Joel’s new office is very, very nice
Posted on September 26, 2003
Filed Under /dev/null/ | 41 views |
Joel of “Joel on Software” has moved his company into their new offices and they are very, very nicely designed:
Power. Every desk has twenty, that’s right, twenty outlets. Four of them are colored orange and have uninterruptible power coming off of a UPS in the server closet, so you don’t need a UPS in every office.
…
there is an interior window in that wall, which cleverly looks across the corner of the next developer’s office and through his window.
Not to mention doors that close. In every software company I’ve worked for thus far none have given their developers offices with doors. You know what happens instead? Every single desk has a pair of massive headphones on it that the developers use to block out the sounds around - they essentially create their own door.
I remember one point of interest from a study done by IBM way back when that I’d dig up if I could find it but so far I haven’t been able to:
- developers get into creative “grooves” in which they’ve managed to mentally arrange all the tasks they’re currently working on. Any interruption destroys this groove, which effectively takes about fifteen minutes to get back into. This means: if your developers are being disturbed every fifteen minutes by other people talking, phones ringing, dogs barking, etc. they’re never getting to the point where they’re working at their optimum.
Developers will know what I’m talking about: that feeling when you *know* what you’re doing, where it’s going and how you’re going to get there and the code just flows out. You’ll also know the opposite: when distractions mean you have to keep jotting down notes on paper to keep track of where you were, when you have to keep re-reading your own code to get back in place, and every task starts with “oh shit, I forgot to do…”.
The open concept office of the 90s was great… for managers. It let them keep an eye on everyone, it let them feel like their company was huge and had lots of people, and it was cheap (no walls, no costs). It was also great for Sony who, in my humble estimation, made 90% of the headphones sitting on those desks. It wasn’t great for the grunts pounding out the final products though.
The best feature of any office I’ve worked in thus far, however, was at GenerationNet: glass walls. The walls in the hallways were double panes of thick glass sandwhiching a semi-opaque white sheet that let light through but wasn’t see-through. Because the walls were glass it meant that developers could write on them with white board markers, anywhere, anytime.
If you want to see developers create some cool shit and come up with some excellent ideas, let them write on the walls. I had some of my best conversations about programming with my co-worker Arvin standing in the hallway as we both wrote and diagramed our ideas madly across those walls.
Comments
One Response to “Joel’s new office is very, very nice”
Leave a Reply
Thanks Adam, I knew you’d be able to fill in more details. I’m pretty sure it was you I got that info from in the first place.