Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuiA | Hacker News Reader

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Cool post. A few issues I see:

- 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.

> 30 people team

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.

> 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?

It sounds uncomfortably close to "mediocre".

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.

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.

What would be a good description of this, then?

Agree -- it's better than most (and good job fleshing out the design), but there does still seem to be an air of "let's make 1-person spaces undesirable because we don't really trust the minions to work without someone watching them."

I actually imagined having a second floor which is even more quieter, just with offices. There you could have single person rooms.

Joel Spolsky built this type of office: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/

Yep, if you need to have developers working on-site, a Joel-esque layout is going to be hard to beat.

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