The true story of the Amazon door desk (2011) | Hacker News Reader

The true story of the Amazon door desk (2011)

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79 pointsPascLeRasc66 comments

A couple points of correction

> The hollow-core doors wouldn't have supported the weight—they would have cracked in places under the strain.

Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under. You run a 1x1 beam along the back and sides for support, and they'll hold 2 computer cases and 2 CRT monitors (smaller ones, but consider that LED monitors weight a LOT less than CRTs did) with no issue whatsoever.

> moving a exterior door through an interior door frame with legs permanently attached is a tricky task

Having literally _just_ built a shop table out of a solid core door and 3/4" plywood (for the bottom shelf) with 4x4 legs, this isn't an issue. You build it so that the legs are bolted to the top (or, more specifically, 2x4s attached to the top with L-brackets) and then take them off (a couple minutes of work), move the desk, and them put them back on (a bit more than a couple minutes, but still not bad).

I built my workbench in my garage and them moved it down to the basement shop (because it doesn't have walls yet and the sawdust from cutting would have made a mess), finishing the task just this past weekend.

Side note... if you follow a similar route, I recommend a 28" wide door. I originally bought a 32" and had to cut it down after realizing it would be uncomfortable reaching over it to the pegboard on the wall to retrieve items.

It cost me somewhere in the range of $400 to complete the workbench, I believe (I'm not positive on that). If you add in the time to build it (if you have to pay someone), it most certainly would have been cheaper to buy a desk (I agree with him here).

> "Having used my own hollow core desks going back to 1985 or so (with an original IBM PC sitting on such a desk)... I have yet to see a reasonable load they would crack under."

yup. part of the founding tale of idealab, the pasadena startup incubator, is the use of hollow-core doors on filing cabinets as desks. they have maybe 150 such desks in use there. i've used them and they're more than adequate for that purpose.

I also came here to comment on the hollow core doors "breaking". Back in the late '80s I made myself a hollow core door desk. I didn't use a 1x1 beam either.

Hollow core doors are what is called "torsion box" design, and they are stupidly strong for their weight. I used a hollow core door supported on one end on a filing cabinet (which really was a bit high, even for me), and on the other end by a cheap sawhorse I built using 2x4s and some metal brackets.

I can remember having at least two largish monitors (17" CRTs), and associated computers on them, and they never seemed to have any problem carrying the weight. Used them for probably a decade, before I switched to a more mobile chic and disassembled the desk for scrap.

Similar: My grandfather, back in the early '80s, got a line on some scrap hollow core doors with a nice birch veneer. He turned them into some great 2.5'x6' bookshelves, and I loved those things! The sides, shelves, and back were still hollow core doors, so fairly thick. The would hold a full complement of books, no problem. But I could carry both of them at once. I could put a palm in the middle of the top shelf and lift one up with each hand.

Don't underestimate the strength of a torsion box!

hollow core doors are not all equal; some are almost entirely hollow, while others have several cross-members along their height (length when used as a table). There are plenty that are just a frame plus a single cross-member at handle height, and those will not hold any significant weight away from the center when used as a desk.

They don't need any interior structure to be strong. That is the nature of a stressed skin panel.

A stressed skin panel provides rigidity to the frame; the skin is not any more puncture resistant.

You build it so that the legs are bolted to the top (or, more specifically, 2x4s attached to the top with L-brackets) and then take them off

Yes, you could, or even should do this. But that's now that happened. This person is explaining what he saw, not explaining how something should be ideally done.

That famous picture of Bezos with a spray-painted "Amazon.com" sign above his desk was also a lie and for show. Bezos was very certain he would become a billionaire and planned carefully to appear rags-to-riches. You have got to admire that kind of long term planning and conviction. What a brilliant guy.

I'm pretty sure he was already a billionaire when that was taken.

The video is from 1999 and, quoth Wikipedia: "He was first included on the Forbes World's Billionaires list in 1999 with a registered net worth of $10.1 billion."

Is there a source for this claim? If so, I'd like to read it and learn more about it

Pretty sure they're being facetious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuI-ss5aQU8

Go to 7:47.

I used to work as an SDE for Amazon at their Vancouver, BC office. The door desk was the default desk you would get. And they were, as Amazonians call it, the "frupid" option. There was a long wait time, and they were shipped from Washington.

Then everyone requested an ergonomic height-adjustable desk and they had to move those door desks somewhere. Very frupid indeed. I wonder how many warehouses of door desks they have somewhere.

Would be funny if Amazon of all companies would throw up their hands and jam excess junk in a storage warehouse somewhere.

Sell em as vintage .com 1.0 memorabilia.

My last startup had about 10 desks built like this, a solid wood door with 4x4 legs attached with metal brackets. They were pretty good. The advantage of this design over sawhorses is that you can sit anywhere without bumping your legs. I put a monitor and keyboard in the middle, used the left side for mechanical parts and right side for paperwork.

At the time (early 2000s) it was really hard to buy manufactured desks. Herman Miller desks cost like $3000 and had a 6-8 week lead time. But you could build a DIY desk for $200 in 90 minutes including the trip to Home Depot.

A cheap Dania dining room table with extendable leaves works great, too. It's fairly light, sturdy, and lots of workspace.

Why was it hard to buy desks? Herman Miller is top of the line, but even today at any big box office supply store you can find ~5 ft desk for ~$150. And there's always IKEA for even less.

At Ikea in Portland I spent $35 for the largest top and 4x$4 legs.

So just $51 for a nice looking dependable desk.

Hollow core doors are around $30 at HD, and probably larger than that top.

50% of the people in these startups are so backward that they have never even been in a furniture store or apparently can’t buy used desks for next to nothing. The other 50% seem to be cultivating faux “look how frugal/hard working we are” sentiment.

Ikea is crap. If you want a lasting desk, hit up a used office furnishing place in your town. For 50 bucks you can have a classic or modern desk with delivery to boot.

Yep, a few hours searching garage sales will usually find one too, though transport can then be an issue. Either way, if you're a startup, between garage sales, use furniture stores, and craigslist you can spend a day or so scouring the area and probably find a dozen desks. If you need to, rent a Uhaul for $100 for transport. Sure, nothing will match, but if you're a cash-poor startup trying to get a round of VC, fancy offices shouldn't really be a focus.

Interesting discussion from 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210868

Is the implication that the purpose of the door desk was to merely APPEAR frugal? Or did it have some other original purpose entirely? I still didn't quite get that part.

Yes, that's the implication.

Yes, that's the implication, but it even if it was for appearances, It still would have been much less expensive than anything considered "commercial" grade, though you could always get something from IKEA or a spartan option from a big box office supply store for around $100 to $150.

Per tfa they were custom doors and cost more than most desks.

He claims they were expensive, but in the top of the article he states two other things: That it's been so long he can't be relied on for accurate recollections, and also that when they first started using door, it did in fact make financial sense.

Most doors have a margin that can be cut to the desired height, which is what "tfa" said was done. That doesn't make it a custom door though. The author said he observed the desks being made, so it sounds like he saw them being cut to the desired height and, not knowing that was common for doors, assumed they must be expensive and therefore custom.

Maybe they were expensive! But the author is not a reliable narrator on the topic, and without some better evidence I'm not inclined to believe amazon went from using typical solid-core doors for a while, but then went out of their way to find very expensive doors.

I'd guess the door desks cost $100-150 to build, more if they had a dedicated desk builder. XD

I have a hard time believing that'd be cheaper than having a stock of ikea desks and having your new employees put them together on their first day.

Source: Someone that had to put an ikea desk together on his first day at his internship. xD

Honestly that was not the worst place I worked at either.

I need a list of companies that use Ikea desks. Every place I've worked at has those awful laminate desks with the metal back and beige metal filing cabinets. I hate them so much. They give me wrist, back, and neck discomfort, there's no room underneath for your feet, they don't feel good to use, they look depressing, and no matter what I do say or what value I bring in, I can't get a replacement since "no one else complains". If a place said I had to build an Ikea desk or even bring my own, I'd consider that a huge huge perk.

Yes, that's what he's saying. It was actually more expensive than other cheap options, uncomfortable to work at, inconvenient to move, and was basically all downside except that it helped sell the frugal image they were trying to push to starry-eyed investors.

Dunno about originally, but it certainly is now. From ~5 years ago, mine wasn't really a door, shipped to my satellite office, and they're not height-adjustable, so unless you ask, someone 5'0" uses the same desk as someone 6'4".

I guess this a difference between being frugal (or appearing that way) and being cheap. I can tell you from my paycheck, Amazon's not cheap.

Attaching 4x4's, or any board, as the desk legs seems like overkill. The correct way to do this is to just place the door on a pair of sawhorses.

A 12ft 4x4 (enough for 4 desk legs) can be had from Home Depot for $12.75. It might be structural overkill, but it's pretty cheap.

A simple sawhorse made out of 2x4s will probably need 20-30 linear feet of wood, depending on the design, which will $7 - $10 per sawhorse, or $14-$20 total. Building the sawhorses also takes more time than installing 4x4 legs, so labor cost is higher.

Of course, the 4x4 legs will likely need some brackets for strength against horizontal forces (e.g. leaning against the desk), so the total price including labor probably comes out as a wash.

I don't much care for the look & feel of plywood. My favorite workbench I built out of ordinary lumber bolted together with carriage bolts, and the surface is 1x8 unfinished pine planks screwed down. It feels good, looks good, and has that nice pine smell.

High grade plywood can look and feel nice. My desk is a height adjustable base, with 3/4" baltic birch as the top. I put a chamfer on the top edge, and drilled desk grommet holes, and then put a couple coats of lacquer on it.

Speaking only for myself, now everyone in my office has an adjustable height standing desk. It's wonderful and way better than the standing options at the prior companies I was at that you could only get if you had a documented medical issue.

During our team's recent move/restack, about 80% of our desks were replaced with adjustable standing desks.

The door desk is dying.

Indeed. The word is that's the new policy and standard (adjustable height desks for all).

I tweaked my back at the gym and spent a ~week standing at my desk. It wouldn't have been worth it to have a doctor check me out and get a special desk for just a week, so having the option was very nice.

There's really no point in making your own furniture these days unless you're doing it as a hobby. Ikea and other flatpack furniture shops have made furniture so insanely cheap.

MDF and plastic fittings have made furniture cheap and disposable, when it used to be something that would last a lifetime (or several, I have furniture from my grandparents). Now it's often easier to just throw your Ikea shit on the side of the road when you move house than it is to take it with you.

I've built plenty of my own furniture in my time, it's something that I really enjoy. But if I was trying to save time or money, I'd never bother.

Disposable furniture is not worth the cost. Buying a 300 dollar chiar seems dumb until you throw out 7 50 dollar chairs in the meantime. Not to mention the environmental impact of this antique mindset.

I sat at a door desk, arranged with 7 others into a pinwheel under a garden umbrella at Tellme, and it was awesome. Of course that was a great team, and the trains rushing by were fun too.

I never really understood how these desks were "frugal". I looked into doing something similar in early 2005 after hearing stories about these, but solid-core doors were more expensive than the other options. I ended up buying two two-drawer filing cabinets (because I needed storage space anyway), running two 2x4s between them, and laying two 2'x4' sheets of MDF on top. All the parts, including the filing cabinets, cost less than a solid-core door alone.

> I never really understood how these desks were "frugal"

Ditto. It might make sense to build a door desk if you happen to have a suitable door in need of disposal.

My girlfriend made a decent workstation out of a 3/4" 4x8 melamine panel ($30), some cheap Ikea Kallax-like shelf units for legs ($20/ea), white corner trim ($1.75/ft) to make the edges nice, and whatever the screws and nails cost. Probably $120 all-in.

SF startup I visited in 99/00 had doors with 2 file cabinets as the standard desk. Seems a lot more practical and requires no construction tools or skills.

It depends on where you get the doors from, you could probably get used ones from building recyclers or ebay for very little.

Used doors would make sense. I always got the impression they were buying new ones, though.

At least where I live, solid core slab doors are $40 at Home Depot. You could almost certainly build a desk top from lumber that would be cheaper, but not by a significant margin.

I just had to shop for doors, the only ~$40 doors I could find at home depot were hollow core, like these: https://www.homedepot.com/p/Masonite-30-in-x-80-in-Primed-Sm...

I don't see them on Home Depot's website any more, but they weren't pre-drilled, pre-hung, pre-primed, or mortised for hinges, none of which matter for desk tops, but perhaps that's why they were that cheap. I thought about replacing some of the hollow core doors in my house with them, but I don't trust my ability to install anything more than pre-hung doors. I already had a motorized standing desk, so I wasn't in the market for a cheap desk top, either.

The cheapest solid core I can find is an $84 Jeld-Wen: https://www.homedepot.com/p/JELD-WEN-32-in-X-80-in-Hardboard...

In contrast, the pieces I mentioned above are $16 ($6 ea. for the MDF, $2 ea. for the 2x4s)

I can buy a desk from Ikea for $40 too, and it even has drawers.

> I never really understood how these desks were "frugal".

That's what the article is saying. They weren't frugal, at all. But they looked frugal to investors who were willing to be duped.

I made my door-desk with a used solid-core door purchased from Habitat for Humanity and a set of Ikea legs. The door was under $40 (although it was on sale when I bought it), and the set of Ikea legs was...I want to say around $30 with tax?

You don't really need solid core. Typing this on an old 30" monitor with a bunch of other hardware on a hollow core that I've used as a desk for 10 years.

The best "startup" desk that I've seen used often, and even brought to my home office is using the Ikea melltorp dinner table as a desk:

https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/melltorp-table-white-s19011777/

It's sizable, metal framed with a tabletop (not 4 legs screwed into a top), and $69.

I've been using a dinner table as my home desk for a while now, I really love it [1]. It's the perfect height, the surface feels great, and it looks beautiful. Best of all, it was free on trash night!

[1] https://i.imgur.com/TSo7BK6.jpg

Jeff shows off his desk here: https://youtu.be/Q4f41fqxftU?t=75

Thank you, was a great video. Comparisons of that time are cringy, especially about the stock market, but he succeeded through the 2001 bubble and the 2008 crisis. His first house in Seattle shows he wasn’t afraid of cutting costs for his lifestyle.

> before they split the warehouse (down south of the viaduct) and the offices (in the heroin district of Seattle near Pike Place Market) before I joined.

Ugh. Sorry, this is off-topic.

I wish people who characterize Seattle like this just left. Sure, maybe there is a heroin epidemic and it's more visible in some areas than others, but downtown Seattle and Pioneer Square (arguably more sketchy) are so much more than the "heroin district". They're also beautiful and interesting neighborhoods, full of wonderful people.

/rant

It's way off topic considering they were talking about 90s Seattle and you don't seem to be. Anyways, it read like tongue-in-cheek humor to me.

attaching legs to a door sounds like overkill. For many years I had a door on top of 2 sawhorses. Easy to move. I used an indoor door so lighter than an outdoor door. Had no issues. IIRC I put cloth over the sawhorses both because the door sat better on cloth and because I could arrange the cloth to cover the end of the sawhorse sticking out to avoid spliters.

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