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Interesting development. Glitch used to be Fog Creek, where Joel Spolsky talked of treating developers well (latest hardware, private offices etc) and paying th

Interesting development. Glitch used to be Fog Creek, where Joel Spolsky talked of treating developers well (latest hardware, private offices etc) and paying them well. I wonder if the culture has changed and that's why the developers felt the need to create a union. [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-developers-2/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/09/07/a-field-guide-to-d...]

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jypepin 7y ago
Also surprised because I thought it was a very small company (less than 50). I'm wondering if it's really useful to unionize for such a small company?
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hinkley 7y ago
Joel talking about the great care they took to build their offices (in a way that I felt was a huge mistake) was sort of the beginning of me realizing that he doesn't get everything right. There's also an uncanny valley effect, where ignoring a problem entirely means that your employees may have needs they aren't aware of, and as soon as you shine a light on it, their job satisfaction is actually lower until you get it right. I think a couple of my bosses understood this intuitively and would invite us to participate in developing solutions. We are much more patient with ourselves than with others.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  What's wrong with how they built their offices, in your opinion?
  - hinkley 7y ago
    There's a lot of crappy office politics that circles around access to daylight. You invariably have a mismatch between Valuable Employees and Valuable deskspace, jockying for position becomes a distraction and having multiple grades of desk just kind of beats the newer employees about the head and shoulders with how little they matter. It is, in a word, fractious. The best solution I've seen for this is to keep most of the windows in public spaces. If I go for water or to the bathroom, I should get daylight. Impromptu meeting spaces and lunch spots: daylight. The thing is, developers say they want daylight at their desk, and then they realize that they can't actually work in natural light (this has gotten better in just the last few years, but I've been watching this happen for 20), and so the people who 'own' the windows end up closing the blinds to work in peace. The worse this ever got, we had the top floor of a building and so many blinds were closed all day that we might as well have rented space in the basement for half the price/ft² So now if I am to get any daylight it is at the sole discretion of someone already on an ego trip? No thank you. Move the desks so that people can see daylight but aren't in daylight. All the windows stay open, your AC bills are a little lower, and the steepness of the pecking order is not quite so brazen.
    - hinkley 7y ago
      I'm still trying to locate the iteration that bugged me, but from what I can see of their new-new-new offices, they seem to be more in keeping with the style I talk about above: https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-the-new-fog-creek-headquarters-bc2f70d7c7dc https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-... ... except that there is so little workspace that I had to stare at the picture for about fifteen seconds to figure out if they did, in fact, have any employees at all.

deleted 7y ago

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jypepin 7y ago

Also surprised because I thought it was a very small company (less than 50). I'm wondering if it's really useful to unionize for such a small company?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hinkley 7y ago

Joel talking about the great care they took to build their offices (in a way that I felt was a huge mistake) was sort of the beginning of me realizing that he doesn't get everything right. There's also an uncanny valley effect, where ignoring a problem entirely means that your employees may have needs they aren't aware of, and as soon as you shine a light on it, their job satisfaction is actually lower until you get it right. I think a couple of my bosses understood this intuitively and would invite us to participate in developing solutions. We are much more patient with ourselves than with others.

Apocryphon 7y ago
What's wrong with how they built their offices, in your opinion?
- hinkley 7y ago
  There's a lot of crappy office politics that circles around access to daylight. You invariably have a mismatch between Valuable Employees and Valuable deskspace, jockying for position becomes a distraction and having multiple grades of desk just kind of beats the newer employees about the head and shoulders with how little they matter. It is, in a word, fractious. The best solution I've seen for this is to keep most of the windows in public spaces. If I go for water or to the bathroom, I should get daylight. Impromptu meeting spaces and lunch spots: daylight. The thing is, developers say they want daylight at their desk, and then they realize that they can't actually work in natural light (this has gotten better in just the last few years, but I've been watching this happen for 20), and so the people who 'own' the windows end up closing the blinds to work in peace. The worse this ever got, we had the top floor of a building and so many blinds were closed all day that we might as well have rented space in the basement for half the price/ft² So now if I am to get any daylight it is at the sole discretion of someone already on an ego trip? No thank you. Move the desks so that people can see daylight but aren't in daylight. All the windows stay open, your AC bills are a little lower, and the steepness of the pecking order is not quite so brazen.
  - hinkley 7y ago
    I'm still trying to locate the iteration that bugged me, but from what I can see of their new-new-new offices, they seem to be more in keeping with the style I talk about above: https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-the-new-fog-creek-headquarters-bc2f70d7c7dc https://medium.com/make-better-software/beyond-open-offices-... ... except that there is so little workspace that I had to stare at the picture for about fifteen seconds to figure out if they did, in fact, have any employees at all.