An inside look at Yandex.ru's offices | Hacker News Reader

An inside look at Yandex.ru's offices

englishrussia.com

56 pointsprofquail23 comments

As fantastic as this office is, I'd hate to work in a environment where anybody can freely look over my shoulder at any time. I'll take privacy and a dull office over this any time. We've managed to satisfy this concern (http://www.mojalbum.com/popcom/popcom-office) and I'm really happy about our office.

What are you doing at work that you don't want people looking over your shoulder? Serious question by the way - it always comes up in work environments that some people are pretty against the lack of privacy that comes along with these types of set ups, but really if you are at work there shouldn't be too much (if anything) on your screen which is private.

I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.

If you have that, and also offer a few "quiet rooms" where you can go if things are loud or you need to check your personal email, I don't see what the problem is.

I think it is more a principle than a pragmatic choice. People want privacy for no other reason than having it.

> I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and everyone is together with no walls between.

Visual and audio noise.

They're really bad for productivity of creators. They're good for managers / coordinators / investors.

The standard argument that "you can wear headphones" doesn't work for serious design work. Pounding music is great for grinding through list-ish stuff, but not for creativity.

It's like sleep deprivation. People who are sleep deprived will insist "I'm fine -- I just need a coffee", but their performance is much lower than those who are well rested.

EDIT> I'm not responding to the over-the-shoulder question here. I find it very distracting to see others' faces, though, e.g. with back-to-back monitors. Most of us are wired to pay attention to faces, so they cause a lot of visual noise.

At this point in my career, open-concept offices with > 4 or so people are a deal breaker. It makes me hate programming.

HackerNews.

I just don't like somebody looking at my monitor. I also don't like somebody looking over my shoulder when I'm reading a book or a newspaper, and there's nothing to hide there. It just makes me nervous. I just don't like being on display and knowing that at all times somebody could be watching me and I wouldn't even know it. That's why I like the layout of our office. We are all together, not 2 meters apart from each other, but everybody can "hide" behind his monitor(s) and have his privacy. Also the way we are organized I don't see others people's faces unless I want to (JabavuAdams pointed this out in his reply to you)

Wow, they're just like us!

The images looked like they had been badly scaled with nearest neighbor in Chrome, so I reopened the page in Firefox, then looked at the original image.

Sure enough, when the photographer took the original image off their camera and scaled it down for the web, they used a low quality interpolation. For some reason. Damned unprofessional.

http://media.englishrussia.com/ya/0_59819_f6ec66d1_orig.jpg

Looks like "Russian" from some Hollywood movies. Not a single word in real Russian :-)

at least the alphabet is right :) the rest looks pretty believable though, makes me wonder what that text is supposed to represent

Pretty sure those are all acronyms.

Not a single one is real acronym. Looks more like "made-up lols".

Yes, as a native Russian speaker there isn't a single acronym or word that makes sense to me. But maybe those are Yandex's own acronyms. Or maybe they just made some shit up for the journalist.

there are a lot of Os in those.

I'm guessing it stands for Otvet

both are carrying what seems to be cigarette packs. They have smoking rooms now. What happened to the conveniency of smoking right in from of the computer? Did computers riot against second-hand smoking?

Smoking at your workplace is prohibited in Russia. It's good

What is going on here?

http://media.englishrussia.com/ya/0_59828_2cce1aaa_orig.jpg

It's very clearly the tubes that connect Yandex to the rest of the web.

The lower part is underfloor heating. I don't know what the higher part is, but I would guess that they retrofitted underfloor heating and used existing overhead pipes for the water. Normally those pipes would be well-hidden.

That photographer needs to learn how to use the appropriate aperture. Wrongly-focused photographs hurt my eyes.

Love the plants and the open floor plan. Time to ditch the fluorescents though. That is a deal killer.

Not sure if I will ever understand why anyone would sit on the floor to do anything with a computer when their is nice chairs available, and yet they designed space just for that.

How much have they looked at Google and how much have this culture developed "on its own" in Moscow?

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