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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

Spend every penny on the chairs. Get really nice chairs, like crazy nice, and then get cheap desks (e.g. Ikea).

As far as lighting I would just say make it extra departmentalised. Some people prefer to work in the shade others prefer those horrible office lights. I would also look at air conditioning and how adjustable it is.

Nothing else matters because everything else will likely be changed as it is needed. Even if you decide on a layout, if it doesn't work people will change it down the road.

But seriously: Get nice chairs.

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nice chairs is a good one, but here are some others:

1. some people don't like keyboard trays, but I've had shoulder problems after several years of working without the keyboard at the right height. get them

2. get plastic adjustable stands for monitor and keyboards immediately, not on user request. make it ergonomic, but you don't have to spend the big bucks

3. some developers need special environments (i.e. less noise, less visual distraction), but some feed off of interaction. learn what these needs are and either make it happen or don't hire them, but don't find out too late. do not handle this with white noise. it may mean they can't co-locate to be as productive, and if that is a problem, you need to figure that out

4. people sometimes need privacy. don't foster an environment that encourages people to take calls inside or meet in cubes, distracting others

A point on 3. Some devs know what they are doing and prefer working alone in a quiet area. A lot of other devs have no idea what they are doing and disparage any situation where people aren't practically sharing seats and doing each other's work. Why? because they want other people around them to answer their questions, to do their work, and solve their problems. They are not "feeding" off interaction. They simply don't know the job. Do surgeons only work in groups because surgery is such as social experience that they feed off the social energy which lets them really bro down and do some surgery? No.

The people who typically put offices together usually don't come from an academic background and they typically don't do anything by themselves. Ever. They go from meeting to meeting all day. They have no basis for understanding that some jobs require individual effort. They buy group B's pitch by default. So they make some really bad mistakes:

Open floor plan - great for people who need to ask a lot of questions. bad for people who know the answers and will get interrupted.

Face to Face seating - great for people who want to get other people's attention. bad for people who want to concentrate on hard problems.

Good points, but I work with someone that is very able, very smart, but is an extrovert. I've actually never worked with anyone that was an extrovert and didn't do the work on their own, but I've heard of them. Usually if someone doesn't know what they are doing, they don't want to let on about it. It just becomes obvious.

What I don't understand is that when I go to small tech startups, the layout is almost always like Facebook's: face-to-face in an open room. Sure it is cheap, but I agree it is hard for some of us to think in those environments. I think Microsoft's "everyone gets an office" is best from the introvertive, thinking developer's point of view. Unfortunately, that isn't enough to make them great. And cubes suck.

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