Office search continues

We've looked at about ten potential office spaces and found three or four that might meet our needs.

The biggest problem is that our desire to have (a) private offices with (b) lots of daylight is very hard to accomodate in New York City.

Let's say you have a building with a square floorplan:

The central part of the building is used for elevators, bathrooms, pipes, staircases, etc. This is called the core:

Offices go between the windows and the core. Now, you can have two rows of private offices with a corridor in between. The outer offices have direct windows. If you use glass walls, the inner offices still get plenty of daylight.

The trouble is, if you go any deeper than two offices, the innermost offices won't have daylight at all.

An office is about 10-12 feet deep; a corridor is 4-6 feet. That means that if the distance from the outside window to the core is more than, say, 30 feet, you either have to waste space or give someone a dark office.

Some of that interior space can be used for conference rooms, kitchens, and other areas where people don't spend too much time, but realistically, I'm discovering that if the distance from the outer wall to the inner core is more than 30 feet, it's wasted space.

Manhattan streets are exactly 264 feet apart. Those big office buildings you see that take up an entire city block might have floorplans that are 200 x 200 feet. Even taking the core into account, you can wind up with a depth of 60 or 70 feet. If you're building a sea of cubicles, this is very efficient. If you want 100% private offices, this doesn't work well at all.

The smaller office buildings that don't take up a whole block are likely to be hemmed in by their neighbors, so they don't even have windows on all sides. In this case the builder will often try to put the core on the windowless side, which results in even greater depths.

Wall Street firms need big trading floors. The ideal trading floor is a huge square, the bigger the better, without a single column. This motivates developers around here to brag about the size of their "floorplates" and to optimize buildings for huge, unobstructed floorplates, which is exactly the opposite of what software developers want.

My new book is here! Apress has just published a new collection of 36 essays from Joel on Software, aptly named More Joel on Software. Get yours today! Available from Amazon.com or wherever fine cheese is sold.

About the Author: I’m your host, Joel Spolsky, a software developer in New York City. Since 2000, I've been writing about software development, management, business, and the Internet on this site. For my day job, I run Fog Creek Software, makers of FogBugz—the smart bug tracking software with the stupid name, and Fog Creek Copilot—the easiest way to provide remote tech support over the Internet, with nothing to install or configure.

Enter your email address to receive a (very occasional) email whenever I write a major new article. You can unsubscribe at any time, of course.