
The desks of 37signals - wlll
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3120-all-hands-battlestations
======
rglover
I hope everyone is catching on to what 37signals is doing: building
significant brand awareness before the launch of a new product. Notice that
they've been posting more frequently, with varying content (and of course a
bit of Basecamp Next peppered in). Really subtle, but it puts them in the
minds of a lot of people.

~~~
victork2
Yep... Having never been a fan of their work myself, I do not check anymore
their posts on HN. Still I enjoy reading some of the comments associated with
the post, it can be enlightening.

To add to your point, being a (self proclaimed) nerd and not a geek: I don't
care about new technologies, I do not own a smartphone, hell, I don't have
anymore Facebook or Twitter, I found what's posted on 37signals very boring
and devoid of interesting information. I am, however, surprised by the huge
number of people that upvote these kind of posts.

To answer the article without really reading it, and again it's because of my
nerdy side I don't care on what I am working as long as I have a desk, an OK
mouse, an OK screen, and OK keyboard, that's it, I am happy.

~~~
rimantas

      > I don't care on what I am working as long as I have a desk,
      > an OK mouse, an OK screen, and OK keyboard, that's it, I am
      > happy.
    

I think with attitude like this it is very difficult to build a GOOD product.
"Meh" most likely. But other nerds may consider it to be OK though. OTOH, I
don't think that being nerdy should necesarry mean "not caring how good
something is".

~~~
victork2
I tend to disagree: from what I have seen having a lot of "pluses" is more a
distraction from actual thinking that a plus in terms of productivity. Same
goes with a lot of things in life, the amount you invest (in time/ money) for
the extra luxury generally outweighs the benefits of a simple and effective
solution.

Also I can't really see the correlation between building a good product and a
desk or its organization. What build a good product is a good team, a good
organization, good and proven tools. It reminds of a story with a friend, this
guy was quite rich and was trying to learn guitar, so when he started he
bought a $3000+ guitar (Martin D20 or something approaching), but given his
skills a 1000 or even $500 dollars guitar could have suited his needs for the
next 5 years. He didn't play better than somebody else with better tools,
maybe worse because of the complexity of repairing the guitar. What drives the
product is the skill of the programmer, the tools are secondary.

But I might be wrong!

~~~
matwood
The difference between your friends guitar story and most of HNs computer
usage is that your friend was just trying to learn guitar while most HNers use
a computer as a job. I think you would agree that someone whose job it is to
play guitar should probably spend (money doesn't equal quality, but just using
it as a point) whatever they think is necessary to have the best guitar for
them.

When it comes to using a computer all day, every day, having great (not just
okay) input devices, and great (not just okay) monitors not only can make you
more productive, but also save your eyes and prevent RSI. Desks also fall into
this category of saving your actual health.

------
tdavis
Having spent many hours of my youth on technology forums, I feel I am
qualified to say: this is the most banal "show your setup" post, ever.

Save Noah, it's just an Apple Store. Sam's apartment/house looks great,
though.

~~~
ForrestN
I think that's part of the statement. It's riffing on the "show your setup"
post, but instead of focusing on the gear (something 37S have eschewed for a
long time) they're focusing on the environment, and, by extension, the people.
All the signaling is about peacefulness and happiness: look at my dog, look at
my kids, look at my lovely pitcher of water.

It's effective in my opinion for a few reasons. One, it's
personal/voyeuristic, which will make at least some people interested and
also, if you have a positive response, connected to the fact that there are
real people working on the big product they're about to launch. Making a
company feel human and intimate is an important branding goal these days, and
something they talk about a lot.

Second, as someone else mentioned, it emphasizes their "work-from-home"
message. When I look at those desks, I see comfort. Every day is like staying
home from work. Gee, it sure must be nice to work like that!

There's even a subtle power/wealth signal, I would argue, in DHH's setup and
the fresh flowers on all the office desks.

~~~
jasonfried
I got the idea for having a small bunch of fresh flowers on everyones office
desk from the restaurant world.

I always like sitting down to a table at a restaurant that has a small simple
arrangement of fresh flowers. It's a great detail and it brings color and life
to your immediate surroundings. Plus, nature is the greatest designer so
there's no better influence.

We have the flowers switched out weekly. They're different each week and each
desk has a different arrangement. We also have weekly arrangements in the
kitchen, the lounge area, and in the front entrance.

For those in Chicago, I highly recommend the good people at
<http://asraigarden.com> for this service. They take great care of us.

~~~
wybo
We also do this, but instead of flowers, we chose plants. Being a bit of a
nature-geek myself, my desk is particularly green, but everyone who wants, has
at least one desk-plant in our office:

<http://wybowiersma.net/pub/academia-desk.jpg>

We also have some plants that don't fit on desks, like this - name says it all
- elephant-ear plant:

<http://wybowiersma.net/pub/academia-plant.jpg>

We (<http://Academia.edu>) got them all from the plant-warehouse in downtown
SF:

<http://www.yelp.com/biz/plant-warehouse-san-francisco>

------
nazar
Is it just me, but despite all nice things 37signals are doing I find them
arrogant and feel like they exaggerating more than they actually doing.

~~~
j_col
I completely agree, for me they are the ultimate embodiment of the
hipster/brogrammer/ninja/guru culture that has become something of a running
joke in the industry (at least in my little corner of it).

~~~
mpp
37signals is the most smug and obnoxious company ever. I'm so sick of them. On
their desks, where's the empty wine glass that they use to smell their own
farts? Thaaaanks!

~~~
jasonfried
I never thought about using a wine glass for that. Great idea.

------
bengl3rt
What I noticed was that only two or three of them use desktop computers - the
rest are on laptops with external displays.

No laptop on the market today has enough storage capacity or RAM (save for the
MBPs that can take 16GB I suppose) to be my only computer. I do a mix of iOS
and web and systems development - not too different of a workload from these
guys, I'm sure. I've also noticed laptops slow down a fair bit when you plug
in an external display and make the GPU work overtime pushing all those
pixels. So, what gives? Have these guys just never _tried_ working on a maxed-
out desktop machine so they don't know how good it is, and they just assume
that waiting around for your computer to do stuff is normal and acceptable?

Another nail in the coffin, I suppose...

~~~
swah
The experience I've been reading is the opposite: that folks can do web
development in a Macbook Air and love it. What do you use 16 GB of RAM for?

~~~
bengl3rt
I'm always running Redis and Mongo and Memcache and Postgres and Xcode and the
iOS simulator and Mail and Skype and etc...

Local server stack + dev tools + collaboration tools, essentially.

SSD helps, as swapping fast is better than swapping slow, but best is not
swapping at all.

------
citricsquid
I've always found working from a laptop to feel very cramped, I find it so
much easier to work with more space, is there an unknown advantage to using a
smaller display or is it just personal preference? (My setup:
<http://i.imgur.com/uKpyV.jpg>)

~~~
mark_l_watson
I would bet that most developers who use laptops as their primary development
box sometimes tether to a large screen - that is what I do in my home office.
I often work in other places around the house, rather than my office, but then
I tend to do tasks that don't require a large monitor.

Having your whole working life on a single laptop (with multiple types of
backups) is a real convenience and time saver.

------
cromwellian
Why does 37signals show up at the top of HN everyday, no matter what they blog
about?

~~~
chrislo
Because people up-vote the submissions.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
I suspect cromwellian's underlying question is: _why do so many people on HN
upvote a post with nothing more than pictures of some people's desks?_

~~~
jasonfried
Because people like looking at other people's desks/setups? It's not much
deeper than that.

~~~
j_col
Well if that's the case, can I have photos of my desk on the front page of HN
also? I've got two monitors and phone and everything.

------
edw519
dhh, do you _really_ work that way or did you clean your desk off before that
picture was taken?

If so, I salute you. I'm still 14 purges away from that level of minimalism.

------
z0r
I dig the vertical monitor. Using one of those as a second screen plus
switching to xmonad has been the most positive change I've made to my own
working environment in the last year. Code, websites, anything text oriented -
shorter lines are easier to read and comprehend

~~~
paddy_m
How does a vertical monitor work with sub pixel rendering?
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subpixel_rendering> . Does linux do sub-pixel
rendering? Does OS X turn it off when a monitor is rotated to vertical?

~~~
wr1472
Also I would recommend going for an IPS monitor if you want to use it
vertically, as it has a much wider viewing angle compared to TN monitors.

------
odiroot
I wonder how many people scrolled impatiently just to see dhh's desk.

~~~
dcope
Guilty.

Interesting to see so many people working remotely.

~~~
hugs
"... so many people working remotely."

I think that's the subtle point of the post. A huge part of their world view
is "work where you want, when you want". And of course, they just happen to
sell tools that help people work remotely from wherever and whenever. I
applaud how much the Signals practice what they preach.

------
fallenhitokiri
I don't really see the problem with "show your setup" posts. I like looking at
great designed workspaces. Inspirational, at least for me.

What I just do not get is how they all can only work with a laptop, sometimes
an Air. I think the screen space would be to limiting for me to stay
productive.

Favorite: Sam's desk. Clean, minimalistic, lots of light,...

------
psb
For me there is way too much light/sunshine there to make a comfortable work
environment. I like to be in a reasonably dim (not pitch black) spot so the
contrast from my screen is comfortable to look at. At least pull the blinds
down.

------
Omnipresent
Not sure where David works from but the view outside that window is grand.

~~~
olozano
According to his twitter feed, that's Spain.

------
evoltix
I think the one major thing that sticks out in these photos is that all these
people work from home or some other remote location. Everyone's work space has
a relaxed and zen-like feeling to it.

~~~
jasonfried
13 people work in the Chicago office. ~20 people work out of their homes in
other locations. Although, some Chicago people work from home a few days a
week, too.

~~~
bradleyland
Our Chicago JV partner says your office is "right around the corner" from
their office at 1000 W Monroe St. So, having used Rails since 0.7, and being a
fan of 37Singals work, I naturally got kind of excited at the prospect of
stopping by. Is the 37Signals open to visitors (even with no specific
purpose)? Just curious :)

------
anujkk
While coding I need only two things to be perfect - a)My laptop b)A
comfortable desk/chair. Everything else - surroundings, noise etc doesn't
matter. I don't even notice these things.

------
shingen
I like the stand-up desks. The first time I remember reading about such a
thing was Michael Dell having a custom built stand-up desk in the early 1990s.
I up vote the expansion of life expectancy.

~~~
mike-cardwell
Is there any evidence that using a standing desk increases life expectancy?

I would expect people who use them take health more seriously in other aspects
of their life as well thus increasing their life expectancy anyway...

~~~
shingen
The evidence is that sitting down for hours per day is extraordinarily
destructive to various aspects of your body, including your metabolism,
circulation, oxygen distribution, and that it increases the risk of diabetes
(and cancer due to consequence of fat gain from a slower metabolism). I
believe (per what I've read on the subject) that it also significantly
increases the risk of heart attack and stroke due to a collapse in normal /
healthy function of the cardiovascular system.

The data on it is rather common these days, a quick google will turn up
several high profile write-ups from sources such as the NY Times.

And if we're just talking logical extrapolation - it makes sense that humans
wouldn't benefit from sitting down all day, as it wasn't common to our
evolution / how our bodies are designed to work. Caveman Joe didn't sit on his
rock for 12 hours typing.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Correct, but the evidence does not indicate that _standing_ for hours a day is
any better for overall health than _sitting_. What I really want is a walk-
around desk ... but I'll grant that I might be more likely to move around
periodically if I'm already standing.

~~~
shingen
Perhaps, but there are only two possibilities (that I see).

1) Standing is radically more healthy than sitting, or 2) Being upright and
walking / moving, is what is radically more healthy than sitting

I think that part of the problem with sitting is the blocking of the
circulation system through slightly crimping the arteries in your legs. It
strikes me that just standing up alone would relieve a lot of that stress and
assist the free flow of blood and oxygen.

So if you want to play it safe, stand up, and move about regularly. If you're
standing at your desk, I'd argue it's far more likely you'll move about
regularly as you're working on problems throughout the day.

I've read previously that the average American used to walk three to five
miles per day a hundred years ago, and that's down to a small fraction of that
now.

~~~
rimantas

      > 1) Standing is radically more healthy than sitting
    

People who spend their days on their feet may not agree with you there.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varicose_veins>

~~~
shingen
I'd counter argue that the common negative health effects of sitting down far
outweigh the common health effects of varicose veins (from that wiki):

"Most varicose veins are relatively benign, but severe varicosities can lead
to major complications, due to the poor circulation through the affected
limb."

I think the positive evidence for standing versus sitting is overwhelming to
put it lightly.

[http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298/ns/health-
mens_health/t...](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39523298/ns/health-
mens_health/t/why-your-desk-job-slowly-killing-you/)

"This isn't actually a new discovery. In a British study published in 1953,
scientists examined two groups of workers: bus drivers and trolley conductors.
At first glance, the two occupations appeared to be pretty similar. But while
the bus drivers were more likely to sit down for their entire day, the trolley
conductors were running up and down the stairs and aisles of the double-decker
trolleys. As it turned out, the bus drivers were nearly twice as likely to die
of heart disease as the conductors were."

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Running up and down stairs and aisles all day != standing all day.

