The office
08.28.08 - 07:21am
When you walk through the double-doors of the main building, the first thing you see is our tiny little lobby area. It’s so tiny, actually, that I think most people don’t even think it’s a lobby. It’s more a vestibule, I guess. Tinier than my bedroom. Tiny tiny tiny. And really underwhelming. It gives you very little clue as to what’s inside, and you could just as well be at a dentist’s office with how sparsely it’s decorated.
When you walk through the next door, though, the one which requires keycard access, life gets a lot better.
There’s a huge portion of the downstairs area devoted to a large screen and mounted projector. Encircling that is a crescent-shaped set of some very comfortable brown couches, with yet more comfortable couches behind them — one of which actually turns into a bed — and a giant table behind that. You know, for work. There’s a kitchen filled with free snacks and drinks, electric scooters to quickly travel between buildings, a pool table that’s been converted to a ping-pong table, and Nintendo Wii controllers scattered everywhere. There are Mozilla posters, and Firefox stickers, and awards we’ve won, and news articles about us decorating the walls. There are offices down there, too, but they seem almost like afterthoughts. The downstairs area is everything you imagine a dotcom workspace to be. A playground.
Upstairs, things get a little more serious. There are cubes, sure, but most of them are conjoined, and with the walls being so minimal and the ceiling being so high you never even feel like you’re in an office. Natural light permeates throughout the space — from the sun roof in the center, to the large windows all around the second story — and you could work most of a summer day without ever flipping a light switch on. Some people even got patio umbrellas for their desks for shade, they get so much sunlight. There are little, odd-shaped tables scattered about called collaboration stations, where people can sit together and bounce ideas off of each other, and office chairs which we have in about as many colors as we do configurations. There’s a kitchen up there, too, and if you look in the freezer you’ll probably find a couple different kinds of ice cream.
Across the complex is our other building, filled mostly with engineers. They have a kitchen, and scooters, and couches too, but it’s more quiet there. Disciplined even. I visit there every so often and the vibe is just so completely different. There are a lot of distractions in the main building, but in this one things are focused. They are serious cat, and that are serious thread. Still, I do enjoy my time there if only because I think the Building K (that’s the main building) people kind of take my being there for granted at this point, and the Building S people manage almost entirely without me, which is both refreshing and unsettling.
It makes me curious, though, about how the dynamic of the company might be if ever we were all under one roof. I should hope whatever brave new space we might someday end up in is as open, collaborative, and unique as the current one is. Because, really, at this point I couldn’t imagine anything less working for Mozilla.
Yes, Dunder Mifflin is a great place to work!