
What photos of Facebook’s new headquarters say about work - e15ctr0n
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/11/30/what-these-photos-of-facebooks-new-headquarters-say-about-the-future-of-work/
======
cheald
Yikes. The push to eliminate any sense of personal space is, I think,
reflective of the new dynamic between employers and employees - don't set down
any roots, you may not be here long enough to matter. Don't expect me to
commit to the company, I may not be here long enough to care. Ideologically
and aesthetically, my reaction to this space was that it feels like a
reduction of the workforce to interchangeable factory laborers.

The aesthetic feels messy, undirected, and haphazard. I'm sure that someone
thinks it means "creative", but I think I'd probably just feel like I'm in a
warehouse somewhere.

~~~
duiker101
That's a personal opinion and I fully respect it. But I would like to share
mine too, which is pretty opposite to yours. I worked for 3 companies as a dev
in about 6 years of experience, I always left because I wanted to move to
something "more", not because I didn't care or didn't feel included. In all 3
I had a seemingly open space and I really like it if I have space to breath.

I don't think it's about not caring or mattering, actually, the open space
environment originated to fight that feeling of being nobody, alone in your
cubicle. What open space is trying to achieve is showing that everyone is, at
least theoretically, on the same level.

Ultimately, I like it, but I don't think it's perfect and it will probably
change. The thing to remember is that this whole big companies are a
relatively new thing and nobody has the perfect formula yet, people/companies
are experimenting and doing an effort to improve working conditions. I think
that matters and I look forward to the future. We are iterating and as long as
we don't start to regress I can do nothing but be happy.

~~~
cheald
Oh, it's absolutely a personal opinion. Everyone will react differently, and I
truly hope that the folks that work there feel that it benefits and fuels
them.

I totally get the idea behind open workspaces, and while there are positives
to them - they definitely do encourage collaboration and more frequent
interaction - I'm massively less productive in them. My issue isn't so much
the lack of walls, but the complete abolition of any sense of ownership of a
space. Not having a space that feels like _my_ space makes it more difficult
for me to get "into the zone", just because I'm less comfortable. Drive-by
conversations can utterly murder a good half-hour debugging session. The
temptation to get distracted by all the things going on around me noticeably
cuts into my motivation and ability to buckle down and tear into the really
hard problems.

I realize that this is just my personal reaction to spaces like this, and I'm
certainly not authoritative on it, but I have absolutely observed that I'm far
happier and more productive in a space that I can both feel a sense of
ownership of and use strategically to limit interruptions and distractions.

------
tempestn
It's interesting watching the juxtaposed trends of increased remote work
and... this, in the tech sector. Clearly there is a trend away from
"traditional" offices, but it appears to be moving in two fundamentally
opposite directions at the same time.

Of course, both share one significant feature: cost savings compared to a more
traditional office environment. I guess another similarity could be increased
equality, although again, achieved in opposite manners: in one case, everyone
gets to choose their own work environment, and in the other, everyone has an
identical work environment. (Right down to a lack of personal effects in this
case.) Still, the proponents of both approaches appear to believe they offer
many other advantages. I wonder whether we'll see one or the other ultimately
dominate.

Personally speaking, as the owner of a small, all-remote company, I vastly
prefer the remote approach for my own quality of life. (Although I've
certainly known people who prefer to go to an office every day.) As far as
work output though, both remote work and open offices have advantages and
disadvantages. Personally I can't stand the distractions being crammed in a
room with a bunch of other developers, but at least being in the same building
undoubtedly makes collaboration easier (not that it's impossible remotely).
The company culture can definitely do a lot to make that sort of environment
more pleasant too. (Things like avoiding noise pollution, and knowing when not
to interrupt.) For me, even if I knew I could make more money by relocating
everyone to an office, it wouldn't be worth it, but obviously that math would
change a bit at Facebook scale.

~~~
rdl
For startups, it's not just about the cost, it's about flexibility. It's
easier to have a decent open-plan low density and 3x the people in it overall,
or particularly, to 10x a certain department while 1.1xing the other
departments temporarily, into a crowded shitty open plan, than it is to have a
bunch of 1-2 person sized offices and somehow put 30 into a single office
while keeping the others at 1-2.

That's the _only_ reason I can excuse open plan in sv tech at all; otherwise
it seems to be a clear failure vs. well-executed offices. It's better than the
hierarchical allocation of offices/corner offices/etc. to managers, but that
isn't the optimal way to deploy offices.

We can do better, even at 0-50 person startups, than either.

~~~
tempestn
That's a great point. It's possible for everyone to have offices without
having the silly office pecking order politics. Many open plans reserve the
prime areas for shared spaces, and there's obviously no reason an office space
couldn't (or shouldn't) do that too. In fact, that jogs a faint memory of
another post on HN some months back of an office like that; all the actual
offices were on the interior, and the window spaces were all hallways, meeting
rooms, and break areas. Can anyone remember what that was?

~~~
hkmurakami
>It's possible for everyone to have offices without having the silly office
pecking order politics.

IIRC this is Microsoft right?

~~~
erdojo
I interviewed once up at the Borg, and as far as I remember almost everyone
had tiny private offices. They were little more than closets. I'm sure some
people had bigger/better offices than others, but there was a decent baseline.

I've worked in both private offices and big open floorplans like this. Prefer
the former. However my favorite work environment was a smaller company where
we all had two-person shared offices (most with no windows), and large
coworking spaces where one could camp in the sunlight and be more social.

The two-person offices kept people from feeling totally isolated and
encouraged some level of watercooler conversation, plus gave everyone a sense
of privacy and control over their immediate environment. I thought it was the
best of both worlds.

------
mclemme
Visited an IBM office in San Francisco, near market street iirc, back in 2006
on a study trip, cubicles everywhere and a promise of a bigger cubicle, a
cubicle with view of a window or maybe even a corner office if you had X years
at the company. It all seemed pretty ridiculous to everyone in my class.

But this seems equally ridiculous, worked 4 places before starting my own
company, and open office spaces were a thing in all of them. They ranged from
absolutely horrible to fantastic. Good noise canceling headphones can cancel
out most sounds, but there's no "cure" for visual disturbances, which for me
(and a good part of my former colleagues), are almost as bad for my
concentration as sounds. So in the worst open office spaces, there was always
a "race" to get the best spots, whenever anyone moved places. By good spots I
mean spots away from the main walking paths and a place where no one walks
behind you and there's no visual stimuli other than maybe a window to gaze out
of when wrestling with some weird bug in your mind.

Of course you can go in a meeting room when you want absolute isolation, but
working on code it is awesome having two big monitors as well as peace and
quiet, both audio and visual (or maybe I just have the attention span of a
goldfish).

The best designed open office space I've worked in was the Spotify office in
Stockholm, Sweden, squad areas closed on three sides, open on the fourth and
with a little sofa corner and mini meeting room in each: [http://tech.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/2014-05-07-11.19.2...](http://tech.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2014/05/2014-05-07-11.19.29.jpg)

~~~
jeggeragain
The FB office makes me feel anxious just looking at it (the noise and the
distractions) whereas that Spotify office looks calming and a place where I
could concentrate and get some real work done (just look at the white wall
with the patterned lines!).

------
jedberg
Zuck may not technically have an office, but if it's anything like the other
places I've worked where "the CEO sits right out in the open with everyone
else!", then he probably has a conference room reserved for his use 24/7.

And this actually makes sense. A lot of what he would talk about would be
insider information. You don't _want_ to hear that as an employee.

~~~
rmc
And I'll bet you can't sit in Zuck's desk or area. How many FB employees are
allowed to listen in on his conversations?

~~~
iaw
If it's non-confidential it doesn't matter, if it's confidential it wont be
discussed in an open setting.

Why would FB employees want to listen in on Zuck's conversations? They all
have better things to do with their time.

------
pjc50
Nice mid-50s factory floor ambience there. I'm half-expecting a whistle to
blow and a new shift to come and sit down at the production line.

------
stuaxo
My reaction on seeing that first pic is that it looks kind of horrible !

~~~
bshimmin
I only quickly glanced at it and thought it was a sweatshop in Bangladesh; I
then had to look again because that didn't seem to match the headline of the
article or what I'd remembered clicking on from HN. I think it's possibly the
ceiling (what is that?) or the things suspended from it that creates this
impression (and it's probably an unflattering photograph), but honestly it
looks like a perfect nightmare to me.

~~~
bshimmin
That said, I think those are all Herman Miller chairs, so I guess that's
something.

~~~
elthran
I'm sitting on one right now (not a FB one), while knowing full well how
expensive they are - what I can never understand is /why/ they are so
expensive - I can't say its noticeably more comfortable than any other office
chair I've used.

~~~
rdl
They're adjustable (so aerons can be at least ok for ~everyone), and durable,
and pieces can be replaced. It's like commercial kitchens vs. home chef --
more expensive, but flexible, and meeting a lot of standards/requirements
which make sense in commercial settings but not in one-off settings.

There's probably a $100-200 chair of some design which works better for each
individual than the $1000 aeron; it's just a _different_ $100-200 chair for
each person. And it probably will not last 7 years in daily hard use.

------
rmason
I admit that it is probably an age bias but this has always seemed nutty to
me. Bill Gates has stated that one of the best things that he ever did for
Microsoft's productivity was to give all his programmers offices.

Sure you can use headphones but I am most productive in absolute quiet. I can
just imagine having headphones on with a low level of annoying white noise and
I am deep into a difficult problem and then someone taps me on the shoulder.

I'd leap up pulling the laptop with me until my headphones jerked off.
Somebody would ask me do you know where they put the coffee? I'd answer that I
don't drink it and then spend another hour getting back to where I was before
only to have someone else tap me on the shoulder, arrrgghhh.

I am willing to bet that the best programmers Facebook has got are hunched in
the stairwell or a janitors closet getting work done.

------
qznc
> Before, people would close their door and you’d feel this real barrier to
> talking to them

Completely correct. I fail to understand how this is a bad thing, though. It
sounds a like a good reason for doors to exist. It is well known that even
short interruptions break flow and thus decrease productivity.

~~~
cheald
This barrier is even less of an imposition now that we have intra-office IM as
the norm. If someone is in their office with the door closed, drop them an IM
that they can read and act on when they're finished with what they're doing.

Maybe it matters less for non-programmers, but even a brief unexpected
distraction can undo multiple minutes of mental effort for me. When I need to
focus, the headphones go on, the door gets closed, and I intentionally erect
barriers to interaction because it's important that I not be distracted. That
closed door is a feature, not a bug.

------
bjwbell
Rich Geldreich [http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-
and-c...](http://richg42.blogspot.com/2015/01/open-office-spaces-and-cabal-
rooms-suck.html)

"1\. North Korea-like atmosphere of self-censorship: ... even simple
conversations with other coworkers can be difficult, because all conversations
are broadcasted into the room and you've got to be careful not to step on the
toes of 10-20 other people at all times. Good luck with that."

~~~
notacoward
That sounds a lot like the _user_ experience of Facebook, for users who have
incompatible groups of family and friends. You know your college friends would
appreciate that Bernie Sanders quote, but if you share it on Facebook then
your Ted-Nugent-wannabe uncle might flip out. The similarity is surely not
coincidental. It's a variant of Conway's law.

------
te_chris
I'm always surprised to see the awful spaces these companies come up with in
SV, having been to both FB and Goog's london offices, which are both very
nice.

~~~
enraged_camel
It's not the companies coming up with the spaces. It's the architects who want
to make a name for themselves and earn their astronomical paychecks.

~~~
akjetma
Frank Gehry definitely doesn't have to make a name for himself. I'm surprised
by how unattractive this is. Though, come to think of it, I can't picture the
interior of any Frank Gehry buildings while I can see lots of exteriors.

~~~
cwilkes
Maybe this is all a colossal puton by Gehry: he hates offices so he makes them
crappy. Except companies aren't that smart and end up worshipping the design.

------
shreyassaxena
It is quite interesting to see how Facebook and other corporations are re
branding open-office, which in practice looks like a factory of workers.
Somehow, the idea is to convince people that it promotes openness and
productivity. Someone in the article says it is easy for her to schedule
meetings on the fly, which also means it is easy for her to access the
employees. However, not sure if I would like to be so accessible when I want
to zone in, and work on a project.

------
jodrellblank
_Chief executive Mark Zuckerberg 's desk is exactly like all the others._

Really? I bet it isn't. I bet his desk isn't used for sustained state of flow
concentration on intricate abstract mechanisms.

What's that saying about the law being equal by equally forbidding the the
poor _and_ the rich from sleeping under bridges and stealing apples?

The open plan office helps CEO _and_ workers be approachable, interruptable,
and able to hold many impromptu meetings.

------
jobigoud
How do people get anything done on single screen setups like this?

~~~
solaris999
If you include their laptops then they're all double screen really

~~~
verinus
no not really.

my laptop screen is dramatically smaller than my normal screen and the dpi
differ as well. so screen + laptop <> 2 x screen.

------
manmal
I don't like working with my back to the room. To feel fully well while
working, I need some kind of wall behind me. I can't picture me working in
this... thing.

------
RyanZAG
Well this looks like a great breeding ground for the next big plague. If one
person gets sick, it'll spread around the entire company?

Also looks strangely reminiscent of the industrial revolution.
[http://3219a2.medialib.glogster.com/jayytyler97/media/c6/c60...](http://3219a2.medialib.glogster.com/jayytyler97/media/c6/c60a6385a82a08b468d8f7b893391c36955e8e28/lotsofworkers.jpg)

~~~
iaw
Facebook has an unlimited sick leave policy. If people are contagious they can
work from home, if they are too sick to work from home they can rest until
they are better.

I agree that the design is not ideal but I think the company culture tries to
mitigate some of the negative aspects by being so flexible with various
policies.

------
facepalm
The article is so enthusiastic, but it makes me sad. Work is where people
spend the majority of their time. This environment is bound to be stressful
and unhealthy.

As for closed doors: just leave them open, problem solved. Or, these days,
just send a message via some chat application to your colleague and walk over
once they invite you via chat.

------
MrQuincle
If it's not only software, where would the hardware people sit, or even
embedded programmers with their dev. kits?

I understand the idea of allowing people to sit everywhere. I don't understand
why they don't come up with a technological solution to get your desk setup of
the previous day.

------
matobago
The last office that writer mentions is the actual office of Mark, he is the
only one with an office.

Facebook offices have very interesting stuff, the roof garden has an amazing
view of the bay, trees from different parts of California and wonderful
artwork from local artists that you can see all around the office.

I saw before this type of setup in Tesla, were the only way to know which is
Elon's desk, is by someone telling you. But also not long time ago he used to
sit in the plant floor where the only items in his desk where the best car of
the year award and his wallet.

This type of setup in my opinion foster productivity, people realize that the
only thing that they have to be doing is work. And the founder lead by
example.

~~~
loco5niner
Unless the type of work you do requires concentration, and you are easily
distracted by external stimuli.

------
kisstheblade
Looks kind of horrible.

But before we all emulate facebook, has anybody figured out how effective they
are? I don't know how much "innovation" goes on there or how much actual work
they get done. Somehow it feels like you could get by with one tenth of that
population. Or maybe I just don't understand all the great features and
innovations they must be adding to facebook every day (with thousands of
coders etc.). Haven't noticed much change in facebook during the couple of
years I have been using it. Maybe they all spend their time "monetizing" me...

------
oliv__
"The design reflects Facebook’s emphasis on openness and transparency"

Right...

------
Loque
I have a friend and ex colleague that work there and they enjoy it - I have
setup an open plan working space and I work somewhere now where a lot of
people work from home.

I think having a space which you want to come into and work is incredibly
valuable - catering to the variety of ideals is very very hard - nice to see
people making the effort!

------
vtny
This is just a sly way of turning knowledge workers into factory workers. We
all work in sweatshops now. It's just another way to increase profits by
minimizing real estate costs. "Oh, it's not a sweatshop. It's the
collaborative workplace of the future." Fuck you.

------
noddingham
I know this is HN but could we (maybe for 2016?) quit confusing Silicon Valley
with the rest of the world. There is nothing in TFA or Facebook's new
headquarters (or Google, or Apple) that says anything about real work being
taken place anywhere else.

------
miseg
I wonder if they're "allowed" to browse their personal Facebook profiles?

------
sogen
c. 1890

[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a8/Sweatshop-189...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a8/Sweatshop-1890.jpg)

------
lentil_soup
any one knows what are those cables hanging from the ceiling?

~~~
iaw
Mostly networking and regular power. There is no power/network running through
the cement floor, it's all dropped down from overhead.

