

An inside look at Yandex.ru's offices - profquail
http://englishrussia.com/index.php/2010/10/23/an-incredible-dream-office/

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CWIZO
As fantastic as this office is, I'd hate to work in a environment where
anybody can freely look over my shoulder at any time. I'll take privacy and a
dull office over this any time. We've managed to satisfy this concern
(<http://www.mojalbum.com/popcom/popcom-office>) and I'm really happy about
our office.

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smakz
What are you doing at work that you don't want people looking over your
shoulder? Serious question by the way - it always comes up in work
environments that some people are pretty against the lack of privacy that
comes along with these types of set ups, but really if you are at work there
shouldn't be too much (if anything) on your screen which is private.

I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and
everyone is together with no walls between.

If you have that, and also offer a few "quiet rooms" where you can go if
things are loud or you need to check your personal email, I don't see what the
problem is.

~~~
JabavuAdams
> I'm a big fan of bull pen type environments, where it's wide open spaces and
> everyone is together with no walls between.

Visual and audio noise.

They're really bad for productivity of creators. They're good for managers /
coordinators / investors.

The standard argument that "you can wear headphones" doesn't work for serious
design work. Pounding music is great for grinding through list-ish stuff, but
not for creativity.

It's like sleep deprivation. People who are sleep deprived will insist "I'm
fine -- I just need a coffee", but their performance is much lower than those
who are well rested.

EDIT> I'm not responding to the over-the-shoulder question here. I find it
very distracting to see others' faces, though, e.g. with back-to-back
monitors. Most of us are wired to pay attention to faces, so they cause a lot
of visual noise.

At this point in my career, open-concept offices with > 4 or so people are a
deal breaker. It makes me hate programming.

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frisco
Wow, they're _just like us_!

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sbierwagen
The images looked like they had been badly scaled with nearest neighbor in
Chrome, so I reopened the page in Firefox, then looked at the original image.

Sure enough, when the photographer took the original image off their camera
and scaled it down for the web, they used a low quality interpolation. For
some reason. Damned unprofessional.

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va1en0k
<http://media.englishrussia.com/ya/0_59819_f6ec66d1_orig.jpg>

Looks like "Russian" from some Hollywood movies. Not a single word in real
Russian :-)

~~~
VladRussian
both are carrying what seems to be cigarette packs. They have smoking rooms
now. What happened to the conveniency of smoking right in from of the
computer? Did computers riot against second-hand smoking?

~~~
va1en0k
Smoking at your workplace is prohibited in Russia. It's good

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lpgauth
What is going on here?

<http://media.englishrussia.com/ya/0_59828_2cce1aaa_orig.jpg>

~~~
die_sekte
The lower part is underfloor heating. I don't know what the higher part is,
but I would guess that they retrofitted underfloor heating and used existing
overhead pipes for the water. Normally those pipes would be well-hidden.

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elbenshira
That photographer needs to learn how to use the appropriate aperture. Wrongly-
focused photographs hurt my eyes.

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fourfour
Love the plants and the open floor plan. Time to ditch the fluorescents
though. That is a deal killer.

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duck
Not sure if I will ever understand why anyone would sit on the floor to do
anything with a computer when their is nice chairs available, and yet they
designed space just for that.

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rhodin
How much have they looked at Google and how much have this culture developed
"on its own" in Moscow?

