About : standard office furniture sizes
Title : standard office furniture sizes
standard office furniture sizes
[energetic electronic music] joel: as the ceo of the company, my number one job is to assemble the talented team that's gonna be able to create the great software that changes the world. and to assemble that team, we need to make the world's best working conditions for programmers. we were really running out of space in the old office. the space had been built for a total of 18 people.
i think at some point, we had like 24 there. so we had, you know, three people in an office kind of intended for one. so we started looking for a new space. in about, in a matter of a few weeks, we found a couple of really good possibilities and when we showed them to our architect, one of them worked out a lot better. it just had a lot more room for private offices,
which is always a priority. female voice: the building itself is a pretty typical corporate building. people mostly buy small law firms, accounting firms and brokerage houses. i mean, there aren't a lot of hip software developers in this building. but joel immediately walked into this space and saw the potential for it in spite of the fact that it looked pretty horrible when we first saw it.
this is what they call building standard installation. this is what they would have built for us if we hadn't really been involved. kind of ugly drop ceilings, a lot of big fluorescent lights. everything is kind of closed and constrained. and they actually consider this to be a high standard of building quality. but to me, it looks like the nbc television series, "the office".
when the building does a normal construction, look how low the ceilings are. they come right to the top of the windows and sometimes even a little bit below there, and it gives you this feeling of oppressiveness, with the institutional fluorescent ceiling, the drop ceilings, the big ugly square whatever that thing is, ventilation devices. and the whole thing just feels institutional,
corporate, boring. i don't know if i could get 20-somethings to want to work in a space like this very much. just a depressing, depressing place to work. that guy must have liked to kick his-- kick the back of his desk all day long. for kids today, the thought of working in a cubicle is almost the epitome of the evil corporate workspace. and the pop--you might want to personalize it a little bit
by putting some ducks on your monitor. but other than that, it's just an evil, evil kind of veal fattening pen to work in. and we couldn't have that. i've noticed that if you just leave it to the landlords to design a space for you, or to the average work-a-day new york city architect, what you're gonna get is a cubicle farm. you're gonna get something just sort of soulless
with low drop ceilings with lots of fluorescent lights, and something that is neither not cool, not fun, just not entertaining, and the people will tolerate working in, but they certainly won't enjoy working in. and if you pay a little bit of attention to interior design, to architecture, and to how the office is laid out, and to what kind of physical office that you make, you're actually gonna make a space
that looks really cool, that makes people kind of excited to want to work in a place. joel came to us and decided, this is what we want to portray, down to the little pieces. he knew where to find the faucet he wanted. he knew where to find the chiller he wanted. the refrigerators, we worked with him on. he was willing to try the different lights.
he was willing to explore open ceiling grids, and open ceilings and, i mean, down to when we hung things, being on site to help look at it and say, "yes, that's what i want. no, that's not what i want." as you can see, we have a huge number of little individual private offices here, all with lots and lots of windows. we've put these clear stories above,
in between all the offices. so, it's not enough to impede your privacy. those will be filled with glass. but it is enough to help make sure that daylight permeates the main area over here. private shower. this is for people that want to bike to work or work out before or after work, or people who just smell,
can be thrown into the shower forcefully. this is gonna be the workstation for all the it guys. they're gonna have a few desks in here, and this is where they can set up computers and whatnot, and then they've got their server closet in the back there. here's a little conference room for the people who don't have private offices, if they ever want to have a little private meeting, or take a phone call,
or, just basically go in a room and sob. these rooms are available. there's two of them. they'll have big whiteboards, a few chairs. that's about it. this is gonna be the library. we're gonna have some bookshelves, a couple of big loungey chairs if you want to come in here and take a nap. there'll be reclining chairs.
we got a great view there. pretty much, there's nothing can be built there because that's where the road goes. and the old customs house, smithsonian museum, battery park, view all the way to governor's island. i'm noticing that like, some of the ac ducts still aren't in and the lights aren't in. the ceiling tiles aren't in.
the floor's not in. well, there's like one ceiling tile per office. that's pretty good. well, we're supposed to move in in three weeks? ah, yeah. three weeks and one day. yeah. so, how likely do you think that is? i don't know. you know, i've been on these construction projects
and things either slow to a halt, and things just get slower and slower and slower, and suddenly, nothing is happening. and you can't move in, and there's nobody actually working on the site, or they speed up. so if it were a software project, and they said that they were-- oh, they're doomed. they're doomed.
you think they're doomed. if this was software, they'd be doomed. if this was software, and they said you had three weeks left to go and you knew the percentage of stuff they had to complete-- yeah. 'cause with software, there's always bug fixing, and there's all that unexpected expecteds, unexpecteds and stuff. well, that happens in construction too.
i mean-- yeah, but you can move in. you can move in. well, that's true. and then they come back and they fix all the bugs. you can use your buggy software too. right? maybe. you can't sell it. so, as you can tell, we're obviously obsessive compulsive about exactly what the office looks like, how it's laid out.
you know, i've spent countless hours trying to figure out how to make the ceiling a few inches higher in the offices, how to make these little aluminum reveals like they have in ari's office on "entourage", how to get the view as good as possible, how to get as much natural light as we possibly can into the workspace, how to make people just really happy
when they come to work, and really excited about the physical space they're working in. it's the kind of thing that programmers, who are usually very logical and practical, would not think that they care about, things like natural light. they might think that they care about the speed of their computer. but i think that when they're weighing in their head
where to go work, whether they want to go to fog creek, or google, or microsoft, or apple, or amazon, or any of the kind of companies we compete with, they may not be thinking conscientiously, but they're gonna be thinking, you know, what are my days like? how much am i gonna enjoy spending in that workplace? and having a physically beautiful space
where everything has been thought about to make it the optimal programmer's space is maybe really, really important to them, either on a conscious level or a subconscious level. do you think that was time well spent? or could you have been working on your company, instead of, you know, doing like business things instead of managing the programmers, instead of coming down here,
worrying about what color paint goes on a wall? my number one job is recruiting the best people and making the place the best people want to work at. and their job is making the best software. and so, one of the things that most software companies spend the least time on, which is just the physical environment where the programmers work, is something where i think we can have a competitive advantage
and get the best programmers if we make the most ideal place for them to work. you know, phil greenspun sort of famously said that programmers have two places where they can spend their time: their apartment, and their office. and if the office is nicer than their apartment, then they'll spend a lot of time in the office. our construction meetings weren't the typical construction meetings.
they weren't an hour in a conference room and 15 minutes on a site. they were 15 to 20 minutes in the conference room, dealing with the business of the construction. and then, we would spend over an hour or more walking the site, looking at every single detail. ♪♪ if you want a place to be a great place to work for the long term, not just for a year or two
to get rich quick, but this is really where you want to spend your career, it has to be a nice place to spend most of your daylight hours. right? it's got to be bright, well lit, clean, pleasant, comfortable chair, comfortable desk, nice computers, just a pleasant place to spend time. we have this amazing view of the hudson river.
we can see new jersey, the jersey city skylines. that's just the view outside. but the view inside the offices too, there's pops of color, and there's cool lines, and things are just set up well, visually very appealing, which i think makes a huge difference in the workplace. i think a lot of companies don't take that into account. maybe it's because of finances or what have you,
but i think that's actually a really key element in making people feel better. and when people feel better, then they want to work better, and there's less resentment at the workplace and all these different kinds of things. joel: when you first come in off the elevators, not knowing what to expect, you see the elevator lobby is painted black. it's designed to kind of be dark
and the metaphor is almost like a play, like theater or drama. it's that sense of expectation when you're sitting in the theater, and the lights have gone down in the house, and you don't know what's gonna happen. and suddenly, spotlight goes on on the stage and that's kind of the reception area where we have all kinds of colored lights,
where you can see daylight in the background, off to the side, and you realize this is the gateway to a very, very bright, very, very day-lit place. but it's still sort of that kind of transition. the best light and views in our office are here on the west side. you basically spill out into this big, spacious room with really, really high ceilings,
fantastic view of the river with a view of the statue of liberty, and it just makes you feel powerful and excited, and it's just a beautiful, beautiful space. my first job at microsoft, i was working on a team with about 10 people and for some reason, that team just had lunch together every day, and i really appreciated that and i didn't think it was that strange,
but it was kind of a lot of fun. it occurred to me that there's a really important component of a team that works together, is actually eating lunch together, and that that can make a very strong qualitative difference to the quality of life, to the group cohesion of the team, how much they like each other, and so, that was something
that was always really important to me. and the way we do that at fog creek is simply by having lunch brought in, catered every single day at a fixed time. alison: every day, i'm pretty much wowed at these lunches. maybe it's just because i come from this very corporate background where they couldn't even give us milk for the coffee. but it makes a very big difference in how i feel about coming to work every day,
about being at work. it's just a good place to work. instead of having a bunch of little tables, we have a couple of really, really large tables. so what that means is, instead of sitting down with your clique, you just go to the table and you find an empty space and you sit down and you talk to whoever's there. we've got a couple of areas of desks for people that aren't developers,
who don't need quite as much concentration time, people that are either on the phone or whatever reason, just don't need to sit and concentrate the same way as software developers do. and we figured we might as well get these automatic electric height-adjustable tables, so if you want to stand up for a while, you can, which is just sort of more comfortable to switch off between standing up and sitting down
than to try and sit in one position for eight hours. we got an aquarium designed just to bring some light into the main area where there isn't a whole lot of daylight. there's a shower where you can, if you work out, or you ride a bike to work, or you want to run during the day, you can shower afterwards. the library overlooks,
it's probably got the best view in the place. it overlooks the hudson river. you can see governor's island. just a really nice view, and a really nice place to sit and read a book. there's a couple of conference rooms where people can sit around and have impromptu meetings, just hang out, just a place to go outside of your office with your laptop
if you want to kind of work in a different place. you know, there's a rule in libraries that you don't talk. right? everybody sort of understands that, and that seems sort of obvious to people, like it has to be kind of silent, because if somebody's reading, if somebody's studying in a library, you don't want to interrupt them by talking. and that's almost like so obvious,
it's unbelievable. and software developers are basically studying, and, you know, they're deep in thought, and they're working, and they're trying to concentrate. and any kind of noise is going to interrupt them, and so, you need to build an environment where that noise just doesn't happen. and the only way to do that is to build private offices
with doors that close so that programmers can go in there and sit quietly and concentrate on their code. and they'll get a lot more work done that way. there's a theory of software development called ^ithe zone^i. a developer gets in ^ithe zone when they're really, really concentrating. they're deep in thought. they're not even noticing time pass.
so somebody will come get them like four hours later and they'll be like, "oh, my god. look how much time i spent on that." and they'll just be sort of really cranking on the code, deep in thought for a particular period of time. [benjamin thinking] check bug #549348. that looks like we need to go quickly do a bug fix. jump over to e-max. find the relevant function.
here we go. looks like i need to add an extra line. added the extra line. check it. looks valid. go to the command prompt. verify that the code works correctly. joel: anybody who watches programmers for a few days will notice that they get all of their work done when they're in this mode of deep concentration, the zone.
and in fact, for a lot of developers that i know, they might get into the zone for a period of several hours during a week, and that's it. and yet, during those few hours, they're able to produce enough work to really kind of justify their existence. [programmers' musings] it would indicate that-- [low conversation] --close a parent case.
[keyboards] we don't really know how to get into the zone, but we certainly know if a programmer is in the zone, how to knock them out of it, and that is just to interrupt them. and so, the more interruptions a programmer has, the more likely you are to knock them out of the zone and to make them unproductive. and it may take a day or two days
before they can get back into the zone again. so that one little interruption has an enormous cost to their productivity. you might think of it as being a five-minute interruption, but if they were deep in concentration, you made them forget everything and they can't get back into that deep concentration until two days later, then that interruption has been extremely expensive.
so anything we can do to cut down on interruptions, we do here. number one most important thing is that if there's a conversation happening that is not relevant to a programmer, they shouldn't hear it. and that means that instead of having a group of people sitting at a table, and somebody comes to talk to one of them,
and all the other ones are interrupted, you have individual offices, so if you need to talk to a programmer, you can interrupt them, but at least you're not going to be interrupting the four other people that happen to be in the same office where they are, or in the same room as them. you need to be able to get into the zone when necessary.
some stuff you don't really need to be in a zone to do. you can just sort of do it and be listening to music, or listening to people talk, but there's definitely times where you need to be able to focus. so i think that's why it is important to have your own space, and if possible, be able to have walls and a door that you can close when you need to. but, there are other ways to sort of create that separation.
one of the things that i've been doing recently is just listening to white noise or background noise on my headphones to sort of cut out the noise around me. and i found that that works pretty well because it's not anything that i would find distracting because it's just white noise, but it also sort of cuts out the chat-- the chatter and the background noise in the office.
before we came to the new office, i didn't have my own office. i shared a desk at one point, or at another point, i was sort of out in the hallway because we didn't have room. and one of the things that would happen is that there would be impromptu meetings around my desk, especially when i was in the hallway, where people would just meet
because i was right next to the fish tank, they would be looking at the fish tank, and then, they would start talking and this would all be going on behind me as i was trying to get work done. and we moved to the new office, and initially, we didn't have walls, and this would happen again because of where i'm located-- it's sort of a central area, and without the walls,
it was like a nice big area to have meetings, and so, there would be these impromptu meetings where people would be talking all behind me. now that we have walls, it's much nicer. i can close my door, and cut myself off from the world when i need to get work done. it's quieter. there aren't people talking behind me.
hopefully they find somewhere less intrusive when they need to have meetings, or go in somebody's office and close the door. it's also really important that programmers learn not to interrupt each other. and so, if two programmers are sitting together in the same office, and one of them has a question, they might just ask the other programmer. right? just turn around and ask them the question.
and that may knock him out of the zone, and that may cause him to lose his attention. and he may come help you with your problem and it all sounds great, like a bunch of programmers with open communication, but you've just destroyed the productivity of the programmer who had to answer the question. if you put them in just separate offices right next to each other, they're either gonna email,
or at least the guy's gonna stand up and go to the next office. and that reduces the amount of times that happens because standing up is no fun, and it may be easier just to look it up on the internet, or just to try to solve it on your own, rather than to go interrupt another programmer. and so, that just dramatically, just the private offices dramatically reduces
the number of times that programmers interrupt each other, and that other people interrupt programmers, and that programmers get interrupted by side conversations that aren't really relevant to them. [buzz of movie reel] the architects in the, i would say, the '50s and the '60s, started thinking that private offices with doors that close are-- prevent communication, and that might have been true in the past.
it's not true anymore. the idea of a more open office space was originally intended to foster communication and allow people to overhear things, to have conversations easily. this is indeed a good reason to have an open office. i don't think it's a good enough reason to lose the concentration that you get from the private offices.
so we try to make up for that open communication with two or three other mechanisms. there are three other mechanisms. one is having lunch together every day. the second is a laconica site, which is sort of like an internal twitter site where anybody can post like little brief messages about what they're working on, or what they just finished or, you know, some funny video that they found on the internet,
and that's a second means of open communication for the whole company that's entirely on the computer. and the third thing that we have is a weekly status report that you send to the whole company. it's done on a wiki page and everybody on friday afternoon just says, okay, here's what i did this week, and here's what's new. and everybody can read that,
and that's just sort of a way of sharing the news of the company, which is mandatory and a very, very helpful way of creating all that communication that otherwise, in a lot of companies, just never happens any other way. and that's pretty much to make up for the fact that we don't have the open offices where you can overhear things. providing software developers
with an individual private office with a door that closes, access to natural light and the outside, and just a, sort of a pleasant environment is something that literally no other employer in new york city does, and very few other employers even in the u.s. have offices that are this nice. and so, that gives us a real strong competitive advantage. if you pay a little bit of attention to interior design,
to architecture and to how the office is laid out, you're actually gonna make a space that looks really cool, in the long run, we see the best employees that we can hire as a competitive advantage in making software. this is my primary development box. i run ubuntu hardy heron, and on top of that, i run a vmware vm that has a 32-bit windows xp. as far as the monitor goes, these are, i think 30-inch monitors, and it turns out, finally,
that's a big enough single monitor. i have this little guy over here, but it's hooked up to an old development box that i keep around as a dv server and some things. it turns out that this is about as much real estate as i actually need, so finally, we're there. for development tools, for my text editor, this is a gvim on windows xp. vim's great.
i'm not gonna participate in the religious emacs or vim wars. for hardware, i have a dual core cpu. i don't even remember what the classifications of it are. i think everybody stopped paying attention after pentium iii. right? then it was just pretty fast, and next year's will be faster. as far as memory though, i have six gigs. and the ubuntu install takes advantage of all that. most people run windows xp x64 or windows xp 32, but i think nearly all the developers now
are running 64-bit windows. there are a couple of others who are running linux and running xp and a vm on top of that. but those are the set-ups, and, you know, you're free to customize your set-up pretty much however you want as long as you can get work done. that's the only requirement. that's one of the nice things
about working for a small company. there hasn't been this need to standardize every single developer workstation. one of the key criteria that i look at in trying to evaluate if a software team is functioning well is, i'll just say, "look, if you need a tool, can you get it instantly, or is it a fight, or are you never gonna get it?" one of the things that really surprises me
is you go on these internet discussion forums where programmers hang out, and there'll be a programmer saying, "i need a tool that does exactly what this commercial $70 tool does, but is free. does anybody know of one?" and this is a programmer who is being paid $100,000, $130,000 a year. the cost of their office space might be $12,000 a year.
they're sitting in a $600 chair using a $5,000 computer, and for whatever reason, it's just impossible for them to shake $70 loose from their company tree to buy a little tool that they actually need to do their job, and it's just ridiculous. i think the 30-inch monitor is actually a good size for me. some of the people use a 30-inch monitor and then another monitor next to it,
and they use that other monitor for, like their web browser or something like that. i sort of depend on all of that space being available to me, where i can sort of lay things out side by side, or, sometimes, you need to actually display three versions of a file side by side so you can compare them and merge them. and, when i'm working at home,
that's just not something i can do. i did a little study because we wanted to get our developers really good chairs. so there's this really comfortable chair called the herman miller aeron chair, and they're like $1,000. and you can get chairs at staples for $100, that are crappy and will break in a year, but when i actually did the whole analysis and the spreadsheet
to figure out what these things cost, we discovered that we were actually spending more on toilet paper than we were spending on herman miller aeron chairs for our developers. so the cost of good tools and a good computer, lots of monitors, big widescreen monitors, and as many of them as you need, whatever software you need, whatever books you need, whatever magazine subscriptions you need,
whatever website subscriptions you need, it's just absolutely negligible in the big picture, just make it automatic. so before coming to fog creek software, i was in the entertainment industry working in radio and television. in every company i worked prior to fog creek software, the attitude was always, well, if you don't like it here, leave.
we'll find someone else. there was always 20 people behind you willing to take your job for even less pay, less benefits, more abuse, and it was true, because they're scratching at the door to get in. so, you know, compensation was little, never had any healthcare, and always the company atmosphere was,
if you don't like this, leave. so one of the biggest shocks coming to work at fog creek was the care they take in actually making sure their employees are happy, giving them perks, making the atmosphere in the office relaxed and fun and conducive to getting your work done in the timeframe that you want to get it done, and knowing and trusting, and giving you ownership of projects and your work.
and actually respecting employees was a nice change. joel's style of running his company is hugely different from places that i've worked in the past. i've had an experience of working in a very corporate kind of staid cube farm type of environment. actually, that was my first real job. it was the type of place where it's, you know, fluorescent lighting, cube farm, gray walls--
no food, no drinks. there was actually a point where they stopped providing milk in the coffee room. and that was kind of like the last straw for me at this particular place because how on earth are you gonna build morale when you can't even give your workers milk? so, i came in this morning and noticed that my desk was all the way up.
and then it started doing things like that, where it would just randomly move around. then we discovered that it's actually voice-activated. down. up. stop. [laughter] that's awesome. we were trying to figure out who to prank, and it was relatively clear to me
that david was our prime candidate, because he has quite often pulled a number of pranks, specifically on me, calling my phone from strange numbers, and things like that, and making me look stupid. and i came up with the idea of hooking two desks together and controlling one desk from the other, you know. it would be like the ghost desk raising and lowering just whenever.
i'm pretty sure this is the coolest thing that has ever happened to me in my entire life. table, 100 divided by three. how's it gonna do the repeating? i don't know. maybe it'll get 33.3, or-- yeah, that's true. oh! [laughter] what? [laughter] he's a lovely guy.
we're all going to hell. yeah. [laughter] is he playing along, or-- no. he's not playing along. he's really enjoying it. i think we should just let it be like that for as long as we can 'cause he's happier. you know? ben: the final kicker came
when david decided to test the desk on his own and he picked up a book and opened to a random page and would say-- table, what page am i looking at? and what he didn't know was that the person behind him was signaling someone else who was signaling jacob, telling them what page david had looked at. [laughter] then the desk would slowly lower down to page 36,
and it was impressive to see his reaction. what the heck? [laughter] maybe we should figure out where that ethernet cable really goes. who is screwing with me? my whole life, i've never had a prank go off that well. wow. thank you, david. that was-- that was impressive. yeah. it's a little disappointing. i'm not gonna lie.
[clapping] yay, david! developers are always gonna be happiest working in a development organization that has, kind of a programmer mentality, and where programmers are respected and treated like talent, and not treated like a cost center. you have to sort of treat programming as a profit center, no matter what kind of organization you're in,
even if it is technically a cost center for you. if there is something in programming that's really just a cost, then you need to outsource that to a company that specializes in programming because they're gonna treat programmers well. and, if you have a function that you thought of as maybe a cost center, it may really be a profit center.
there are companies like, for example, wal-mart, that have been able to lower prices because they have better distribution systems. and they have better distribution systems because they use computers, and because their programmers just do a better job of figuring out how to create the code that does the logistics that makes wal-mart have the lowest prices which makes them ultimately successful.
in all these organizations, it's really important to make sure that the programmers feel like they're really, really important to the organization, and not sort of an accidental side effect. a programmer is always gonna try to look for a job where they feel like they're gonna be listened to, where they feel like their opinions are not only respected but are going to be followed all the way up the management chain
to the-- at the very, very highest levels. and a programmer, all else being equal, is gonna prefer a job where they can be working for other programmers as high up the management chain as possible because a big source of conflict is when a programmer is reporting to a non-technical manager, and the non-technical manager has a particular way of looking at the world that may not correspond to the programmer's way of the world,
and if there isn't somebody to translate those two different ways of looking at the world, then people get upset. another thing that programmers want to see is who they're gonna be working with. and when they're trying to decide whether or not to take your job, or the job offer at google or at microsoft, or whatever other shiny company on the hill
is making them an awesome offer, they're gonna be thinking about who they're working with. and that's one reason it's really, really important to only have smart people in the company. if somebody feels like they're gonna be coming to work, and the other programmers they're gonna be working with are idiots who are gonna write bad code, and they're gonna have to make up for it, or if they're just sort of unpleasant people in any kind of way,
the truth is that makes a less attractive workspace. so, one reason to hire smart people is because they're smart, and the other reason to hire smart people is 'cause smart people want to hang out with other smart people, and they want to have intelligent conversations, and they don't want to have to clean up somebody else's bad code. there are very few programmers
who actually just want to be the superstar programmer in a team full of idiots. most programmers would really prefer to be a superstar programmer in a team full of superstars. brett and liz, we know you guys are expecting little baby creekers, very soon, in brett's case, so we have some gifts for you. liz: brett and i, or brett's wife, is due six weeks before i am.
and so we're not telling each other our names, but we're both having boys, and so, i thought of the problem, what if we have the same name? and, so i pulled brett aside and i was like, "how are we gonna figure out that we don't have the same name for our babies?" he's due october 13th and i'm due november 25th. so i was thinking of all these like,
write it down on a piece of paper and we give it to someone who doesn't, you know, who only shows it to someone else, and then somehow, they figure it out, and we'll do it that way. and he just looks at me, completely like in disbelief, and just says, "well, md5 hash it." [laughs] and i looked at him like he was speaking another language, and he was like, "i don't understand
why people don't solve problems by coding." so i know now we don't have the same baby name because i coded. it says "i tcp/ip, but mostly i pee." who found this? jillian? female voice: where did you find that? the ideals that we set here are kind of hard to find elsewhere. thank you, everyone! brett: thanks, guys.
absolutely. liz: fog creek paid for a class i took, a night class at nyu within hr, and everyone there was in different backgrounds. hotel industry. some were in law firms. everyone there was from a completely different background. and whenever we would go around and talk about, you know, how to create, kind of an atmosphere
at your company that would keep employees, make them happy, everyone had examples of like, what their companies was doing wrong. and every time the professor would give an example of like, well, you know, here's a good way to keep people around, keep them happy, keep productivity up, and i'd be the only one raising my hand, being like, we actually do that already.
so one day, i was at work like normal, waddling down the hallway, when i just knew it was time, and then, the next day, there was charlie. you wanna smile? you like your bugs? yeah, look, he's already starting to go. [nursery rhyme tune] kick, kick, kick. when i first started,
i noticed there was no maternity or paternity leave plan. and as the only female, i knew one of our goals was to start attracting other female developers, qa testers, engineers, and, you know, make our company more diverse, and also to keep the amazing, you know, rock star male developers that we have. so i went to joel one day with just an idea, and i said, "you know, i think we need a maternity leave plan.
we don't have a paternity plan. i think we should get one." and he just looked at me and said, "great, do it. make it happen." for the primary care taker it is, or caregiver, 12 weeks at 75 percent pay. and for the secondary, it is six weeks at 75 percent pay. and then both get, within the first four weeks, you can expense up to $500 in food,
whether it be takeout or groceries, which is really, really helpful and after experiencing having a baby myself, that $500 was really helpful 'cause i couldn't move at all for quite some time. once we announced the plan, you know, all the guys were thrilled, because, you know, that's unheard of in most companies for men to equally get like such a great deal in the situation.
i just kept saying, i wish-- chris is my husband-- that the company that he worked for at the time, he was a contract worker, so he didn't get any benefits whatsoever, and had to go back to work right away. and, you know, i was just, i kept saying, i wish he worked for a company like fog creek where he got some leave and could help me 'cause it was hard in the beginning alone.
with other employees that we've hired, both male and female, when they see this plan, you can tell they're, you know, really happy. you know, it's a great way to keep employees just feeling, you know, respected and, not cherished, but, you know, the company cares about you, and they want to keep you around, and they want to treat you well, and they recognize that outside of work,
life is just as important. so i like to think that, you know, my idea a couple years ago helped contribute to, you know, where the company is today. this is charlie-- and these are his bugs. brett: i used to work for a big e-commerce company, and i think i thought this is what all software development jobs were like. you would, you know, work 10 or 11 hours
and come home so exhausted that you wouldn't want to see another computer again for, well, at least until tomorrow at work. and after i worked at fog creek for a few months, this amazing thing started happening, after i kind of detoxed. i went home, and i wasn't exhausted, and i was hanging around these people all day who were talking about, you know,
interesting things going on in programming languages, and interesting things going on in the industry. so i wanted to go home and try stuff. and this was a new thing for me. so, i think, at least-- certainly after that first six months, i think i've explored a new language every six months at least, and, you know, admittedly, i'm kind of a trend hopper there, and, you know, checked out ruby when that was super hot,
erlang, all that stuff, haskell. but it's great to feel like i have time to work on, you know, my skills, and just on things that i'm interested in, because, well, for one thing, i'm around a lot of ideas and a lot of people talking about what's going on, and for another, i've got the time and energy to do it. so that's a very great and different thing about working at fog creek. whatever organization you put your programmers in,
the organization has to have a programmer mentality. it has to have, it has to be run by people who understand the ways of programmers, who think like programmers. and there are a few different aspects of this. for example, programmers are very concerned with the truth, like, they think in a very binary way. there's ones and zeros, and you can't really argue with a compiler.
and there is no politics in a compiler, and there are no feelings. there's just the truth, and that's a particular way of looking at the world that your organization has to have, or the programmers in the organization won't feel comfortable. a lot of times, for example, the easiest way to make a programmer really, really frustrated
is to require them to use some particular technology, like you tell them, "you guys got to use c#, because the boss read about c sharp in delta airlines inflight magazine and heard that it was the latest and greatest thing." and then, if the programmer wants to use a different language, or if that completely doesn't make sense, that's gonna be really, really frustrating to them. programmers want to use the right tools for the right jobs,
and they have their own very strong opinions which are probably based, let's say, reality-based opinions as to what tools to use and how to develop software, and how to go about doing things. and those things, it's extremely frustrating to a developer to suddenly find that there's some political process going on with a bunch of people who don't understand technology. and they're being forced to do something
that doesn't make any sense whatsoever because of what they consider to be politics. now, i always say to people, "listen, every organization has politics. as soon as you have three people, there's politics. politics is just the interplay, the power relationships and how people sort of work together in a society." but there's also dysfunctional politics and that's what you really need to watch out for.
dysfunctional politics is where the person who shouldn't officially have any kind of power, but is friends with the ceo, he's able to get bad decisions made that don't make any sense, for power struggle reasons. bad politics is where there are members of a team or there are managers who are trying to grow their teams and get more headcount because it, you know, basically raises their salary,
but not because you actually need the headcount. i worked at lockheed martin on satellites. the one thing about lockheed martin is that it grows essentially based on who's president. i mean, whether a democrat or a republican is president. so, you know, during the bush years, they hired a bunch of people, the first bush years, because he, you know, put a lot of new, you know, weapons programs in place and all that stuff.
and under clinton, defense spending wasn't cut too much, but it definitely didn't grow that much, so the company, lockheed martin didn't grow that much. so there's pretty much this age gap of the employees at lockheed martin. you'll be working with people in their 40s and 50s, and the newer employees who were hired during the second bush administration are, you know, 23 or 24, and the tasks
that have to be done are very mission-critical, and they can't really be screwed up, you know, most of the time. because an error at lockheed martin means like a satellite comes out of orbit or something like that. so, the end result is that the younger employees at lockheed martin are generally given more trivial projects to do, by, you know, the kind of "old guard" who's been there, you know, since the first bush administration. so it's a kind of odd place to work,
but i mean, fog creek is more lightweight. it's kind of more exciting. and it's also kind of exciting to be part of a start-up and kind of be part of the software start-up culture where people are kind of, they're all very smart, but they're also very mellow about everyday work things like, you know, wearing jeans to work, and, you know, eating junk food at work, and playing video games after work.
it's kind of fun to do all that stuff sometimes. we've had very, very low turnover because fog creek feels like a really cohesive team of people. we all really like each other. and it feels, it's a cliche, but it feels more like a family. the fog creek approach really is that programmers are talent, is that the programmers here are like the stars and the directors of a movie.
i feel like i'm directly a really integral part of the company. like the company is part of me and i'm part of it. and i know that sounds a little bit trite, but it also happens to have a lot of truth to it and it's a wonderful motivator. when you're working on the sidelines, it's easy to get overlooked, to be taken for granted, and it's hard to be as motivated.
it's hard to be putting as much effort into it, when you know you're just not gonna be rewarded, and you're not gonna be viewed the same way. ben: if you succeed, the code and the company will succeed, and if you fail, and the code and the company will fail. basically, you work at a place where you're trusted, and there's not a disgusting hierarchy of management under which you are a slave.
and that's really the best part of fog creek. joel: everything we do to build this company to this day is organized around the idea of getting great programmers that want to work here, getting really, really good talent, and then giving them kind of free reign to build awesome stuff. so, you know, we have a couple products today, and we're certainly gonna have more products in the future,
but most of my focus has been around making an environment that's awesome to work in, making a place that's almost like a utopia for developers, giving everybody the tools they need to get their jobs done and then treating them really, really well. [classical piano music] [laughter] table. you don't know what you're doing. it's not doing well.[laughter]
go. table david's age in inches. it can't go that low. it can't go that low it's gonna stop. but the point is... how does it know? think about it. at one point david said i believe to the camera-
that this was the this may be the best thing that has ever happened to him in his whole life[laughter] at which point we we all kind of grimmaced a little bit. maybe we'd taken it a little too far. [classical piano music concludes]