal machine and the company still has control of their IP.
Right, unfortunately the asset library of the editor does not contain these items.
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 Markus' office design is excellent. What I would change however, is the television setup. I've been 100% remote for most of my career, so I'm always the guy on the television. I would much prefer to be on everyone's screens individually like a little StarCraft briefing room.
Some benefits:
- sound quality is better
- less chance of audio feedback
- visual cues (like when someone wants to interject) are easier to pick up on
- screen sharing is usually easier
- difference in latency is less pronounced
Primarily the TVs are used for sharing screens, and team metrics. So they are mostly used for data, rather then communication.
My dream office would have more rooms like this!
I imagined having a floor where people arrange themselves based on lighting preferences, so the farther you go into the floor the lower the lights are. You can't have the lights brighter then the previous office.
Personally, I find it extremely difficult to concentrate with music playing. It may be because I'm a musician, but (with a couple of exceptions) it just draws my attention from whatever it is I'm doing.
Here's a question though: in a workplace with lots of space that's able to offer a choice of a small private office or a well-set-up desk in an open office for every developer, would you still choose the open space? And would you be comfortable seeing people who are junior to you disappearing into private offices?
Now I have my final day in a open floor plan. For the second time in my life it has worked well, -IMO mostly because everyone is really nice and busily working on their own stuff.
I've also been in offices where they had 40-60 people in each open area, desk space just barely wide enough for a keyboard and mouse and no dividers between desks and no closed off meeting spaces. Working is such an environment was, let's say, much more of challenge
I love the 3-man office. Personally, I would just make it a 1-man office. I'm a very loud thinker and easily distracted so I really can't have anyone in the room when I'm hacking.
- office rooms (usually 1 team or half a team per room, about 3-4ppl)
- electric tables for everyone (so you can work either seated or standing)
- very nice kitchen, 2 * cooking facilities, 3 fridges, espresso machine
- sauna + showers + lockers and towels
- laundry facilities
- music room with bass, guitars, eletric drums, keyboards. also combined as VR room
- games lounge with big ass screen and some consoles and PC with proper "rally setup"
- big library with sofas
- quiet room with 2 beds
Additionally:
- occupational nurse comes to the office once a month
- physiotherapist comes to the office once a week for some exercise
- Monday morning starts with a common breakfast
and of course some very smart people!
Where was this?
That's the perfect office, and I know because I've worked in it and every other variation.
Personally I think it is really strange that people who earn six figures still has to shit next to each other with almost no privacy.
Fuck that. I am out of there for some air, a walk and peace.
I like the unisex bathroom. The majority of bathrooms are already unisex, as everyone have unisex restrooms at home. We could avoid a lot of complications by having them in the offices as well. Another good thing of your model is not having the gap in the stalls that is so common in the US. I also loved having a shower. One thing, why do you need the window between the bathroom and the kitchen? I don't like the idea of everyone in the kitchen looking who is going to the bathroom.
One thing that would bother me working in this office is that it looks like almost every computer screen has a window behind it or is facing a common area. I don't like that, personally.
The one-on-one meeting area, I think they would be better in a place with a whiteboard and more acoustic isolation and privacy. It could be used for interviewing a candidate too.
The stand-up room could lose one window in favor of a whiteboard.
But... some points made me cringe.
> The unisex bathroom has a separate shower for those that come to the office by bike.
I do not want a unisex bathroom. I've had a unisex bathroom... at work and in college and I don't want to go back to that again. Unisex bathrooms create way too many awkward situations... (And also, I wouldn't put the bathroom next to the kitchen... that's just odd.)
> The kitchen is very well equipped with a large stove, because cooking is a great social activity, and you can’t beat healthy, self-cooked lunch.
I don't want there to be a kitchen at work. Truth be told, I don't even want there to be a microwave at work... this is the source of the bad smells the author was complaining about. These things never get cleaned right. I've worked for a lot of agencies, including some really nice places, and unless they have full-time custodial staff going around cleaning up after you, the kitchen will always be disgusting. And the smell... encouraging people to cook at work I think is a horrible idea. If I had a kitchen... I certainly wouldn't put the stove against an interior wall, I'd want that to be vented outside with a strong range hood fan.
> No dedicated meeting room? Yes, meetings should be reduced to an absolute minimum and can be held in one of the offices or in the stand-up area. This makes them public and everyone easily has the chance to join in.
I'd want one or two dedicated meeting rooms. If only for interviews, or staff disciplinary meetings / HR meetings where it wouldn't be appropriate to have it in someone's office... I don't need a massive conference room, but a couple of 12x12 rooms with round tables and some white boards would be nice.
Fortunately this awkwardness can be avoided by having separate sex bathrooms, because people of the same sex are never attracted to one another.
> And also, I wouldn't put the bathroom next to the kitchen... that's just odd.
For plumbing reasons, things that require water tend to be near to one another. Ever noticed that bathrooms are always above one another, even in buildings with otherwise complicated floor plans? At least, I assume that's why.
Far less often, by biological imperative, so yes. It can be, if not avoided, diminished.
I could imagine having a second floor, that has more privacy features: single person offices, rooms for private conversations, power napping, nursing mums, yoga.
What do you think?
I've worked in places where people can't be trusted to wash their mugs and cutlery, though, so it wouldn't work everywhere.
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 they don't mind visitors. The window still lets others look in to peek at what they are doing, and the non window space on the door can still be used to put up signs, posters etc. as they would on the wall section.
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.
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.
1. Alternate configurations of the offices to handle growth. People are gonna get added, it's inevitable so you may as well make the best of it.
2. 2 - 4 meeting rooms. They're just a must. Customer / contractor calls, interviews, client meetings, private meetings (nobody wants to get fired in front of their peers), etc.
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.
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.
But people don't.
First, legal problems: you can't have a unisex multi-stall bathroom in the USA. I'm not sure if it's actually illegal (it probably is in many states), but it'll never fly even if it is. Honestly, what you really need is a male restroom that's about 5 times the size of the female restroom. Again, that won't fly politically, but practically it makes sense because there's so few women in software. Better yet is to just ditch the shared bathrooms altogether: they're nasty and smelly, and it's inhuman to have to sit on the pot next to someone with only a crappy divider which doesn't even go to the floor so you can see their feet and their pants around their ankles. You also have to worry about Idahoans playing footsie with you in there. Whoever came up with this idea has serious mental issues, and somehow it's the norm almost everywhere. Instead, just have separate 1-person unisex bathrooms, and put little showers in at least 2 of them for the cyclists.
The walled offices with giant windows: these windows are much too large on the inside. The whole reason for a walled office is to have privacy, and you're taking it away with those windows. Also, you're distracting the people sitting inside because they'll see all the people walking by their office, since that office will most likely open into a high-traffic corridor. Make the windows much smaller, maybe enough to see the top of the head of someone sitting inside and that's about it. Or just get rid of them altogether, or maybe have frosted glass. Windows on the other side are nice, but there's only so much space along the outside wall of the building, so who gets to sit here? Likely only managers.
The dedicated "quiet alone-time" places are great, but there aren't nearly enough of them. They're going to get monopolized, while all those "team spaces" are going to get ignored mostly. How about just having only the quiet 1-person places, and just one or two of the team spaces for the people who really like that or in case something comes up where people want to work as a team temporarily?
The library isn't a bad idea, but it's not nearly large enough.
The "townhall" is a massive waste of space. You don't need daily stand-ups, that's a patch for lousy management. The building should have a large meeting room shared by all departments for events where you need everyone present.
Honestly, we'd all be better off if we could go back to the way offices were in the 70s or 80s, minus the smoking inside part.
I do like his illustrations though: it reminds me of playing Duke Nukem 3D.
As far as I can tell, as long as the toilets themselves are separated, there's no issues (Youtube Space LA uses this format).
Granted it's not the same as an office bathroom, but I know of at least one mid-price but trendyish restaurant with a unisex multi stall bathroom here. And I'm in surprised-we-don't-have-a-trans-bathroom-bill-yet Missouri.
I've been in a few nice restaurants where the "stalls" were actually separate walled, tiled rooms with nice wooden doors with locks. Those bathrooms are a real joy to use compared to standard public restrooms. The darker tiles and wood and dimmer lighting and nice fixtures are also really nice. While the ones I was in were not unisex, I could see how that would work just fine, since the only area shared is the area with the sinks.
Honestly, I have a hard time seeing such bathrooms ever being commonplace; it seems like the people who design and build buildings just love having stalls with crappy little partitions that end 12 inches above the floor so you can peek into the neighboring stalls. You can't have that in a multi-sex bathroom for obvious reasons.
It is illegal in the US, see 29CFR1910.141(c): "...toilet rooms separate for each sex, shall be provided in all places of employment [...] Where toilet rooms will be occupied by no more than one person at a time, can be locked from the inside, and contain at least one water closet, separate toilet rooms for each sex need not be provided."
https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2016-title29-vol5/xml/CFR-...
Interesting. Care to elaborate?
I worked at home for almost ten years until two months ago when I started a job at a tech company at their main office. They have the oft-maligned[0] open-office layout, which coming from a work-at-home coding job, should have been really painful. Their approach, however, has worked out really well for me for a few reasons:
0/ Staff understands the need for concentration when coding. Almost everyone here is a software developer, so we're all respectful of one another. I was told on day one that if someone has headphones in, it's best to instant message them rather than walk up because there's an unwritten rule that "headphones" means "I'm concentrating". I actually wonder how many folks have headphones in with nothing on -- I use my active noise-cancelling cans regularly with nothing but the noise cancelling turned on because it gives solid, simulating, silence. But the thing of it is, the place isn't loud or overly distracting.
1/ There are a number of meeting rooms and couches throughout the office, located in quiet places, with no "rules" about use other than that scheduled meetings win over impromptu for meeting rooms. People are encouraged to work wherever they're comfortable and I prefer to sit on a couch with my feet up since while I was working at home I tended to work on my couch in the living room or in my bed rather than in my office[1]. The couches are placed in areas that are offset from the general office area, so they're quieter, as well. I simply don't sit at my assigned desk and nobody cares (really, it's encouraged). My desk is also located on a side of the office where lights are turned off because those who sit over there prefer it[1].
2/ They have a number of other alternative workstations set-up, like unassigned standing desks (with bar-stools for those who want to sit at a standing desk...). This allows me to switch things up when I'm in a rut and need an environment change to inspire me.
I thought it was going to be a lot more painful to adjust from working at home to working in an open-office environment. I'm finding I like it quite a bit, though. At the end of the day most companies have two choices for office layout -- open or cube farm. The reason is that cubicle walls are considered furniture under tax code, whereas offices are classified differently. This makes cube-walls far more cost effective than "real walls" due to the increased time that it takes for the latter to be allowed to be written off. Having done the cramped cube-farm arrangement, I'll take open. Cubicles are the worst of both worlds -- they feel like working in a (small) closet, and when laid out the way they typically are, they destroy ones ability to navigate an office, block natural light and make a place feel more prison-like. Open offices kill privacy and negatively affect concentration but allow light to flow and make the office feel big and ... open ... which I am finding I like quite a bit. Plus, it's a lot easier to ride the one-wheel skateboards around the office when there's fewer obstructions.
[0] Oft-maligned by me, specifically. I wrote regularly about my hatred of this kind of office but now having spent a few months working in one, I am enjoying it quite a bit provided a few features are present.
[1] I casually mentioned my dislike for the darker side of the office to one of the company founders who introduced himself while I was working on the couch in the kitchen. Before I could get the sentence out was told "Oh, just move your desk!". I haven't done so because I have no need. Sometimes I want to work in the dark (it's not actually "dark", it's just not lit by interior lighting -- our office is pretty bright due to the wealth of windows and natural light during the day), so I troll back there when I feel like it. Because I can work in so many different places in the office, it's irrelevant where my desk is.
Being given the choice to read someone's thoughts on improving people's lives isn't exactly oppressing you.
I'm just honestly disturbed how much this "issue" seems to resonate with hacker news. I could leave well enough alone, but I had an opinion I wanted to share.