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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

Photos (originally from user Manjuuu in a previous submission https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36107267)

https://officesnapshots.com/2015/04/06/github-san-francisco-...

https://www.officelovin.com/2014/05/inside-githubs-san-franc...

> Every morning GitHubbers choose where they want to work: in one of two bars, several cafes, a library, a park, a speakeasy, a museum, a coder cave, or from home.

This is what it looks like when you have more money than sense. Just imagine. You want to build an office for people to work in to create your business. So you build a half dozen unrelated storefronts, just so your workers have the convenience of working from some other business.

If you didn't have the money to build that, what would you do instead? Text your coworkers to meet up at a real dive bar, coffee shop, library, museum. Take the money you would have spent on a plush office, and instead invest it in the actual business: more unique value-adding feature development, more customer engagement / support / UX, more reliability, more training and iteration on remote culture.

The thinking behind those kinds of perks is that they'll keep employees on-site longer, and that the additional time is at least somewhat productive. If you accept that supposition, then having nice and/or "fun" offices becomes justifiable...to a certain degree, anyhow; there's a very real limit to what you can reasonably squeeze out of people, after all.

Now, if I wanted to be cynical, I'd think that building what amounts to a bar in your office might be an effort to try and bring the illusion of a healthy work/life balance into the office to squeeze out a couple extra hours of work. If it looks like a bar and feels like a bar, will working in that bar still feel like working? For the most part, but it's that little difference that might be important.

That said, I don't actually think it's so blatantly manipulative. If people were already a bit more on the unhealthy side of a work/life balance--something that isn't exactly unheard of with plenty of tech companies--the design choice probably felt like it was reintroducing, at least to some extent, something already missing for some employees.

In any case, given the cost of building and furnishing new offices considered "nice" or "fancy" in this context, designing sections of the office to look like bars, libraries, or the Oval Office probably didn't add much to the overall budget. After all, you were going to furnish those areas, anyhow. For anything over that, you'd likely try to justify it in terms of increased employee morale and comfort.

OMG, those barstools with the flat bottoms. Painful after 10 minutes. Who does this? I see this in co-working spaces all the time. Whoever designed them does not actually do any deep work. I just want a great chair and 3 monitors.

It baffles me too. They're for perching, not for sitting. Compare that with something like an upmarket Korean internet café, where all the chairs are supremely comfortable and the monitors are a gorgeous 4k 120Hz. It's really a lesson in the designers being the users. Internet Café owners in Korea generally grow up using them too. Tech offices are made by the same people who design hipster cafés, wealthy homes, and restaurants interiors for a living. They don't understand the demands, and go for aesthetics over function.

> who design hipster cafés, wealthy homes

And for some reason, they do that while sitting on a table in a hipster café (at least a friend of mine does that).

I have back problems. For me, perching on a barstool for an extended time is much more comfortable than sitting in a chair.

And the giant open-plan workspace, with no dividers or anything between all the people.

I just want a great chair and a very large 4K monitor, in a peaceful and quiet environment. If I want noise and hubbub, I can play something through my headphones.

Office Snapshots here.

Thanks for the link, though for those interested GitHub had another office after the one posted in that link.

It can be seen on the design firm’s site:

https://raptstudio.com/work/github/

The sliding barn doors on open shelves mystify me:

https://officesnapshots.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/githu...

You don't get the cabinet to keep the dust off of the dishes, but we'll keep the cabinet doors so that they're still in the way? It's like a nudist suspending a zipper over their crotch.

Form has clearly been prioritized over function for this office design.

Does this make anyone else hungry for a burger and a beer? The interior reminds me of the many brewery/restaurants that have come up in town over the past few years.

Yeah they look like "generic hamburger place on the expensive side"

The interior reminds me of everything. It is the bootstrap.js of interior design.

Probably made by the same interior designers. Same aesthetic, with no consideration as to the purpose and required function.

That's such a gorgeous office!

Some of the "glamorous" tech office designs can be sterile and off-putting. Github's is all at once cozy, innovative, quirky, fun, and sophisticated.

A target to shoot for, and something that will no doubt be missed.

One of my favorite offices was Squarespace and GitHub's.

> Squarespace

Now I want to start a Pinterest board. These are so nice.

I worked for a furniture store that did modern home and office furniture and decor. That was the nicest I'd ever seen. Horrible place to work though.

My back hurts just looking at most of those photos.

There are no desks in the photos, just the lunch break area.

I love the little study and am trying to remodel a shed-office into something similar.

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