Inside the offices of LA gaming startup Scopely | Hacker News Reader

Inside the offices of LA gaming startup Scopely

themuse.com

13 pointsKMinshew10 comments

Just a quick note on the page design: I see the influences of both the Pinterest-style "pins" and the MS-style "metro" look here.

Honestly, I find both of those styles incredibly difficult to navigate and I think they offer poor UX. My eye just doesn't know where to fall on the page. I know this sort of design is trendy and contemporary, but frankly I hope this fad passes soon.

That being said - the office looks cool, the company sounds cool, and the more gaming startups out there that do well, the more fun there is to be had in the world (and that is a Good Thing(tm) in my humble opinion ;)

> the office looks cool

I agree it looks "hip." I also happened to like the friendly shots of the employees who looked like real people I might want to know.

However, that's an office for sales people. I wouldn't want to be a developer working on hard problems in the middle of that.

...also didn't realize that Hollywood was part of "Silicon Beach," although to someone out of state I guess it's all beach. There's another startup on that corner, named Pop-up Pantry.

Back to your cube, rube! This is the whiz-bang kind of kick-ass office great developers LOVE to work in. I'll bet only a real square would want to be able to hear their own thoughts.

(disclaimer, I work at Scopely) I don't quite understand what you mean by saying that it's an "office for sales people". Agreed, it's a bit crowded! I think we doubled (or more?) our team's size since we moved into this space. But other than that, the type of office suites me and most developers quite well. We are working on acquiring more office space and making dedicated "quite rooms" for people to work in with less distraction.

It would be no big deal to check email in such an environment, but hard problems... uggh.

Do you allow employees to work at home (even go to the library) part of the day/week? This would mitigate things I'd guess.

Back to the point: It's well known (now) that interruptions destroy developer productivity.

"Human Task Switches Considered Harmful" http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html

The original: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects...

Aimed at the boss: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

For better or worse, every startup has an open plan office like this. The new breed of 22 year old software engineers do not appear to be negatively affected. Joel and Peopleware need to do a re-assessment using younger people who grew up with 24/7 internet.

Interesting, though I'd be surprised that humans have evolved much in 15 years.

I have worked in such an environment though and there were huge costs (and true a few benefits). What I found though was that the hard work got done from 9pm-12am over the VPN ... a recipe for eventual burnout.

Pop-up Pantry shutdown last month.

That's a shame, it was interesting.

Scopely creates addictive, multiplayer mobile games loved by users around the world, and it also provides a platform for independent game studios to publish mobile games of their own.

Looks like they've got a conflict of interest there? Likely one model will flourish without the other.

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