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620

answers:

8

Not really looking for description of bosses, but the actual physical surrounding, e.g. desks, chairs, whiteboards, reference libraries, group coffee, etc. Just interested in how many programmers actually work in idealistic conditions and what serious software developers have in their work environment in order to improve their productivity.

I know that physical surroundings are not everything, but curious about how good and bad some folks have it.

I know some folks who work in a lab that is so cold sometimes that they have to wear gloves to type and others so hot that they had to install a window unit. In other ares of our building the AC unit runs loud all day. We have all grown accustom to it and it is no longer distracting. Our chairs are pretty decent mesh design and we all have two monitors that are about 27". We all have earphones, so we don't have to worry about distracting 80s tunes. I'm working on getting a whiteboard, but other co-workers have one that we use for sketching out designs and concepts.

Just curious about other folks out there.

+1  A: 

2 monitors - Apple iMac - Bottle of water - No shoes

alex
A: 

I work at HP Brazil. We have a fairly good work environment there, better than most other environments I've seen in nearby IT companies. The desks are pretty big (L shape), good workstations, two 20'' lcd monitors, comfort chair but a tough drawback especially for me that sweat more that the average people: the air conditioning is very defective and I frequently feel very unconfortable at work due to the high temperature inside the office. So, I bought a portable fan that I leave over my desk almost always turned on and pointing to my face, so that helps with the warmth.

Other than that, I have a very disorganized desk with random old paper work and things left around me.

Felipe Lima
+1  A: 

I'm in a room with three other guys. We each have a desk in one of the four corners of the room. These are L-shaped desks, pretty big with plenty of room. I've got a four-monitor setup with room a fair bit of room left for old papers, various bits of food, pictures, a Patrick Starfish doll (actually two Patrick dolls, who frequently end up doing naughty things to each other, sigh...).

We've got it really nice just cause the guys I'm with scoped out the room when our company moved into our current building, so they picked a big room and used their clout to under-staff it. We've filled up the unused space with a credenza, a small tree, a bookcase, a guitar+amp, and best of all, a projector/screen setup + XBox/PS3/Wii above a small leather couch. It's just for after hours, but still... sometimes my boss will even stay a play a few minutes.

Most of the people we work with have cubicles. I'm happy with our shared office because we can talk all the time, which is a really, really good thing when we're working on the same code. The lower barrier to conversation is a huge plus and it's really noticeable compared to having to walk over to my other coworkers' desks to talk to them.

Our office has ended up as sort of a social hub, too. People tend to come to our office to chat with us so we don't have to get up as much.

Our company in general is generous with the personal space and equipment/furniture. Anybody can have multiple computers and monitors. Everybody's got a basic leather office chair. There are several public bookshelves in the hallways throughout the building, though admittedly there's more "Learn HTML4 in 24 hours" and "Mastering Motif" junk than there are "Code Complete"s. Everybody's got a whiteboard at their desk.

We've got a nice breakroom that's stocked with lots of snacks, soda, and coffee, plus oddities like tuna and a big jar of oatmeal. Everything costs 50 cents, not free.

The office environment is pretty plain. The walls are just plain paint, no decorations or anything.

All in all I really like where I work. We're not a cutting edge tech startup or anything. We're a government defense contractor with most of our money coming from the Navy and Army. Everyone's very relaxed and we get anything we ask for, so it's really a great place all in all.

John Kugelman
+1  A: 

At the office (Googleplex in Mountain View): currently a very "open" cubicle shared with another pretty senior developer, two large desks of which one is mostly taken up by two large monitors and with my workstation under it and keyboard and mouse also on it, the other one used miscellaneously but often for various laptops; my chair an Aeron, also in the cubicle the other guy's Aeron, a plush comfy chair, and a couple of sit-on balls; several whiteboards (one of which is almost entirely taken up with photos of my cubicle-mate's young daughter), shelves (some creaking with books, mostly but not entirely technical). Coffee (and everything else: fruit, munchies, cold drinks, etc, etc) is at the microkitchen, a short but non-null walk away.

At the same office I recently sat in shared offices (3 or 4 people, a mix of junior and senior engineers, PMs, and managers), a bit less generous in desk and shelf space (but with nice views from the wall-to-wall windows in many cases... until the sun shines in and one has to draw curtains). The senior VP I reported to until recently had the same kind of shared office, shared with just one other senior VP (who also happens to be a Google Fellow, only one to hold both "top-dog" titles ever in Google's history) and typically one other Director or super-senior engineer, so they also had space in that office for a comfy couch. The arrangement was otherwise quite similar in both cases. There are people who prefer to dispense with a workstation in favor of more laptops (not many) typically still with abundant large monitors (or sometimes a single 30" one) for occasional connection.

At Google we don't really believe in individual offices, with rare exceptions -- a huge gulf wrt the Microsoft/Peopleware/Spolski school of thought, which reveres such individual offices.

At home (where I do lots of my work) it's laptops all the way -- 15" or 13" screen more often than not (the 17" ones are just too bulky) -- I own several large screens I could place on the small table in front of my couch, but it's just too much of a bother, and the laptops with Apple Spaces or Linux workspaces are just fine. At home, I sprawl on a couch, often in jammies or the like, and have coffee or other drink at hand, as well as a spacious ashtray (yep I'm a smoker -- so at work I have to take breaks to indulge my vice, while at home I can just indulge in SW development and light up as the addiction[s] require;-).

Despite the lack of interruptions at home (except for cats jumping up and demanding to get petted -- wife and teenage stepson are just as geekish as me, and wouldn't dream to interrupt somebody out of the zone!-), I'm quite happy with the arrangement at work too -- most of the people I occasionally but urgently need to check something with, I can just walk up to and "grab"; and sometimes, when I'm tempted to try some innovative and risky new twist in design or architecture, I can grab a random passerby and get a serious face to face debate about it... no videoconference, chat or email exchange can compare with THAT productivity.

Standard convention at work is that when we crave some uninterrupted time we grab a laptop and head up to "elsewhere" (in my case, often the vast outside spaces where I can smoke too... good thing California's weather makes that practical most of the year!-) -- by unspoken convention you don't interrupt people hacking away on their laptop in an outside space, microkitchen, cafe, or empty conference room, except for dire emergencies. What can I say, it works!-)

Alex Martelli
A: 

2 monitors - no apple yet!!!, big desk, glass window wall behind me with 180 degree view, no shoes, casual dress, company food

used to have one monitor, pool table, tennis table, xbox, wii, tv, once a week soccer game or squash, cheap cinema tics, flexible hours, bbq on fridays (before pub) but have downgraded that for bigger salary ... :(

stefanB
A: 

I'm in a decent-sized office with 2 other people. We all have L-shaped desks, which are ok, but most of our chairs are pretty awful. Most of the computers in my building are way out of date (P4s with no more than 512MB RAM), but thanks to a few newer machines coming in, and having some friends in hardware, I've been able to get my hands on a dual-core with 3GB of RAM. The part that interests me is that most of these dated machines have one or two 20 or 22" LCDs. Our office has 6 LCDs mounted on the wall with our various monitoring tools, and we recently got a 52" TV on which we're running a newer, comprehensive monitoring tool.

The only complaint I have (aside from people) is that our room is way too hot, all the time. I brought a thermometer in from facilities, and it was up to 83 degrees in there, even after my teammates had left, and I was the only one in there.

Lazy Bob
A: 

All technical staff have 8x8 cubicle with C shaped desk and two filing cabinets. I have a window cubicle, which about 20% of staff has. Two 19in monitors for a HP Laptop is common. Printer within 50 feet. Free coffee, pay for soda and snacks. Building is less that 10 years old and has some HVAC problems. Parts of building are cold, others hot. One skylight leaks. Management fairly responsive on getting problems fixed.

Prof
+1  A: 

24 inch monitor, HP PC, sales lady talking non-stop on the phone. Weird guy in men's restroom...

Rick J
Made me laugh, thanks.
Pat