The Curse of a New Building | Hacker News Reader

The Curse of a New Building

steveblank.com

67 pointsaycangulez26 comments

A friend of mine who has created several successful non-profit organizations adds a "no buildings" clause to the bylaws of every new organization he creates.

He believes that once non-profit organizations accumulate some capital, the first thing they do is build a big new building, and that's the beginning of a downhill slide.

Unfortunately, the same mentality applies to universities, too. They love to build new buildings instead of hiring the best faculty.

Might have something to do with the fact that university donors love to build new buildings instead of just giving the university money to be spent on HR. (And then the university doesn't have a guaranteed funding source for a top professor? Yikes!)

Endowed chairs work a bit better, but those usually don't go towards new recruitment.

Isn't that, in turn, perhaps because oftentimes donors then get to name the building? At least this seems common in the US, but that's just an observation from the outside.

Yep. Large donors also like to only pay for constructing buildings, not maintaining them.

My university did exactly this. (Supposedly) spent anywhere between £5 mil and £50 mil on a new building; £80,000 on their opening ceremony with lots of local celebrities; and then left all the students with 4 year-old hardware for design/video courses.

I really appreciated the sterile white-washed building for creative courses while attempting to use After Effects on a G5 iMac :|

It was the money ("our sales skyrocketed") that changed the company culture, not the building. It isn't hard to maintain an atmosphere of egality and shared sacrifice when there's no money to go around. Once the company is flush with profits, the founders are looking at a big payoff, and management is drawing full salaries, telling employees to continue on as if nothing as changed will eventually lead to discontent. Building a new office probably seemed like the easiest way to address all the complaints that had arisen after the company ceased being a startup, and became a success.

Wouldn't explaining the reasons for not moving while using the money instead for generous employee bonuses solve that problem?

In the short term ... but how to tap psychologically into new hires who never went through that experience, and whose initial perceptions and expectations need to be set?

My old company did the opposite of this. As they expanded, they built worse and worse office environments. I started out in a nice 10x10 cube, and ended up in a 5x5 low-walled cube, on an 'expansion floor'.

After I quit, the primary building tenant moved to a new building, and the company I had had worked for became primary. This auspicious event was marked by the building cafeteria (fairly decent as these things go) shutting down, so not even hot food was available.

So yeah, not all companies get better digs as they expand.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to work long hours in a cramped, smelly cubicle on a second-hand half-broken chair when the company is wading in cash.

"Good programmers are not motivated by material needs" and yada yada, but we really don't like feeling exploited.

Very true. Just moving everybody into their own offices can destroy interaction. Its as bad as communicating solely by email.

... and reduce interruptions and non-productive idle chit-chat.

That said, I think that in the future, at least in software development, more and more developers are going to be working from home or coffee shops, because it has so many advantages over the commute-office-cubicle-corporate-meeting culture. Company spends less on office space. Developers get interrupted less and so can stay in productivity zones longer. Employees spend less time and money on non-productive & never-ending activities (commuting) and experience less health risk (car accidents) and cause less air & noise pollution (driving). I also suspect (though not 100% positive) it will put downward pressure on the number of middle managers needed, and thus save companies even more. Employees still need to be "managed" but if all the worker bees are remote than there is less cover and opportunity for managers to create makework and timesinks solely to help justify their own jobs.

I personally still find it easier to focus on work and eliminate distractions when I'm at the office. That, and the ability to quickly discuss a problem with colleague or bounce a solution off him or her exposing flaws is great. No high typing speed can replace live human interaction, IMO.

isolation isn't about high typing speed I think as much as about high thinking speed -- shrinking the think-act-check loop, and maximizing the freshness of short term memory. and cutting out unnecessary stimulation and tangents. i think if you're stuck, yes, communicating with other folks can help get unstuck. but that can be done with IM, video chat, email, phone, screen sharing, pastebin, etc. There's advantages to live bodies in an office, definitely, but lots of disads too.

"... Very true. Just moving everybody into their own offices can destroy interaction. Its as bad as communicating solely by email. ..."

An office with a door, no interaction and communicating by email is a hacker dream.

Depends on with whom, I think. With management, and colleagues in non-engineering departments, absolutely. But with coworkers on their own team who are hopefully their buddies, I don't think this is true. I had the enormous privilege of having met some incredibly interesting people by working with them, and being able to talk with them - whether "productively" or not (there was plenty of both) - was one of the best and most enduring aspects of the job.

Not sure I buy this. I wear earplugs and deliberately avoid making eye contact to avoid being distracted. An office would be the same thing, except someone could just knock on the door to get my attention.

Offices are good for people who do work. Cubicles are good for people that want to talk about what they're "going to" work on.

No one way is right for every individual and organization, and I'm not going to be arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong about your situation. I do feel that the "all devs must have private offices" can optimize for a perception of individual productivity at the expense of the broader team productivity.

Personally, I find that being alone in an office is best when I've got a very clear understanding of the problem to be solved, my stakeholders have a very clear understanding of how I'm going to solve the problem, and I don't need to help anyone else with what they're trying to get done.

That's to say, almost never.

I suspect a lot of "private offices for developers because their #1 enemy is distractions" talk is cover for the introverted preferences of many developers. This type of personality sees almost all chit-chat as inherently distracting.

I have been in the seemingly unusual position of being a highly extroverted - dare I say, socially dependent? - developer and technician in my career. As such, I found it gratifying to be able to talk to my coworkers easily both from a workflow perspective and, well, just to socialise. It has led to some enduring professional and personal relationships that have lasted long beyond my past jobs themselves, and has formed the basis of a number of key business opportunities for me.

So, I think a more outgoing person is more likely to find some satisfaction in being able to talk to others easily, instead of consciously having to leave his/her secluded office and wander around--looking conspicuously unproductive in ways considered uncouth in corporate America--for that purpose. Such a person is also going to find it easier to manage the distractions posed by others in more natural, intuitive, fluid ways than awkwardly putting on headphones or demonstratively ignoring someone.

There are ways to make people around you go away or pipe down without confirming their ugly stereotype of developers as Asperger's geeks; for clues, if this behaviour does not strike you as self-evident, take a look at how people in more managerial, sales-y and marketing roles do it. They say things like, "Well! I need to get back to this (gestures to screen), I'll catch up with you in a while," or, "Excuse me, I really gotta call this guy back..." That's congenial code for GTFO; it does rely on your companion to get the message, but you'd have to be dealing with some pretty thick people for them to be oblivious to the GTFO part.

That said, I definitely understand and sympathise with the plight of those stuck in noisy cubicle farms replete with salespeople and ringing phones, the sort of suit-driven sardine floor plan that inspired this whole "offices for developers" movement. To appreciate what I have to say above without running for the hills screaming, you definitely need to be in a basically manageable noise, people and traffic situation and have fundamentally reasonable coworkers and management, from the perspective of a technical implementor.

Cubicles are the worst of both worlds, where you have the noise of open floor plan, but not the collaboration. You have the social isolation of private offices, but not the real focus-inducing solitude.

Exactly. Earplugs are an amazing improvement, though.

It's all about the environment. Offices work great, as long as you have good hallways that force people to walk around. Hallway conversations give you the value of the cube farm without the need to learn about the medical history, marital problems and other minutae that the cube farm's false privacy offers.

That said, I think ops people work better in open plan offices.

Can someone explain "tiltup" ?

It's a style of building that was very popular doing the boom in Silicon Valley during the 80's and early 90's. Construction crews would pour the walls into molds, let them dry, and then literally tilt them up and put a roof on them.

It was weird to drive through parts of the Silicon Valley (e.g., North 1st St.) finding buildings had been tilted up in what had been flat land the week before.

Quite a few of those buildings are empty now.

Blank linked the word to http://www.tiltup.com/ (maybe after initial reader confusion) to provide context.

Looks to me like the miles and miles of low-rise office parks in Silicon Valley include lots of 'tilt-up' concrete-slab construction.

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