Kevin's Weblog

With our office relocating soon, there’s been a lot of talk about what the desk layouts will be like and whether it will be more like our wide-open layout or more like the traditional cubes in Sunnyvale. Yesterday definitely helped me gel my feelings on the matter.

I spent the morning working in an unoccupied cube. It was a little wierd because I had no idea who was around me, what they were doing, etc. But, I could also concentrate and bang out code.

In the afternoon, I borrowed some space in a conference room that’s been turned into the office for a 4-person team. In this case, there was a collegial atmosphere where there was almost constantly conversation at a low-level. Despite that, I actually found it fairly easy to withdraw when I was coding, then drift back in while waiting for a build or test run to complete.

I’m not sure which of the two I preferred, but I definitely found both superior to our setup, which is essentially 300 people in one big room. For whatever reason, I find the discussions there much more distracting. Also, it leaves you exposed to all of those 300 people deciding they need to walk over and talk to you about something. My conclusion is that this is what comes from startups growing up and failing to realize that their office layout doesn’t scale. 4-8 people in a room together, all working closely on one thing, is fun and productive. 300 people in a room together is a recipe for massive productivity loss from communication overhead and constant distractions.

I went up to the Sunnyvale offices yesterday to meet with a couple people about the project I’m working on, and also to hear Mark Pauline (founder of SRL) give the Friday tech talk. A summary of bits that I found particularly interesting:

The organizer of the talk series mentioned that a number of managers had asked him why Mark was talking. He’s said that if Schwarznegger was an acceptable speaker, he didn’t see why Mark wasn’t.

Most of the talk used the show in LA that I went to in April as an example. He started with some video (much better quality than mine) and then proceeded to point out various interesting aspects of the performance. I think I might have had a unique perspective in the audience, having actually been at the performance.

He pointed out some horizontal distortion in the video. This is not an artifact of the digital processing. Rather, this is a physical effect of the 150dB sound fields at the show flexing the CCD in the camera.

The sneaky soldiers represent something new in the history of SRL, in that they were designed with CAD and built using modern custom fabrication techniques. What this means is that they can easily make more, unlike most of their equipment which is heavily customized and hand-built. As a result, they can use them in more extreme ways, since if one gets destroyed they can relatively cheaply have another made.

There’s an interesting quirk of permitting rules in LA. Any permit for an event that shuts down more than 2 blocks is issued directly by the City Council, and the police and fire departments can’t stop it once the Council gives approval. This is meant to pander to the movie industry, but works out well for SRL (although they still need a front organization to get the permit from the City Council).

There’s going to be a show in the Bay Area in Sept. Check the web site for details.