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Facebook Designing New Campus

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37 pointsmichael_fine51 comments

This will most certainly be interesting to watch. My visceral reaction to the idea of one giant room was, "Wow. No thanks." I'm not personally the biggest fan of Frank Gehry's work, either.

That said, I'm always a little bit excited when people push architectural boundaries, especially when it comes to workspaces. Hopefully my friends at Facebook will still be around when this is completed.

My visceral reaction to the idea of one giant room was "Rad". Love open floor plans.

I'm really curious what the final interior plan will look like; presumably it's not some huge airplane hanger of openness but some clever way of staying open-while-interesting.

Like you, though, I'm just excited at the prospect of larger companies doing something different. Should be fun to watch.

I appreciate open floor plans too, but it seems like a little too much for me. Here's a hi-res photo of the model's floorplan (which I'm sure is just a sample). http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/facebook...

I'll reserve final judgement until it's built and we can see pictures/video.

They (Facebook) should really look at what research has found before they jump feet-first into having an open floor plan. It's not like they've just invented it!

Open floor plans were invented as a way to cram more people into less space, thereby minimizing cost of office space per employee. They were not invented to improve productivity.

Facebook offices have always been open plan. I personally like it. It can occasionally been frustrating, but overall the benefits outweigh the negatives for the way we work. I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs.

Many people work from home or camp out in a small meeting room if they want privacy. There are also over ear head phones available for free all around the campus.

Wikipedia has an article that links to a lot of the research on open plan offices (and other configurations):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_plan

> I don't believe that it has ever been about minimizing costs.

At Facebook, no, it hasn't been. What parent is saying is that he hopes FB did some research on whether this will actually help or hurt productivity before risking the lifeblood of the company (engineer productivity).

37 Signals has a great approach where they have open office space, phone booths for private calls, and meeting rooms of varying sizes.

Speaking of research, they should also find out how much it costs to maintain a Ghery building. If you think Facebook stock is bad now wait until you see how a Ghery building affects their bottom line.

Every time I'm reminded of just how many programmers Facebook has it bothers me that he missed such a cool opportunity. He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much.

Imagine if the budget for this 5000 person building was spent to house 500 people. It could make Google's campuses look downright spartan. It would make everything else a distant second choice for most people.

I've wondered what it'd be like to have a company that capped its growth at around 500 people, but made damn sure that those 500 were among the brightest in the world. Would it be an innovation think tank? Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done? Or would they just automate all the drudge work away?

I imagine it might be a little like RenTech in the financial world, which according to Wikipedia has only 275 employees and $23B in assets under management, for roughly $100M/employee. Wonder how that would translate to an organization focused around building actual products for people.

> Or would they find that those 500 brilliant people spend so much time doing drudge work that they can't get any actual work done?

[Maybe] Not if a couple of those brightest 500 have enough respect for and include amongst them a couple of the world's most dedicated and efficient administrative assistants.

Theres also Valve Software (read their lovely handbook! http://newcdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf). They (to my knowledge) only hire folks who're at senior grade in terms of their skills. Also Valve software just generally sounds like an amazing work environment.

aside/caveat: I'm aiming to create just such an organization (operationally structured a la Valve) in terms of caliber of folks in NYC with WellPosed. I'm settling for nothing less than having an organization dedicated to building tools/products meant to make innovation happen faster on our wee world. I'm starting with fixing machine learning / numerical computation, BUT done right, rather than automagic bullshit everyone in "big data" keeps jerking off to the press :)

It looks like I'll be able to get things off the ground sans investors too (which is kinda key for what I want to do forever). Any NYC area senior grade awesome folks who like work broadly deep across math, cs, engineering things nicely and sane work expectations etc a la the organization referenced above, shoot me an email and chat, Please

I'm working to create something special that I want to last forever, and I need the most amazing people on the planet to make it happen :)

(pardon my reply turning self promoting, but I'm deadly serious about what i'm doing, and its exactly that sort of place i'm aiming to create)

(also: your hypothetical lots of smart people not getting anything done is called a circle jerk, not a business that could successfully recruit amazing people and retain them.)

Ahem. Rather than automagic bullshit, could you just do machine learning which handles multiple data-types.

That would be a big change for the ML crowd to have to deal with real world, multiple typed, dirty data. Earthshattering, I know. (Yes, we've already spoken by email. Best of luck on your adventures)

I said the other folks are doing automagic BS, :-)

Yup, Thats one of the problems I'm solving "right" (or nearly so) in the basic alpha as it gets in shape.

Thanks! Were you the unicorn email dude?

Not sure what you are complaining about here. :) Facebook has 1/4 the number of employees Yahoo has and less than 1/16 that of Google. It's smaller than my high school.

They'll get just as big unless they make a conscious decision to avoid it.

For those of us who aren't those 10x programmers though I appreciate the opportunity to work at a company like Facebook...

To be clear, I'm not claiming I'd get hired there if it was run like that. I'd still rather see a company run like that.

> He gets programming better than probably any BigCo tech CEO and yet he made the same damn mistake of hiring thousands upon thousands of programmers instead of just getting the 10X Programmers and having 1/10th as many while paying them 2x as much.

What makes you think that Facebook doesn't hire every 10x programmer it can? What makes you think that Google doesn't?

After they hire every 10x programmer they can, what do you think they should do? They've still got money to spend and stuff to do. Are you seriously suggesting that they don't spend that money to do those things?

Of course they hire 10X programmers, but they also hire 1X programmers. I'm suggesting that they could only hire 10X programmers and pay them 2X more. Twice the industry salary (~$250k/yr), nothing but 10X programmers, and an amazing campus would make Facebook unbelievably desirable for most programmers. Not even Google or Apple could compete because they still hire massive numbers of 1X programmers.

> I'm suggesting that they could only hire 10X programmers and pay them 2X more.

Why do you think that Google/Apple/Facebook don't pay 10X programmers >2X more?

In my experience, admittedly at other companies, the 10X programmers do make a lot more. Yet there's still more work and more money to spend. What should they do with that work and money?

You're making a lot of claims about salary structures. Where are you getting your information?

What software engineering organizations do you have experience with?

I ask because I'm beginning to suspect that your actual knowledge in this area is even less than that of the typical Harvard Business Review author....

I wouldn't say that this is the worst possibly use of Facebook's money, but I would rank it up there.

Building a new HQ is largely an exercise in vanity and boasting. There is almost always an existing building that would serve just fine, otherwise.

"The largest open floor plan in the world"? Oy. I hope they hire some good acoustics folks before they finish the planning stages.

Would you say the same thing about Apple's building or is that different as they have more money to spend?

I think it may be worth it, a big part of hiring the best talent now is creating an environment that they enjoy rather than dread being in. Not that the open plan office is for everyone.

The new Apple mothership and the Ghery Facebook HQ share an affection for poor planning. Neither will be able to accommodate future growth and renovating existing facilities will be difficult logistically. Being able to afford it today doesn't mean they'll be able to afford it in the future. Hopefully they'll be using recyclable materials since neither facility has been designed for permanence.

It's amusing to correlate "new campus" with "stock drop" in the history of Silly Valley.

Atari, Apple, Sun, Cisco . . . these companies all had significant hard times about the time they started large new sets of buildings.

SGI built a new campus (now the Googleplex) in 1998, the same year they announced they were switching from their own MIPS processors to Itanium and shipping Windows NT workstations. In 2005, SGI was delisted from the NYSE.

Sounds like the Skyscraper Index, an interesting observation that many of the world's tallest structures were built right before the economy headed into recession. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyscraper_Index

I think it's money well spent. Facebook is one of the principle belligerent powers in the War for Talent. They're going to lose some ground in that war after the IPO. A stunning campus could help minimize that loss.

This all but guarantees they'll never be able to offer an office where I can get serious stretches of undisturbed time. For an major employer of developers (who are known for wanting to get into the zone) that's stunning, but not in a good way.

You could always work from your own home. Fast internet, free food, get in the zone for as long as you want.

> free food

Am I being dumb or are you saying Facebook pays for their employees' groceries if they choose to work from home instead of working at the office and eating at the free cafe(s) there? I'm impressed if so (even though it probably wouldn't really add up to that much money for a company that can afford to pay $1B for Instagram).

Reminds me a lot of this:

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_gAOnHhen4zY/S9r-pZcS6bI/AAAAAAAAAA...

Open floor plans don't make collaboration any easier. You still have to walk over to the other person just now, you must also try and hear yourself think over the hundreds of other people inside a hanger. This is the epitome the of a cog in the machine work environment to maximize people per square foot. It's degrading but in a way that's quite fitting for the way Facebook is going right now.

I think I understand the reasoning behind open floor plans, but what's the point of having everyone in a single mega-room? It's not like the two people in opposite corners of the hangar will be able to communicate seamlessly just because they're in the same "room"; they'll have to walk over to one another just the same as they would if they had walls separating them.

(Of course being in the same room doesn't hurt in that respect either, but partitions have other advantages as well, e.g., aesthetics and noise.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Honestly? It looks like a vision of hell.

If there's one thing Microsoft got right, it's that they read Peopleware and took it at least half seriously.

Could you elaborate on the design?

Having worked with smaller teams in open plans, and now being in a coworking space, I have to say, I don't like it. It's really easy to get distracted by the smallest movement around you, or someone having a phone call, or two people laughing. I don't think cube farms are necessarily the answer either, but without serious consideration for noise dampening, the "one giant room" will be a pretty big distraction.

Corporate accounts payable Nina speaking... Just a moment!

Some of Frank Gehry's designs definitely look like the Facebook stock.

I worked for a number of years in the MIT Stata Center, an office building designed by Gehry. It was a trainwreck on so many levels. This article (http://www.fastcompany.com/641146/lost-funhouse ) details the some of the construction issues, but even if the building had been watertight, on budget, and on time, the design itself made it difficult to work in.

Indeed. The quality of design affects the quality of construction. The cost per square foot is typically shocking and the Ghery definitely places form over function. After visiting many buildings by Ghery, Hadid, Holl, and Libeskind I've found them all to be lacking. If you prefer modern design with refinement seek out Ando or Meier. There are plenty of others, as well, who have much more talent.

The Norman Foster buildings I've been in have been pretty good. Apple made the right choice.

I wonder if there will be some amazing Chinese architects in the next decades, given their pace of construction.

Foster as well as Piano have some very refined work. Foster is at his best when doing renovations and additions. He has a very delicate approach which is handsome and actually celebrates and enhances the existing structure.

I'm still waiting for some great Chinese architects to step up. They aren't given much room to flex their talents, however, due to the very brand conscious nature of the consumer. For instance there is a recently completed Ghery building here in Hong Kong with a flat on the 8th floor listed for $400 million Hong Kong Dollars, or roughly $51.5 million USD. Insane. But that's what the market is after.

Yeah, Gehry made I.M. Pei look practical and user-driven, which is probably his greatest achievement to date.

(Some of the Pei buildings were decent, but really none of the newer MIT buildings were all that great. Building 20 actually exceeded most of the new buildings in functionality, and it was a wooden shack. Even the "core" buildings around the IC are kind of defective in a lot of ways. Sad for a university with an architecture school.)

Hope it holds up better than the MIT Strata Center...

Here's the design which would truly reflect the vision and dynamism of the company:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/01/05/surveillan...

What's with the high voltage lines right next to the building? Or is it something else?

Old Sun campus too small for these guys already?

My impression was that they were only using half of that campus and that was when I visited somewhat recently. I'm not sure what the objective is here.

Where is this thing supposed to go? Are they designing to a particular site?

when a tech company builds a new campus, that's it. All downhill (further downhill).

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