Stumbled across these seriously nice looking offices the other day. I have office envy. Although perhaps the nice offices are to make up for the fact that they make marketing software, blurgh.

Eventhough I’ve never had one, it’s pretty obvious to me that private offices are the best option in terms of productivity for concentration-workers [1]. I also want a pony.

Browsing on officesnapshots.com, it seems most tech companies still don’t go for private offices. Or perhaps it’s just that the “cool”, “hip” companies are all too edgy to have private offices … man.

A special dishonorable mention for the flickr offices, cube farm without proper cubes even! Photo by mylesdgrant.

The new Mozzilla offices come a close second, saved by the fact that presumably they’re planning to fit them out a little better. RedHat aren’t really trying either, in Brazil at least.

I don’t mind the look of the Last.fm office, although it reminds me of the “lab” at Uni, which was not the most productive place in the world – although fun.

I can forgive some of the smaller companies for having grungy startup style offices where everyone’s sharing a beanbag, but for the bigger companies I just don’t get it. You’re paying all these programmers to build your products, so you pack them all in a room together where they can’t concentrate? I guess the upfront costs are too much for the accountants.

Even the companies that do make an effort, seem to focus more on gimmicky stuff, cafeterias, break-out rooms etc. The core office spaces, where you’re going to have to spend some time – face it – aren’t that special. One aspect of that is probably that “cool” stuff is better for marketing yourself to potential employees, just don’t mention that at some point they will have to do actual work.

Part of Google’s Zurich office, photo from Picasa (which has no visible copyright info?)

So I guess for a while at least, a lot of programmers and the like will continue to get their best work done in the wee hours of the morning or night, when all is quiet and the logic flows.

Or perhaps we should just all work from home, then we can all have our own personal perfect office, and  we could stop worrying about petrol too.

[1]: I just made that up. But I mean anyone whos work involves concentrating on one task for tens of minutes at a time, like for example programming 🙂