The Worst Workspaces In Tech 209
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Low or little walls encourage collaboration...
No, they don't.
Quit reading those trendy Agile books.
Low or little walls encourage noise and distractions, especially when you're doing complicated and intensely-focused work.
One would think companies would be a little smarter, but then they're mostly run by dime-a-dozen recent MBA night school grads with little technical experience and who parrot that Jack Welch BS and whose only non-original idea is to outsource everything to India in order to get a bigger bonus check and then move on to another c
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Walls are not that expensive to build and power outlets are not that difficult to install, unless you have a bunch of union Facilities guys at your company who work maybe 15 minutes a day and control everybody's aesthetics.
It's not that walls are expensive to build. Have you ever priced cubicles? They're not cheap. What they give you is flexibility in redesigning the space at a later date.
If you're leasing the space you may not be able to build it out. If you're the one leasing the space you may not want to have it built out in a way that makes it difficult for you to rent if the current tennant leaves.
Re:Not so bad. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Previous t
Re:Not so bad. (Score:4, Interesting)
These are bad workspaces? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
So does the San Jose County Jail.
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Re:Not so bad. (Score:5, Interesting)
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and not even *in* Redmond (Score:2, Informative)
Also, http://valleywag.com/photogallery/Microsoftheadquarters/1001409798 [valleywag.com] is the Washington State Convention Center, in Seattle not Redmond.
At least http://valleywag.com/photogallery/Microsoftheadquarters/1001409785 [valleywag.com] is actually on campus (Building 33 if memory serves, which I bet it doesn't) and more than a few people do work on laptops out in the open like that (since main campus is pretty crowded and you're lucky to get a solo office without 3 or so years of seniority).
This is the most accurate look at
Re:The worst workspace? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let them get comfortable with some COM programming, say, ADODB to query something, and then laying out data on an Excel sheet.
Then see if they can accomplish the same task using ActiveState's Python implementation in a reasonable amount of time.
Then, for sheer sadism, force them to SSH into a Unix box and accomplish a similar task using vi and Perl
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But information too has become an addiction. I don't know what it's like at your house, but we can't even watch a simple rerun of Friends without one of us saying "Who's that actress playing Joey's girlfriend?
This has always been the case. The only thing new (since I got NetScape 1.1 at 19) is that I can actually get an answer, rather than just being frustrated.
Was the cell phone wasn't invented to fill a particular need?... Onc
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Strong disagreement.
Stroustrup is one "head" who spends a lot of time discussing "where to put stuff", and his ideas are rather generally applicable.
The core language is best kept small and simple, so that it is fast and tractable for the n00b.
Swell stuff like code generation is better shunted into a library, so that you
aren't paying for stuff you don't use (scalability),
aren't
D[h]ell (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd like to see what happens the first time they try that on somebody with either kidney or bladder problems.
Re:D[h]ell (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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That's probably illegal as hell.
As far as the program goes, can you prove that the source code is yours? If so, you can probably hit them hard for copyright infringement (somewhere to the tune of $120,000 per infringing copy in use)
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Hires multiple development teams, in offices in different parts of the world.
Assigns the same project to the various teams. Teams do not know about each other.
One team shows a likelihood of success, the rest of the projects are cancelled,
employees are terminated.
It's happened to more than one colleague of mine, one of whom was forced to participate
in this at the corporate management level.
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Vista = Fistya for those who didn't get the misnomer.
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Aperture Science (Score:5, Funny)
There's also an AI who flooded the place with a deadly neurotoxin...
Re:Aperture Science (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Aperture Science (Score:4, Funny)
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Interesting. (Score:5, Insightful)
-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.
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Okay, I'll give a pass to the second half: "utterly boring" is an opinion... but how is utilitarian a valid criticism of a work area? Do they know what the word actually means? Would anyone really be happy working somewhere that wasn't utilitarian? How would you get any work done?
Where is the TPS report driven office with a lot.. (Score:2)
Where is Slashdot? (Score:4, Funny)
Oh wait, wrong list.
Re:Where is Slashdot? (Score:5, Informative)
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Office Snapshot -- A photograph collection... (Score:5, Informative)
does it really matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Ah yes, the telltale sign of a well rounded person.
Re:does it really matter? (Score:5, Funny)
Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies (Score:5, Informative)
From the comments:
Re:Irrelevant Pictures and Inaccuracies (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Closely packed (Score:2)
Is that the worst they could come up with? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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At least they had free water. Coffee was 50c and a 5 minute walk though.
Bad Slideshows (Score:2)
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Sorry, er, um, I'm new here, and forgot where I was posting!
Best = Worst (Score:4, Insightful)
What no Amazon? (Score:5, Interesting)
Nothing like having your restricted little world reduced by two feet. I even had to give up my red stapler.
Re:What no Amazon? (Score:4, Interesting)
Several maintenance men were paid full time to keep this stupidity going.
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Ultimately, corporations reduce us all to idiots.
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How big was their office?
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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.
I had a client that did that.
They got in trouble with the local building codes because they could not do the same to the parking spaces and the local codes required them to maintain a certain proportion between desks (actually regular employees) in the building and parking spaces adjacent to the building.
I think they finally bribed the right people and got a waiver.
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Huh? (Score:2)
These people are SO out of touch (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Because there are factors to consider other than my physical environment—such as the need to keep a paycheck coming in, and the difficulty of getting any other job at age 60. My immediate goal is to make it through July, which will be my 5 year anniversary, thus making me vested in their retirement fund. That means I get to take the accumulated pittance with me when they lay me off (I'm sure I'm marked for execution at the next possible oppor
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Oh - puhleeez - I've worked in MUCH worse places (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:Oh - puhleeez - I've worked in MUCH worse place (Score:2)
I'm sorry, sir, but your entry is disqualified. The heading clearly says "Worst workplaces in tech". What you describe—though it involves fearful mechanical devices, noxious chemicals, unspeakable offal, reckless driving, and odious vermin—is not "tech" according to the conventional notion applied here on SlashDot. How many computers did your "workplace" have, eh?
Now, if I had known that non or low-tech workplaces were eligible, I might have trotted out some of my more lurid mini-careers (such
Re:Oh - puhleeez - I've worked in MUCH worse place (Score:2)
The worst places... (Score:2)
Some open plan offices have sound dampening systems; loudspeakers that play white noise at a low level. You couldn't hear them, but you couldn't hear the person three desks away either.
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Some open plan offices have sound dampening systems; loudspeakers that play white noise at a low level. You couldn't hear them, but you couldn't hear the person three desks away either.
I once stayed in a Howard Johnson's Motor Lodge in Pittsburg that had piped-in noise. At each corridor intersection or bend, there was a speaker. But it wasn't white noise. It was machinery noise - a faint background of whirr, chunka chunka, hiss, whirr, clank. At first I thought someone had just left a microphone ope
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Our cubicles do a reasonable job of dampening noise.
"Consider yourself lucky, if you have partition walls you can decorate, natural sunlight, a window you can open/close, a quiet room shared with maybe one or two other people. Having a cafeteria with a choice of ethnic meals is also a bonus."
Yes partition walls
Utilitarian is bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
If you don't like a gray cube wall, put something on it! And why are desks and privacy walls the enemy?
Maybe if you're in sales, you'll like the open architectures and bright colors, but all I want is to have the equipment I need to do my job properly.
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Wierd Silicon Valley workspaces (Score:4, Informative)
Intel is famous for their workspaces. They pioneered cubicles in the early 1970s. They have some of the world's biggest single-room cube farms. They actually built new buildings, from the ground up, with 1-acre rooms of tiny grey cubicles. Vast amounts of money were spent to create this Dilbertland. The cubicles are so tiny that two people cannot physically sit in one and talk; one has to sit out on the aisle and block traffic. They look like library carrels. This isn't a call center; it's where their engineers work.
Klutz Press has a "fun workspace" - the partitions are made out of corrugated sheet metal. The building (a warehouse) is made of corrugated sheet metal. Lots of toys in the reception area.
Softimage LA went through a period where everything, including partitions, was curved and on wheels. You could fold up the cubicle of someone who was out and push it to the side.
Sony Pictures Imageworks, an animation shop, is a typical cube farm surrounded by offices. Except for the art department, which has a big open space with drawing boards.
Silicon Valley law firms tend to have rocks. Big rocks. Polished stone surfaces. Rock gardens. And, for some reason, glass-enclosed conference rooms. Traditional law firms used to go in heavily for wood paneling, but the "high tech" law firms wanted a more modern look. The overall effect is upscale mall, but whatever.
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http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070506/conan-intel-video/ [istartedsomething.com]
Although, looking back, there were pieces that were really sad, such as pillars on the wall in the middle of a huge cubicle farm that made me think of parking garages.
agressiv
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That's really what Intel looks like. And those are the better cubicles. Some sections have smaller ones.
bullpen is the new office (Score:2)
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Could be worse (Score:2)
WTF? No pictures? (Score:2)
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What can I say? (Score:2)
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Really ? (Score:3, Insightful)
The workplace/cube is certainly one of the ways to measure the top-ness (sic) of a workplace but just that ? Come on people, we all know that there are a lot of things which into making a great workplace. The dimensions and colour of your cubicle is probably just one of them.
Yahoo New York? (Score:5, Funny)
Only Mentioning Big Places (Score:2)
Articel is Total Crap (Score:2)
I have no reason to believe any of the other pictures are accurate either.
It looks like this journalist was either too lazy or underfunded to actually do real research, and too immoral to admit it.
Looking at ValleyWag is clearly not worth the time of day.
Re:*Article*is Total Crap (Score:2)
kindergarten (Score:2)
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You should have joined in by making hand turkeys with only a middle 'feather'.
You are never too old for arts and crafts!
Any government office (Score:2)
You can add almost any government office to that list. The ones I've worked in range from bland and sterile to hideous. The good ones are merely sterile. Endless gray cubicles and rarely anything resembling an amenity.
Actually, the best office on a military project was when we were stuck in a warehouse while the Navy remodeled the regular cubicle (which they call 'pookas') hell. We could push our desks around and arrange them the way we wanted. There was a bbq outside the back door and we could have
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-b
I smell a rat here... (Score:3, Informative)
This [valleywag.com] photo is actually the loby of the Washington State Convention & Trade Center [wsctc.com]. Most of the other "Microsoft headquaters" photos look to be taken there as well.
Two candidates (Score:2)
In the mid-nineties, I worked for a now-swallowed Baby Bell in the midwest, in what was going to be their entry in the long-distance sweepstakes. Upper management's lack of planning, and an "architecture" team that gave Promulgations to all the other teams, resulted in most of us doing regular days of 9-9.5 hours, and a heavy dose of 10, 12, and occasional 16 hour days. (One young consultant once put in, and I am neither making this up nor exaggerating), 119 hours one week. He was
Why did we read these? (Score:2)
This [valleywag.com] and this [valleywag.com] are considered 'the best'.
This [valleywag.com] and this [valleywag.com] are considered the worst.
There's not a whole lot different between the open table, no privacy of Mahalo/Gawker and the cubicles from Yahoo/Six Apart. Yet one set is at the bottom and one at the top. Right. And the attempt at knocking Microsoft is low, even for
Trying too hard... (Score:2)
I mean I agree with it and all, but surely you could have said the exact same thing about half the stuff that ended up on their Top Ten Best list too...
I have the worst work space (Score:2)
Out of my office window, I can see my dock, my boats, Puget Sound and the San Juans.
Whenever its nice out, I always come down with a case of eye trouble. I just can't see working on such a beautiful day.
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Really? What were the grounds for the suit? Has the company appealed the judgment or did management decide that it cost more to appeal than to do the remodeling?