Comment by BatFastard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by BatFastard | Hacker News Reader

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LOTs of things I like about this office layout.

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!

Okay you have my interest. Could you expand on why you would like to see desktops with laptops for a VM? Would the laptop borrowing happen on a night by night basis? Wouldn't you expect some employees to always take the laptops home. Genuinely curious as to why you think this would be better. (more cost effective, better office env, etc.)

Not the OP, but:

> 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.

There are other reasons to take a laptop home. For instance, at my workplace, the night before snow is predicted, nearly every single person will want to take their laptop home so that they can work from home the next day if it snows. If your laptop pool is smaller than the number of employees, there won't be enough laptops to go around.

Every single person will want to, but how many actually need to?

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.

I just can't imagine a software developer not owning a computer. Its a basic tool of your craft. I always have my own tools. An employer might prefer that I use theirs at the work place, but I dont depend on it for my livelihood.

Most companies don't want their IP floating around on computers that they don't control

In addition, a lot of people don't want to workify their computer.

Desktops over laptops for numerous reasons. Lower initial cost, better GPU (I work in graphics), ability to add more memory, ergonomic keyboards, ergonomics in general, lower lifetime costs (I still using some 17 year old computers, with upgraded processors, memory, hard-disks).

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.

> What I would add, black out blinds on all outer facing windows. I don't see a refrigerator or a coffee machine/water/drinks.

Right, unfortunately the asset library of the editor does not contain these items.

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