7 ms·

Architect behind Googleplex now says it's 'dangerous' to work at posh offices

59 points by boulos 5y ago

MiddleEndian 5y ago
Having worked at Microsoft in their headquarters in Redmond, I have to agree with the unhealthiness of being stuck in a work community all the time. I was dazzled by MS for the first several months, it was my first job out of college, there were tons of shiny things and fringe benefits, they rented out entire sports stadiums for company meetings, they had clubs for salsa and ballroom dance just like at school, etc. But it was very disconnected from Seattle or even the rest of the world. Microsoft practically ran Redmond and Bellevue, to the point where it programmed their stop-lights. I was there for a couple years and everyone I knew was a Microsoft employee or a spouse or family member of a Microsoft employee (many of whom were also Microsoft employees). I was also dating a Microsoft contractor I met through one of those work-related clubs. It started to drive me nuts, and it was my major reason for leaving MS. I don't think I could ever do that again, barring otherwise dire circumstances. I later worked at a Google satellite office in Cambridge, and while I left for other reasons, it did not have the all-encompassing life capture that the MS HQ did, not because of any company policy (since Google has a similar HQ) but because I was not physically trapped in a company town. I imagine I would have had a better time at MS had I worked in their Cambridge satellite instead.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  I am with you visiting Google HQ felt like going to a really strange amusement park.
  - quantumwannabe 5y ago
    Mountain View is Googleville. Nearly all the buildings in the industrial part of the city are owned by them. You have to travel several miles from the Googleplex before you stop seeing Google-owned property. I don't know how any startup could set up there as it feels like there is zero office space left!
    - astrange 5y ago
      To be fair, those parts of South Bay are so not-dense you have to travel a mile to see anything or to get lunch.
      - snowgrove 5y ago
        This is also hyperbole. Mountain View is very dense compared to most of the suburban USA. There are numerous non-Google burrito, taco, Korean hot-pot, etc. places all with a few minutes’ walk of the Googleplex. I know because I’ve walked to them.
        boulos 5y ago
        I dunno, define "few"? It's easily 20 minutes+ each way to get to a non-tech company building (maybe more if you're embedded in say Crittenden).
        snowgrove 5y ago
        Pear Ave and the restaurants next to Sports Page are directly adjacent to buildings on the south end, but Maps does say you’re right about the stuff north on Rengstorff (about 20 minutes from building 42). I guess time flew and I didn’t mind the walk. Faster if you GBike it.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - snowgrove 5y ago
      For non-Valley insiders: the above is hyperbole. For one thing, the massive Intuit campus is right next door to the Googleplex. For another thing, the industrial areas just across Highway 101 (a quarter mile from the ‘plex at most) are full of non-Google startups and midsized tech businesses, as well as junkyards and auto body shops and who knows what else.
      - swivelmaster 5y ago
supperburg 5y ago
His house is very ugly. I hate it when architects think they are painting an abstract picture with wood and marble. Good architecture feels good to live in — it’s not an accessory or a statement.
- cromka 5y ago
  It's like, your opinion, bro. I for one, love architecture, and find his a very warm, clean space. You may simply not like modernist minimalistic style, but this is where good architecture shines: it's hard to design something good with very little. Designs like this are timeless. Just lookup the mid-century modern California (LA, Palm Springs) houses or even the 1920 revolutionary concepts of Bauhaus or Le Corbusier et al. On the opposite of spectrum lies what I personally call "every 'luxurious' NYC condo": the cacophony of styles, overloaded with art, heavy, without personal touches, mostly designed to show the wealth of the owners, but not designed by themselves. Those interiors are ridiculously tacky, and each of them will become outdated within next 5-10 years. Just like de Saint-Exupery said himself: 'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'
  - oefnak 5y ago
    What do you think about this? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
  - supperburg 5y ago
    Heavy is such a good word to describe those things. But I disagree about this house. I think minimalism depends on materials. The wood lap attempts to demonstrate a material but it’s way too clean and it screams “MATERIAL.” In my eyes it’s a bit heavy. The island that’s made to look like a solid block of granite is terrible to me. It causes me to imagine how unpleasant it must be to use a cube of granite for anything. And I don’t think a loud piece of granite is minimalist.
- random314 5y ago
sildur 5y ago
> That said, plenty of Google's some 144,000 employees appear to be just fine with the on-site luxuries their employer provides. Well, of course they are. Those who weren’t “just fine” already left. But it’s not about how fine they feel, it’s about how healthy it is. To me, that paragraph looks weirdly like backpedaling.
- nextlevelwizard 5y ago
  I don’t understand the issue you or the guy are having with this. You aren’t forced to work there. If someone likes it let them have it.
imiric 5y ago
> And so he suspects, happily, that the pandemic has wiped out one particular type of office: the cubicle farm. > "Cubicles are like human chicken farming. They have always been bad for anything other than kind of factory farming kind of approach to the office," he said. Having worked both in a cubicle and an open office, I'd take the cubicle any day of the week. Maybe a certain type of cramped cubicle is bad, but in the company I worked for we had large desks, neck and chest-height dividers, and teams faced opposite from one another, so it fostered collaboration, while maintaining a sense of privacy. The open office OTOH had no sense of privacy, and you could hear conversations from several desks away. Wearing headphones to block out the noise was the only way to get some work done, but there was nothing you could do about visual distractions in your peripheral vision. It was awful. > "Put people in tiny little footprint because it takes less money than an enclosed office and we can kind of keep an eye on them." On the contrary, the open floor plan popularized by Google et al was always loved by managers for this reason, not the cubicle farm. > Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it's easy to hang out and chat. No, thanks. I'll keep working from home or remotely from wherever I want rather than in your open space office.
- ihateolives 5y ago
  "Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee." I wonder if he really does have any personal experience about working in a place like this at all. People need order, they need to have something they can call their own. They'll keep coming back to place they were last time and will have arguments if someone has taken their spot. Teams will claim a place their own unofficially. Nobody is going to move around every day just because they can. People need predictability. I'm inclined to think that Wilkinson himself has never been forced to work in a places he envisions.
  - pavel_lishin 5y ago
    Given their focus on a place where "it's easy hang out and chat", I'm wondering if Wilkinson has ever worked at all.
emptybottle 5y ago
TIL that Google popularized the open floor plan. Is there anything in the tech industry that they haven’t made worse?
- EduardoBautista 5y ago
  Job benefits, liveable salaries, affordable alternative to iOS, gigabit internet, off the top of my head.
  - GreenWatermelon 5y ago
    Yes, but aside from Job benefits, liveable salaries, affordable alternative to iOS, gigabit internet, what has google done for us? reference: https://youtu.be/2ozEZxOsanY https://youtu.be/2ozEZxOsanY
civilized 5y ago
Slow news day?
e-clinton 5y ago
In an ideal world, give me a private office or let me stay home.
BinaryCoder 5y ago
Article: "his most famous work: Googleplex" ...vs... Wiki: "Wilkinson is perhaps best known for designing the interior of one of the buildings in the Googleplex"

59 points by boulos 5y ago

Having worked at Microsoft in their headquarters in Redmond, I have to agree with the unhealthiness of being stuck in a work community all the time. I was dazzled by MS for the first several months, it was my first job out of college, there were tons of shiny things and fringe benefits, they rented out entire sports stadiums for company meetings, they had clubs for salsa and ballroom dance just like at school, etc. But it was very disconnected from Seattle or even the rest of the world. Microsoft practically ran Redmond and Bellevue, to the point where it programmed their stop-lights. I was there for a couple years and everyone I knew was a Microsoft employee or a spouse or family member of a Microsoft employee (many of whom were also Microsoft employees). I was also dating a Microsoft contractor I met through one of those work-related clubs. It started to drive me nuts, and it was my major reason for leaving MS. I don't think I could ever do that again, barring otherwise dire circumstances. I later worked at a Google satellite office in Cambridge, and while I left for other reasons, it did not have the all-encompassing life capture that the MS HQ did, not because of any company policy (since Google has a similar HQ) but because I was not physically trapped in a company town. I imagine I would have had a better time at MS had I worked in their Cambridge satellite instead.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
I am with you visiting Google HQ felt like going to a really strange amusement park.
- quantumwannabe 5y ago
  Mountain View is Googleville. Nearly all the buildings in the industrial part of the city are owned by them. You have to travel several miles from the Googleplex before you stop seeing Google-owned property. I don't know how any startup could set up there as it feels like there is zero office space left!
  - astrange 5y ago
    To be fair, those parts of South Bay are so not-dense you have to travel a mile to see anything or to get lunch.
    - snowgrove 5y ago
      This is also hyperbole. Mountain View is very dense compared to most of the suburban USA. There are numerous non-Google burrito, taco, Korean hot-pot, etc. places all with a few minutes’ walk of the Googleplex. I know because I’ve walked to them.
      - boulos 5y ago
        I dunno, define "few"? It's easily 20 minutes+ each way to get to a non-tech company building (maybe more if you're embedded in say Crittenden).
        snowgrove 5y ago
        Pear Ave and the restaurants next to Sports Page are directly adjacent to buildings on the south end, but Maps does say you’re right about the stuff north on Rengstorff (about 20 minutes from building 42). I guess time flew and I didn’t mind the walk. Faster if you GBike it.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - snowgrove 5y ago
    For non-Valley insiders: the above is hyperbole. For one thing, the massive Intuit campus is right next door to the Googleplex. For another thing, the industrial areas just across Highway 101 (a quarter mile from the ‘plex at most) are full of non-Google startups and midsized tech businesses, as well as junkyards and auto body shops and who knows what else.
    - swivelmaster 5y ago

supperburg 5y ago

His house is very ugly. I hate it when architects think they are painting an abstract picture with wood and marble. Good architecture feels good to live in — it’s not an accessory or a statement.

cromka 5y ago
It's like, your opinion, bro. I for one, love architecture, and find his a very warm, clean space. You may simply not like modernist minimalistic style, but this is where good architecture shines: it's hard to design something good with very little. Designs like this are timeless. Just lookup the mid-century modern California (LA, Palm Springs) houses or even the 1920 revolutionary concepts of Bauhaus or Le Corbusier et al. On the opposite of spectrum lies what I personally call "every 'luxurious' NYC condo": the cacophony of styles, overloaded with art, heavy, without personal touches, mostly designed to show the wealth of the owners, but not designed by themselves. Those interiors are ridiculously tacky, and each of them will become outdated within next 5-10 years. Just like de Saint-Exupery said himself: 'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'
- oefnak 5y ago
  What do you think about this? https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/whither-tartaria
- supperburg 5y ago
  Heavy is such a good word to describe those things. But I disagree about this house. I think minimalism depends on materials. The wood lap attempts to demonstrate a material but it’s way too clean and it screams “MATERIAL.” In my eyes it’s a bit heavy. The island that’s made to look like a solid block of granite is terrible to me. It causes me to imagine how unpleasant it must be to use a cube of granite for anything. And I don’t think a loud piece of granite is minimalist.
random314 5y ago

sildur 5y ago

> That said, plenty of Google's some 144,000 employees appear to be just fine with the on-site luxuries their employer provides. Well, of course they are. Those who weren’t “just fine” already left. But it’s not about how fine they feel, it’s about how healthy it is. To me, that paragraph looks weirdly like backpedaling.

nextlevelwizard 5y ago
I don’t understand the issue you or the guy are having with this. You aren’t forced to work there. If someone likes it let them have it.

imiric 5y ago

> And so he suspects, happily, that the pandemic has wiped out one particular type of office: the cubicle farm. > "Cubicles are like human chicken farming. They have always been bad for anything other than kind of factory farming kind of approach to the office," he said. Having worked both in a cubicle and an open office, I'd take the cubicle any day of the week. Maybe a certain type of cramped cubicle is bad, but in the company I worked for we had large desks, neck and chest-height dividers, and teams faced opposite from one another, so it fostered collaboration, while maintaining a sense of privacy. The open office OTOH had no sense of privacy, and you could hear conversations from several desks away. Wearing headphones to block out the noise was the only way to get some work done, but there was nothing you could do about visual distractions in your peripheral vision. It was awful. > "Put people in tiny little footprint because it takes less money than an enclosed office and we can kind of keep an eye on them." On the contrary, the open floor plan popularized by Google et al was always loved by managers for this reason, not the cubicle farm. > Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it's easy to hang out and chat. No, thanks. I'll keep working from home or remotely from wherever I want rather than in your open space office.

ihateolives 5y ago
"Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee." I wonder if he really does have any personal experience about working in a place like this at all. People need order, they need to have something they can call their own. They'll keep coming back to place they were last time and will have arguments if someone has taken their spot. Teams will claim a place their own unofficially. Nobody is going to move around every day just because they can. People need predictability. I'm inclined to think that Wilkinson himself has never been forced to work in a places he envisions.
- pavel_lishin 5y ago
  Given their focus on a place where "it's easy hang out and chat", I'm wondering if Wilkinson has ever worked at all.

emptybottle 5y ago

TIL that Google popularized the open floor plan. Is there anything in the tech industry that they haven’t made worse?

EduardoBautista 5y ago
Job benefits, liveable salaries, affordable alternative to iOS, gigabit internet, off the top of my head.
- GreenWatermelon 5y ago
  Yes, but aside from Job benefits, liveable salaries, affordable alternative to iOS, gigabit internet, what has google done for us? reference: https://youtu.be/2ozEZxOsanY https://youtu.be/2ozEZxOsanY

civilized 5y ago

Slow news day?

e-clinton 5y ago

In an ideal world, give me a private office or let me stay home.

BinaryCoder 5y ago

Article: "his most famous work: Googleplex" ...vs... Wiki: "Wilkinson is perhaps best known for designing the interior of one of the buildings in the Googleplex"