I work at a mid-size (~500 employee) telecom. "The [company name] 15" is a meme here because there's always so much free food in the kitchen. Every time anyone meets with clients/partners/etc., they always have way too much food catered, and the leftovers get put out for the rest of us. New employee orientations are especially awesome because they always order like ten times as much food as the newbies can eat. And we get donuts and klobasneks in the break room every Friday morning... plus every day, the break room is stocked with cereal and milk.
I like to post about the stuff I find in the break room on Facebook, and I've had multiple people tell me they gained 15 pounds just reading my posts.
> I could never go back to a cubicle with no windows in sight!
That's a mixed blessing. I consider cubicles a perk, and while windows are nice, the lack of windows isn't a deal-breaker for me, and they have their downsides.
At my last employer -- a 12-person defense contractor that put the "small" in "small business" despite having been around for 20 years -- I sat facing the window. We had four people in the room, with an empty seat for a fifth, none of us with our backs to the walls: we all faced the edge of the room. Three of us faced plate glass windows. Yeah, sure, the view was pretty. We worked on the 12th floor. I faced a freeway and a light rail line, with a rail station visible as well. It wasn't uncommon for us to stop work so we can gawk at a nasty accident on the freeway, so we can speculate on why the police have the freeway closed off, or to marvel as a hawk flew in front of our windows. That's the good. The bad is that the glare could get blinding at times. And all of us were afraid of closing the blinds because we didn't want to interfere with somebody else's view, so we just sucked it up and worked in glare on various days.
And then there was the office layout itself. Nobody had any privacy, and we could all see each other's monitors from our desks. I never worked on the same project as two of the people in my room (and they usually were on separate projects themselves): it wasn't uncommon for other members of their teams to walk into our office and have an impromptu design meeting with them while the rest of us tried to tune them out. And, no, we had no meeting rooms readily available to us: we rented a handful of offices in an executive suite that we shared with other companies, so any meeting rooms had to be booked well in advance and cost us $$$.
Now, at my current employer, I work in a cube farm, and I love it. I have my own space, I can see when someone's coming up to me, my cube doesn't get used as an impromptu meeting room, etc. Sure, I don't have my awesome view anymore, but it's not terribly important, and I'm no longer dealing with glare. If I really need to look outside, there's a window not too far away from me anyway, and when the weather gets bad, a lot of us gather by that window so we can check out the storm.
I work at a mid-size (~500 employee) telecom. "The [company name] 15" is a meme here because there's always so much free food in the kitchen. Every time anyone meets with clients/partners/etc., they always have way too much food catered, and the leftovers get put out for the rest of us. New employee orientations are especially awesome because they always order like ten times as much food as the newbies can eat. And we get donuts and klobasneks in the break room every Friday morning... plus every day, the break room is stocked with cereal and milk.
I like to post about the stuff I find in the break room on Facebook, and I've had multiple people tell me they gained 15 pounds just reading my posts.
> I could never go back to a cubicle with no windows in sight!
That's a mixed blessing. I consider cubicles a perk, and while windows are nice, the lack of windows isn't a deal-breaker for me, and they have their downsides.
At my last employer -- a 12-person defense contractor that put the "small" in "small business" despite having been around for 20 years -- I sat facing the window. We had four people in the room, with an empty seat for a fifth, none of us with our backs to the walls: we all faced the edge of the room. Three of us faced plate glass windows. Yeah, sure, the view was pretty. We worked on the 12th floor. I faced a freeway and a light rail line, with a rail station visible as well. It wasn't uncommon for us to stop work so we can gawk at a nasty accident on the freeway, so we can speculate on why the police have the freeway closed off, or to marvel as a hawk flew in front of our windows. That's the good. The bad is that the glare could get blinding at times. And all of us were afraid of closing the blinds because we didn't want to interfere with somebody else's view, so we just sucked it up and worked in glare on various days.
And then there was the office layout itself. Nobody had any privacy, and we could all see each other's monitors from our desks. I never worked on the same project as two of the people in my room (and they usually were on separate projects themselves): it wasn't uncommon for other members of their teams to walk into our office and have an impromptu design meeting with them while the rest of us tried to tune them out. And, no, we had no meeting rooms readily available to us: we rented a handful of offices in an executive suite that we shared with other companies, so any meeting rooms had to be booked well in advance and cost us $$$.
Now, at my current employer, I work in a cube farm, and I love it. I have my own space, I can see when someone's coming up to me, my cube doesn't get used as an impromptu meeting room, etc. Sure, I don't have my awesome view anymore, but it's not terribly important, and I'm no longer dealing with glare. If I really need to look outside, there's a window not too far away from me anyway, and when the weather gets bad, a lot of us gather by that window so we can check out the storm.