The Curse of a New Building | Hacker News Reader

The Curse of a New Building

blogs.wsj.com

86 pointsrmason47 comments

This is indistinguishable from selection bias.

If you want to write the opposite article, pick any three wildly successful companies. They've all grown enough that they've had to move into a new building. Pick a project that went well around the time of the move; they're big enough that there must be at least one. Now, attribute causation and come up with some pithy bullet points. Ta-da! You've got yourself a wsj article.

A new building can cause a CEO to take his eye off the ball and can contribute to changing the company's culture. It resonated with me because I've seen it happen time and again.

It doesn't mean it will always happen. But I'd wager those company's who successfully moved into a new building spent considerable time focused on having it not happen to them.

This is a CEO issue, not a "new building" issue. The new building is a symptom, not a cause.

When experienced managers and leaders start trying to manage beyond their competence it's more often a result of arrogance rather than ignorance.

This isn't a random WSJ article; it's a Steve Blank article. That doesn't matter except that your "ta-da!" probably doesn't generate credible Steve Blank articles.

You also haven't contradicted Blank. He didn't say companies shouldn't ever transition out of their startup phase; he just said that the purchase of an optimal new building signals that transition. The implication is that you should be sure you're ready for it.

At the bottom:

    Lessons Learned

    - New buildings are a distraction.
    - You should avoid them at all costs
    - Building upgrades can destroy a culture

He seems to be totally against new buildings.

I don't think he'd be against moving into a new generic office space. He's against letting the new building define who the company is, and take away time and energy. Just moving to another strip mall might not cause that problem! :)

For startups. Not in general. It helps to have read Blank's other work about the phases companies go through; startups to him are companies still working on optimizing their product/market fit.

Why was management involving themselves in decisions about carpets and walls? Surely this was a poor use of time in area where they are not experts. An architecture or interior design company would be one thing, but engineers and management should at most merely approve decisions. Surely their involving staff sent the signal that worrying about this stuff was OK. If one assistant or outsourced interior designer had been in charge how many problems would have been avoided?

Every business reaches the point where everyone can no longer work in the same room. Even if you continue renting out three floors of a building, you will eventually lose the "everyone knows everyone" feeling unique to small companies. When there are 500 people in the company there's no getting around it. You lose something there, but it's a sacrifice most companies make in order to continue growing.

There are some thing you can do to maintain your culture. You can usually maintain a fairly flat management structure. There are large companies - eBay, last I checked - where almost no one has an office and everyone works side-by-side. You can continue to promote events and activities. You can continue to promote risk taking rather than becoming risk averse as most large companies do.

I don't know the situation, but I really doubt that "new building" is the unavoidable root cause of the author's problems. Some loss of startup culture may be unavoidable as a company grows, and perhaps the time-wasting could have been managed better in this case.

I'm usually at the North campus in one of those nobody-has-an-office spaces, but I spent a few days working with the Milo guys out of their space in the "Milo House" and that was awesome. The cramped quarters had a startup-y feel to them that was great.

> Why was management involving themselves in decisions about carpets and walls? Surely this was a poor use of time in area where they are not experts.

It's pretty much the perfect example of Bike Shedding. Most people can't build a bike shed, but they want to put in their 2c, so they will bicker endlessly about what colour to paint it.

Also, things like selecting office location are so deeply political that decisions about them invariably creep to the top.

>Also, things like selecting office location are so deeply political that decisions about them invariably creep to the top.

I'd argue that /moving/ an office is almost always going to cause rancor because moving your house is expensive and difficult, and, well, obviously you had an acceptable commute before. Commute times are huge;

I'd actually like to see some numbers; my gut would be that when you move the office more than 10 miles, your turnover goes through the roof for the next 6 months or so.

(the interesting thing about a commute is that especially for younger workers, it's not always obvious how brutal the commute will be. "Oh yeah, half an hour each way, I can deal with it" - 6 months later? your view is dramatically different, especially if you have been working long hours at the office.) So yeah, moving the office, I mean, more than a few miles, is a huge deal and absolutely needs management involvement. Potentially you could lose some really key people.

I'd argue that deciding, you know, about shit like carpet, on the other hand? the only time that should move up the ladder is when it's still a business run by 'some guy' - and even then, it needs to be a recognized bikeshed.

(the cube/office decision might also be worth the time. There's a real difference. but picking out carpet? yeah. leave that to someone who doesn't have anything better to do, or outsource it.)

I believe Joel Garreau was the guy who said that a company's new location will be as close as possible to a CEO's house without affecting his property value.

A recent article on the topic:

http://greatergreaterwashington.org/post/19239/ceos-want-fas...

Not really, because with an office building the people who want to put their 2 cents in are going to be working inside it and want some input on their working conditions. They're not just arguing to feel smarter about something, but because they're going to have to live with the outcome.

I've seen the attitude that drives executives to insert themselves into these sorts of processes and it basically boils down to pretty much every human being thinking they have a great sense of aesthetics when most of us really don't.

In addition to (presumably) being successful business people, they want to be also thought of as tasteful interior designers, they have some sort of pet theories on "enhancing creativity" they want to pursue, the list goes on ad nauseum...

Really, they should just hire somebody who is an acknowledged expert in the field and give them their high level requests which can then be filtered professionally into something that makes sense. Involved but not attempting to drive the process.

Yes, but you "have to live with" every decision your company makes, and you cannot make them all. This is control-based thinking: the sort of thinking that leads foolish managers to try to control coding decisions they don't understand or a million other things.

Besides, the grungy midtown location, perfect for startups, was starting to get us down after five years. We had a little bit more money, so we were looking for a place with about twice the space that cost about four times as much.

Our ideal of giving every developer a private office is unusual, so it’s almost impossible to find prebuilt office space set up that way. That means we didn’t have much choice but to find the best raw space and then do our own interior construction.

Here are a few of the features of the new office: - Gobs of well-lit perimeter offices. - Coffee bar and lunchroom. - A huge salt water aquarium - Plenty of meeting space.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

> While offices for everyone sound good on paper, moving everyone out of cubicles destroyed a culture of tight-knit interaction and communication.

Please, no, do not fall for this misconception. I've worked in several "tight-knit" environments. Invariably, everyone starts wearing headphones to tune out the distraction and also starts communicating via IRC/messaging so as not to cause distraction. Completely negating any potential for the mythical spontaneous communication.

Forget carpet, colors and textures. The functional aspects of a new building are critical and guaranteed to heavily affect everybody, so you cannot think enough about them and always get tons of input.

Otherwise, you end up with nice bathrooms but outside secure areas that eat minutes from everyone's daily routine, burning sun instead of natural light, not enough conference rooms causing excessive environmental noise, too many cubes next to HR but not enough for the development team, teams who are split across floors because you planned the space poorly, unused kitchens because they are simply in the wrong place, a lobby with standing room only, having to escort visitors inside secure areas to use the bathroom because you forgot one outside, only one AV-capable conference room but half of all meetings require a projector, and a late realization that the receptionist desk should've been at the bottom of the stairs to greet lost visitors and the fedex guy instead of running up and down stairs all day to answer a call box, etc.

That's a pretty basic checklist that a good architect with experience of office design would go through. Those are all design problems an architect will be able to solve for you and often in ways you wouldn't have thought of. Don't reinvent the wheel.

Yeah, tell that to the architect we had.

I thought this would be about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome

> In the late 1970s, it was noted that nonspecific symptoms were reported by tenants in newly constructed homes, offices, and nurseries. In media it was called "office illness”. "The term "Sick Building Syndrome" was coined by WHO in 1986, when they also estimated that 10-30% of newly built office buildings in the West had indoor air problems.

This was originally posted on Steve Blank's site here: http://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war-story-11-the-c... -- not sure why the WSJ chose to recycle it four years later. This is probably the third or fourth time it's been on HN.

Thank you. I knew I had read this somewhere before, so not surprised to see that it's a repeat of his own blogging.

Have to mention best buy here. They built an enormous HQ on "eminent domain" seized land, then proceeded to shrink the headcount by 75%. An entire wing is empty.

I've seen this happen at other companies too. It's a sure sign to run the hell away (unless of course, you have a sweet corner office).

When the pop is no longer free, or the company is building a new HQ, get out.

So when you need a bigger space, make sure it's at least as poorly constructed and ill-suited to the task as your current space?

Maybe the lesson (for tech companies) should be to postpone leasing high-rent office space until you're confident you'll be able to afford it for a while.

Seriously... I am curious as to what alternative the author proposes? Pack people in even tighter? Never grow your workforce? Make people work from home?

This sounds like a someone saying "At lunch I ate too much food and now I feel sick. No one should ever eat food!"

A possibly-relevant anecdote from How Buildings Learn:

Apparently one of the best-loved buildings at MIT was a "temporary" building erected during WWII that stood for several decades. Due to its "temporary" nature and cheap construction people didn't hesitate to make any ad-hoc modifications that seemed useful at the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 The architectural marvel of the Media Lab ended up being a lot less flexible in exchange for better fit and finish.

Seems to be happening to Apple?

Since the focus on that huge UFO shaped building, they been having all sorts of problems like the developer site breech, the iPad sales coming down, the stock price receding.

Purely anecdotal I know. But gotta wonder.

> Since the focus on that huge UFO shaped building, they been having all sorts of problems

Unless that UFO building killed Steve Jobs, I doubt there is an association.

Maybe Steve just went home.

Stock price coming down seems to have made Apple happy, judging by the number they bought back.

I bet part of the problem is, execs often use floorplans as a way to help create silos.

Every sane manager wants silos. There's no way they want to risk their employees getting too chummy with the enemy. They might jump ship for a new team, or worse, help the other team out while still having the salary budgeted to their real boss.

Sounds a lot like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sports_Illustrated_cover_jinx

Might just be that breakout companies tend to regress towards the mean after a big breakout. Or the new building is a giant ego project like Sears tower or moving the company to a CEO's hometown.

Relevant video of OMGPOP circa 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97M5FoZ-SlQ

That looks like a slightly less hellish version of Ksplice's working environment circa 2010: https://blogs.oracle.com/ksplice/resource/ksplice-iap-14.jpg

(I hope they at least got more office space out of Oracle post-acquisition...)

Anecdotes like this bother me. Specifically that one can really draw conclusions like this based on them:

> - New buildings are a distraction.

> - You should avoid them at all costs

> - Building upgrades can destroy a culture

Would this have happened anyways? Did it really had anything to do with a new building at all or more to do with a company that failed in it's transition? All successful companies have to grow up at some point, is not moving into a new building isn't going to fix that problem just create different problems for you to deal with.

Unfortunately, there is no way to test the theory rigorously with a double-blind randomized controlled study. But Steve has seen it happen many times, and I've seen it happen a few times myself, and I think it's advice worth heeding.

Isn't YC moving into a new building? cue dramatic music

Edit: Now I remember where I read that: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/332975930962239488

>>>>> The new building telegraphed to our employees, “We’ve arrived. We’re no longer a small struggling startup. You can stop working like a startup and start working like a big company.”

What does this mean? Does the author not think successful large companies work just as hard and put in just as many hours as a startup? I just finished a contract with a large public company and during the release cycles we were putting in 11 and 14 hour days.

Statistically speaking, large companies are far less economically productive. And frankly if you were working 11-14 hours a day I wouldn't be surprised if you were less productive than someone working 4-6.

I'm thankful for Steve's wisdom. I know that it's not a popular stance but let's give the guy the benefit of the doubt.

The article advocates an idea with which I am inclined to agree. But, how does the cultural impact of rapidly hiring employees compare to the 'new building' impact discussed here? I have a strong suspicion that hiring too many too fast is just as effective at destroying the startup culture as moving into a more professional (read: corporate) office.

This article reminded me of an old quotation I read at some point in the past, but don't remember the exact wording or attribution. It was something to the effect of:

"The beginning of an organization's decline can usually be traced to when it moves into a building built for the purpose."

Anyone know the exact quotation I'm thinking of and who said it?

The contrary position is that if a company stays in its rundown office space, it will stagnate, morale will suffer, people will leave and the rest of the operation will shrivel up and die. New space is a reward for ambition, and one of many steps to becoming bigger and better operation.

This is one of the best articles I've read on HN.

How to stay hungry, in other words. Or, why opulence can crush you.

I wonder how these lessons apply to us personally and as a society. Does getting rich make us fat and lazy? Or decadent?

Done a dozen startups. Its a joke with my colleagues (been thru several together): when they buy/build a new headquarters, its the beginning of the end. Been true more than once.

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