Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office | Hacker News Reader

Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office

joelonsoftware.com

110 pointstwampss85 comments

This is a seriously awesome office space that any developer looking for the urban lifestyle that NYC offers would be nuts to not want to work at. But Joel, you already have a fantastic reputation and should be able to recruit top talent based on your location, reputation, and because because you employ other smart people. That 500K of your own cash you put into that space depreciates over 39 years. You basically can't write it off until you move! I got stuck with over 200K in our last build-out that I'm still sitting on 3 years later. However if 500K is all you spent in addition to your lease with a standard buildout allowance, you got a great deal.

Like Joel, I bootstrapped a software company to similar size (25 employees). I did a calculation and we spend about 1.4% of our revenue today on 5,000 sqft of office space, but have outgrown it and it's no longer the nice spacious office we started with. 10,000 sqft of space in the best class A space in Western MA will cost about 3% of our 2009 expected revenue, with modest but nice build-out included. Given that this would be our 4th move in 6 years, I tend to be careful about long leases and lease buildouts.

I'd rather invest in paying good salaries, offering the best equipment and a nice (but not extravagant) work environment. Then I can afford to launch new products without being beholden to investors.

I really like the glass walls though...

Where do you work in Western MA? I'm a software CEO as well and do a lot of work out there. We should get together sometime.

seriously nice diggs, cant imagine how much that place costs but they've got the cash and have a great outlook on getting ROI via recruiting and client WOW, certainly offers a differnt perspective to just getting bought. Why not built a super cool company that you love to work at instead?

I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon#. And in a few years Fog Creek will move to a different location again - at which point they'll have to build a new high end office.

So really, this seems to be a case of spending money to improve quality of life. The other benefits, such as for recruiting and PR are just a nice side effect.

#) Assuming 50 employees, over 5 years, the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less. Given the choice, I would probably give up 15% of my salary to work in a nice place with good food, a good view, good equipment, and so on.

I agree, but then of course, spending a shit ton of money just to make yourself feel better is one of the luxuries of not being beholden to outside investors.

Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s.

Heh, you just won't let go of that "beholden to outside investor" thing, will you?

Are you suggesting that investors keep startups from getting ludicrous office space? From my experience with well-funded dotcom startups, they all tend to spend staggering amounts on sexy office space. We're lightly funded, so we sure as hell didn't.

In any case, Joel isn't spending a shit ton-- he's spending ~4-6% of revenue, as he said. Decent investors would only involve themselves if you were spending an unreasonable amount of money. Joel could be up to his armpits in Series D financing and not have an investor blink at this expenditure.

(if it isn't obvious, I think it's a dumb expenditure for an unprofitable startup, and a fine expenditure for Joel)

Hm. You're right. I'm wrong.

(Although I'm unlikely to "let go" of the outside investor thing; I help run a bootstrapped company, and had a bad VC experience).

Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s.

Or I was idly thinking once of a plan where you sprint for 3 weeks (still with weekends off) and then everyone has an entire week off.

Over and over, ~13 weeks of vacation a year.

I wonder if a refreshed, happy, and likely less compensated team like that could keep up with a full time one.

the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less.

You think that top software engineering graduates in New York City make $26k per year? Recalibrate! Recalibrate!

I think the number you're looking for is "less than 4%". Remember that the office-construction expenses can be massaged by accountants to reduce taxes on them, and that an employee's (e.g.) $80k salary costs the employer considerably more than $80k, thanks to the employer share of things like Social Security and health insurance. To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Note that a headhunter will charge you a cool $30k to recruit an employee with a $100k salary:

http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics2.htm

...and who knows what kind of stiff that headhunter is going to try to foist off on you?

The chances that the $4k per employee per year is paying off for Fog Creek are much, much better than you think.

By the time we left the old office, it was costing us 2% of revenue. The new office is not full yet and is somewhat more expensive, but I expect that in the long run our real estate costs will be around 4%-6% of revenue, which is the norm for office-based workforces.

The specific upgrades we paid cash for will probably end up costing 1% of an employee's salary, averaged out over everything, over the lifetime of the lease.

Just curious, how come your profile is written in 3rd person? Is this really Joel Spolsky, or a representative?

spolsky gives way too many interesting comments to be just a representative.

wait a minute, are you spolsky?

Joel hang out here on a pretty regular basis.

copy paste

It's not written in the 3rd person! That would be more like "Joel thinks that the savings blah blah".

> You think that top software engineering graduates in New York City make $26k per year? Recalibrate! Recalibrate!

Oops, mental typo. Thanks for the correction.

To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Note that a headhunter will charge you a cool $30k to recruit an employee with a $100k salary:

Two points and a necessary footnote:

1) 30% is on the high end. 20%-25% is a normal fee (and in this environment, you can probably bargain your recruiter down to 20%).

2) That cost is what you pay for a recruiter, instead of paying your HR people to do the initial screening. Your recruiter might call up someone knowing that there are ten client companies that would interview someone who graduated in the top 10% of her class at one of the top 10% of schools -- but that only two or three of those interviewers would be a good cultural fit. It's worth it for your recruiter to chase the weird ones (if they're not right for XYZ Co., ABC Ltd. would still love to have them!); the equation is different for in-house HR.

Footnote: I'm a recruiter, who -- sadly -- does not get to work with awesome companies like Fog Creek. Working on it, though.

That's like 3-5% of their salary or at least I hope so. Just how little do you think they earn?

"... I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon# ..."

The key is to spend capital to get the best programmers to create profit. This idea isn't something Joel made up it's an idea by Phil Greenspun, "Building and keeping a good software engineering team" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...

So what's your idea?

To have "a good ROI via recruiting," never mind the etc., he just has to improve his profits by more than 40k per year, by making better products than he would have otherwise, by hiring better people than he would have otherwise --- or by having to pay 40k less per year in salary, although that seems less likely. Although the chain of causality here has a lot of randomness attached to it, if he has a few million dollars in revenue per year, such an improvement hardly seems implausible.

The flip side is that spending a lot of money on something apparently unnecessary might incline you to spend more money on things that are actually unnecessary.

(I'm assuming "a good ROI" means 4% per year.)

My envy on this place is mighty (and all this from a bug tracker?), but is tempered by more annoyance at the Javascript nightmare that is Picasa. Why can't I middle-click to open pictures in new windows? Because Google Breaks The Browser. Top.

If you were using The Browser, Opera, here's how you could open those pictures effortlessly in new tabs:

1) Right-click on top of a picture, keep the button down.

2) Flick your mouse slightly downwards.

3) Release the right mouse button.

And there you go. Now, after checking out a picture, you'd want to close the newly opened tab, and get back to where you were:

1) Right-click, and hold

2) Move the mouse slightly downwards, and slightly to the right.

3) Release the mouse button

And there you go again. It doesn't take long to get comfortable with Opera's Mouse Gestures, and you'll realize they're very handy.

The issue isn't with the absence of mouse gestures; it's with the absence of link targets.

Suspecting that might be the case, I tried opening some pictures before posting, and it all worked for me.

Since that's the case, the Opera feature to mention is something about successfully opening JavaScript links in new windows, not mouse gestures; talking about the mouse gestures just confused me.

Only if the Firefox middle-click thing was only about opening JavaScript links too, I guess.

In any case, mouse gestures are a good thing and make your browsing more efficient.

Oh, I think the complaint was that normally middle-click opens things in a new tab (which it does, and has since Mosaic 1.0, except that before we had tabs they were windows) but that doesn't work with Picasa or whatever, because they're JavaScript links.

People at Fog Creek read Hacker News. edit: Other than just Joel.

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

You mean people like Joel?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=spolsky

Actually, that's a shot of Joel's office. But, yeah, Fog Creeker's other than Joel do read Hacker News.

That looks like a pretty impressive office. It sounds like a successful recruiting tool; I would definitely like working in that environment.

What other companies put that much attention towards work environment? I know that a lot of popular startups tend to favor communal environments, but seeing actual offices is pretty rare. All of the places I've worked at tend to fall somewhere between decent to hellish cube nightmare.

How do we resolve "offices with doors that close" with "communal work environment" anyway? Are they just diametrically opposed office philosphies?

Here's the suggestion from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn:

The best adaptation I've seen of the open-office idea is a partial retreat from it. People crave acoustic privacy so they can talk on the telephone, but visual privacy is not as important -- they like being able to see what's going on. This has led to a very satisfactory compromise called "cave and commons". Each office worker has a private office, often small, which opens into a generous open area surrounded by many other private offices. The open area has a kitchen, some couches, sometimes tables for sitting around informally, and sometimes a working library, or at least a rack of current periodicals. You can shut the door of your cave and concentrate, or you can leave your door open and keep an eye and ear on who's coming and going in the commons, and whether the meeting or presentation going on there might be worth leaning in on. The feeling is congenial and homey, and it encourages the casual encounters which, research keeps showing, are at the heart of creativity in offices.

I lived in a dorm designed like this for four years of college. I'm not sure I've ever been as productive since. ;)

I would not be surprised to learn that Spolsky has read Brand's book. He's certainly got the idea. Note the emphasis on glass in the Fog Creek offices, providing acoustic privacy but not visual isolation.

Interesting Stewart Brand documentary on the utility of buildings.

http://smashingtelly.com/2008/08/04/how-buildings-learn-uplo...

Good god, I've got to forget that exists immediately so I can keep working. ;) Thanks for the link!

I will never EVER work in a communal work environment again.

I can only work in a space somewhere between an 'office with a closed door' and a sensory deprivation tank.

Agreed -- I might be a fancy typist when you get right down to it, but that doesn't mean I want to work in a typing pool.

I've spent way too much time thinking about this question over the years for my small teams. My conclusion is that neither is perfect, but the best options are:

-- Open work space for 3-6 people, IF everyone is working on the same project, IF everyone is committed to doing good work (and won't be surfing YouTube throughout the day), IF there are quite/private places to retreat to for phone calls and solo problem solving, and IF the configuration doesn't stay the same for years. Many people report being more productive for short periods with this sort of arrangement.

Bonus: pair programming seems to lead to a different sort of "flow" than solo programming, which is more amenable to an open work space.

-- Offices with a door for everything else. The upside of offices with a door: reduced interruptions, which are the bane of complex programming. (Try solving a really really hard problem with the threat of interruptions constantly on your mind. Not actual interruptions - just the threat, or memory, of interruptions.) The downside: teams have to be more deliberate in fostering team communication.

The "cave and commons" (elsewhere in this discussion) seems like a good compromise. Even better, in my opinion, would be a modular space where teams could work together some of the time in an open war room, during some phases of development, and where they could work privately during other phases. But that's not easy to find.

Cave and Commons is the way to go, as several other posters pointed out.

I'd like to add the critical factor: team size. Once team size gets too large (say over 8-10 people) random noise and distractions take over. I've seen teams of 30 try to do collocated, collaborative work environments and it just falls apart. At that size, the best I've seen so far is cubes, "study hall" and private rooms. That is, cubes for \half the day, a group "study hall" type atmosphere for the other half, and easily available small group work rooms. By "study hall", I don't mean a bunch of people being quiet, just a bunch of people in the same area working on group/individual tasks.

There's an interesting phenomenon that goes on in collaborative work spaces. Many times programmers get lots of benefits from working together but still would rather be left alone. So many times the team requires time that it works together, say for a couple of hours every morning, like it or not. Not everybody likes it so much. Many times there's a gap between "the way I like working" and "the way that I work that is the most productive"

Just goes to show that programming is not a technical exercise, as much as we like to talk functional code, security, and all the other bits and bytes bullshit. It's a human activity, and full of the irrational and quirky nuances that comes from working with hominids.

I look at it and almost weep - but I feel like its TOO good. I've grown accustomed to the start-up feel of making do with what you have, spending big on a few items (chair, monitor) and having everything else made of cardboard..

Definitely. I even showed my developer friend the pictures and ended up explaining what Fog Creek does.

Having my back to glass would drive me insane, and evidently all of the offices are like that:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

Check out all of the famous series 7 chairs:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

It's got that not-quite-a-prison institutional look to it. That's great if you're running a high school in the poorest district in Mississippi, but given his budget [1] you'd think it would look nice.

I've got a private office, and the landlord charged my company nothing to throw up walls and doors in the empty space we rented. Maybe it's impossible to avoid Veblen goods in NYC, though.

[1] http://www.gibraltarfurniture.com/malik-mc-c-2201.html That's right. It's 300 dollars.

> That's great if you're running a high school in the poorest district in Mississippi

That's just an absurd statement. The design is very high-end, perhaps you just don't like the modern look?

Maybe it's "high end". But all of these are better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctony/2486595834/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewiedewie/2377292918/

http://la.eater.com/uploads/2008_02_mcdonalds-thumb.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteorry/17414425/

There's a McDonald's down the street from me similarly superior to Joel's lunchroom, which resembles none of the above. It was clearly patterned after a high-school cafeteria.

Actually only the two interior offices have that layout. All the other offices have the desk facing a real wall with another behind it, and glass on the left and right.

Oh and the same room from another angle looks much less like a prison:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

Yeah, the view is sweet, but even the pigeons get it.

>That's right. It's 300 dollars.

Wow; apparently my old highschool should sell the chairs in lunchroom to raise a quick million dollars.

Why do the admins have to sit in a closet?

Have to? Almost all the admins I've known love to sit in closets :) (I was an admin for a few years so this is somewhat self-deprecating)

I have been an admin in the past and I wouldn't have minded a window.

Apparently Joel doesn't know that all good sysadmins are also good programmers.

Why do the UI designers have to... wait a minute, there aren't any!

If he spent half the amount of money he spent on this amazing office for a kick ass UI team, he would increase sales by an enormous amount for Fogbugz. I know so many people who would switch if it wasn't so damn ugly and difficult to use. I don't think people use Lighthouse because it has better features.

Joel's priorities seem very odd to me.

Could you quantify "ugly" and "difficult to use"? I use FogBugz, and while it's not the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, it's far from ugly. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's said. I don't find it hard to use at all. I just use it for bug tracking and to-do reminder. I don't use any advanced features. What exactly do you find difficult to do?

We used to use Fogbugz then switched to Lighthouse because it was much cleaner, more intuitive and had near seamless Github integration.

It's not that Fogbugz is necessarily difficult, it's that Lighthouse is easier.

We use Fogbugz too and like it (though Pivotal Tracker is calling our names...). In my anecdotal experience, many of the people who think it's ugly and unusable got this impression from earlier versions. It's improved a bit over the last few years. Not to say that it doesn't have room to go, but it's not that bad anymore.

A couple of months ago, my company's software team evaluated FogBugz as a possible replacement for our Trac setup.

I would describe FogBugz as ugly by modern standards, because it appears to have been written a little under ten years ago. And I would describe it as difficult to use partially for the same reason, and partially because some very simple features are missing, e.g. cc'ing people on tickets and bidirectional integration with SCM repositories. The "special" features, like integration with customer email, are not important to us.

Yet what it does is not very difficult, and many other options exist -- free, for pay, hosted, or any combination thereof. I now wonder why people listen to Joel on software.

Joel seems to be doing extraordinarily well without your advice.

Dustin never said he wasn't doing well, he just said he'd be doing better if the UI was upgraded.

I tried using fogbugz a couple of time and agree with you. For the ease of use, I know that there were quite a few things I didn't really get (though I forgot which one). In the end I'm now using pivotal tracker instead.

Now apart from that I completely agree with joel's reasoning regarding building a great place to work for programmers, I just think that he should also hire more designers and ui experts...

I would definitely not be a whiny emo girl if I were to work in that environment. ;-)

Better recruiting tool: Make an office that female developers want to work in, the male developers will follow.

I'm not sure recruiting desperate and socially akward dudes who are going to get all creepy weirdo on the female staff is the best recruitment strategy I've ever heard.

I have to keep reminding them that women usually do NOT want to hear about the problems they were having with their barcode scanner scanning in their comic book collections

to be fair neither do i

Yeah, but Joel, that's because you're a whiny emo girl... ;-)

Um...yeah. I think the biggest draw of any office is the pussy. That's what I care about.

But I don't think you'd want female developers. Female sales staff, female secretaries, etc.

Nice office, but without nice pussy, what's the point?

Reddit is that way ---->

I want to second this --- I don't like working in places that are exclusionary, that privilege gender (or, say, ethnicity0 above talent. It's not about the eye candy. Generally places that you'd only want to work if you were male are not places I want to work.

Seriously, how does Joel make both ends meet in an expensive place like NYC ? Selling bug-tracking software ?

I would bet Copilot is pretty profitable too

Second best offices I've seen.

At Bowdoin College the CS professors have offices with an awesome view and a shower and bathroom in each office.

Awesome! I just can't even imagine how Fog Creek makes enough money for all of this from mostly a single product. They must have tens of thousands of paying customers - which strikes me as incredibly strong for a niche as small as software development - kudos!

The shrinkwrap software business is good.

it is surprising that a story about someone moving to a new office makes into the front page of HN! the new office might have all the fancy features, but, there are a few things that annoy me: 1. I don't really care for all those fancy features and if I were considering joining a company those fancy features will be the last thing in my mind before I make a decision. 2. If one still has the urge to know who moved where and what they have got there then they can always find that in other sites (hardly HN stuff IMHO) 3. And the most annoying bit is that this story got to the front page while a lot of other threads that I found interesting and would have helped me become a better Hacker usually get a couple of points and pretty much no discussion at all.

I love HN and the community and still read a lot of interesting stuff here, but, I am beginning to feel that HN is slowly slipping away to be a site that also has a few genuine and invigorating posts/discussions about entrepreneurship and programming.

I work at a big software/hardware company. We have pretty much the same perks, same height adjustable long desks, aeron chairs (or you pick one based on the one you like) etc. Only thing I don't like is that there is no windows :-((.

so no big deal, but windows are nice

Interesting. I work about a block away from that office; I take the 4/5 to Bowling Green every morning and usually walk past 55 B'way once or twice a week.

Knowing that Fog Creek is so close is tempting me to send in my resume... :)

Glass whiteboard ! http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

Brilliant, Joel.

I love how you're able to market your company. You just got about 14,000 top notch hackers to look and drool over your office space. It's a great recruiting tool.

It's cool that they have a shower in the office. Never worked in an office that has one, always wished for one.

Where do those height adjustable desks come from? I'd love to be able to work standing sometimes

steelcase :)

Those huge motorized desks with 20 electrical outlets sound awesome.

droool

Dope office is dope!

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