The Worst Workspaces In Tech

nicholas.m.carlson writes help you feel better about your hovel. Vallywag recently compiled a list of the top ten places to work, but the resulting submissions and exploration also provided them with an interesting look at some of the worst places to work. "What makes them so bad? Some offend with exposed fluorescent lights, gray cubicles and a dystopian corporate sheen. But others, with their pseudo-hip graffiti, kindergarten toys and plastic decorations — all in a desperate attempt to seem 'Internet-y' — come off even worse."

Not so bad.

I think some of these people doing this review are a bit spoiled. They are used to their private cubicals, posh offices, etc.

At least most of the people in these environments have new workstations, a monitor or two and some deskspace.

The don't show the tech business running out of a cockroach infested hotel room with 10 year old computers using dial up to connect to the net.

Re:Not so bad.

I agree. I was looking at the pictures thinking, 'what? these are supposed to be bad?'. Sure cubicles aren't a nice private office, but that's just how most places are. I see a lot of attempts by employees to try and decorate them a bit to make it more friendly/fun. What's wrong with that?

Compared to having just a desk in an open room (like in the one set of pictures), I'd much rather a cubicle to call my own and hangup/decorate as I like.

These are bad workspaces?

Are you kidding me?

I don't think these people have ever seen bad workspaces. Adobe is "unfriendly"? They have lots of light, lots of space, good furniture, palm trees... oh yeah, they have a fsckin' basketball court. Piss poor facilities, obviously.

Of all of the "bad" choices, only facebook's could possibly deserve to be on that list, as it looks like a high school cafeteria with monitors. Otherwise... I'd say the problem is that the tastes of the Valleywag people are ridiculous.

Re:These are bad workspaces?

>oh yeah, they have a fsckin' basketball court.

So does the San Jose County Jail.

Re:The worst workspace?

Yeah, but at least it doesn't Rot the Mind. [charlespetzold.com]

D[h]ell

In 2006 when I started at Dell we had one 15" tube monitor.

We did not have cubes, we had this abomination called a pod.

The pod walls are 18 inches higher than the surface of your desk.

The person sitting across from you can be heard just as
clearly on your phone as you can.

Dell would not pay for noise canceling headsets.

Dell uses a Compaq ie. HP mainframe to run their ticket system.

Now that is some damn irony.

It took me multiple weeks of begging to receive my very own
company purchased pen and notepad.

They monitor to "the second" how long you go to bathroom and
it is part of your evaluations.

Emails to customers are expected to be done between calls,
or while waiting for reboots, or when there are no calls.

You have to get permission to work overtime to get aforementioned
emails done outside your 8 hr shift.

Yet...they constant ask you to work overtime to take more calls.

On overnight shift they ask you take "platinum calls" ie. MCSE
required when you don't have even an MCSA.

To be honest that is a contract violation.

This is not for Desktop or Workstation Support, this is for
Server Support.

So for me D[h]ell will always be #1 worst place to work period.

Re:D[h]ell

When I worked Bresnan Communications they did just that to a woman I worked with and came up with a new policy that all bathroom usage must be done on breaks and we would be monitored to be sure we were not taking time outside of them for breaks. I refused to sign the policy. They kept bringing it to me. They told me I'd be fired if I didn't sign it. I asked why they needed me to sign it as I would be held to it as a condition of my employment. They simply told me have it signed by the end of the day and then came back and had a supervisor stand over me while I signed it. I signed it and put "signed under duress" below my signature.

I worked to try and organize with the Communications Workers of America. That idea fell through when someone was told that I didn't trust at all. I finally ended up giving the company the finger and moved a good portion of the way across the country. After leaving they found a copy of the source code of some SNMP network management software I had written. I wrote it on my own time to assist the staff as they wouldn't pay Motorola and Arris for the tools we needed to do our job. They changed the graphics to their logos and renamed it Bresnan something or other. After hitting the coast I ended up finding a job working as a systems analyst for a labor union [other than CWA] and am part of a staff union that is represented by CWA. Being union represented isn't perfect. But it really beats having to deal with things like the BS that went on at Bresnan Communications.

Re:Not so bad.

That picture of "Microsoft" is a demo lab at a conference. The article actually has 0 pictures of a typical work-space from that company. Makes me wonder how accurate their other ones are...

Aperture Science

Aperture Science. Despite the nice, clean looking test chambers, the rest of the facility is quite a dump.

There's also an AI who flooded the place with a deadly neurotoxin...

Interesting.

The List: -Yahoo
-Mozilla
-Mahalo
-Google
-Microsoft
-LinkedIn
-Jajah
-Facebook
-DoubleClick
-Adobe

I find it funny how they say Google is one of the worst places to work, yet everyone seems to want to work there.

Where is Slashdot?

We're number one! We're number one!

Oh wait, wrong list.

Re:Where is Slashdot?

Here [cmdrtaco.net]

Office Snapshot -- A photograph collection...

Neatorama [neatorama.com] shares Office Snapshots [officesnapshots.com] Web site that has a collection of interior office photographs of various popular/well known companies. It is generally from Web/Tech companies.

does it really matter?

As a college dropout (A's in CS, fsck philosophy), it was tough getting my foot in the door. One mistake I made along the way was letting a risk-taker scare me off with stories of sometimes having to work in boiler room type surroundings.

If it's good work, the atmosphere becomes almost invisible. Some of the best companies in history started in a garage and some of the worst started atop skyscrapers.

Re:does it really matter?

As a college dropout (A's in CS, fsck philosophy)

Ah yes, the telltale sign of a well rounded person.

Re:does it really matter?

Most of the CS people I know are 'well-rounded.'

Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies

I noticed some of the pictures seem very very random.

From the comments:

I have worked at Microsoft in Redmond for the last 7 years. Of the Microsoft photos, only one of them looks like an actual Microsoft workspace in Redmond; the one in which there are several people crowded around what looks like a coffee table. And even that one is not a typical office or conference room. It looks like a makeshift conference room. At least two of the photos are of the Orlando, FL convention center where Microsoft has an annual event. In reality none of the photos are typical of Redmond, where most employees have single-occupancy private offices.

Re:Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies

I was an intern at Microsoft back in the last millenia and had my own private office half the summer, with a door and a 24" monitor. The other half of the summer I shared that office with another employee.

I've been to the Redmond campus a half dozen times since then, and the place is still one of the most appealing work environments I've ever seen.

Re:Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies

I have to agree, I've worked at Microsoft twice as a temp programmer. The first time I had a private office, the next I shared an office. Bad place to work? Hardly. And what's really hilarious is those photos are of the Washington State Convention Center, not of the Microsoft campus. BTW, the convention center is really nice too. To hold *conventions* in, that is.

And I can't believe Google was listed because of a "kindergarden" design motif. Holy crap, who gives a flying f***? Smells like a quick throw-together article, with listings designed to draw ire (and thus page hits).

Sorry, when you can't even get basic facts correct, I can't believe much else you say or show either.

Re:Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies

Agreed. The one picture with the rows and rows of computers appears to be the Hands-on lab at TechEd.

I'm not impressed with either of these articles. My preferred environment is someplace clean and uncluttered. Yet valleywag called the offices with gimmicks the best, and the nice clean offices the worst?

I wish I had a picture of the "office" I and six other consultants were put in years ago. It was the former mainframe tape storage closet. No windows. Six feet wide, with a table along the wall. When the guy at the end wanted to go to the bathroom, everybody had to get up and let him through.

Is that the worst they could come up with?

Grey cubicles at Google, seriously?

I had a boss who worked for a company that referred to the owner of the company as "Lord Vader" because she was utterly insane. It had a turnover rate that was prettymuch total on a yearly basis.

I had to work once a week for a while in a warehouse in a metal chair with no one else around and an ancient piece of computer technology.

There is at least one game company that seems to have a vested interest in driving its employees into the ground and treating them like children.

I know another place that had computer technology that was so out of date it could barely run the software we were developing.

I am not sure if any of these constitute the "worst" places to work, or even how they rate to the companies listed in the article, but surely there are worse things out there than the horror of grey cubicles.

What no Amazon?

When I worked there they found that if they shrunk our cubes by a couple of feet they could get X more programmers in the building.

Nothing like having your restricted little world reduced by two feet. I even had to give up my red stapler.

These people are SO out of touch

These are the worst workplaces? Maybe in California. I've worked in much worse. My current employer (whose CEO is among the top ten best-compensated in the US) has me working in a building in which every time it rains, the roof runs. (Not leaks, the water runs down in streams.) They keep trying to find bigger buckets.

We do have our own cubicles--made of what appears to be moldy cardboard—and they match the carpet exactly. We have nothing like a kitchenette or breakroom. If you want coffee, you have to go get water in the restrooms. Of course, the sinks are always overflowing because some stupid jerk empties the remainder of his breakfast mush, ramen, smelly fish stew, or whatever into them every day.

The lighting is typical 1950s era: harsh overhead fluorescents that would quickly blind you if you tried to work with a monitor under them. So we ask to have them turned off. They are glad to do this, because it saves on electricity bills. The drawback is that this leaves our environment utterly troglodytic ; the advantage is that we can't see our environment).

It could be worse, of course—I could have been working in the building that sank. No, it didn't sink completely—it's just sort of The Leaning Tower of Dallas. (Actually, it's in Irving, but who's heard of Irving?) The good thing is that they managed to get most of the people out (a triumph of organizational genius, considering that the sinking occurred in a mere decade), the bad news is they moved them in with us. Our warren of cubical cells is now so overcrowded that collision is a serious factor in deciding whether or not to go to the bathroom to make coffee.

Oh - puhleeez - I've worked in MUCH worse places

For a summer I worked at Johns Manville in New Jersey. Yeah - the place that was sued into bankruptcy by its own workforce for being such a toxic shithole.

I worked in building D. D for DEATH. I had to unload a van filled with paper from banks. I'd get the truck weighed at the front gate, net to the sign that said "PHOTOGRAPHY IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN". Geee. I wonder why...

Once it was weighed, I'd drive it to building D, and back it up the ramp into the building itself. The building consisted of several ENORMOUS rooms, each one at least 50 ft wide and 30 ft tall. In the room I ws in was an enormous machine that looked like a cross between a cauldron designed by Rube Goldberg and a funnel designed by NASA. On the side of this thing was a hopper. I would dump paper out the back of the truck into the 6 inches of standing filthy water that filled the floor of the place. Often I could see the V shaped ripples of rats swimming through the smelly brown miasmic watery goo.

Against one wall was a stack of paper that went all the way to the roof, which had gaping holes in it. It was summer, and there was no air conditioning, and wearing a mask was very uncomfortable. But wear one I did, for as I looked down the hallway to the other end of building D, the air was thick with the blue haze of asbestos.

I would stand on the paper bales, and toss more paper into the hopper. Once it was full I'd signal the guy who operated it, Mike, and he would press a red button, and I would press a red button, and the hopper would lurch up the side of the vat, and dump the contents into the steaming smelling chemical bath of crap.

Out of the bottom of the vat was a pipe about 14 inches wide. A steady stream of really foul smelling waxy black ooze would slowly extrude from the pipe. Mike would hack at it with a Machete and it would plop into his wheel barrow. H would then wheel it down the hall to a drop point, where there was a 55 gal drum, and he would dump the stinking vile glop into the drum. Once the drum was full of the black gelatinous offal, he would cap it, crimp it, and seal it, where it would then be "take somewhere", likely some landfill near Newark or Edison or Sayreville.

Some of the people who worked there were practically feral. I remember one fat black guy who drove this miniature bulldozer around at a high rate of speed, splashing the filthy stanky water all over the place. He didn't care wher eit went.

My guess is that all those people who worked on site all day in building D are now dead. And that's industrial capitalism for ya. OF course, now we ship that kind of work to China or Indonesia, so we can't see it, so it's OK....

That was the worst place I ever worked.

RS

Yahoo New York?

The hot chick on the phone automatically eliminates it from the list.