

Offices and The Creativity Zone - raganwald
http://hivelogic.com/articles/offices-and-the-zone/

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timr
The problem is, good office space is expensive. Just as it's cheaper to eat
mass-market junk than to shop for organic food, it's cheaper to pack your
employees into veal-fattening pens, turn on the bad fluorescent lighting, and
imagine that having everyone together in one place will result in magical
"teamwork" synergy that makes up for the pain.

I have a theory that good office space is an adaptive luxury afforded only to
small companies: just as large and small animals have to develop special
anatomical features to overcome the surface-area/volume ratio problem, large
companies have to make sacrifices that accommodate for their size.

Even Microsoft and Google have adopted cube-farm mentalities as they've grown,
and presumably, they know _something_ about programmer happiness...

~~~
pg
There are a lot of cheap office spaces that are great to work in. The trouble
is, they tend to be small.

For example, I suspect Yahoo was paying more per square foot for the grim cube
farm we moved to after getting bought than Viaweb was for our cheery offices
on the top floor of a triple-decker in Harvard Sq.

I think the problem with big company offices is that the office space
available in large quantities tends to be grim. It seems like you have to pay
a fortune to make office space both pleasant and large.

The problem may not be impossible to solve, though. I doubt many big companies
have tried to make offices that were large, pleasant, and cheap. There might
be solutions if someone looked for them.

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smhinsey
I'm currently going through some real problems with workspace quality at the
office. We're growing too quickly, and I think given the real estate market
and general state of the economy, corporate level management is a little
hesitant to start going after new office space.

I see things like this and really believe them, but wow, I wish I could just
buy a good workspace in a box, bring it in, and set it up like a tent in the
middle of the loud open office.

~~~
timr
<http://www.jwz.org/tent-of-doom/>

~~~
smhinsey
nice. unfortunately my workspace is too "open" even for that.

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pmorici
This article is dead on. I can esp. identify with the passage about "perceived
productivity" versus "accomplishment" in the work place.

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edw519
Best argument yet for telecommuting.

    
    
       4 hours output for 11 hours input (including lunch & commute), or
    
       8 hours output for 8 hours input
    

Your choice, boss. Are you a good enough manager to double (or triple) output
for free?

~~~
pg
Hours aren't the most important measure. You can do things face to face that
you can't do remotely.

~~~
ardit33
I agree on that, but also sometimes I find myself much more productive when I
work from home. There is a lot less distraction, no interruptions, quiter, can
play my favorite music in the background, -- very important things to
productivity when you are coding.

But I also find that when I am in office, I can do things faster, if it is
something when there are other people involved. I can go to their desk and
discuss about how to resolve a particular issue, maybe even draw things on a
whiteboard. It helps a lot.

So, Ideally I would like to come to work only 2-3 days a week, and work from
home the rest. But unfortunately my manager would probably feel uneasy about
it, as he is not a former engineer, so he just wont understand. So giving him
these arguments wont be enough. There have to be some direct and measurable
economic benefits for a company to allow telecomuting en masse.

