The Curse of a New Building

http://steveblank.com/2009/05/15/supermac-war-story-11-the-curse-of-a-new-building/

by aycangulez • 16 years ago

67 26 16 years ago

Very true. Just moving everybody into their own offices can destroy interaction. Its as bad as communicating solely by email.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

Not sure I buy this. I wear earplugs and deliberately avoid making eye contact to avoid being distracted. An office would be the same thing, except someone could just knock on the door to get my attention.

Offices are good for people who do work. Cubicles are good for people that want to talk about what they're "going to" work on.

MartinCron2• 16 years ago

No one way is right for every individual and organization, and I'm not going to be arrogant enough to tell you that you're wrong about your situation. I do feel that the "all devs must have private offices" can optimize for a perception of individual productivity at the expense of the broader team productivity.

Personally, I find that being alone in an office is best when I've got a very clear understanding of the problem to be solved, my stakeholders have a very clear understanding of how I'm going to solve the problem, and I don't need to help anyone else with what they're trying to get done.

That's to say, almost never.

duffbeer703• 16 years ago

It's all about the environment. Offices work great, as long as you have good hallways that force people to walk around. Hallway conversations give you the value of the cube farm without the need to learn about the medical history, marital problems and other minutae that the cube farm's false privacy offers.

That said, I think ops people work better in open plan offices.

bootload• 16 years ago

"... Very true. Just moving everybody into their own offices can destroy interaction. Its as bad as communicating solely by email. ..."

An office with a door, no interaction and communicating by email is a hacker dream.

abalashov3• 16 years ago

Depends on with whom, I think. With management, and colleagues in non-engineering departments, absolutely. But with coworkers on their own team who are hopefully their buddies, I don't think this is true. I had the enormous privilege of having met some incredibly interesting people by working with them, and being able to talk with them - whether "productively" or not (there was plenty of both) - was one of the best and most enduring aspects of the job.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

... and reduce interruptions and non-productive idle chit-chat.

That said, I think that in the future, at least in software development, more and more developers are going to be working from home or coffee shops, because it has so many advantages over the commute-office-cubicle-corporate-meeting culture. Company spends less on office space. Developers get interrupted less and so can stay in productivity zones longer. Employees spend less time and money on non-productive & never-ending activities (commuting) and experience less health risk (car accidents) and cause less air & noise pollution (driving). I also suspect (though not 100% positive) it will put downward pressure on the number of middle managers needed, and thus save companies even more. Employees still need to be "managed" but if all the worker bees are remote than there is less cover and opportunity for managers to create makework and timesinks solely to help justify their own jobs.

mitjak• 16 years ago

I personally still find it easier to focus on work and eliminate distractions when I'm at the office. That, and the ability to quickly discuss a problem with colleague or bounce a solution off him or her exposing flaws is great. No high typing speed can replace live human interaction, IMO.

joshu• 16 years ago

Can someone explain "tiltup" ?

gojomo• 16 years ago

Blank linked the word to http://www.tiltup.com/ (maybe after initial reader confusion) to provide context.

Looks to me like the miles and miles of low-rise office parks in Silicon Valley include lots of 'tilt-up' concrete-slab construction.

dws• 16 years ago

It's a style of building that was very popular doing the boom in Silicon Valley during the 80's and early 90's. Construction crews would pour the walls into molds, let them dry, and then literally tilt them up and put a roof on them.

It was weird to drive through parts of the Silicon Valley (e.g., North 1st St.) finding buildings had been tilted up in what had been flat land the week before.

Quite a few of those buildings are empty now.

gamble• 16 years ago

It was the money ("our sales skyrocketed") that changed the company culture, not the building. It isn't hard to maintain an atmosphere of egality and shared sacrifice when there's no money to go around. Once the company is flush with profits, the founders are looking at a big payoff, and management is drawing full salaries, telling employees to continue on as if nothing as changed will eventually lead to discontent. Building a new office probably seemed like the easiest way to address all the complaints that had arisen after the company ceased being a startup, and became a success.

donaq• 16 years ago

Wouldn't explaining the reasons for not moving while using the money instead for generous employee bonuses solve that problem?

abalashov3• 16 years ago

In the short term ... but how to tap psychologically into new hires who never went through that experience, and whose initial perceptions and expectations need to be set?

terra_t• 16 years ago

A friend of mine who has created several successful non-profit organizations adds a "no buildings" clause to the bylaws of every new organization he creates.

He believes that once non-profit organizations accumulate some capital, the first thing they do is build a big new building, and that's the beginning of a downhill slide.

aycangulez• 16 years ago

Unfortunately, the same mentality applies to universities, too. They love to build new buildings instead of hiring the best faculty.

djcapelis• 16 years ago

Might have something to do with the fact that university donors love to build new buildings instead of just giving the university money to be spent on HR. (And then the university doesn't have a guaranteed funding source for a top professor? Yikes!)

Endowed chairs work a bit better, but those usually don't go towards new recruitment.

Throlkim• 16 years ago

My university did exactly this. (Supposedly) spent anywhere between £5 mil and £50 mil on a new building; £80,000 on their opening ceremony with lots of local celebrities; and then left all the students with 4 year-old hardware for design/video courses.

I really appreciated the sterile white-washed building for creative courses while attempting to use After Effects on a G5 iMac :|

watmough• 16 years ago

My old company did the opposite of this. As they expanded, they built worse and worse office environments. I started out in a nice 10x10 cube, and ended up in a 5x5 low-walled cube, on an 'expansion floor'.

After I quit, the primary building tenant moved to a new building, and the company I had had worked for became primary. This auspicious event was marked by the building cafeteria (fairly decent as these things go) shutting down, so not even hot food was available.

So yeah, not all companies get better digs as they expand.

Deestan• 16 years ago

On the other hand, I wouldn't want to work long hours in a cramped, smelly cubicle on a second-hand half-broken chair when the company is wading in cash.

"Good programmers are not motivated by material needs" and yada yada, but we really don't like feeling exploited.

The Curse of a New Building

Related Stories