The Development Office of the future?
Here at Nextfly, we have been toying around with the idea of making an office for the development team. Being lead developer here, I have some opinions on how I believe we should plan the office. I think the people who should be in this space should consist of our designers and developers. I feel like we should create a designer / developer friendly work environment.
A developer friendly work environment is giving the person space with the option to code on a couch, in a bean bag chair, stand or sit at a desk. I also believe there should be games for us to play (For example: N64, ping pong table, Foosball table, or an arcade machine). This may sound like an idiotic idea for us, to have this at work, but developers can get tunnel vision and not be able to fix a problem or when designers get a creative block they can play a game or two to give them a break from work to get away from everything.
Bigger companies like Google, Facebook, and Linkedin believe in giving their employees the ability to be more productive in a non conventional fashion. My thoughts for the office is to separate the dev team from the rest of the Nextfly so we can talk nerdy with each other without annoying the rest of the team.
I think we need to have either a large piece of glass either a window or door so we can draw on it to convey what we are trying to say in more complex situations or a wall painted with chalkboard paint so we could draw or write on. I think the walls should be painted dark grey and white with our logo painted in a retro style. I think our walls should reflect creativeness. I would like us to have desks kind of like Buzzfeed’s Los Angeles office has. It’s a fairly large rectangular table that sits 8 people but only put 3 people per side so we can have some space between each other.
The table has a cable channel in the middle so we can having all of our cords and cables running into it so we can have less clutter on our desk. I think each person at the desk should have dual monitors because it can make you up to 33% more productive and more efficient. Also the table has wheels on the bottom so we can move it if need be.
The reason for this change is to get the creative people out of the boring, conventional office space to get creative juices flowing by providing complimentary working conditions. In my current day-to-day there are many distractions (many which can be avoided by putting my headphone on), however, I’d like to dream of the day when the development department has their own den to encourage productivity and teamwork.
Feel free to help me continue on this conversation and make waves with the higher ups. Tweet @nextfly using the hashtag #developerden to advocate for me. Who knows? With your help, that dream might become a reality sooner than imagined.