Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

I'm currently working at a place where I have 4 locations I can work from:

1 - my office (shared with one other person)

2 - a team room, about 10 people right now

3 - an office across from my client, it's a "guest cube" in a cube farm

4 - from home

Plus the normal mix of conference rooms.

I find that in any given week, I'll rotate through about 3 of those pretty comfortably. My officemate also has a similar work schedule, so I'm alone in my office most of the time, so I use it for deep concentration. It's too isolated though to spend all my time there.

The team room is great if I need to collaborate, or get my energy up. It's also not too bad if I need to concentrate as everybody there is working.

The guest cube is where I go if I need to do document editing, presentations, client meetings...stuff that's so distracting I can't get any technical work done anyway.

And home, because well, who doesn't want to work from home every once in a while?

So far, it's the best workplace I've ever been, and this includes about 5 years of working from home, various client sites, cubes, personal offices, open floor plans. The best part is that it doesn't cost the company a fortune, but I get flexibility, privacy when I need it, collaboration when I need it, different work contexts etc.

I've been more productive in the few months I've been here than I've been anywhere else in my career.

I run officesnapshots.com, where the majority of the photos in the blog post are from, and what you have described is the exact direction office designs are heading. Europe has been moving this way for a while and the US is (finally) beginning to as well.

The idea is to offer a variety of places where employees can work and let them move between them freely depending on what needs to get done.

Need privacy? Work in this private room. Need to collaborate? There's a room for that too.

Much of the pushback from developers on Hacker News regarding open floorplans seems to be that their offices default to 'open office' rather than 'private office'. But given that many tech companies are founded by developers and technical people, and this hasn't changed yet, I suspect companies just aren't trying to optimize for individual developer productivity.

The author thanks you. Your website (Office Snapshots) is awesome.

Do you have a workstation in each spot to go work on? Or do you work specifically on your laptop?

I find that even with a company-issued laptop, as awesome as it is, it can't compare to a 2-3 monitors workstation if I really need to work on something complex that requires multiple applications up next to each other.

Everybody, top-to-bottom is issued a laptop. We get a choice from about a half dozen models of Dells and a couple Macs. About 1/3 of the company is transitioning to using Macs. The sales/BD guys tend to get the lighter machines, the MB Airs, that sort of thing, while the designers/writers tend to go for bigger screens. Engineers tend to go for RAM and SSDs or max out on disk space depending. I think there are a few folks who've asked for desktops simply because they don't want to carry something around and they know they'll never move, it's mostly secretaries.

We're all also given very nice laptop bags to carry our stuff around in.

My office, the team room and the guest cube all have monitors we can plug into. All my monitors at home are occupied at the moment.

They standardized on Dells until last year when they started offering Macs. This means that every possible workplace is full of standardized Dell Docs. So if you have a Dell, you just plop it in and you're wired up to network, monitor, power, keyboard, mouse etc. It's a bit more fuss with the Macs and all the display port dongles and power bricks, but on the flip side, the machines themselves are physically lighter, thinner and generally nicer to use on their own than the Dells. For example, if I forget my mouse (I use a rMBP) it's not a big deal since the trackpad is very good, but my Dell using colleagues are kind of SOL since the trackpad works so poorly.

Also the equivalent Dell to my rMBP (15") weighs something like 11 pounds and is about 3 times as thick.

In general the philosophy seems to be to offer workplace flexibility while making each choice as good as possible.

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