Offices also have to be good enough to warrant having to travel hours each day to get to/from them, which is a pretty tough to compete with for a lot of people

To put an even finer point on this: no matter how good your office is, if your office is in the middle of a huge metropolis then you are now asking people to either do long commutes or make some honestly hefty sacrifices in living arrangements to be close.

No amount of office niceness can compensate for the surrounding area to be not a place you want to live in.

I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for smaller startups to not place their offices in areas a bit off the beaten path. SF is uniquely weird about this from what I understand, but like NYC or Tokyo is filled with startups putting their office in places where workers either have an hour commute or have to increase rent by a lot to live closely. All for, frankly, the status of the address. Then companies whine about high salaries and nobody wanting to come or Mori tower.

Meanwhile there are many neighborhoods that are cheaper, have near equivalent services, and could offer a nice environment where people want to live closely. Commercial real estate is not always available, but the rent savings alone could easily pay for a lot of renovations to another building

if you want to attract the best talent and have an in-person culture, you kinda have to place offices in central locations, which inevitably become very expensive.

take NYC for example. office space in manhattan is extremely expensive, but it's also very well connected. people can reasonably commute from four out of the five buroughs, and a bit less reasonably from NJ, the lower hudson valley, etc. pretty much anywhere else in the greater NYC area would be much cheaper to rent office space, but the subway and commuter rail are all designed around the expectation that people need to be moved en masse to/from manhattan. an office in queens would be attractive to people who live in queens, but it would exclude people who want to live in all those other places.

that said, some companies do exactly what you suggest. amazon has a lot of offices in less "desirable" areas. HQ2 is a prominent example. crystal city is far from the most prestigious place to have an office in the DC area, and it's not particularly well connected to most neighborhoods in DC proper. but if you're okay with living in alexandria or arlington, you can have a decent commute and save a bit of money on housing.

there are also a lot of smaller tech companies that set up in random suburban office parks. typically they do this because they are more focused on reliable profits (and lowering costs) than rapid growth. these places can honestly be pretty nice to work at, but you need to really adjust your expectations around comp. you don't hear about these places because they've essentially decided not to be competitive.

The reason I take jobs in a centralized dense downtown is because I know I can find another job without changing my commute. It also makes socializing after work, or during work, so much easier. I've worked in 5 different offices within a mile if each other in the last decade. I can still grab lunch with people I used to work with within a 10 minute walk of my current office. It is the only reason I am happy to go into the office a couple times a week.

If I worked in a generic office building in the suburbs I would never want to go in.

Boss: We "can't afford" free snacks in the break room anymore.

Also Boss: How come none of you come into the office anymore?

I don't know about Spolsky, but I got the impression that Greenspun was hiring MIT undergrads (and there was the Ferrari promotion).

Apropos of Spolsky's discussion of interior design, I think Greenspun's firm's old building is currently an office of IDEO, but I don't know whether it had great design back then.

Is that the IDEO office near Central Square in Cambridge?

That's the one I'm thinking of, but might be mistaken, since I didn't pass it often.

It might've housed Greenspun's TCL+databases Web firm, then at some point seemed to be used by a niche college(?), and in recent years is IDEO.

Greater Boston loves a niche college.

That was a different era too. Remote work technology was much more primitive. It would have been much harder to coordinate a remote team.

Infosys in India did this successfully in the 90s and 2000s. Giant sprawling campuses with gyms, saunas, pools, laundromats, doctors/physical therapy units, dorms, coffee shops plenty of food courts with subsidized food, open round the clock. Buildings in weird shapes- spheres pyramids washing machines. Even football fields! Programmers who lived in shabby Apts flocked to the nice offices and practically lived there.

Spolsky’s office design missed a few critical elements (he had a couple of articles about offices and I don’t recognize the one linked here). IIRC he didn’t avoid the cardinal sin of office design which is politicizing windows.

First, developers think they want windows and then they can’t handle the light. So the people with windows close them and then nobody gets to use the windows. And news flash, it can be really hot next to a window. Better to pull the desks back and put the walkways near the window.

Also when you have 9 key employees and 7 window seats you end up snubbing 2 people you wouldn’t want to live without. That shit is part of the calculus of turnover.

Far better to put little tables with three chairs by the windows. Someone can take a break, or have a quick tête-à-tête there. It’s everyone’s window.

Or you make an office in which every seat is a window seat?

No, because GP is arguing that, even though window offices are status symbols, working next to a window has issues (heat/light) that often results in people covering the windows. Better to put common areas like walkways near windows.

All my career I have worked in 1-4 person offices with enough window space on one or two sides. When the sun comes around, close the blinds a bit.

It's possible, just not with open floor plans and cubicles.

My desk is next to a window. It has literally never been an issue, and always a pleasure.

Airconditioning, positioning and judicious use of blinds is always enough.

Agree here, I have a desk by a window (with quite lovely view frankly), but I have a blind down most time because the sun, the sun is very bright and very hot and can heat faster than the AC can cool. I even had to get the partial light blocking blind replaced with a full light blocking blind. The sun light wasn't even hitting my monitor, the orientation of everything meant it just hit me straight in the face blinding me for part of the day. I still like the window seat, but it isn't all great for sure.

Yeah, that orientation makes all of the difference. My current space has an entire wall of windows but 1) the building is oriented such that we don't get direct sunlight because our side is almost directly north facing, and 2) there are very large Oak/shade trees lining the length of the building on our side. We're fortunate and we've actually had to fight a couple of minor battles to hang onto our space.

That's most likely what Spolsky meant. He was at Microsoft in the '90s, meaning he would have been familiar with the layouts of Buildings 1-6 & 8-10, which were two story cross shaped or linked pairs of crosses shaped structures designed to maximize the number of window offices.

A number of later buildings were H shaped, probably for similar reasons.

The original MS buildings looks fantastic. It’s very much human sized.

Two stories, large windows, green surroundings.

Of course it was inevitable they’d tear it all down to replace it with open offices shakes head

Microsoft campus is a virtual anomaly for Seattle office space. Every space I’ve ever seen has had one window for every three to six employees. Unless you have a north facing window, the sun will typically be a problem for part of the day.

I’ve seen a few spaces where closely spaced buildings provide some afternoon protection for the lower floors, but that is relatively rare.

Coatings have gotten better over time, but most people don’t understand that glare is worst when the monitor is pointed straight at your eyes, and a little bit of tilt will solve most of your problems.

This actually is very true, especially in a country like India. Most offices in India have much better facilities and amenities than most employees' home - better chairs which comes under 'health of the employee', free and/or reimbursable dinner after office-hour, etc. etc.

I'm not trying to forget the many others such as growth and challening opportunities for the super-smart ones, those yearning to get away from the mega-corps' monotonous grind.

As someone with a family, thus sounds awful and very much the sort of "the company is your family" cult like behavior that has warped the industry for the past couple decades.

I think it’s a reflection of the cult of youth. It’s common in many industries. Young people will put in long hours to get experience and give up comparatively little because they have less going on outside of work. It’s not necessarily healthy but it’s also something some of those people actually relish. So such an office design tends to appeal to a younger crowd by default.