March 16, 2008
Found this last night, as well: Office Snapshots. I’m amused that the places that have that very early startup feel (Craigslist, Virb and Threadless, for example) are the places where I’d feel most comfortable. Not that either are necessarily small financially, but both have that “no suits here” vibe to them.
I dig the private offices at Freshview once their dev team became larger — so long as they were designed to accommodate pair programming.
When did Tumblr get all huge and corporate like? Those pics are nothing like what I’d imagined.
Update: Just found a timely quote from Paul Graham on the Federated Media blog:
…The average office is a miserable place to get work done. And a lot of what makes offices bad are the very qualities we associate with professionalism. The sterility of offices is supposed to suggest efficiency. But suggesting efficiency is a different thing from actually being efficient.
…Things are different in a startup. Often as not a startup begins in an apartment. Instead of matching beige cubicles they have an assortment of furniture they bought used. They work odd hours, wearing the most casual of clothing. They look at whatever they want online without worrying whether it’s “work safe.” The cheery, bland language of the office is replaced by wicked humor. And you know what? The company at this stage is probably the most productive it’s ever going to be.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose.
To me the most demoralizing aspect of the traditional office is that you’re supposed to be there at certain times. There are usually a few people in a company who really have to, but the reason most employees work fixed hours is that the company can’t measure their productivity.