It's official... | The Coffeehouse

HumanCompiler
Compiling humans...and code

dahat wrote:

HumanCompiler wrote: Congrats and come say hi to the C9 team sometime. Great team you're joining.

What building are you folks in? I might just have to stop by in 2 weeks when I'm in town again looking for a place to live.

Building 18

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

PaoloM wrote:

CompGuy101 wrote:Are you going to work in a cubical?

If so, take before and after shots so we can see your geek-office-goodness.

Cubicles are very rare around here. Pretty much everyone has an office.

And you can have it painted as you like

Black, with cure posters and a UV light?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

PaoloM wrote:

CompGuy101 wrote:Are you going to work in a cubical?

If so, take before and after shots so we can see your geek-office-goodness.

Cubicles are very rare around here. Pretty much everyone has an office.

And you can have it painted as you like

Since painting your own office isn't deductable as "working time" I guess you'd have to do it on a saturday... by yourself, and put up with the smell of VOCs for the next few months on account of typical MS offices not having much ventilation.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

W3bbo wrote:

PaoloM wrote:
CompGuy101 wrote:Are you going to work in a cubical?

If so, take before and after shots so we can see your geek-office-goodness.

Cubicles are very rare around here. Pretty much everyone has an office.

And you can have it painted as you like

Since painting your own office isn't deductable as "working time" I guess you'd have to do it on a saturday

READ MOAR

LaBomba
Summer

Your own office eh...wowwwwwwwzer!

How about Google, do they have cubicles or offices as well?

zian
Exploding heads since 1988

LaBomba wrote:
Your own office eh...wowwwwwwwzer!

How about Google, do they have cubicles or offices as well?

Don't some people have to share offices though? I think I saw some past C9 footage showing people working 2 to an office.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

zian wrote:

LaBomba wrote: Your own office eh...wowwwwwwwzer!

How about Google, do they have cubicles or offices as well?

Don't some people have to share offices though? I think I saw some past C9 footage showing people working 2 to an office.

It's usually only a temporary solution, or if two people need to work together for some reason.

blowdart
Peek-a-boo

BTW dahat when can we give you bug reports? I found an amusing one this week Big Smile

evildictaitor
if( !succeed( try() ) ) { while(true) try(); }

CompGuy101 wrote:
LaBomba, the vast majority of Google-rs have cubicals. I saw it in a "Tour of Google".

Not everyone in Google is cubicled, but most of 'em are. Nice cubicles tho.

HumanCompiler
Compiling humans...and code

PaoloM wrote:
It's usually only a temporary solution, or if two people need to work together for some reason.

Not true (at least on our end of campus). Microsoft has been buying and building more space and over the next year or two things will loosen up a bit, but there are still a lot of peope doubled up in offices because we're short on space. When I started at Microsoft I had my own office. Then Rory joined our team and I was low man on the totum pole and he became my roommate. Since he left I've had my own office again, but I've been told that the next person we hire for our team will end up as my roommate because there's not enough space. Sad

What's interesting though, is that while I love having my own office (Rory was great, we got along well, but just having another body in the same room as you can be distracting sometimes) our team has started experimenting with renting out a conference room for 3 days out of the week and just hammering out a feature together. Since our team is small it's worked out really well so far. This is interesting because for us, it seems like it would be better to have some shared space and maybe only 1 or 2 offices for those who need some time to work alone and do the rest of our work together. A few offices across campus have been experimenting with setups like that.

PaoloM
Hypermediocrity

HumanCompiler wrote:

PaoloM wrote: It's usually only a temporary solution, or if two people need to work together for some reason.

Not true (at least on our end of campus). Microsoft has been buying and building more space and over the next year or two things will loosen up a bit, but there are still a lot of peope doubled up in offices because we're short on space. When I started at Microsoft I had my own office. Then Rory joined our team and I was low man on the totum pole and he became my roommate. Since he left I've had my own office again, but I've been told that the next person we hire for our team will end up as my roommate because there's not enough space.

Yeah, it happened to me in 9, before we moved to North Campus. But it's temporary, the preferred solution is to have your own office.

However...

HumanCompiler wrote:
What's interesting though, is that while I love having my own office (Rory was great, we got along well, but just having another body in the same room as you can be distracting sometimes) our team has started experimenting with renting out a conference room for 3 days out of the week and just hammering out a feature together. Since our team is small it's worked out really well so far. This is interesting because for us, it seems like it would be better to have some shared space and maybe only 1 or 2 offices for those who need some time to work alone and do the rest of our work together. A few offices across campus have been experimenting with setups like that.

Small teams on focused projects are helped a lot by these kind of environments. In RedWest A, while working on a really cool project that didn't ship Sad

, we had "The Cave", where a bunch of devs were accomodated close together into a single big room, desks strewn gracefully along curved paths and low dividers so you could just stand up and see almost everyone else's head.

We used a wall with a projector for SCRUM, triage and Xbox timeouts, it worked really well (except for the lack of natural light, hence the nickname) but you need to have the right people to do it, it's not for everybody.