Inside Dropbox’s Urbanized San Francisco Offices | Hacker News Reader

Inside Dropbox’s Urbanized San Francisco Offices

officesnapshots.com

47 pointstlongren58 comments

Um, isn't it a little weird to have meeting space labeled "Romance Room" and so on? Seems juvenile at worst—"har har look who's in there together now, bro!"—and at best just stupidly awkward and pointless.

It's only juvenile if the people behave that way -- nobody there does. You're projecting.

But what's the value or the point? What am I missing? Why would I want to, say, have a serious 1:1 with my boss in a Romance Room? Maybe I'm too old for this level of "whimsy"...?

No, you're right, it's just lame.

Could this argument be applied to a room called, "Coworker Fuck Room"? I mean, it's just a room name, so it's only juvenile if the people behave that way, right?

I could see it as the "go-to" room for pitching new ideas (so you can "romance" someone into liking your idea), but the "break up" room makes less sense. Since when do you want to broadcast that you're "breaking up" with a person or idea with a specific room?

It's just a room name, so I dunno if it really matters, but it's definitely a little weird.

Edit: I just realized that the room would probably be way more available than other rooms, because of the name. That might come in handy for a clever meeting scheduler if resource contention is a problem.

Except that there's no room called the "Coworker Fuck Room", so that's a straw-man argument...

The logic that you can simply dismiss any room name as being appropriate if those who work with it are mature enough is not valid because there are room names which are so unambiguous, no interpretation but an inappropriate one can be made. My above comment is not a straw-man, it's an example of one such room name that cannot be interpreted any way but inappropriately. Feel free to use a different example if you think the above one is too extreme.

Of course we could all imagine a bunch of made-up names for rooms that would be inappropriate in a business setting. Nobody is arguing that no such names exist.

My problem is simply with your entire approach to your argument. What you are doing is very common on internet forums, and it is a cheap way to "prove" people wrong under any circumstances. It is called black-and-white thinking. Here is the template: "If you think this one small thing is true, then you must think EVERYTHING ever in the entire world is true!!!" Obviously, you will be able to think of some example in the world that is false (even if your example is not what the original person was arguing for or against), so then you will feel like you have accomplished your goal (you have proved the person wrong).

Here is where we start going down this rabbit hole:

The logic that you can simply dismiss any room name as being appropriate...

Keyword here is "any". Who in this thread tried to argue that ANY room name should be appropriate? (Hint: nobody tried to argue this. You just made this argument up so you could shoot it down.)

...it's an example of one such room name that cannot be interpreted any way but inappropriately.

Yep, you're right, inappropriate language exists in the world. Nobody can argue against this. And nobody HAS argued against this.

Here, I will use your method of argument against you: You are WRONG to think that "Employee Fuck Room" is an inappropriate name. What if it was in the offices of a company that produces pornography? Then it would be very appropriate here. It would be especially appropriate if this company had very edgy office vibe that encouraged this type of language. Also, what if someone ran a small shop that specialized in distributing super-offensive memes on the internet? They could have a room called "Employee Fuck Room" and get away with it, and one could argue it would be totally appropriate in drumming up the types of ideas they need to run their business. See!! I completely made up a couple examples that show how you could be wrong in some tiny edge case, therefore, you are 100% WRONG.

See how stupid that is?

This style of argument can lead to some real gems. (Bonus, religious-nut-themed example: "If you think gay people should be able to marry each other, then you must also think that a monkey and a toaster should be able to marry each other!!")

The world is not black and white. If I think some name is ok, I don't have to think that ALL names are ok. I have a brain that is able to pick and choose. I don't have to just think in black and white, ALL GOOD, or ALL BAD.

Here's a novel concept: How about we just understand that people will disagree with each other once in a while, and move on with our lives. Some people here can think that "Romance Room" is a silly and fun office name, and some people will have no problem with it. Some OTHER people will disagree. And that is fine. You don't need to try to convince everyone to come over to one side or the other. Some of us can just disagree, or agree, and we can just move on with our lives.

Okay there's very clearly a miscommunication occurring.

Here's what I thought your argument was:

> At a company where the maturity level is sufficiently high, room names cannot be inappropriate. Specifically, these room names are not appropriate.

Here was my counter argument:

> There are certain room names which are inappropriate, regardless of the maturity of those who work at the company in which the room name exists. Specifically, these room names are inappropriate because they don't imply, but directly state sexual activity between coworkers.

I tempered my argument by saying I don't think it's something that will ultimately matter, but is certainly "weird", a term that is admittedly ambiguous. I then gave an example of such a room which would be unambiguously inappropriate, the "Employee Fuck Room". If this specific example causes you consternation, then I withdraw it. It's not important to my argument, in any event, and serves only to illustrate my point by example.

The kind of argument you're describing is not anything like what I've been saying. It's my unqualified opinion that you're reacting emotionally and putting a whole lot of other issues into this conversation which aren't relevant.

> It's my unqualified opinion that you're reacting emotionally...

Oh, I see, so if ANYONE disagrees with you about ANYTHING EVER, it must only be because they are reacting emotionally and have no logical basis for their disagreement? Huh, REALLY? (See, I just used black-and-white thinking again... See how we could go around and around like this until the end of time? Aren't internet arguments fun? Hit me back, it's fun coming up with these.)

This isn't Reddit, we can have a civil conversation about this if you want to...

Ok, let's start over. Hello, how are you?

I'm good. I also think there are certain room names that cannot be interpreted as anything but workplace inappropriate, maturity irrespective, and that this room name is one such name.

That's not what the strawman fallacy is...

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

Actually, I'm not sure. Is it really not technically straw man? I think it is, but am tired of typing and I feel like I have wasted a lot of time in this thread. Everyone have a good week! See ya later.

I'm honestly not sure if that would be an immediate red flag or an awesome moment of candor.

Probably both.

not projecting at all, that's like saying phrases have no meaning. It is juvenile, possibly it's an attempt at humor, but that doesn't detract from the silliness that comes from naming rooms that way.

I'd find it kind of annoying, although meetings with your boss in the "Breakup Room" would be even worse. It seems like a really dumb branding idea for an office. The space itself is nice, though.

I would have gone with filesystem concepts like inode, vfs, uid, gid, etc.

I'd find the glass walls awkwarder. Feel like everyone's watching you while you're trying to focus on your conversation.

Companies in the bay area often have these silly names for rooms. It's not really awkward, and after a while it feels pretty normal.

It's just a fun thing, so it's pointless to read too much into it.

True this. The office I work in SF has meeting rooms named after dead musicians.

I recently got to visit Facebook's Canadian office (in Toronto) and they had Canadian themed names for their board rooms. E.g. Board Room Eh, Roberta Bondar Room, etc. - gave us a good laugh, haha.

Ours are named after comic book characters but the best thing is they are in alphabetical order.

Previous agency's were named after Typefaces

Our meeting rooms are named after the planets, sadly there is no correlation of planet size to room size.

I believe the phrase you are looking for is cheesy as fuck.

Seems that the trend for office design these days is to make a theme park out of business space. I guess the idea is to make the space feel like an enjoyable place to spend a majority of your waking life.

Places that produce creative work are often plain. It makes the work stand out more. Also, I think if the work is boring you'd want a more creative space.

However, these just seem wacky and zany. Often tech people have really bad taste, but a lot of money. This type of office is the result. shudder

I was more disappointed by the "CHALLENGE ACCEPTED" text written on the wall. Being exposed to meme-y nonsense every day would have a severe impact on my job satisfaction.

I wonder how all those articles, slides and presentations on technical topics with meme-y phrases and pictures will feel like in 10 years time (those that are still relevant, that is).

But what's the value or the point? What am I missing? Why would I want to, say, have a serious 1:1 with my boss in a Romance Room?

Every early stage startup in San Francisco has an employee who is a combination secretary, HR person and vice president of ops. She usually went to an quirky college like UCSC or Evergreen and is often the ex-girlfriend of one of the founders or has some other quirky but never-again-mentioned relation to someone in the office. This employee's main distinguishing characteristic is her high level of quirkiness. Her title is Vibe Director or VP of Vibe or Senior Vibeologist.

This quirky person is in charge of buying the snacks, getting the t-shirts printed, buying white board supplies, paying the bills, picking out the posters, ordering the Aerons and also higher level stuff like finding new office space. When the company gets a new office she is in charge of naming the office rooms. However, for some reason the CEO and other founders also find naming the rooms a very serious and important task. The names can't simply be decided upon, there must be several heated meetings arguing the pros and cons of naming them after San Francisco Streets, or SF Neighborhoods, or cities in California. Since nobody wants to meet in Fresno or Bayshore or on Geary Street, this is a big deal and the meetings generally end with slammed doors, silent crying, and the vibemaster sitting alone in the nameless conference room with a 1000 yard stare into one of the whiteboards.

Then one day one of the investors visits the office and his adorable french bulldog starts humping the VP of Vibe's adorable english bulldog in one of the still-unnamed rooms and a lightbulb simultaneously appears above everyone on the room naming committee's heads.

also known as the Startup mom, making sure all the children(Founders, Employees) don't starve and die in the office.

I was disappointed to not see a single actual work area -- just the conference rooms and such. I assume the work areas will be SF startup standard huge open rooms full of lines of back-to-back desks?

Well you saw more than me, all i get to see is "Service Temporarily Unavailable". That's a pretty sensitive area for startups, besides. Stars like Joel say offices and quiet are worth the costs many times over, but startups are usually too cash starved and self punishing to actually do it. One startup I was at for a while, Noom, even lied and checked the boxes on the Joel test in job ads for quiet working environment being a huge priority when in actuality everyone was stuffed back to back in open rooms and noisy as heck. The CTO said it was fine to lie as long as interviewees saw the reality once they got there and that fewer people would apply if they told the truth, ha.

My ideal office remains something like Pioneer Way in MV where you can get a 20-30k sf dedicated standalone building for $1/mo NNN, and then have 4 parking spots per 1000 feet in a gated lot. If you put 25-75 people in a place like that, you could have a lot of dedicated function areas (various labs, datacenter, kitchen, presentation/theater, etc.), meeting areas, open work areas, and private offices. Throw in subscribing to bauer employee bus services for the minority without cars, and having on-site quality food (or walking 10 minutes to Castro St), and it'd be pretty ideal.

Dealing with Mountain View rather than SF government is a big win, too.

Downside would be "crappy view".

same thought, cool common areas, but where are the workspaces?

I run Office Snapshots, which originally published the Dropbox office. I get this question fairly regularly, and there are a number of reasons that can contribute to the common lack of workspace photos.

- The design firm submitting the project didn't work on the workstation portion of the office, and therefore does not take photos of them

- Professional photos are generally taken after the company has moved in, and workstation photos are too difficult to do when there may be confidential information present. These photo shoots can take many hours, so disrupting employees for a day is not what companies are interested in.

- Workstations are just not as sexy as conference spaces to show off (I disagree, though)

All that said, I like to use foursquare or instagram to browse photos taken at offices to get a real look at the spaces. Here's a couple photos of the workstations:

- https://foursquare.com/v/dropbox-hq/4f3970aee4b08f009b927739...

Thanks!

Those look like totally standard "startup with long rows of desks", although lower density than I've seen elsewhere. Trying to get work done in what is essentially an aisle off of a walkway would suck.

I wish there were a list of companies somewhere which sorted them into private offices, shared offices (2-3 people), team rooms (3-15 people), high cubes, low cubes, work areas for teams in rows in bigger rooms, and "one huge room full of every desk, all in long rows".

Yeah, from what I can tell, startups are stuck in a weird place where they can grow incredibly fast and might need to add a hundred employees in a matter of months. Construction doesn't really scale that fast, so it seems like this is just the best option until employee grown slows.

I'll shoot you a quick note with some details of a new feature I'm working on that you might enjoy based on what you described.

The cynic in me suggests that it has nothing to do with that, that the primary benefit of open plan offices is that it looks "cool" especially when you're an executive who thinks the whole Management By Walking Around thing is the way to run a software company and gets a slight ego boost by walking around saying "Good Job, keep it up."

Actually it's not entirely cynicism, its backed up by experiences I have had.

You are 100% correct. If it was just scaling, you wouldn't have companies like Paypal switching to a "cool" open plan layout that the employees hate but the managers get a thrill from.

Open plan = less productivity, higher stress and more sick days. Yet, it remains the new hotness. Drives me nuts.

Thank you to whoever update the link to point to officesnapshots.com. I wish I would have linked there to begin with.

Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.n...

I was astonished to see a graphic in the youtube buffering article indicating that dropbox handles over 1% of the internet's upload traffic:

http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/sandvi...

That is an astonishing amount. Almost 1/3 of Youtube! I knew they were popular but I had no idea it was that much.

Even more astonishing: a service which has been active for six years now is responsible for 1/3 of all of the downloaded data on the Internet.

These photo's are a tad old aren't they? I was there two weeks ago & most of the office has been renovated to have a more industrial theme & feel. It's also missing photos of their kitchen/dining area which was the most impressive part of their office, for me at least.

That's an awful lot of ping pong balls.

Mr. Moose isn't using them anymore.

Lovely architectural and design elements, until someone ruined it with the stupid names. The serious design elements are really exquisite, it's a shame, the architecture & design team must cringe to see what Dropbox did with their work.

There's a fantastic blog dedicated to company offices called Office Snapshots that may tickle the fancy of those that like the Dropbox office: http://officesnapshots.com/

Cool. Thanks!

They even cover this office (without errors!): http://officesnapshots.com/2013/06/05/inside-dropboxs-urbani...

I run Office Snapshots and it's pretty safe to say that Next Ventured "borrowed" the original post :)

I'd seriously recommend filing a DMCA against them. Your intellectual property is one of the most important things you own.

Protip: that 'position:fixed' header on your site is one of the web annoyances that prompts me to fire up Stylebot and nuke the element from your site.

Stop doing stupid shit like that. Especially on 16:9 laptop displays, anything that eats vertical real estate gets nuked.

#header { display: none; }

#main { padding-top: 0; }

Thanks for the feedback, I had no idea anyone would be bothered by it. It seemed that leaving access to the menu that allows for readers to more quickly and easily browse the site was a positive thing.

That style of menu is all over. Is your annoyance particularly on blogs that use them, or on any site?

Anywhere.

With Stylish as a plugin on my browser, it's become disgustingly easy for me to attack annoyances. Including FWIW, Hacker News itself: http://stylebot.me/styles/2945

Buzzfeed was particularly fun: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/G6pzJBLK...

NY Times and Edge Perspectives: https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/NUMQuQUh...

Basically: if it moves, is fixed, is an interstitial, or is just plain annoying, I kill the hell out of it. And with Stylebot, the easy stuff is just point, click, and "Hide". Then it's gone.

Bring it on.

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