Google’s New Office In Dublin
home-designing.com
home-designing.com
I love the fact that their work environment is not limited to their desk and meeting rooms. You can select the environment that works the best for you, and that stimulates the qualities you require for a specific task (or just pick the one you like the most).
Though many dot-com and ad agencies may make their offices look like adult day-care, I think the underlying ideas at play are the future:
* Physically and emotionally warm environments
* huddle spaces for face-to-face collaboration
* low ceilings create a quiet conference and intimacy
But for other parts of business (research, email, document editing, etc) I have found the war-rooms and coffee-shops to be a better fit.
We consume not because we're told to, but because we want to. We become vehicles in an economic equation.
Something is unnerving about the fact so many of us feel privileged to have the ability to dedicate our lives to what is essentially an organization to make money. I know it stikes odd to think that's the only purpose of Google (it seems not to be) but it certainly is for a significant portion of the corporatocracy.
Those two factors combined (variables in an economic equation and we have blind faith in corporations) can undermine the basis of a free society whose goals go beyond the enrichment of a handful of shareholders.
In the epitaph of our civilization, maybe it'll say "but after all, you gotta give it to them: at least some of their corporations had offices that were actually sorta livable."
Individuals try to maximize something quite different than money, money is mostly instrumental.
Individuals have far more varied dreams, aspirations, fears and sentiments that "trying to make money". Most of them actually only try to make money because they are forced to in order to survive.
Corporations on the other hand exist almost solely for making money. Sometimes they add pride and some personal vision in, but those are few and far between (and it still comes second to money).
You can see a person giving its life for someone else's benefit. A parent taking care of a chronically sick child, for example. No corporation would ever do that.
This isn't the theme of "Brave New World" that I picked up on, and I don't think the book featured a world with profit-seeking corporations.
Seems to me like "consuming because we want to" is the better choice of the two, no?
I'd probably shuffle off to a quiet, dimly lit corner somewhere with my headphones, and try to block out the intense primary colours and lack of sound insulation.
I must be getting old.
So it's possible that the captions are added by the design firm rather than Google. (If you look at office pictures from http://www.google.com/about/jobs/, the tone of the surrounding copy seems different. Though perhaps still a little corporate :)
That's the rest of Dublin for the majority of days.
And sorry, you can't go to a park unless you have a waterproof notebook.
But maybe you can hide in the corner of a pub or coffee shop (with Wifi) and have a pint/coffee/tea etc. With soundproof earphones you'll be fine.
Yea I'm with you on that. I'm not opposed to having workspaces more comfortable and less mundane, but some of these offices look more like a McDonalds' playpen than a workspace to me.
And if you're visiting from another building (a common occurrence) it's very very frowned upon to camp out in a conference room, so you head over to the cafe or you sit back in a giant "e" in the hallway and you open up your laptop and you get to work.
I am, however, skeptical of the people who bring their laptops to work out of massage chairs. I like massage chairs, but they are way too distracting.
Also, multiple monitors are useful, but there are some programming tasks (like implementing an algorithm and writing some unit tests) where a laptop is fine.
The idea is: you can choose. (If you want a couch at your desk, nobody is stopping you. And electronically-controlled height-adjustable desks are standard equipment, so if you want to work at your desk but alternate between standing and sit, you can. It's wonderful.)
edit: As a fact I've got a couple of recruiters offering that position in Dublin.
I prefer this one, though. It's cozy, and has engineer-oriented amenities like workshops. :-)
(It's a photo on the right, under the musical keyboard and on top of the 'blue waves' photo)
See the original: https://www.google.ie/search?q=trinity+library&um=1&...
I doubt there's much of a question as to whether the people at Google work hard and get a lot accomplished during their days. So you'd think that if such a productive company could accomplish that in a distributed (distributed meaning people working at places besides their desk) office, so could your more run-of-the-mill companies.
If that was the engineering office, they would be. Since it's sales.. well.
Hint: not a lot. Other companies do it with having minimum offices or none at all
Several consultancies will happily open a "paper company" for you in Ireland or wherever you choose. No problem whatsoever
"Talent goes to Mountain View" [citation needed].
There are a lot of talent outside the US (V8 came from Germany, also Zurich, London and Dublin offices have technical openings, Australia, not to forget Belo Horizonte in Brazil) and inside the US (NY comes to mind)
Google's datacenters are spread across the world.
Marketing.
> Several consultancies will happily open a "paper company" for you in Ireland or wherever you choose. No problem whatsoever
Not every company is willing to spend this much on marketing.
> "Talent goes to Mountain View" [citation needed]
Read up on the story of Lars Bak.
> There are a lot of talent outside the US (V8 came from Germany, also Zurich, London and Dublin offices have technical openings, Australia, not to forget Belo Horizonte in Brazil) and inside the US (NY comes to mind)
Openings that have been "open" for many years. If you get through you will be moved to Mountain View, CA.
You are overestimating the size of Google's (internal) marketing, and don't know how marketing is structured for companies like Google, also you seem to not understand how multinational tax structures work, so I won't explain any further.
"If you get through you will be moved to Mountain View, CA"
That's not what happened to several people that work or have worked at Google that I have personal knowledge of.
Some will go to MV of course, depending on area of work.
Lars Bak? "In 2004, Bak joined Google to work on the Chrome browser. He did not return to the United States"
So sad.
Well, Google's quite successful, so who am I to judge? But... not my cup of tea. And, somehow, it puts me in mind of the crap customer support for "end users". I guess, in my experience, the more internal distraction, the less outward focus and attention.
So far, gains through automation keep Google on a winning pace. But, I wonder...
http://www.businessinsider.com/googles-offices-in-tel-aviv-2...
On the floor where I work, they've installed devices designed to generate noise that makes the office seem quieter. (Or so I'm told.) It seems to work pretty well; there are a lot of people on the floor but I don't feel the need to listen to music unless I am really in the mood for music. When everyone goes home, it kind of sounds like a gurgling stream. Apparent but not distracting.
I don't really understand how it works, but considering I prefer to work from the office than from home, they must be doing something right.