Why Googleplex Architect Says Luxury On-Site Perks Are 'Dangerous'
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It's just a complete failure of urban development thanks to NIMBY. Cities want to keep Google in their area for obvious financial reasons, but don't want to touch any of their precious SFH zoning. So they let Google to do everything they want, even housing. Google's recently trying to develop urban area around their campus (San Jose has the most buzz but it seems MTV and Sunnyvale also has a similar masterplan? You'll be surprised to see how aggressive Google is on purchasing real estates around their campus) and I guess their primary motivation is to outsource as many office functionality as possible to third parties. We'll see how many "free perks" will remain after that.
Google/Facebook offices are one of the best places in the south bay to hang out and that's fucking terrible.
Solving it is hard, but the answer is definitely not "make the offices worse so that the crappy soulless neighborhood nearby seems better."
I agree that this is the main reason. Facebook in Menlo Park is similar. There's not much within walking distance and certainly nothing that could handle the scale of thousands of workers showing up.
Salesforce is a company that generally has taken a different approach. There are no cafeterias, but many of the main offices are in urban areas with plenty of nearby infrastructure.
Sounds like Amazon
Google Warsaw is in a vibrant city center and there's tons of restaurants around.
If you look at the GooglePlex, there are no other offices around. It's just Google. Neighbors are a park and nature preserve, NASA AMES research center and a Highway.
(And 2 hours to get a hamburger in Sunnyvale? Must be St. John’s)
Mountain View I guess :)
But not an environment where it's easy to get work done.
But mainly, I want an office with a door that closes. I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own mouse, again, selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own chair, which I have selected and adjusted for its ergonomic properties. I want to put pictures of my kids on the walls. I want to leave physical notes to myself. And have reference books nearby. I want a plant.
I do not want a soul-less hotel-style "business workstation." And I especially don't want one in an open floor plan with everyone talking over everyone else.
Get it through your thick, stupid skulls.
"It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." -Greg "Joz" Jozwiak
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history...
[2] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...
My impression is that Microsoft has done offices very well, but at the cost of locality with team members (since shuffling offices is a great deal more burdensome than shuffling an open floor plan).
^This. I enjoy using a nice electromechanical keyboard, but the noise from typing (even on a model with quieter/damped key switches) is incompatible with a shared/open plan office space.
But the greatest reasons are privacy, a sense of spatial ownership, and freedom from distraction and interruptions.
Though my colleagues have noted previously that they find the level of volume coming from my keyboard to be less a distraction and more a useful indicator of how interruptable I am that I don't need to deliberately update.
I want all the above, along with face time with co-workers and a half hour commute separating it from home.
Working in a random area from a laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. I want a specific keyboard, specific mouse, and specific monitors. I don't want a tiny laptop screen plugged into a dock with the same generic Dell equipment that comes with every machine, and I don't want to have to lug in my own equipment every single time I come to the office.
It's also nice to have a spot that's "mine" for the most minimal of personal touches - I can leave my headphones there, I can have post it notes on the monitor reminding me of things, I could even have a picture if I wanted.
That's why you see offices with giant empty slides in the lobby, treadmills with a laptop stand that are never used, hangout spaces your boss doesn't allow you to be in, et cetra. They're there to fool candidates and post posed pictures on the company website, nothing more.
I've worked in offices where people actually go to hang out spaces, and other useful places. Not everyone has a controlling boss like that, and most places that build these spaces likely don't have that sort of management.
Don't get me wrong. It has plenty of upsides to it, but yes you get this other impractical aspect. I'm pretty sure this guy is the main reason open offices got so huge in my God, do we all hate them.
Also tired of these people who cash huge checks and then have regrets.
This makes me scream in my head. Do we really believe this? Should we really believe this? Have there been no successful adults who were not fermented in an office?
This article is an interview with an architect who designs offices for large corporations. He has to believe this, otherwise he's out of a job.
I don't think that he is trying to make a sociological statement but to emphasise the impact of the offices on peoples development.
IMHO open plan offices are a fermenting ground for burned out adults asking themselves at what point they will have a personal space like a grown up.
I really felt like the campus made people feel like it was more like college which led to some bad behaviors, IME.
One thing I liked at Apple is that at 4pm, almost everyone went home (many commuted via the company bus). A coworker of mine who had moved from Apple to Google and back to Apple preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home.
I would guess this has more to do with Apple’s cohesive product line creating a laminar flow of ideas through the environment versus Googles emergent order out of turbulence. I worked at the MV campus for a spell and all of the campus ‘bennies’ cognitively evaporated within a month or two. The only thing of durable appreciation for me was the shuttle service.
PMs analogous to Google’s don’t seem to exist either (as far as I know it is purely a marketing function with little direct influence). Admittedly I’m not too sure how it works once a product gets released and matures into a flagship like the iPhone but bottom-up incubation work definitely continues even on those.
Pretty much. It's obviously for the benefit of the company because they wouldn't do it otherwise.
Still I appreciate the perks since you're expected to overwork anyway.
> "Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do," he said. "It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."
I see these perks as fundamentally trying to make the suburban office park experience tolerable to younger workers, who would otherwise get this stuff from the city. I work for a more urban company and we don’t do any of this crap except lunch. We don’t need to; it’s down the street.
(if you doubt it, think about it: how many resources does surveillance capitalism need to build datacenters just to hoard your personal that's unrelated to the service provided? p2p is far greener than any cloud service you can think of)
Spoken like a man who doesn't enjoy going out to eat.