

Inside Dropbox’s Urbanized San Francisco Offices - tlongren
http://officesnapshots.com/2013/06/05/inside-dropboxs-urbanized-san-francisco-offices/

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binxbolling
Um, isn't it a little weird to have meeting space labeled "Romance Room" and
so on? Seems juvenile at worst—"har har look who's in there together now,
bro!"—and at best just stupidly awkward and pointless.

~~~
alphakappa
Companies in the bay area often have these silly names for rooms. It's not
really awkward, and after a while it feels pretty normal.

It's just a fun thing, so it's pointless to read too much into it.

~~~
s9ix
I recently got to visit Facebook's Canadian office (in Toronto) and they had
Canadian themed names for their board rooms. E.g. Board Room Eh, Roberta
Bondar Room, etc. - gave us a good laugh, haha.

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rdl
I was disappointed to not see a single actual work area -- just the conference
rooms and such. I assume the work areas will be SF startup standard huge open
rooms full of lines of back-to-back desks?

~~~
stevesearer
I run Office Snapshots, which originally published the Dropbox office. I get
this question fairly regularly, and there are a number of reasons that can
contribute to the common lack of workspace photos.

\- The design firm submitting the project didn't work on the workstation
portion of the office, and therefore does not take photos of them

\- Professional photos are generally taken after the company has moved in, and
workstation photos are too difficult to do when there may be confidential
information present. These photo shoots can take many hours, so disrupting
employees for a day is not what companies are interested in.

\- Workstations are just not as sexy as conference spaces to show off (I
disagree, though)

All that said, I like to use foursquare or instagram to browse photos taken at
offices to get a real look at the spaces. Here's a couple photos of the
workstations:

\- [https://foursquare.com/v/dropbox-
hq/4f3970aee4b08f009b927739...](https://foursquare.com/v/dropbox-
hq/4f3970aee4b08f009b927739/photos?openPhotoId=504a7976e4b0838e2febc5b8)

\- [https://foursquare.com/v/dropbox-
hq/4f3970aee4b08f009b927739...](https://foursquare.com/v/dropbox-
hq/4f3970aee4b08f009b927739/photos?openPhotoId=4f7b48ffe4b07999dd0b2a1c)

~~~
rdl
Thanks!

Those look like totally standard "startup with long rows of desks", although
lower density than I've seen elsewhere. Trying to get work done in what is
essentially an aisle off of a walkway would suck.

I wish there were a list of companies somewhere which sorted them into private
offices, shared offices (2-3 people), team rooms (3-15 people), high cubes,
low cubes, work areas for teams in rows in bigger rooms, and "one huge room
full of every desk, all in long rows".

~~~
stevesearer
Yeah, from what I can tell, startups are stuck in a weird place where they can
grow incredibly fast and might need to add a hundred employees in a matter of
months. Construction doesn't really scale that fast, so it seems like this is
just the best option until employee grown slows.

I'll shoot you a quick note with some details of a new feature I'm working on
that you might enjoy based on what you described.

~~~
ojbyrne
The cynic in me suggests that it has nothing to do with that, that the primary
benefit of open plan offices is that it looks "cool" especially when you're an
executive who thinks the whole Management By Walking Around thing is the way
to run a software company and gets a slight ego boost by walking around saying
"Good Job, keep it up."

Actually it's not entirely cynicism, its backed up by experiences I have had.

~~~
YcombRegBroken
You are 100% correct. If it was just scaling, you wouldn't have companies like
Paypal switching to a "cool" open plan layout that the employees hate but the
managers get a thrill from.

Open plan = less productivity, higher stress and more sick days. Yet, it
remains the new hotness. Drives me nuts.

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Timothee
Cached version:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.n...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Awww.nextventured.com%2F2013%2Fdropbox-
office-tour%2F&oq=cache%3Awww.nextventured.com%2F2013%2Fdropbox-office-
tour%2F&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.6989j0&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8)

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enko
I was astonished to see a graphic in the youtube buffering article indicating
that dropbox handles over 1% of the internet's upload traffic:

[http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/sandvi...](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-
content/uploads/2013/07/sandvine-graph.png)

That is an astonishing amount. Almost 1/3 of Youtube! I knew they were popular
but I had no idea it was that much.

~~~
jmduke
Even more astonishing: a service which has been active for six years now is
responsible for 1/3 of all of the downloaded data on the Internet.

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heywoods
These photo's are a tad old aren't they? I was there two weeks ago & most of
the office has been renovated to have a more industrial theme & feel. It's
also missing photos of their kitchen/dining area which was the most impressive
part of their office, for me at least.

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thesis
That's an awful lot of ping pong balls.

~~~
bandy
Mr. Moose isn't using them anymore.

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beaker52
/.

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hnriot
Lovely architectural and design elements, until someone ruined it with the
stupid names. The serious design elements are really exquisite, it's a shame,
the architecture & design team must cringe to see what Dropbox did with their
work.

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citricsquid
There's a fantastic blog dedicated to company offices called Office Snapshots
that may tickle the fancy of those that like the Dropbox office:
[http://officesnapshots.com/](http://officesnapshots.com/)

~~~
ubercore
They even cover this office (without errors!):
[http://officesnapshots.com/2013/06/05/inside-dropboxs-
urbani...](http://officesnapshots.com/2013/06/05/inside-dropboxs-urbanized-
san-francisco-offices/)

~~~
stevesearer
I run Office Snapshots and it's pretty safe to say that Next Ventured
"borrowed" the original post :)

~~~
dredmorbius
Protip: that 'position:fixed' header on your site is one of the web annoyances
that prompts me to fire up Stylebot and nuke the element from your site.

Stop doing stupid shit like that. Especially on 16:9 laptop displays,
_anything_ that eats vertical real estate gets nuked.

#header { display: none; }

#main { padding-top: 0; }

~~~
stevesearer
Thanks for the feedback, I had no idea anyone would be bothered by it. It
seemed that leaving access to the menu that allows for readers to more quickly
and easily browse the site was a positive thing.

That style of menu is all over. Is your annoyance particularly on blogs that
use them, or on any site?

~~~
dredmorbius
Anywhere.

With Stylish as a plugin on my browser, it's become disgustingly easy for me
to attack annoyances. Including FWIW, Hacker News itself:
[http://stylebot.me/styles/2945](http://stylebot.me/styles/2945)

Buzzfeed was particularly fun:
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/G6pzJBLK...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/G6pzJBLKuir)

NY Times and Edge Perspectives:
[https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/NUMQuQUh...](https://plus.google.com/104092656004159577193/posts/NUMQuQUhM2y)

Basically: if it moves, is fixed, is an interstitial, or is just plain
annoying, I kill the hell out of it. And with Stylebot, the easy stuff is just
point, click, and "Hide". Then it's gone.

Bring it on.

