Rethinking office space
googleblog.blogspot.com
googleblog.blogspot.com
"When the elevator doors finally opened into the penthouse, it felt as though Romero was standing on top of the moon. The two-story, 22,500-square-foot loft seemed to spill into the stars. The space was bare but surrounded by a wraparound window view of the city and a seemingly endless sixty-foot arched glass ceiling.
But there were problems, the agent explained. The space was so big and windowed and close to the sun that it was extremely difficult to air-condition.
Even the glass ceiling they toiled beneath became a problem, specifically, a nightmare of light. Next to vampires, no one hates the light as much as gamers; there’s nothing worse than a big, bad glare blinding down on a computer screen. Nobody could work. The architects were immediately called in to install stylish spoilers on top of the cubicles. But they proved hardly dark enough to suit the gamers’ finicky tastes. Instead, they caravanned to Home Depot and returned on a mission. They whipped out the staple guns and fastened thick sheets of black felt over every cube in the office. They didn’t just work in the shade, they worked in the black. To get into their cubes, they had to part their drapes of felt like photographers entering miniature darkrooms. It became an awesome and ironic sight; walk through the glass dome of gamers’ paradise and all one saw were rows of caves."
The real concern (which Google can't fully solve) is housing. If you add 10k or 20k more employees in these beautiful new offices, where do they all live? I guess Google could build apartments too but that's not ideal, I don't want to live at work.
I currently commute to MTV from SF. I have a shitty apartment, i pay 2x as much as it's worth in any other city, and I commute 1.5hrs each way on a clogged highway. I hope it's doesn't get much worse.
To everybody else it means MTV, making the things you say very confusing.
Well, if enough people say it, it'll catch on. I'd bet that Google is rapidly becoming more important to most people than Music Television anyway.
MP - Menlo Park (Facebook) PA - Palo Alto MTV - Mountain View (Google) SJ - San Jose SF - San Francisco
The cool thing about Google building housing is, it benefits you even if you don't want to live at work. Plenty of people (myself likely included) would enjoy living close to work in a lively apartment building surrounded by like-minded people. But if you're not one of them, you still win, by virtue of not having to compete with these people for housing elsewhere.
You may be happier living at work than you realize, (yes, I joke, but not as much as you'd think).
Unfortunately, the higher ups really like a short commute from their suburban homes.
At least Amazon and Twitter are urban.
Recently I have found ways to keep my commute negativity way down. I started going into work earlier when the traffic is lighter And much more predictable. I leave at 6:50 and I'm in by 8:00. And I started using the time on the bus as time to read, which has been great. Having 3h a day to just read books means I am tearing through my 'books to read one day' list. Sometimes I even look forward to the bus ride, it's personal time for me.
Actually not that bad of a setup...
Only issue is for legal reasons anyone could live there Google employee or not. However that is a good thing in the sense that if you lost your job your housing remains.
In the industrial revolution, it wasn't uncommon for major industrialists to build "model villages" [1] to house workers. The best examples include Bournville (Cadbury's chocolate), Saltaire (wool) and Port Sunlight (Lever Bros soap etc).
They were attractive places to live, compared with Victorian slums. You got a healthier, happier workforce living within walking distance of their jobs. Sir Titus Salt's Saltaire is now a World Heritage Site.
There's no reason why Google couldn't do the same, at least for a proportion of its workers. It looks as those Facebook will....
http://www.mv-voice.com/print/story/2012/07/13/google-housin...
In general, it's much easier to build office space than housing. Cities like it because it generates revenue but they don't have to provide additional support services such as schools, police officers, etc.
Interestingly for me, they are getting bigger and bigger. The space ship complex for Apple (and this proposed Google setup) are both quite large. So harder to lease out as a unit to the next company that comes along.
Still, if you have the extra cash laying about companies like IBM have proven that investing in real estate is a good hedge against the future. They have several really beautiful campuses.
Mind you this is a $400 billion company.
It is, of course, not a universal law, but lavish new office spaces are one of those things that don't seem to go well.
If this is the norm we wouldn't even have Google (and FB, Apple, Microsoft, Apple, etc) campuses today.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/poorly-timed-headquarters-200...
This happens to governments when they decide to build the "New City Hall". It generally goes really badly.
Do you have any data to back it up or did you just made it up?
Or from a16z:
"Pouring huge money into overly glorious new headquarters — “The Edifice Complex” — then repeating two years later. There’s also a danger in signaling to employees “we’ve made it, we’re amazing” (and while everyone hates the cramped but collaborative space when they’re in it, they miss it terribly after the move)."
And for the a16z stuff you quoted, the first paragraph says "10 ways to damage your fast-growing tech startup".
Thanks for classifying Google as a fast-growing tech startup, but I think the startup phase was over a long time ago.
So maybe it is that big successful companies tend to build buildings, and that success sometimes is the downfall of an innovative company.
It's often a sign that some of the people at the top believe they have nothing better to do than immerse themselves in creating a special building. They are by definition not as focused on the company's business. If this is happening with Google, it doesn't signal doom, but, as you say, a degree of maturity.
I'm a bit dubious when the top google link of this well known phenomenon is an urban dictionary definition.
I wouldn't be surprised if it's geolocation-based.
But it seems that's stalled.²
¹ http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/googles-uk-b...
² http://www.techworld.com/news/startups/google-rent-offices-a...
¹not speaking for my king^H^H^H^Hemployer
When Apple announced a plan to make one giant office building to house its entire corporate workforce, the general consensus was positive. Even Cupertino's politicians praised its ambition and assumed wealth it will bring to the city. Has anyone been in Cupertino recently? It feels like almost every single office building in that city is occupied by Apple now :-|.
Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
Google's office plan does seem a bit overly optimistic but clearly pitched in a way to win support of Mountain View. Right now I don't see anything in the blog post that speaks to engineers and managers who actually WANT to work in the buildings, so I hold judgement until they share more about that part.
Seriously, that's exactly what an iconic headquarters [1] is supposed to speak to - a defiance of ever being acquired, and if acquired, then to never be assimilated. In the case of both Apple and Google, I don't think it's hubris to think they'll be around in 50 years.
I applaud both campuses. The downstream implications of congestion, shopping needs and residential impact are not to be downplayed, however - and its not clear how those are being addressed in either proposal/project.
> Not saying any of it is bad, unless you consider a scenario with Apple
> needing to sell its "mothership" to any future potential corporation.
¹http://www.metropolismag.com/Point-of-View/January-2014/In-P...
It won many design awards, but later required massive retrofits to install traditional HVAC and ultimately was a complete failure.
Google has only 3 options:
1. find existing buildings nearby, but this increases sprawl even more 2. move to another city or only open space in other cities 3. build new buildings on land holdings you already have
#1 and #2 have the downsides of making it harder to collaborate.
It's not "Edifice Complex" if you have no choice but to build more space. And so, if you're going to build new buildings, why not get what you want to satisfy your requirements rather than a cookie cutter design?
but as far as revolutionary concepts go, how about just giving your employees an office with a window and a door that shuts?
Also, America, no wonder your commute is long, theres a 10 lane highway surrounded by a bunch of single-family homes. If you want to put more people into the same space, what you usually do is go up in height.
So what happens in other locations is that demand for locations starts going up, housing prices go up, taxes go up and people who can't pay those taxes get displaced. Developers buy those houses, raze them in favor of apartment complexes and eventually you get density.
If people can stay in their single family 1.5 or 2 million dollar homes and pay property taxes on the 30k they bought it for 30 years ago density won't happen because those are the people that vote and they'll keep voting for municipality limits on building to "keep the character of the neighborhood".
No, it restricts increases in the basis value to which the tax rate is applied to a maximum of the value after purchase (or other qualifying event) + 2% per annum.
> unlike most places where you pay property tax on the current value.
A number of other states have Prop 13 like limits to the annual increase in tax basis value, and some others do full market valuation but split the increases over a several year period so that the tax basis value lags the increase, and other places just have fairly infrequent reassessment except at purchase (which, in effect, also causes tax basis value to, on average, trail behind increases.)
Because of California's lenient qualifications, someone who bought that $30k house can move to North Carolina and collect massive rent checks without seeing their property taxes jump to reflect reality. The owners of apartment complexes have a vested interest in keeping their properties as they are, since a major renovation or addition would trigger a revaluation. Same for owners of office and retail space who aren't big enough to cut tax deals with the various levels of municipal government.
A certain niceness of a house in a certain market will tend to sell/rent for $X per month, no matter how you arrive at $X. So if property taxes are high, it tends to reduce the actual price of the house since people don't just pay a mortgage, but rather have to pay everything associated with the house; mortgage, insurance, taxes, etc.
This is a similar phenomena to the low interest rate, high property price that we've witnessed over the last decade or so in the US. At 4% a 200k house costs about $1k/mo once you roll in some kind of property tax and PMI. At 8% $1k/mo buys you less than 100k of house again assuming the same property tax and PMI.
Furthermore, property taxes normally force some people out of their homes; this isn't as bad as it sounds - in SF at least, they would get a hefty windfall. On average, the property would be used more efficiently by the new owner.
NIMBYism is the biggest problem in SF. Every year, 20K people or so move into the city while we only build enough housing for roughly one tenth of them. Housing has increased by ~10-15% a year for the past decade or so.
There's the anti-edifice complex company - Intel. Intel built their own office buildings to their own design, which was to have acre-sized floors with bullpens.[1] Grey bullpens. Grey walls. Grey carpet. It's depressing just to visit. I'd hate to work there.
Apple's new mothership[2] definitely indicates an edifice complex. It could work out, though. Apple is currently spread over a large number of modest buildings separated by busy roads. The mothership is a big round building with a lot of underground parking. Just getting most of their people within walking distance will be a win. Of course, that assumes Apple allows them to talk to each other.
The city of Mountain View insisted that Google put 5,000 housing units into their plan. That should help.
The classic edifice in Silicon Valley is IBM Almaden Research, from the 1960s. You enter through a modest gate and drive through rolling hills for a mile, until you reach the big glass and steel complex atop the mountain. The cafeteria looks out on miles of unblemished parkland. A lot of good stuff came out of there, including three Nobel prizes. Today, it's a shadow of what it once was. Part of it is rented out.
Overdoing this sort of thing is rare in the US today. Moscow, Dubai, and Beijing, though...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZmos0GSCWE [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2784069
Citation? I'm seeing conflicting reports. One article says Google wants to build them; One has a councilman suggesting it. I don't think it's required -- that would be weird.
http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/27/google-hq/#Vd7nAQ:64H
"“It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locate or build housing in line with the company’s growth has put pressure on cities to the north like San Francisco."
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/02/26/google-taps-heat...
Google’s plan to redesign the city’s North Bayshore area will bring even more workers to this suburban city. Mountain View city councilman Leonard Siegel said he wants to add 5,000 new housing units to the plan.
Also hopefully they won't throw stones after they move in to their glass house!
I worked at a place that was doing important work, and when I started I had a nice office on the 5th floor. It had a beautiful view.
A couple of months later I, and the rest of the group, was moved to an underground office. Now, I don't mean basement. I mean the "company" had emptied out a huge underground oil bunker[1], built a false floor and interior walls, installed fans behind the walls to deal with fumes[2], then build a small cube farm. Radios and cell phones did not work in the new area, and the faint sound of wind behind the false walls was a bit distracting. That is a mighty big negative to balance the worth of a project.
1) it had been used by a electric plant that had been torn down
2) seems oil will "bleed" from concrete walls for some time and the air flow would get rid of the dangerous fumes, or so I was told
A year later, they moved me to floor negative 3. A few weeks later, they announced my contract was ending.
So, being moved to the basement is a clear sign you are not getting respect. The next time I'm moved to the basement, I immediately start actively looking.
But wait, it's not SF? Well, neither is Kansas, and as far as urban life & young people go, Mountain View is a lot better than Kansas.
Yeah, but now it's
> The average cost for a 1-bedroom apartment in Mountain View is $2,356, according to myapartmentmap.com
http://www.sanjoseinside.com/2014/10/29/rent-control-off-the...
Granted, if you're a software engineer at Google that's not too horrible, but it sucks that so much of your big salary goes to renting an average little apartment.
Interesting how you refer to that as "only". That's like 40% of the average American salary. But if you work at Google and you indicate $1400 with "only" I cannot help but assume Google employees are far above the average national income.
Yes, this is insane. But people can pay them. Tech company employees are indeed far above the average national income.
[1] http://sf.curbed.com/archives/2014/10/06/mapping_the_median_...
When companies are doing really well the corporate offices are too busy doing stuff to hire a starchitect and the company is growing too fast for it to make sense to literally set in stone how it should henceforth be arranged.
You tend to build a fancy new building when the company has stopped growing (so you know how big to make the building and how to lay out the various departments) and when the management staff is to some extent twiddling their thumbs looking for something useful to do rather than starting bold new projects. That sort of building signals the company is coasting rather than being dynamic. They are investing time and money and effort in a building because (unlike when they were growing) they currently can't think of anything better to invest that time and money in.
However, both Apple and Google are arguably exceptions to this rule.
In Apple's case, mitigating circumstances include that they've already survived building and moving into the "Infinite Loop" campus and a vast flood of architecturally-interesting Apple Stores. Their new campus - while impressive - is essentially iterative; it's doing something they've done before using skills they've successfully used before, merely on a larger scale.
In Google's case, their (goofy) design explicitly seems to anticipate LOTS of change and potential further growth and reorganization. They are not "setting in stone" the shape of the company.
And in both Google AND Apple's case, the companies have so much money and so many employees that it'd be stupid NOT to try to consolidate a bit at this point.
I see one guy with a laptop, and I suppose a few people could be trying to solve hard problems by walking around. But there is more yoga in those pictures than software development or customer service or anything that Google does for a living.
But if anyone could pull it off, it's probably Google!
Also who is going to clean all those windows? New automated self cleaning window robots?
It's very distracting to the overall flow and feel of the video?
I wonder how long it'll take for the first buildings to come to fruition?
Starting sentences with "So..." and ending with questions is annoying indeed.
I'm don't mean this as negatively as this probably sounds. Google has done a lot of innovation in things like data centers, and I am hoping they have similar innovations for the problems I have raised.
They did.
The problem is the full vision: architects love tossing in an unrealistic amount of people having loads of fun that's almost impossible to have in such a spontaneous way. They stage social utopic scenarios in their renderings which almost never describe how the public ends up utilizing and interacting with the public spaces provided by the project.
(I looked for the footage, but couldn't find the clip.)
Ok, sign me up for the new Google Domed City with integrated weather, parks, transportation (self-driving cars), housing, office space, entertainment, and local governance. Would like one here here in Ft. Worth, it is snowing a lot today.
https://beta.googledomedcity.com not resolving, darn.
When is the Beta launching near me.
Couple of feature requests: don't forget to include greywater recycling guys. And voting.
There is no need to write "Not the sexiest title for a blog post, I know." when there are equally valid constructions that eschew the sexual.
Also - I have to ask (genuinely intrigued) - who is this language supposed to be offending, and why?
I actually preferred the mall space. There was a movie theater and a drivers' license annex in it, and some lunch-friendly restaurants. The commute was faster. Parking was never a problem. City buses stopped there.
The new corporate headquarters was in the middle of nowhere. You had to drive for 15 minutes to get anywhere else that you might want to be, including spiraling up all those ramps in the underground parking garage. It was well done architecturally, and very pretty, but I don't care about that while I'm working. And when I'm done working, I want to go somewhere else, and do something that is not work.
The supposed benefit to collaboration was not realized by reducing the walking time between offices. The people that worked together most often were still seated the same distance from each other, and from their regular conference rooms. Anyone not physically present was still brought in via conference call. The increased distance to anything else made it more likely that you would miss someone who was out to lunch, at an appointment, or on a personal errand. The start and end of ordinary business hours created localized traffic congestion.
So yes, it would be better to have a more distributed workforce.
North Bayshore would obviously be better for Googlers, but there seems to be a lot more resistance to building housing there, for whatever reason.