

Inside the offices of LA gaming startup Scopely - KMinshew
http://www.themuse.com/companies/scopely

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nlh
Just a quick note on the page design: I see the influences of both the
Pinterest-style "pins" and the MS-style "metro" look here.

Honestly, I find both of those styles incredibly difficult to navigate and I
think they offer poor UX. My eye just doesn't know where to fall on the page.
I know this sort of design is trendy and contemporary, but frankly I hope this
fad passes soon.

That being said - the office looks cool, the company sounds cool, and the more
gaming startups out there that do well, the more fun there is to be had in the
world (and that is a Good Thing(tm) in my humble opinion ;)

~~~
mixmastamyk
> the office looks cool

I agree it looks "hip." I also happened to like the friendly shots of the
employees who looked like real people I might want to know.

However, that's an office for sales people. I wouldn't want to be a developer
working on hard problems in the middle of that.

...also didn't realize that Hollywood was part of "Silicon Beach," although to
someone out of state I guess it's all beach. There's another startup on that
corner, named Pop-up Pantry.

~~~
mbthomas
(disclaimer, I work at Scopely) I don't _quite_ understand what you mean by
saying that it's an "office for sales people". Agreed, it's a bit crowded! I
think we doubled (or more?) our team's size since we moved into this space.
But other than that, the type of office suites me and most developers quite
well. We are working on acquiring more office space and making dedicated
"quite rooms" for people to work in with less distraction.

~~~
mixmastamyk
It would be no big deal to check email in such an environment, but hard
problems... uggh.

Do you allow employees to work at home (even go to the library) part of the
day/week? This would mitigate things I'd guess.

Back to the point: It's well known (now) that interruptions destroy developer
productivity.

"Human Task Switches Considered Harmful"
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000022.html>

The original:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Projects_and_Teams)

Aimed at the boss: <http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html>

~~~
rdouble
For better or worse, every startup has an open plan office like this. The new
breed of 22 year old software engineers do not appear to be negatively
affected. Joel and Peopleware need to do a re-assessment using younger people
who grew up with 24/7 internet.

~~~
mixmastamyk
Interesting, though I'd be surprised that humans have evolved much in 15
years.

I have worked in such an environment though and there were huge costs (and
true a few benefits). What I found though was that the hard work got done from
9pm-12am over the VPN ... a recipe for eventual burnout.

------
damian2000
_Scopely creates addictive, multiplayer mobile games loved by users around the
world, and it also provides a platform for independent game studios to publish
mobile games of their own._

Looks like they've got a conflict of interest there? Likely one model will
flourish without the other.

