Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/12/29.html

by twampss • 18 years ago

110 85 18 years ago

swilliams• 18 years ago

That looks like a pretty impressive office. It sounds like a successful recruiting tool; I would definitely like working in that environment.

What other companies put that much attention towards work environment? I know that a lot of popular startups tend to favor communal environments, but seeing actual offices is pretty rare. All of the places I've worked at tend to fall somewhere between decent to hellish cube nightmare.

iron_ball• 18 years ago

How do we resolve "offices with doors that close" with "communal work environment" anyway? Are they just diametrically opposed office philosphies?

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

Here's the suggestion from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn:

The best adaptation I've seen of the open-office idea is a partial retreat from it. People crave acoustic privacy so they can talk on the telephone, but visual privacy is not as important -- they like being able to see what's going on. This has led to a very satisfactory compromise called "cave and commons". Each office worker has a private office, often small, which opens into a generous open area surrounded by many other private offices. The open area has a kitchen, some couches, sometimes tables for sitting around informally, and sometimes a working library, or at least a rack of current periodicals. You can shut the door of your cave and concentrate, or you can leave your door open and keep an eye and ear on who's coming and going in the commons, and whether the meeting or presentation going on there might be worth leaning in on. The feeling is congenial and homey, and it encourages the casual encounters which, research keeps showing, are at the heart of creativity in offices.

I lived in a dorm designed like this for four years of college. I'm not sure I've ever been as productive since. ;)

I would not be surprised to learn that Spolsky has read Brand's book. He's certainly got the idea. Note the emphasis on glass in the Fog Creek offices, providing acoustic privacy but not visual isolation.

brl• 18 years ago

I will never EVER work in a communal work environment again.

I can only work in a space somewhere between an 'office with a closed door' and a sensory deprivation tank.

jon_dahl2• 18 years ago

I've spent way too much time thinking about this question over the years for my small teams. My conclusion is that neither is perfect, but the best options are:

-- Open work space for 3-6 people, IF everyone is working on the same project, IF everyone is committed to doing good work (and won't be surfing YouTube throughout the day), IF there are quite/private places to retreat to for phone calls and solo problem solving, and IF the configuration doesn't stay the same for years. Many people report being more productive for short periods with this sort of arrangement.

Bonus: pair programming seems to lead to a different sort of "flow" than solo programming, which is more amenable to an open work space.

-- Offices with a door for everything else. The upside of offices with a door: reduced interruptions, which are the bane of complex programming. (Try solving a really really hard problem with the threat of interruptions constantly on your mind. Not actual interruptions - just the threat, or memory, of interruptions.) The downside: teams have to be more deliberate in fostering team communication.

The "cave and commons" (elsewhere in this discussion) seems like a good compromise. Even better, in my opinion, would be a modular space where teams could work together some of the time in an open war room, during some phases of development, and where they could work privately during other phases. But that's not easy to find.

DanielBMarkham• 18 years ago

Cave and Commons is the way to go, as several other posters pointed out.

I'd like to add the critical factor: team size. Once team size gets too large (say over 8-10 people) random noise and distractions take over. I've seen teams of 30 try to do collocated, collaborative work environments and it just falls apart. At that size, the best I've seen so far is cubes, "study hall" and private rooms. That is, cubes for \half the day, a group "study hall" type atmosphere for the other half, and easily available small group work rooms. By "study hall", I don't mean a bunch of people being quiet, just a bunch of people in the same area working on group/individual tasks.

There's an interesting phenomenon that goes on in collaborative work spaces. Many times programmers get lots of benefits from working together but still would rather be left alone. So many times the team requires time that it works together, say for a couple of hours every morning, like it or not. Not everybody likes it so much. Many times there's a gap between "the way I like working" and "the way that I work that is the most productive"

Just goes to show that programming is not a technical exercise, as much as we like to talk functional code, security, and all the other bits and bytes bullshit. It's a human activity, and full of the irrational and quirky nuances that comes from working with hominids.

Andys• 18 years ago

I look at it and almost weep - but I feel like its TOO good. I've grown accustomed to the start-up feel of making do with what you have, spending big on a few items (chair, monitor) and having everything else made of cardboard..

bemmu• 18 years ago

Definitely. I even showed my developer friend the pictures and ended up explaining what Fog Creek does.

Mistone• 18 years ago

seriously nice diggs, cant imagine how much that place costs but they've got the cash and have a great outlook on getting ROI via recruiting and client WOW, certainly offers a differnt perspective to just getting bought. Why not built a super cool company that you love to work at instead?

jd2• 18 years ago

I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon#. And in a few years Fog Creek will move to a different location again - at which point they'll have to build a new high end office.

So really, this seems to be a case of spending money to improve quality of life. The other benefits, such as for recruiting and PR are just a nice side effect.

#) Assuming 50 employees, over 5 years, the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less. Given the choice, I would probably give up 15% of my salary to work in a nice place with good food, a good view, good equipment, and so on.

tptacek2• 18 years ago

I agree, but then of course, spending a shit ton of money just to make yourself feel better is one of the luxuries of not being beholden to outside investors.

Between ludicrous offices and the 37s "4 days a week" plan, I'd probably go with 37s.

mechanical_fish3• 18 years ago

the costs are roughly $4000 per employee per year. That's maybe 15% of their salary, probably less.

You think that top software engineering graduates in New York City make $26k per year? Recalibrate! Recalibrate!

I think the number you're looking for is "less than 4%". Remember that the office-construction expenses can be massaged by accountants to reduce taxes on them, and that an employee's (e.g.) $80k salary costs the employer considerably more than $80k, thanks to the employer share of things like Social Security and health insurance. To say nothing of the costs of recruiting a single employee. Note that a headhunter will charge you a cool $30k to recruit an employee with a $100k salary:

http://www.asktheheadhunter.com/basics2.htm

...and who knows what kind of stiff that headhunter is going to try to foist off on you?

The chances that the $4k per employee per year is paying off for Fog Creek are much, much better than you think.

njharman• 18 years ago

That's like 3-5% of their salary or at least I hope so. Just how little do you think they earn?

bootload• 18 years ago

"... I doubt it has a good ROI via recruiting, etc. Joel mentioned he spent more than a million on improving the interior design. No recruiting is going to make up for that, any time soon# ..."

The key is to spend capital to get the best programmers to create profit. This idea isn't something Joel made up it's an idea by Phil Greenspun, "Building and keeping a good software engineering team" ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/ancient-history/managing-softwar...

So what's your idea?

kragen5• 18 years ago

To have "a good ROI via recruiting," never mind the etc., he just has to improve his profits by more than 40k per year, by making better products than he would have otherwise, by hiring better people than he would have otherwise --- or by having to pay 40k less per year in salary, although that seems less likely. Although the chain of causality here has a lot of randomness attached to it, if he has a few million dollars in revenue per year, such an improvement hardly seems implausible.

The flip side is that spending a lot of money on something apparently unnecessary might incline you to spend more money on things that are actually unnecessary.

(I'm assuming "a good ROI" means 4% per year.)

dbrush• 18 years ago

People at Fog Creek read Hacker News. edit: Other than just Joel.

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

icey• 18 years ago

You mean people like Joel?

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=spolsky

babakian• 18 years ago

Actually, that's a shot of Joel's office. But, yeah, Fog Creeker's other than Joel do read Hacker News.

jcapote• 18 years ago

droool

brm• 18 years ago

Better recruiting tool: Make an office that female developers want to work in, the male developers will follow.

DavidMcLaughlin• 18 years ago

I'm not sure recruiting desperate and socially akward dudes who are going to get all creepy weirdo on the female staff is the best recruitment strategy I've ever heard.

spolsky3• 18 years ago

I have to keep reminding them that women usually do NOT want to hear about the problems they were having with their barcode scanner scanning in their comic book collections

newyorkcitywest• 18 years ago

Um...yeah. I think the biggest draw of any office is the pussy. That's what I care about.

But I don't think you'd want female developers. Female sales staff, female secretaries, etc.

Nice office, but without nice pussy, what's the point?

river_styx• 18 years ago

Reddit is that way ---->

kragen5• 18 years ago

I want to second this --- I don't like working in places that are exclusionary, that privilege gender (or, say, ethnicity0 above talent. It's not about the eye candy. Generally places that you'd only want to work if you were male are not places I want to work.

anthonyrubin3• 18 years ago

Why do the admins have to sit in a closet?

johns2• 18 years ago

Have to? Almost all the admins I've known love to sit in closets :) (I was an admin for a few years so this is somewhat self-deprecating)

anthonyrubin3• 18 years ago

I have been an admin in the past and I wouldn't have minded a window.

staunch• 18 years ago

Apparently Joel doesn't know that all good sysadmins are also good programmers.

dcurtis• 18 years ago

Why do the UI designers have to... wait a minute, there aren't any!

If he spent half the amount of money he spent on this amazing office for a kick ass UI team, he would increase sales by an enormous amount for Fogbugz. I know so many people who would switch if it wasn't so damn ugly and difficult to use. I don't think people use Lighthouse because it has better features.

Joel's priorities seem very odd to me.

MrRage• 18 years ago

Could you quantify "ugly" and "difficult to use"? I use FogBugz, and while it's not the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, it's far from ugly. But then beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so it's said. I don't find it hard to use at all. I just use it for bug tracking and to-do reminder. I don't use any advanced features. What exactly do you find difficult to do?

anthonyrubin3• 18 years ago

Joel seems to be doing extraordinarily well without your advice.

gommm• 18 years ago

I tried using fogbugz a couple of time and agree with you. For the ease of use, I know that there were quite a few things I didn't really get (though I forgot which one). In the end I'm now using pivotal tracker instead.

Now apart from that I completely agree with joel's reasoning regarding building a great place to work for programmers, I just think that he should also hire more designers and ui experts...

henning• 18 years ago

Dope office is dope!

marbletiles• 18 years ago

My envy on this place is mighty (and all this from a bug tracker?), but is tempered by more annoyance at the Javascript nightmare that is Picasa. Why can't I middle-click to open pictures in new windows? Because Google Breaks The Browser. Top.

shiranaihito3• 18 years ago

If you were using The Browser, Opera, here's how you could open those pictures effortlessly in new tabs:

1) Right-click on top of a picture, keep the button down.

2) Flick your mouse slightly downwards.

3) Release the right mouse button.

And there you go. Now, after checking out a picture, you'd want to close the newly opened tab, and get back to where you were:

1) Right-click, and hold

2) Move the mouse slightly downwards, and slightly to the right.

3) Release the mouse button

And there you go again. It doesn't take long to get comfortable with Opera's Mouse Gestures, and you'll realize they're very handy.

kragen5• 18 years ago

The issue isn't with the absence of mouse gestures; it's with the absence of link targets.

huhtenberg• 18 years ago

Glass whiteboard ! http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

mynameishere3• 18 years ago

Having my back to glass would drive me insane, and evidently all of the offices are like that:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

Check out all of the famous series 7 chairs:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

It's got that not-quite-a-prison institutional look to it. That's great if you're running a high school in the poorest district in Mississippi, but given his budget [1] you'd think it would look nice.

I've got a private office, and the landlord charged my company nothing to throw up walls and doors in the empty space we rented. Maybe it's impossible to avoid Veblen goods in NYC, though.

[1] http://www.gibraltarfurniture.com/malik-mc-c-2201.html That's right. It's 300 dollars.

jonknee• 18 years ago

> That's great if you're running a high school in the poorest district in Mississippi

That's just an absurd statement. The design is very high-end, perhaps you just don't like the modern look?

mynameishere3• 18 years ago

Maybe it's "high end". But all of these are better:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctony/2486595834/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewiedewie/2377292918/

http://la.eater.com/uploads/2008_02_mcdonalds-thumb.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/meteorry/17414425/

There's a McDonald's down the street from me similarly superior to Joel's lunchroom, which resembles none of the above. It was clearly patterned after a high-school cafeteria.

d-rex• 18 years ago

Actually only the two interior offices have that layout. All the other offices have the desk facing a real wall with another behind it, and glass on the left and right.

Oh and the same room from another angle looks much less like a prison:

http://picasaweb.google.com/spolsky/FogCreekSNewOffice#52853...

mynameishere3• 18 years ago

Yeah, the view is sweet, but even the pigeons get it.

anewaccountname• 18 years ago

>That's right. It's 300 dollars.

Wow; apparently my old highschool should sell the chairs in lunchroom to raise a quick million dollars.

timr• 18 years ago

I would definitely not be a whiny emo girl if I were to work in that environment. ;-)

petercooper• 18 years ago

Awesome! I just can't even imagine how Fog Creek makes enough money for all of this from mostly a single product. They must have tens of thousands of paying customers - which strikes me as incredibly strong for a niche as small as software development - kudos!

iamelgringo3• 18 years ago

The shrinkwrap software business is good.

bbither• 18 years ago

This is a seriously awesome office space that any developer looking for the urban lifestyle that NYC offers would be nuts to not want to work at. But Joel, you already have a fantastic reputation and should be able to recruit top talent based on your location, reputation, and because because you employ other smart people. That 500K of your own cash you put into that space depreciates over 39 years. You basically can't write it off until you move! I got stuck with over 200K in our last build-out that I'm still sitting on 3 years later. However if 500K is all you spent in addition to your lease with a standard buildout allowance, you got a great deal.

Like Joel, I bootstrapped a software company to similar size (25 employees). I did a calculation and we spend about 1.4% of our revenue today on 5,000 sqft of office space, but have outgrown it and it's no longer the nice spacious office we started with. 10,000 sqft of space in the best class A space in Western MA will cost about 3% of our 2009 expected revenue, with modest but nice build-out included. Given that this would be our 4th move in 6 years, I tend to be careful about long leases and lease buildouts.

I'd rather invest in paying good salaries, offering the best equipment and a nice (but not extravagant) work environment. Then I can afford to launch new products without being beholden to investors.

I really like the glass walls though...

j_b_f• 18 years ago

Where do you work in Western MA? I'm a software CEO as well and do a lot of work out there. We should get together sometime.

rams• 18 years ago

Seriously, how does Joel make both ends meet in an expensive place like NYC ? Selling bug-tracking software ?

johns2• 18 years ago

I would bet Copilot is pretty profitable too

jfornear• 18 years ago

Those huge motorized desks with 20 electrical outlets sound awesome.

Tichy• 18 years ago

It's cool that they have a shower in the office. Never worked in an office that has one, always wished for one.

iamelgringo3• 18 years ago

Brilliant, Joel.

I love how you're able to market your company. You just got about 14,000 top notch hackers to look and drool over your office space. It's a great recruiting tool.

cosmok• 18 years ago

it is surprising that a story about someone moving to a new office makes into the front page of HN! the new office might have all the fancy features, but, there are a few things that annoy me: 1. I don't really care for all those fancy features and if I were considering joining a company those fancy features will be the last thing in my mind before I make a decision. 2. If one still has the urge to know who moved where and what they have got there then they can always find that in other sites (hardly HN stuff IMHO) 3. And the most annoying bit is that this story got to the front page while a lot of other threads that I found interesting and would have helped me become a better Hacker usually get a couple of points and pretty much no discussion at all.

I love HN and the community and still read a lot of interesting stuff here, but, I am beginning to feel that HN is slowly slipping away to be a site that also has a few genuine and invigorating posts/discussions about entrepreneurship and programming.

danw• 18 years ago

Where do those height adjustable desks come from? I'd love to be able to work standing sometimes

adambox• 18 years ago

steelcase :)

VolatileVoid• 18 years ago

Interesting. I work about a block away from that office; I take the 4/5 to Bowling Green every morning and usually walk past 55 B'way once or twice a week.

Knowing that Fog Creek is so close is tempting me to send in my resume... :)

biohacker42• 18 years ago

Second best offices I've seen.

At Bowdoin College the CS professors have offices with an awesome view and a shower and bathroom in each office.

gubbersingh• 18 years ago

I work at a big software/hardware company. We have pretty much the same perks, same height adjustable long desks, aeron chairs (or you pick one based on the one you like) etc. Only thing I don't like is that there is no windows :-((.

so no big deal, but windows are nice

Joel on Software: The new Fog Creek Office

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