Comment by mikelevins | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikelevins | Hacker News Reader

The best office environment I was ever in, in 30 years of working in software development, was on Apple's Newton team in the Bubb Road building in Cupertino.

Everyone in the building I was in had a private office with floor-to-ceiling exterior windows and a door that closed.

Groups of offices shared a larger open common room with sofas and comfy chairs and coffee tables conveniently arranged for sitting around talking. There were white boards in the offices and on several walls of the common areas.

You need to concentrate? Go in your office and close the door. Feeling amenable to visits from colleagues? Open the door. Feel the need for free-form conversation with one or more colleagues? Plop onto the couch and talk things over.

NeXT was laid out somewhat similarly, but with less convenient common areas.

At various times I've experienced wall-to-wall private offices, giant open rooms with everyone side-by-side on long tables, and everything in between. For my money, the Newton office was the best. Privacy and camaraderie were available to us at all times in whatever measure suited each of us.

I share your sentiment. I worked for a company that leased an old Sun building - all of the engineers got a private office. Three solid walls (unfortunately exterior windows were limited) and one entire wall was glass and frosted between knee and shoulder height. The door to the office was a floor-to-ceiling sliding door on this glass wall.

The offices all had whiteboards on two walls and were large enough to comfortably fit 3-4 chairs total. This was great because it meant any useful meeting could happen in anyone's office. There were larger conference rooms on the corner of each hallway which had screens for video conferencing and larger tables to accommodate larger groups of folks.

If you needed privacy to focus, you closed your door. If you were open to watercooler-chit-chat, you left your door open. It was easy to overhear technical conversations if you wanted to, but also easy to ignore since you had 3.5 walls of noise privacy.

At the time I did not realize how good of a work environment that was. It was almost a decade ago. I still consider that my ideal work environment if I have to work in an office.

>NeXT was laid out somewhat similarly, but with less convenient common areas.

Fascinating. I've always found Conway's Law [0] to hold up incredibly well, and there's a perfect example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law

Hate to be that guy, but didn’t the newton product fail?

Or at least fail in the direct sense of the word, and not “inspired something actually successful”.

It did, but it does not make his argument less valid.

What's the relevance?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com