Working environment! Thoughts?

yenoah

If you were being offered a job (software dev role); Pay was just about your minimum requirement; typical small outfit, not a lot of scope for upward progress etc. Would you be concerned with your working environment? Say a place with a street level office. Blinds drawn so no natural daylight at all. Just bright overhead tubes. All staff a bit cramped in one room, all desks looking at each other etc.

I kinda need daylight. I suffer a bit from depression sometimes and cant imagine 40+ hours a week without it. Am I mad? Would you let this be a deal breaker?

Sheeps

Not taking a job because of the working conditions is completely rational.

yenoah

Sheeps wrote: »

Not taking a job because of the working conditions is completely rational.

Thanks, that mekes me feel a little more normal. I actually havn't turned the offer down yet, but the thoughts of that office kill me.

Robdude

I think you are being smart for considering the work environment before you accept the job.

I worked at one place that had the most uncomfortable, unergonomic desk/chair combinations. They also had horrible hardware.

I was young and excited about getting a job offer - I took without even thinking about those other things. But it was a real problem after a while. It was a small company and money was always 'tight' - we joked about it even, but after a while I'd have back pains from sitting there and waiting for the old workstation to compile the application was a huge waste of time each day.

It ended up being a miserable job.

I'm not saying you shouldn't take it; but don't think you are crazy for considering the work environment.

Colonel Panic

A poorly lit, noisy working environment would be a dealbreaker for me too, it should be #1 on the Joel Test!! (Not really)

yenoah

Colonel Panic wrote: »

A poorly lit, noisy working environment would be a dealbreaker for me too, it should be #1 on the Joel Test!! (Not really)

I thing the environment I am describing is well lit and very quiet. But its lit with very bright flurescent tubes and there is no day light. Its a cramped space with all desks facing each other, no dividers etc. Its the daylight that I hate not having. I need a window and I need a bit of space.

Colonel Panic

Oh I misread. Well, my point is yes, a working environment you would be unhappy spending all day in is definitely something to avoid.

Malice

I agree with the general consensus. Your workplace is somewhere you're going to be spending a lot of time so it really should be somewhere that doesn't annoy you too much. Whenever I have an interview with a company I make sure to get them to show me around the office environment if the interview goes well. It's important to be able to spot stuff that would be a problem. What's the light like? What are the desk, chair and computing equipment like? What's the air temperature like? Are the devs going to be sat beside the sales & marketing folk and so be driven demented by phone calls and marketing speak?

All of those questions are important to me. If a job offer came along from a company that offered me a rickety desk with a dodgy chair, a crusty ball mouse, a CRT monitor, a PC from last century, a fluorescent light flickering overhead and a few phone monkeys nearby talking loudly about "going forward", "deep diving", "pushing the envelope" and "dog fooding" then I'd have to seriously consider how much I really wanted the job. Admittedly a sufficiently high salary would help a lot .

tricky D

One of my concerns would be the inabaility to look away from the screen at something in the distance every now and again, so as to give the eyes some exercise. Focusing on a screen a metre in front of you for long periods is bad for the eyes.

Sparks

High salary is nice, but replacement wrists and eyeballs tend to run to the expensive side

Yes, it's perfectly normal to turn down a job because of working environment, I've done it myself two or three times. I once interviewed for a well-known low-cost budget airline once to work on their website system. By the time we got to the interview room, I was 90% certain that I wasn't going to take the job, just from walking through the office I'd be working in. And it's not just the furniture - in another interview, the office was grand, the engineering time was okay, but management (and HR in particular) were a nightmare, so I just walked. No point getting into a situation where you know you're just going to want out within a month.

Tom Dunne

Completely OT, but I had to ask.

WTF is "dog fooding"?

Malice wrote: »

and "dog fooding"

Malice

Tom Dunne wrote: »

Completely OT, but I had to ask.

WTF is "dog fooding"?

Basically it means developers actually using the software they develop. See here for a more in-depth explanation.