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Joel Spolsky's 20 year old post on designing an office is still relevant here. He imagines a lifestyle and tries to create a perfect space and location to enabl

Joel Spolsky's 20 year old post on designing an office is still relevant here. He imagines a lifestyle and tries to create a perfect space and location to enable that: The office should be a hang out: a pleasant place to spend time. If you’re meeting your friends for dinner after work you should want to meet at the office. As Philip Greenspun bluntly puts it: “Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.” https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/09/24/bionic-office/ I wonder how many programmers he employed with partners and children back then though?

bombadil44 3y ago
Offices also have to be good enough to warrant having to travel hours each day to get to/from them, which is a pretty tough to compete with for a lot of people
- rtpg 3y ago
  To put an even finer point on this: no matter how good your office is, if your office is in the middle of a huge metropolis then you are now asking people to either do long commutes or make some honestly hefty sacrifices in living arrangements to be close. No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in. I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower. Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building
  - leetcrew 3y ago
    if you want to attract the best talent and have an in-person culture, you kinda have to place offices in central locations, which inevitably become very expensive. take NYC for example. office space in manhattan is extremely expensive, but it's also very well connected. people can reasonably commute from four out of the five buroughs, and a bit less reasonably from NJ, the lower hudson valley, etc. pretty much anywhere else in the greater NYC area would be much cheaper to rent office space, but the subway and commuter rail are all designed around the expectation that people need to be moved en masse to/from manhattan. an office in queens would be attractive to people who live in queens, but it would exclude people who want to live in all those other places. that said, some companies do exactly what you suggest. amazon has a lot of offices in less "desirable" areas. HQ2 is a prominent example. crystal city is far from the most prestigious place to have an office in the DC area, and it's not particularly well connected to most neighborhoods in DC proper. but if you're okay with living in alexandria or arlington, you can have a decent commute and save a bit of money on housing. there are also a lot of smaller tech companies that set up in random suburban office parks. typically they do this because they are more focused on reliable profits (and lowering costs) than rapid growth. these places can honestly be pretty nice to work at, but you need to really adjust your expectations around comp. you don't hear about these places because they've essentially decided not to be competitive.
  - asielen 3y ago
    The reason I take jobs in a centralized dense downtown is because I know I can find another job without changing my commute. It also makes socializing after work, or during work, so much easier. I've worked in 5 different offices within a mile if each other in the last decade. I can still grab lunch with people I used to work with within a 10 minute walk of my current office. It is the only reason I am happy to go into the office a couple times a week. If I worked in a generic office building in the suburbs I would never want to go in.
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Boss: We "can't afford" free snacks in the break room anymore. Also Boss: How come none of you come into the office anymore?
neilv 3y ago
I don't know about Spolsky, but I got the impression that Greenspun was hiring MIT undergrads (and there was the Ferrari promotion). Apropos of Spolsky's discussion of interior design, I think Greenspun's firm's old building is currently an office of IDEO, but I don't know whether it had great design back then.
- mattl 3y ago
  Is that the IDEO office near Central Square in Cambridge?
  - neilv 3y ago
    That's the one I'm thinking of, but might be mistaken, since I didn't pass it often. It might've housed Greenspun's TCL+databases Web firm, then at some point seemed to be used by a niche college(?), and in recent years is IDEO.
    - mattl 3y ago
      Greater Boston loves a niche college.
api 3y ago
That was a different era too. Remote work technology was much more primitive. It would have been much harder to coordinate a remote team.
noltncy 3y ago
Infosys in India did this successfully in the 90s and 2000s. Giant sprawling campuses with gyms, saunas, pools, laundromats, doctors/physical therapy units, dorms, coffee shops plenty of food courts with subsidized food, open round the clock. Buildings in weird shapes- spheres pyramids washing machines. Even football fields! Programmers who lived in shabby Apts flocked to the nice offices and practically lived there.
hinkley 3y ago
Spolsky’s office design missed a few critical elements (he had a couple of articles about offices and I don’t recognize the one linked here). IIRC he didn’t avoid the cardinal sin of office design which is politicizing windows. First, developers think they want windows and then they can’t handle the light. So the people with windows close them and then nobody gets to use the windows. And news flash, it can be really hot next to a window. Better to pull the desks back and put the walkways near the window. Also when you have 9 key employees and 7 window seats you end up snubbing 2 people you wouldn’t want to live without. That shit is part of the calculus of turnover. Far better to put little tables with three chairs by the windows. Someone can take a break, or have a quick tête-à-tête there. It’s everyone’s window.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  Or you make an office in which every seat is a window seat?
  - bumbledraven 3y ago
    No, because GP is arguing that, even though window offices are status symbols, working next to a window has issues (heat/light) that often results in people covering the windows. Better to put common areas like walkways near windows.
    - foepys 3y ago
      All my career I have worked in 1-4 person offices with enough window space on one or two sides. When the sun comes around, close the blinds a bit. It's possible, just not with open floor plans and cubicles.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      My desk is next to a window. It has literally never been an issue, and always a pleasure. Airconditioning, positioning and judicious use of blinds is always enough.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
Brajeshwar 3y ago
This actually is very true, especially in a country like India. Most offices in India have much better facilities and amenities than most employees' home - better chairs which comes under 'health of the employee', free and/or reimbursable dinner after office-hour, etc. etc. I'm not trying to forget the many others such as growth and challening opportunities for the super-smart ones, those yearning to get away from the mega-corps' monotonous grind.
JustLurking2022 3y ago
As someone with a family, thus sounds awful and very much the sort of "the company is your family" cult like behavior that has warped the industry for the past couple decades.
- hnick 3y ago
  I think it’s a reflection of the cult of youth. It’s common in many industries. Young people will put in long hours to get experience and give up comparatively little because they have less going on outside of work. It’s not necessarily healthy but it’s also something some of those people actually relish. So such an office design tends to appeal to a younger crowd by default.

bombadil44 3y ago

Offices also have to be good enough to warrant having to travel hours each day to get to/from them, which is a pretty tough to compete with for a lot of people

rtpg 3y ago
To put an even finer point on this: no matter how good your office is, if your office is in the middle of a huge metropolis then you are now asking people to either do long commutes or make some honestly hefty sacrifices in living arrangements to be close. No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in. I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower. Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building
- leetcrew 3y ago
  if you want to attract the best talent and have an in-person culture, you kinda have to place offices in central locations, which inevitably become very expensive. take NYC for example. office space in manhattan is extremely expensive, but it's also very well connected. people can reasonably commute from four out of the five buroughs, and a bit less reasonably from NJ, the lower hudson valley, etc. pretty much anywhere else in the greater NYC area would be much cheaper to rent office space, but the subway and commuter rail are all designed around the expectation that people need to be moved en masse to/from manhattan. an office in queens would be attractive to people who live in queens, but it would exclude people who want to live in all those other places. that said, some companies do exactly what you suggest. amazon has a lot of offices in less "desirable" areas. HQ2 is a prominent example. crystal city is far from the most prestigious place to have an office in the DC area, and it's not particularly well connected to most neighborhoods in DC proper. but if you're okay with living in alexandria or arlington, you can have a decent commute and save a bit of money on housing. there are also a lot of smaller tech companies that set up in random suburban office parks. typically they do this because they are more focused on reliable profits (and lowering costs) than rapid growth. these places can honestly be pretty nice to work at, but you need to really adjust your expectations around comp. you don't hear about these places because they've essentially decided not to be competitive.
- asielen 3y ago
  The reason I take jobs in a centralized dense downtown is because I know I can find another job without changing my commute. It also makes socializing after work, or during work, so much easier. I've worked in 5 different offices within a mile if each other in the last decade. I can still grab lunch with people I used to work with within a 10 minute walk of my current office. It is the only reason I am happy to go into the office a couple times a week. If I worked in a generic office building in the suburbs I would never want to go in.
ravenstine 3y ago
Boss: We "can't afford" free snacks in the break room anymore. Also Boss: How come none of you come into the office anymore?

neilv 3y ago

I don't know about Spolsky, but I got the impression that Greenspun was hiring MIT undergrads (and there was the Ferrari promotion). Apropos of Spolsky's discussion of interior design, I think Greenspun's firm's old building is currently an office of IDEO, but I don't know whether it had great design back then.

mattl 3y ago
Is that the IDEO office near Central Square in Cambridge?
- neilv 3y ago
  That's the one I'm thinking of, but might be mistaken, since I didn't pass it often. It might've housed Greenspun's TCL+databases Web firm, then at some point seemed to be used by a niche college(?), and in recent years is IDEO.
  - mattl 3y ago
    Greater Boston loves a niche college.

api 3y ago

That was a different era too. Remote work technology was much more primitive. It would have been much harder to coordinate a remote team.

noltncy 3y ago

Infosys in India did this successfully in the 90s and 2000s. Giant sprawling campuses with gyms, saunas, pools, laundromats, doctors/physical therapy units, dorms, coffee shops plenty of food courts with subsidized food, open round the clock. Buildings in weird shapes- spheres pyramids washing machines. Even football fields! Programmers who lived in shabby Apts flocked to the nice offices and practically lived there.

hinkley 3y ago

Spolsky’s office design missed a few critical elements (he had a couple of articles about offices and I don’t recognize the one linked here). IIRC he didn’t avoid the cardinal sin of office design which is politicizing windows. First, developers think they want windows and then they can’t handle the light. So the people with windows close them and then nobody gets to use the windows. And news flash, it can be really hot next to a window. Better to pull the desks back and put the walkways near the window. Also when you have 9 key employees and 7 window seats you end up snubbing 2 people you wouldn’t want to live without. That shit is part of the calculus of turnover. Far better to put little tables with three chairs by the windows. Someone can take a break, or have a quick tête-à-tête there. It’s everyone’s window.

Aeolun 3y ago
Or you make an office in which every seat is a window seat?
- bumbledraven 3y ago
  No, because GP is arguing that, even though window offices are status symbols, working next to a window has issues (heat/light) that often results in people covering the windows. Better to put common areas like walkways near windows.
  - foepys 3y ago
    All my career I have worked in 1-4 person offices with enough window space on one or two sides. When the sun comes around, close the blinds a bit. It's possible, just not with open floor plans and cubicles.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    My desk is next to a window. It has literally never been an issue, and always a pleasure. Airconditioning, positioning and judicious use of blinds is always enough.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

Brajeshwar 3y ago

This actually is very true, especially in a country like India. Most offices in India have much better facilities and amenities than most employees' home - better chairs which comes under 'health of the employee', free and/or reimbursable dinner after office-hour, etc. etc. I'm not trying to forget the many others such as growth and challening opportunities for the super-smart ones, those yearning to get away from the mega-corps' monotonous grind.

JustLurking2022 3y ago

As someone with a family, thus sounds awful and very much the sort of "the company is your family" cult like behavior that has warped the industry for the past couple decades.

hnick 3y ago
I think it’s a reflection of the cult of youth. It’s common in many industries. Young people will put in long hours to get experience and give up comparatively little because they have less going on outside of work. It’s not necessarily healthy but it’s also something some of those people actually relish. So such an office design tends to appeal to a younger crowd by default.