The Office Matters | Hacker News Reader

The Office Matters

avc.com

45 pointscoffee13 comments

"When you are less than ten people, it is hard to invest in stuff like this."

True, but if you have the right 10 people, you won't have to 'invest' in it, it'll just happen. If an environment that small is created by the 'company' and forced on the 10 employees, they probably won't like it anyhow. If they design it themselves, and put their backs into it, they'll almost always love it.

Part of a good culture at startups is allowing the employees to evolve it themselves.

Our company is 5 people right now. Our lead engineer started buying friday beers for the team. Then I asked our CEO to have the company pay for it, and he did. We now have a beer and snack budget

One of the Junior engineers brought in a PS3. We destroy each other a couple of times a week playing Soul Calibur.

We've got a big long list of things we want to do to make our office a better place to spend time. It's empowering to be able to change your situation.

I agree. I have been at Etsy since the (relatively) early days and despite what the post says the office was pretty much the same, except in a crappier Brooklyn neighborhood. It didn't take more employees or more money to have a great DIY space.

Dick Costolo (Twitter COO, Feedburner founder) wrote a great article about the organizational impact of the office lay-out back in 2007 - http://www.burningdoor.com/askthewizard/2007/09/no_offices.h... - he's for Open Plan offices. He says they increase interdepartmental communication, which is true in my experience.

I cringed when he described engineering "being able" to listen to support people talk with clients all day long.

There is nothing worse than hearing one side of phone conversations when I'm trying to concentrate; it's like having a power drill grinding into my temple.

It seems like a lot of management types love open-plan offices because of the opportunities for serendipitous communication. I understand that, and can see the value if you're a CEO and your job is to be on top of things.

But a programmer's job is to be on the bottom of things. Hearing about some change to some component through the office chatter is completely immaterial to me and my day unless I'm actually working on that specific piece of code at that moment. All "being on top of things" means is that I'm distracted from the stuff I need to focus on.

This is the chief argument against open plan offices - it can be difficult for people involved in intense mental work to concentrate.

Would headphones w/ noise cancellation help? Even if you didn't play music through them?

Yes, and I've done so in the past, but it gets uncomfortable by the 8 hour mark.

>Would headphones w/ noise cancellation help? Even if you didn't play music through them?

KISS; sounds like some really expensive ear plugs.

Earplugs are definitely a simple solution, but have the drawback of not being highly visible to people around you.

When I need to concentrate, I wear my big Sennheiser headphones - often not even plugged into an audio source.

They are very comfortable for long periods, block out most of the noise, and (best of all) they send a clear "do not disturb" message to anyone thinking of interrupting.

This. A million times, this.

It drives me fucking insane when I'm trying to work stuff out mentally to hear people speaking.

Edit: ear buds aren't great since I'd like to still hear in 10 years, plus, in my ears, they get uncomfortable around hour 4-5. And I've tried the full variety of foam and hard, medium, and soft plastic that Shure offer; they still get uncomfortable after long enough.

I think I should reuse that idea of the weekly waffle meeting (mentioned in the comments) in our team :)

Anyway, I'm happy to see someone argument that: office matters, as do building architecture. Office arrangement clearly influence the way folks work together, when, how they eat etc. Evidently the business results are influenced by the office arrangement amongst others.

I'm of two minds about offices. We should make them as great as possible. But we should also try to eliminate them entirely. Office/commute/cubicle culture is the cause of much waste, pollution, inefficiency, parasitism and distraction, reduced productivity and meta/make-work. Are there situations where a company office is a net win? Probably. But I'm sure there are lots of cases where it's a net negative.

This reminds me of something I've been curious about: is an office essential for a startup? Through my consulting, I've seen lots of companies embracing the remote thing, but few startups. Does it just not work? Why not?

Are there any examples of startups that have had most or all of their team remote that were successful and built a strong culture and identity?

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