I was there to see the headquarters of one of the most influential technology companies in the world, and it looked like a Lego fortress. The campus was all primary colors and serrated edges, as if cut from card stock for an elementary-school bulletin board.
Street art hung from the walls. Bicycles and scooters were strewn like forgotten toys. The corporate name was decapitalized. (Something about trying to be cool.)
“We repurposed the sign from the old Sun Microsystems campus,” my greeter said when she met me at the campus’ entrance. “We leave it as a reminder to stay motivated.”
As we walked past the iconic thumbs up on the front of the sign, I turned around to see the faded “Sun” on the back of it.
“Welcome to Facebook.”
For a company built on openness and connectivity, the office felt like the walled garden Facebook itself has become. My greeter walked me to one of the complex’s main arteries from Hacker Way toward Main Street. “The campus was designed to be a cross between Disneyland and downtown Palo Alto.” I could tell. Thousands of employees filled the streets of Facebook’s downtown area, a Main Street USA in a Magic Kingdom partial to hoodies and t-shirts.
There was a barbershop, a dental office, a bike shop.
If I worked here, I would never have to leave.
Live to work
The gilded offices of Silicon Valley have both the amenities and exclusivity of a country club. The need to keep the outside world locked out is understandable—tourists come from halfway around the world just to take pictures from Google’s driveway—but I worry that the locks go both ways.
“Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity, and history,” wrote media theorist Neil Postman. “As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
The office is also a technology, a tool used to help get work done. And though there is something special about a workplace where you can get your dry-cleaning done between meetings, the blurring of work and not work can also veer toward oppression.
The catered dinners, bottomless vacations, and open floor plans set up by employers to promote productivity and work-life balance can—at times—have the opposite effect.
It doesn’t have to be crazy at work
“It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends, and whenever they have a spare moment,” Jason Fried writes in the new book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work, which hits the shelves in the US today (Oct. 2). “People can’t get work done at work anymore.”
“Once you examine these [perks], they look a little less like benefits and more like hooks,” says Fried’s co-author, David Heinemeier Hansson. “It’s not that ping-pong tables aren’t nice in an abstract way, but they can also wreak havoc on everyone else in the office’s ability to get things done.”
Hansson and Fried have a horse in the race to rethink how organizations are organized. Together, they founded Basecamp, a software company that has embraced remote work since it launched in 1999 with some unconventional approaches to benefits. For example, instead of catered meals, Basecamp pays for CSA produce boxes for its employees to cook with at home.
The pair has written multiple bestsellers challenging conventional wisdom about how we work. And a growing body of research backs up their opinions.
One study found that employees with unlimited vacation policies took fewer days off on average than their limited vacation counterparts. Another found that coworkers communicated less frequently face-to-face when they worked in an open-floor-plan configuration.
“Open workplaces are interesting in that they symbolize collaboration and communication, but they also have to provide spaces to actually get work done,” says Deano Roberts, the global facilities director at Slack. Roberts, who also serves as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserves, has a very pragmatic approach to office perks.