Office Layout For Developers
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone.
I fail to see a meaningful difference between large cubes with full height walls (and desks placed to avoid shoulder surfing by passers by) and offices beyond the construction costs involved.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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The best layout I ever worked in, was a big room with desks, no walls, so people could talk and see each other, and spacious enough to have room for regular Nerf gun wars.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
The lab for one of my projects was like that, the collective goof off potential made it really hard for me to keep productive. I don't think I'd ever voluntarily take a job where I had to spend most of my time in an open office. X| X| X|
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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So, how does it feel to be 'kept'? :-D
Software Zen:
delete this;Pretty damn good actually. :laugh:
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
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Andy Brummer wrote:
white noise generators
Do they work? If yes what brand are you using. Some times I go to client sites and I have to work in their noisy cubicles. I wonder whether this is what I need to look at.
It masks a regular conversation happening in the cube next to me, but I don't think it would make a difference if things were actually loud. This is a full building system with hundreds of speakers, so I don't even know where to begin with comparing it to the individual models.
Curvature of the Mind now with 3D
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Rama Krishna Vavilala wrote:
1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone.
I fail to see a meaningful difference between large cubes with full height walls (and desks placed to avoid shoulder surfing by passers by) and offices beyond the construction costs involved.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
Dan Neely wrote:
between large cubes with full height walls
I have never seen those so I have no idea.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
A couple of things I've come across which I really liked: Natural light. I don't process light as efficiently as the next person, and natural light seems to help as opposed to brighter overhead/desk lighting. White boards. At one job, we had an entire meeting room paneled with white boards. We could leave a few different projects' sketches up at the same time. This was nice when we needed to get away from some design for a while, we didn't have to worry about the next group wiping out our ideas. In terms of the open office thing, I'm on the fence about that. It can be very distracting, and you can get dragged into the side conversations, just because you cannot help but overhear. On the other hand, it's great (when you have receptive co-workers), to just be able to ask a question when you're hung up on one particular aspect, or you want to run an idea by someone. I think this is a topic where you really need to poll your team before setting your ideas in motion. See what they think would be helpful for them specifically, and endeavor to meet that where it's reasonable. For example, free lunch everyday -> not reasonable. Free beer on Fridays -> reasonable.
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Dan Neely wrote:
between large cubes with full height walls
I have never seen those so I have no idea.
In my previous company it was arranged like this and I really like it. High, semi-transparent walls up to the celling with the third wall missing/those from the windows' side/. It was nice, but the company founder was a developer so hew new what the programmers need. We also had a good NVidia VGA cards on our machines and the new developer’s first task was to try to improve our JAVA web application for scoring and statistics from multiplayer DOOM and Unreal Tournament every day half-hour sessions.
There is only one Ashley Judd and Salma Hayek is her prophet! Advertise here – minimum three posts per day are guaranteed.
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Dan Neely wrote:
between large cubes with full height walls
I have never seen those so I have no idea.
Minion level cubes here range from 8x8 to 8x10 to 10x10; depending on how long ago they were built, and excepting secretaries and other similar positions the cube walls are either around 5'8" or 6'6". The shorter variety top out at eye level for me; the taller ones are almost impossible for anyone to look over from outside. The intended primary work area is on the outside wall adjacent to the entrance so casual snooping isn't possible.
3x12=36 2x12=24 1x12=12 0x12=18
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
When it's time for some heads-down coding, I like to be able to turn the lights off. I can't stand short- or no-wall cubes because when I see movement in my peripheral, I look up involuntarily.
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The best layout I ever worked in, was a big room with desks, no walls, so people could talk and see each other, and spacious enough to have room for regular Nerf gun wars.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
I never worked in such environment. My environment is made of cubicules, but they are short in height (about one meter high) so I can see everyone, but just their heads and that was already distracting sometimes (specially when there was one girl around). How distracting was your environment?
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
Love this thread! I've had some pretty crummy office environments and one really good one. I'm currently sitting in a ridiculous workspace. We've got cubes about 4 feet wide and 6 feet deep. Running along the left of the cube is a desk about 18" deep, which leaves about 36" for an office chair and me. I can deal with the space. That's not a problem. The problem is noise. It's hard to get your head down, thinking deep into how to solve a complex coding challenge when all of the sudden my ears are pierced with someone scheduling a haircut for their dog, or the cellphone chirping as they receive a text message. Every sneeze or cough can break my concentration. The problem here might be that most of the time you can hear a pin drop. I think if there were more people making more noise, it would almost be easier. The best benchmark I can think of is how far away you can hear a telephone conversation. I don't need to hear a telephone conversation 30 feet away. If someone next to me is on the phone, I can understand that. Not much you can do when we're all sandwiched in here.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
Many of these ideas are in my current space. We rent an old building's second floor, about 1200 sq. ft. for five programmers/systems engineers. Each of us has a private office; however, only three offices have windows to the outside. To me, having outside natural light is extremely important because I really enjoy being outside. (I have spent many days running my laptop off my truck's inverter sitting beside the local river working with my 1m^2 fold-up table full of notebooks and drawings. It's a bit like Mark Twain's octagon work space without the walls.) The biggest drawback to the current space that would make things better is that our conference room is also the kitchen area. We do not have a curtain or bi-fold doors on the kitchen area. Having a more formal meeting space is nice when talking to new customers and making a good impression. Also, think about storage for all those little things like paper products, recycling bins, cleaning supplies, empty packaging, etc. We don't have much storage space here and it does create some inconveniences. If you work at home, you like to be outside, and you have decent views from you property, consider putting up a green house so that you have views on all sides. I haven't tried this, but I imagine that it would allow me to work outside into the winter months and in lousy weather.
Drew -- A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
This is what we have in our company: We have private offices for each person. The offices are large enough so a bed can be put in. That way they can take a good nap any time they want. The offices have good sound insulating walls so they don't hear much noise from outside. The offices are accessible 24 hours a day -- they can come any time they want. Of course the company has a few public areas so people can discuss things about projects or have meetings. A wide open office for a bunch of developers, in the company owner's opinion, is counter-productive.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
From a management perspective, the Starship Enterprise layout. With the manager holding his clock and whip in the center seat and all the workerbee monitors facing him so he can see what anyone is working on at anytime. (Seriously, my former Bitch Supervisor From Hell(tm) would have loved that. If she walked into your cube and didn't recognize what was on your monitor immediately as something work related, you'd better start talking fast.) But practically, I loved my supercube, which had high dividers, desks all the way around with shelving above them. It was twice the size of the regular cube spaces. In fact after I left the company, they ran a divider down the middle and turned it into two cubes. The corporate offices had the half height cube walls and it was like working in a fish bowl. I liked the full height cube walls so I could work undistracted for the most part. Having a large common area (with lots of whiteboards) was great for design meetings.
Psychosis at 10 Film at 11
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
Close offices are the best. Open them onto a central common area. Perhaps include conf rooms in the central area. Conf rooms also need to have doors so they can be closed off to keep discussion noise away from non-participants. In conf room, mount projectors on the ceiling and provide both power and wired network taps at the table itself. Even if you all do wireless, visitors often find wired easier and more reliable. This is our setup and we get constant comments from visitor about how convenient it is. Make sure both are accessible from the top of the table if possible. In common area, provide chairs and tables, but also some open work stations that people can use to remote desktop into the dev box to show off things or colloborate. Provide copious outles and network taps, not just around the walls, but also throughout the room via outlets and network taps in the floors so furniture can be freely moved about to meet people needs without having to resort to cables across walking areas. Perhaps surround the common area with a low wall to provide a visual barrier and place for wall-borne connections. A phone or two in the common area might be convenient too. Perhaps a projector and screen on one wall in the common area?
patbob
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The best layout I ever worked in, was a big room with desks, no walls, so people could talk and see each other, and spacious enough to have room for regular Nerf gun wars.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
DOn't know if it would work for most devs but an open space would not work for me. They put windows in our new 5'6" high cubes (WTF) and we have been comming up with ways to cover them up (whiteboards coat hangers work great). I'm sure they paid a premium for those windows too.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
I really think that the crux is not the office or cubicle, but rather the stuff that is in it. I have always been able to close out the "world" by using "real" headphones (lightweight but full ear cup). They produce an isolation effect, a muffling and a focusing of attention. They also have the advantage of telling people, as a visual cue, that I am not "here" when I have these on; I am in "there", deep-deep down in the guts of the code, SO DON'T BOTHER ME! I want a table top that is spacious and spill-smudge-worry resistant. I prefer to use a dark-fake-wood top kitchen table as my work space (always purchased used and then really cleaned and tightened up...the kind that has the removable inserts if you can find one). Kitchen tables are tough and sturdy and easily cleaned, and my legs can go anywhere they want without constraint. I want good (good for ME) lighting. Individualized lighting is essential. I want a chair that is a sanctuary, a domain. A really great chair is the most important thing. Put it in a corner office or in a cubicle and it is still a great chair, a home away from home. A place where you spend a little more than half of your life should provide excellent support and adjustability. So, save your money that you would waste on walls and partitions and all of that fluff, and give everyone GREAT chairs, excellent noise canceling headphones and some damn-the-torpedoes used kitchen tables.
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I have to think about this one now. Our company purchased a foreclosed building for a bargain and now we have to layout offices and work areas. I already saw Joel's office layout:- http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html[^] Are there any better ideas? Few things I know from my experience:- 1. No cubicles - cubicles in my opinion cause big loss in productivity. 2. Quiet offices so that devs can spend some time alone. 3. An area where multiple devs and testers can work together and collaborate on a single project. What is the best office layout you have worked in? Any ideas/suggestions?
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The best layout I ever worked in, was a big room with desks, no walls, so people could talk and see each other, and spacious enough to have room for regular Nerf gun wars.
Christian Graus Driven to the arms of OSX by Vista. Read my blog to find out how I've worked around bugs in Microsoft tools and frameworks.
No big room for me. I like some pretense of privacy, not being stared at. I've also known people not able to work with distractions - people moving around, etc.. I've had to put up with Felix Unger (Odd Couple character) type nasal problems I could almost filter out, but people a few rows away were complaining about. WTF? They were no where near the noise... Worst environment seems to be little cubes with bad soundproofing with non-programmers doing other work. People who are on the phone all day for their job. I was a contractor programming, stuck in a call center. I'd hear the strange noices made by some of the characters in between calls, and had to filter out the phone calls. Also bad, they sometimes dumped contractors into a conference room; one big long table. Ok, where do I put my desktop, monitor(s), and manuals? Cubes seem to be getting universally smaller. I don't need big, but I need a place to collect manauals, and papers related to working. Maybe a place to put a family photo or two to make it seem less dreary...
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I would hate to work in a totally open-plan office, even cubicle partitions allow far too much noise to percolate. When I really need to concentrate I have to have a silent or near-silent environment, even quiet music is too much of an intrusion. Having an open plan office with people talking to each other and on the phone would dent my productivity a lot.
I work in one of those open offices. Right now it's Noon so the place is partially empty, however I can hear an engineer explaining a concept to a programmer, a PM on a conference call to some idiot that's not catching a clue, a couple of the gals chit-chatting & a Q/A tester on a conference call discussing his test results. Also while I was typing this I saw 3 people walk by, one directly in my line of site and the other two out of the corner of my eye. All this in the space of a couple of minutes. During the working hours it's much worse. Oops, now someone's cell phone is quietly chirping across the room. Makes it very hard to concentrate, also there's the lack of any privacy. Yes, it's nice to see if someone I need to talk to is around, but we have Communicator so I can find out that way, probably even better because it can show if the person can be disturbed. Also we have white noise generators, but all it seems to do is buzz in my ears (maybe it's set up wrong or maybe I'm sensitive to that frequency). Anyway, after 2 years of this, I'm not sold on the advantages.