Your business success will depend on the extent to which programmers essentially live at your office. For this to be a common choice, your office had better be nicer than the average programmer’s home. There are two ways to achieve this result. One is to hire programmers who live in extremely shabby apartments. The other is to create a nice office.
The open offices I’ve worked in—and some were otherwise great places to work—usually lead to distraction, decreased productivity, and low morale in myself and the people I’ve worked with. For the record, I think offices when used as places to meet, to share ideas, or to bust out code in a 2-week sprint are great. But as an everyday environment, open offices come at a price.
Daniel Bogan runs The Setup, a series of interviews about what hardware and software people use to get their jobs done. I answered his questions for the Flickr code blog a while back. Here’s my answer to the question ‘What is your dream setup?’
What would be your dream setup?
We’re at a really fascinating point in hardware development right now, which makes it difficult to answer this question. My knee-jerk answer is that I want the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer combined with an iPad combined with the Cintiq combined with, you know, a Cray supercomputer or something else equally powerful.
The problem is, really, handwriting recognition; if you’ve ever tried to use the iPad with an external keyboard, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Switching from typing to writing or drawing and back is a pain. Regular notebooks allow you to draw and write without changing your hand position, which doesn’t seem like a luxury until you try actually working on a tablet and then find you need to input text.
Steve Jobs may think that styli are inelegant, but the fact is, using a pen to write or draw on paper is both comfortable and easy; it’s just not as fast as typing. Most people are content with inputting data via a keyboard, and this makes sense for a lot of jobs: marketing, business development, finance, and programming, for example. But for the designers, there’s a big gap between starting the creative process and executing the product design *because* it’s much easier to sketch out your ideas on paper, with a pen, than a computer. And this is unfortunate; in the future, we should have computers that allow us to keep contexts for different stages of product development. The iPad and ThinkPads are steps in the right direction, but they’re still awfully clumsy, which is why, in part, people criticize the iPad as a product for mere consumption.
I want a Moleskine that is a blindingly superfast computer. That’s my dream setup.
—Timoni
An interesting thing happens when your customer base reaches a certain size: You cease having edge cases. I think we’ve probably been at that point for a good year now – maybe longer – but we’ve really felt it recently. Mistakes, bugs, incompatibilities, and related issues that used to affect a handful now affect hundreds. 1% is real number now.esign
