No, what I admire most isn't the office itself, though it's quite nice, it's the location. I can imagine that you can, for example, get some nice restaurants and few other option to get a real food within a walking distance.
From my window, I can see just three freeways tightly surrounding this place-less office park from each side. And I am hungry, right now, there are just two ugly canteens that close by 2 PM anyway. It makes me feel desperate. Hunger is not nice.
Here in Europe business parks aren't really that popular for tech companies (unless you work for something like IBM, but I'd guess they'd have their own canteens), most are based in the city centre which is nice for lunches.
I realize not everyone has this luxury, but the market is still very hot in Boston/Cambridge around me. And I'm sure others can second that for their cities. I have at least fifty restaurants within a fifteen minute walk. I'm not trying to taunt and life has a location hold at times, but if you can make the jump, we as developers are in a very fortunate position right now, and you can have a job within days/weeks around here if you've got the skills. Best to you.
I miss that about New York. If you avoid the tourist traps, you can get great food for reasonable prices.
In Berlin pretty much all the food is cheap, but very little of it is good. The standard of sushi is generally passable, though it's not my favorite thing.
The sushi is awful compared to Tokyo, San Francisco, New York or Helsinki. But there are lots of great options in Mitte (where all the tech companies are). Lebanese, Syrian, Turkish, Vietnamese and even some Italian restaurants are just great and very cheap.
For quality, I'd say Soho is a bit better for the price.. Midtown tends to be mediocre-affordable, awesome-superexpensive; Soho tends to be prettygood-affordable, awesome-superexpensive.
Unless midtown food options have radically changed since I last worked up there five years ago.
I recently switched from a job where the corporate cafeteria (horrible) was the only option, to a new job in town of my food full city. No one know how much of a big deal that difference was in my decision to switch.
I got into the habit of making an extra portion for dinner that I take to work as lunch for the next day. It's quite low effort and I get to eat tasty food every day.
Söder is Stockholms "Harlem" ;) While being pretty central it's not located in the most central part of the city, and the only decent lunch place around here just closed last week, ack! :)
As a (steel & glass) architect I'm certain this is not an expensive office when compared to other tech companies. I think most people are being fooled by the "high-class americana" style, but really this does not cost more than a high-end minimalist office.
Question the style choices, sure, but the assumption that is in anyway more expensive than average is completely false.
Same, I think it looks like they bought a bunch of expensive furniture for a renovated-in-the-90s-rambler. The juxtaposition and lack of dominant style isn't very appealing.
You know what the first thing I pick up on is? Everyone is dressed nice. I don't know if that's just for the camera, but I see suits and vests all around. They look classy in a classy office. I wonder how the office would look if notch was wearing cut off shorts and a wife beater.
They don't dress that way all the time. From what I've gathered they have "Formal Fridays". At first when I saw Notch mention this on Twitter I was a bit confused, but now I see it goes nicely with the theme of their office.
I like the idea of it, especially for companies that have clients/customers outside of tech. We're all comfortable in hoodies all day, but when you all have to turn up to meet at a government office you'll suddenly find that the suit you haven't tried on in over a year doesn't fit right, or has a stain you'd forgotten about.
It makes you feel different. You think about yourself differently, and everyone else does too.
It's kinda fun. Everyone should try it sometime if they haven't, even if it's just wearing a collared shirt instead of a T-shirt. Try it out and see how you feel.
That picture is about as posed as posed gets but in my (limited) experience, people in the tech industry do tend to dress 'up' somewhat more than in the US.
But, you know, if notch were in a smoking jacket or a Hefner-style robe, I think it would still work ;-)
Counterpoint. A few weeks ago one of my coworkers showed up in the kind of shoes that some people use on the beach (http://www.billig-sport.dk/public/produkt/stor/2699.jpg) with one of them only held together with duct tape.
During the summer several people showed up with no shoes at all.
I appreciate seeing an office for a successful indie company that doesn't consist of brick facades, exposed ventilation and a big open room filled with people, computers, video game consoles and foosball tables. I just appreciate the slightly more mature look than I'm used to seeing glorified in office pictorials for tech companies.
That being said, I don't see ANY computers there, so maybe they just didn't picture their brickwork in this photo shoot.
An interesting observation, on Kotaku the comments are focusing on a weird jealousy over Notch's success. Comments about people suddenly regretting buying a license to Minecraft, saying how tasteless the offices are, or how bad things are in Africa.
I can't imagine getting any work done there, but since there are no computers, I'm assuming nobody does, and this is really just a set for some HBO drama. To me, this is a huge waste of time and money. Good for the economy though I suppose.
You can see some to the far left of the second image (the one after the collage). Then if you skip to the final image and note the shelf-unit (at the end of the long table) it snaps into focus - and you can just see the desks behind :)
Time will tell, but this is beginning to sound like echos of Ion Storm[1]. We've already got our Deus Ex out of Mojang, though -- my girlfriend and I still regularly play Minecraft together -- so I can't really feel any enmity for them.
Seems to be quite a different story to me: Mojang has, with minimal expenses, already created an extremely successful (and profitable) game. It seems that they are now using some of that cash to get a really nice office.
Ion Storm on the other hand basically used their fame and some promises of a future product to get a load of cash from investors, and spent that on a very nice office.
And now they have non-minimal expenses, and they are unlikely to have another hit of even half Minecraft's success ever again - Minecraft was a HUGE outlier.
One can only wonder if this game is going to be too geeky to cross over to significant adoption. I know a lot of people that got into Minecraft that would probably struggle with 0x10c.
While I initially assumed the same, I think 0x10c could possibly evolve into a state that allows even casual players to be able to jump in without getting involved in the geekier aspects.
For instance it be possible to have a Minecraft-esque gameplay mechanic on the planets and, as a player, to acquire through some in-game currency a pre-designed spacecraft created by others. So it could be played as an ordinary space trading game to an extent. In this form it'd be an extension of Minecraft.
For others, I can see guilds being set up around exploitation of the programmable computers onboard spacecraft, with guilds developing their own encrypted communications protocols and attempting to break those of their competitors while still engaging in standard space game warfare with the added extra of electronic warfare. This is far geekier, but it has scope for players of varying skill levels occupying different roles without having to learn how to program the DCPU-16. This would be a sort of EVE Online scenario.
There are other combinations that would be available, given a big enough community, a way to exchange items and the right gameplay dynamic. If Mojang gets that right and sells it right then 0x10c may potentially become a huge hit.
Of course what I've described is ambitious in what's required from the game and there are a million things that could go wrong and make it too hard to make a game with this breadth and flexibility. The odds are against Notch and his team, but if they do succeed I think it'll be epic.
Let's not forget that to an outside observer Minecraft is very geeky and quite confusing. It's a game without any gaming like most are used to, yet over time interest snowballed and non-gamers got into it based on recommendations. I hope the same could happen with 0x10c.
I'm guessing that the expenses probably still aren't bad compared to their income. Just one day's sales of Minecraft probably pays for the rent there. The furniture was a 1-time expense, etc.
Yup. I think we're going to see this more and more. Companies that generate significant success from outliers, find funky ways to burn through the (substantial) cash by growing and then are unable to repeat their initial success to keep fuelling things. If they can repeat the success then more power to them.
While I didn't think exactly of Ion Storm, this photo did remind me a bit of the extravagance of that generation of "rock star" developers. Not saying that out of any malice or jealousy of Notch or Mojang - just being honest about my gut, knee-jerk response.
Wow, I would really want to work in a place like that. I would probably feel more relaxed and creative than in the typical whiteish plain-looking offices.
Incidentally, I don't mean to call you out in particular, but when you call grownup female programmers "girls," lots of very cool women will decide to hang out somewhere else -- sort of for the same reason black men in the US aren't going to love it if someone calls them "boys." Not trying to police your language, just something to think about.
> Incidentally, I don't mean to call you out in particular, but when you call grownup female programmers "girls," lots of very cool women will decide to hang out somewhere else -- sort of for the same reason black men in the US aren't going to love it if someone calls them "boys."
I agree with you that calling female programmers and coworkers as girls is demeaning, but it IS NOT the same as calling a black man a boy, which has a long history of racist oppression.
The easiest way to insult any male is to refer to him as a boy. For males it carries the sting of naiveté and inadequacy. Females on the other have a very positive attachment with youth and "girls" and clearly spend a lot of energy continuing to identify themselves that way.
I wasn't really getting at this. Calling a black man "boy" is extremely racist and doesn't have to do with gender identity. It has to due with systematic culture destruction and oppression as a result of slavery in the United States and conditions in which black folks were placed post slavery.
I totally get what you're saying, and I know any comparison of different groups with different troubles is tricky. They're not identical. But I'll stand behind the analogy.
Take a look at how 1950s professional men in Mad Men call their female coworkers "girls." You know what the legal context was? Women were literally a lower caste than men. Didn't have the same rights to divorce, didn't have the same rights to appear in court, didn't have the same rights to serve on juries, didn't have the same rights to take many respectable jobs, didn't have a right to equal pay for the jobs they could take, didn't have the right to stop their husbands from raping them, didn't have the same rights to inherit property. 50-year-old women were called "girls" by 30-year-old men because the law itself treated women like servants, wards, or objects rather than independent adults. And this was true throughout the United States when you, or your mother, or your grandmother was born.
So I do think it's similar to the kind of issues that black men have with "boy." But thanks for your thoughtful response, even if I disagree. I try not to rant about this stuff, and I hate that we have to cope with it all in order to have a simple conversation, but here we are. There's plenty of crappy history to go around.
Calling females "girls" or otherwise infantalizing them was used to deny them property, bodily autonomy, voting rights and independent personhood. The abolition and marriage property rights movements went hand in hand.
I'm not arguing that they are equivalent, but both are part of a long history of violent oppression.
There is a history current state of sexist oppression, just as with racism. I didn't mean to imply that there is a mutual exclusion: racism and sexism are active parts of our culture and society, both today and in the past.
I only want to point out that racism and sexism, while related, are distinct and different. Referring to women in professional circles as girls is a very different kind of thing compared to calling a black man "boy", and attempts to draw parallels between the two are problematic, as we get into the territory of identity and experience erasure.
Boy, not guy. If you used 'boy' for a black male, it would be pretty racist.
Know how today it's popular to call to someone by saying "Hey man", "Yo man", etc? That was a trend started by black men in response to racist white people calling them "boy" as a way to insult or demean. The stigma still exists throughout most of black culture because believe it or not, there's still parts of the south where full grown black men are called "boy" by ignorant/racist whites.
Using "girl" is not in the same ballpark, so I can see how this may have slipped your mind, but some full-grown women don't like being called a "girl". It's demeaning in a similar way, though I don't believe it was intended to oppress the entire female sex, so it's not nearly as bad.
If it's a professional setting, don't call people "girls" or "boys". It's just not respectful. If someone is over the age of 21, just use "woman" or "man", or whatever they prefer to be called. They will appreciate it.
Just because something should matter more doesn't mean it does. I agree that vocabulary alone should not matter, but this isn't how the world works. You can't use 'the N word' in public because people don't differentiate your intent from the vocab. Same goes for all terms for all kinds of people.
No matter what anyone calls themselves, it's important you treat all people with respect by default, regardless of how they act towards themselves or others. If your boss calls herself a 'girl', you should still call her a 'woman'.
Sometimes people will unwittingly foster an unwelcoming culture by making jokes about themselves. Sexual harassment is one example. By calling herself a 'girl', and by making derogatory comments about women, this boss could be setting the standard for all women in the office to be treated, which is very unfair. The same thing happens with race, religion, etc.
They have a couple of female employees, their finance manager is female and has worked there for about a year, their "director of fun" (manages events, media relations) is also female and has worked there for about 8 months. They both talk highly of the office so I guess it's more than just a "man cave".
You have a pretty serious misconception of aesthetic tastes of females. I know many that would -love- to work/hang out in a place like this, and they aren't geeky/nerdy/"gamer girls" either.
Apparently I live right next doors to their office. Explains why I keep running in to Notch wherever I go, almost started to think he was stalking me :)
Personally I wouldn't had gone in the "gentlemen's club"-direction, feels a bit old and stuffy as well as having some bad connotations (if it isn't meant to be ironic that is) but each to their own I guess :)
The theme they picked (this is from an article that ran in swedish media) is a british "Gentlemen's club". I don't know about you but for me that is a male-only upper-class establishment. I'm not so sure that's a vibe you want your indie gaming company to project.
Then again, you can't politize everything and it's probably meant to just be different and be in "good fun", shrug
Guess the good thing about having your own company is that you can do what you want :)
The word "Gentlemen" implies the class bit, but clubs and societies exist all over Britain from the humble workers clubs for the miners through to the exclusive clubs in the West End. Very few (perhaps none) are now gender exclusive.
What you're missing is the role of the members clubs in the industrial revolution.
They were instrumental as a place where business leaders could get together, relax, share ideas, views, experiences and do business. Debating the days' news, and enjoying a drink.
From that light... I'd do it too. I'd build part of an office as a club and would encourage other startups and developers to drop-in and share.
Gentleman's clubs were the environment for serendipity of their age. And even with mass communication and global travel, it remains the case that if you can get people together, relaxing, dreaming big ideas and laughing... magic can happen.
Yeah, I'd build a club environment too. And it wouldn't be so I could pretend to be of that class, it would be to construct an environment that was proven to be good for serendipity.
I'd also stock the bar well and subsidise it... helps to grease the wheels.
There is a great deal of absurdity in modern society, which demands that everyone have spaces which they can call their own - except whites/white males, whose spaces must be open to everyone. Tell me, do women-only gyms also have bad connotations for you? What are the connotations of the "no whites allowed" workshops during the recent(ish) gay-pride idiocy in Gothenburg?
Foul? What about it do you not like? It seems a bit over the top to me (it's an office not a private club) but interested as to why you dislike it so much.
The dark, heavy furniture looks like what (Danish) furniture shops make for the US market, very different from the open, light, and minimalistic Scandinavian (mostly Swedish) design school used for products made for the home market. You know the design from IKEA, but there exists much more expensive (and somewhat higher quality) products.
My first reaction was that this might be a deliberate provocation against what would be considered good taste in Sweden.
1) It's dark. Dark is nice for atmospheric, not so nice for avoiding eye strain, plus overall light is just more pleasing - ask an estate agent (realtor in the US?) what sells property - space and light is the answer. I know we're not selling the office here but it's a good measure of what people really like - what they're willing to pay for.
2) It does look more like a private club, but not just that, it manages to look like a private club without being high end. Look at that carpet - it looks like something you'd find in a budget hotel or conference center.
3) From a design perspective it just clashes - you've got at least three wood tones in there (including very dark and really pretty light), at least two different basic styles (the old world globe and leather chairs, the ornate candle stick and taps against the clean lines of the bar, the exposed ceiling, the light wooden floor).
The more I look at it the more horrible I find it.
And I should be clear, I have nothing against the more "traditional" look. I once worked for a major global law firm where the office decor was in places very conservative (think wood panels, ornate dark wood furniture in reception, thick carpets) and it was beautiful, and I live in a house that's about the same age as Texas which is obviously not modern in it's appearance.
As I say, it's very much personal taste but whether you like it or not, I think it's hard to say that that the aesthetic is not all over the place.
I'm sure someone who knows way more than me about such things can come along and tell me why it's all great from an interior design perspective but to me at least, it's a mess.
I would not say 'foul', but I wouldn't like to work in that space. It feels to heavy and I personally like techie things like devices splattered around and at least one 'hardware table' with a scope + soldering iron and such. Books are nice, but leather bound? Pretentious; I rather have books which are actually read and look shit.
Of course it's a matter of taste and I think this part is nice to receive customers / partners. But for me (and at least a few of my colleagues) it would have to be a lot looser than this. And lighter.
And about the suits; I have a bit of an issue with that because it was mandatory for programmers to wear a suit here not 15-20 years ago. And I did and hated it. I do it now when there are formal events or client contact, but outside that, I really feel forced if I wear such a thing. Again; matter of taste. I do agree you should try and that you DO feel more powerful doing it. It just doesn't mix that well with coding :) IMHO.
They have close to 30 employees, I think ~24 are in-office. Not sure if the list on the Minecraft wiki is accurate but it's pretty close (they added one maybe two in the recent weeks): http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Mojang
I wonder if they got the space checked out by an architect, or some kind of inspector. Probably not, as that would be destroying the open platform of building whatever you want.
From my window, I can see just three freeways tightly surrounding this place-less office park from each side. And I am hungry, right now, there are just two ugly canteens that close by 2 PM anyway. It makes me feel desperate. Hunger is not nice.