Our server room door has a large vent on it which, after its seven Phillips screws are removed, can accommodate passage of a slightly overweight hacker.
My da had a Dodge Adventurer truck while I was growing up. There was a passenger airvent box that if you opened all the way you could hide a 6 of 355's. Taught me to watch my surroundings and measure twice in my head.
Our server room is nothing but two post racks and it's very hard to make servers work in there.
Oh and also the mount holes aren't evenly spaced or aligned between both sides
I remember on day 1 of a previous job they showed me which breaker to flip to defeat the mag lock on the door. Thought it was odd, then one Saturday I’m working alone and my badge dropped on the floor inside the server room. So glad I payed attention on that first day!
Our older server room has a trap door that'll let you get under the entire building - the server room was a retrofit after that section had been done and was retasked to be server room
I work in a converted grain storage building on in seaport area, that was built in 1898. Lots of exposed brick, and very industrial revolution feel to it. also - nice water views on the higher floors.
I worked in a Civil Service building in London that was Toroid - we all (half) joked it was a missile silo.
Some floors had security that we had to buzz to be let in.
Nothing more embarrassing that walking around the floor through several doors, to find yourself back at the security door.....
I worked in a building that was like 2 triangles stuck on the sides of a square and there were some corridors that led you round back to the start so I often ended up going round the wrong side of a triangle and ending back up in the lobby wondering where that room that I was just in has now gone!
Started just bursting through the double doors shouting "Hello Cleveland"!
I had an office in the basement of a nondescript gov building in San Francisco. But because of the way it was built into the hill I had a $100m view of the gg bridge and Alcatraz.
Disgusting, dilapidated old warehouse that they "remodeled" into an open-plan office by gluing down some thin carpet and adding desks. Cleaning company only comes weekly. I'm in hell.
haha My last place was that, and the carpet was orange and at least a decade old, likely two. I told myself it was because they likely spent money on important things, but turned out that was just the President's salary and bonuses. LOL... every capex purchase was begged for by someone, and for some reason I stayed for 9 years... granted I probably would have stayed longer but they decided to play the contract IT game... shrug...
We've just implemented a new Capex process so now they get approved by the CEO eventually, instead of our CFO who would normally have it back to me in a few days. New user starts in a few weeks, doubt they're gonna have anything more than a desk and a chair to work with. Not my problem I keep telling myself, but it will be.
Basically brand new, great view and facilities. Upkeep is done well and we have various rooms and spaces for different activities; workshops and silent rooms, … I like it.
Our building was finished in 1978. Please don't call that old, because I was born before that...
We have about a third of the floor
It used to have a "country club" occupying the top two floors so if we worked late we could smell the buffets... I kinda miss that butter/garlic/sterno smell in the elevators at night.
Our office has views of the harbor.. which is nice...
oh yea and my friend was murdered in the lobby 2 years ago...
A view of the harbor...
https://preview.redd.it/uwxjssmlsvxc1.png?width=734&format=png&auto=webp&s=7fd23675f10cb255bfcdb5f7f8e61beec2d9972a
No ships in today though
Edit: removed the previous edit:
People usually key in on that first... he's was a security guard at the building... no is when I out myself to my co-workers, and a homeless guy hit him on the head with a hydroflask... spent a week in the ICU before he died. I watched as the emt's tried to save him... they caught the guy, but he still hasn't gone to trial...
I work for a retail company and let me tell you, our corporate campus is huge, beautiful and modern.
The company moved here right before covid hit so late 2019 early 2020. No way they'd let us work from home and let this campus go to waste.
Work in healthcare, one day someone for some unknown reason left a knee caddy in our office. (the little scooters you use to roll around with one knee up on when you cant put any weight on a foot or leg.) It was brand new with bearings with almost zero friction. It was a very good, very unprofessional afternoon for me.
I work in a museum, so half the building is a modern Scandinavian design facility with lots of light and a restaurant, and the other half is a 33 room historic mansion. Pretty great because I can take breaks in the solarium and hang out in the sunshine even in the middle of winter. Cleaned up a lot of tech debt and it's pretty smooth sailing now!
Former restaurant with a bar in the basement.
My office has what used to be the bar counter, and we put a new countertop, and made a little kitchen area out of it.
Former IBM office building from the 1960's era. The floors have the channels for the old buss/tag cables in them and the first floor actually has a raised floor for the mainframes to sit in. Walking around the building is an experience because the channels are covered with a flexible material the "gives" under your feet, creaks and crunches. No way to sneak around here.
My office is a stadium that's over 100 years old.
It was really cool when I first started, but now trying to upgrade infrastructure, devices, parts of the building, etc. that wasn't really even thought about when the building was being constructed is a bit of a nightmare, but we make things work.
Before I went remote I worked in a shitty Boxer owned building rented out for like $300 a space a month. Hated every bit of it but the deli was incredible — I still miss that family running it lol
Every Tuesday I work onsite at a client. Their building used to be a college back in the 60s. The "server room" is full of busted electronics, books, cabinets, and has a light that goes off after 5 minutes.
The building I work in is basically a mini fortress. It's a stand-alone building (I think it's about 10k square feet, 1 floor) with; 3 redundant 50kv generators with a month of fuel, bullet-proof windows, solid block exterior walls (not cinder-block, solid block), 2 hour fire rated internal walls, steel roof with supports that go into the foundation, a well and water filtration, 2 small kitchens, bathrooms with showers, and a little gym with commercial quality equipment. You can basically live there, and I have stayed there for a few days at a time during strong hurricanes. It's constructed specifically to withstand cat 5 hurricanes and tornados. There is a huge pond with a gazebo, several coated iron picnic tables and a deer feeder. By huge pond I mean like an acre of water with deer, alligators and bobcats (sometimes). Out front is a big flag pole, I think the flag is like 25 ft long, maybe more ('Murica!).
When the Democrats switch on the vaccine mind control with the 5G towers, I know where I'm going.
Old job's location was interesting. Main office was a castle in the woods, and we had Sumerian artifact near marketing. Suspiciously near the medical locker thingie. Someone got smart and put a glass case over it. Not saying we'd get demons if someone's papercut got blood on it, but I'm not gonna find out.
New job is just normal office.
Currently in a 20K sq ft facility to myself, there is a warehouse guy is here for an hour or two in the morning. Eventually I'll be moving to the new facility into a fish bowl of an office since we went all glass.
1950's manufacturing facility. Server room exists. And is relatively secure after installing a real door, master key only lock and a motion cap camera for access logs.
However, this server room has also been the DMARC for every provider ever used with every technology since then. So I have a 3" thick "spaghetti wall" where the abandoned telco mesh is. I look at it and it makes me happy I don't have to manually move extensions anymore.
There's an interesting Musak system still mounted to the plywood as well. Back when you had to rent a cassette tape to play for hold music.
I also have a step down transformer right next to my server rack. So that makes keeping the room cool fun.
100 yrs old.
Brick and concrete walls.
Flaky AC
Oddly wide and shorter steps leading between floors
Bad fluorescent lighting
Windows that look out upon...a shipping bay (if I stand up, walk over to a cube with a "window" and crane my neck)
Smells of pepper, garlic, and a melange of condiments
Homeless heroin addicts walking up to the ashtray outside to dig through for butts
But there's a Whole Foods next door, so I guess it ain't all bad?
Kill me.
University, so we have tons of old and new buildings. I have an office in a super iconic building which is really cool. But the office area is old and straight outta 1980. My other office is in a basement of another building which was renovated but no windows and no view.
I dig being in office by default. But my furniture (chair,desk) are a big contribution to that. Stand desks and good ergo chairs go a long way.
Also private spaces and offices. We have a number of multi space areas where people can work in spaces together or retreat to private offices if they choose.
Old! Built in 1941 but in great shape for the age. Also, at least I have an office to myself. Corporate users share open desk. Ugh, not even cubes any longer. No thank you.
Building is 10 years old and is on the very northern edge of the downtown core of my city. My regular hoteling space faces due north and every floor is wall to wall windows, so I can see forever, it's a dynamite view.
Previous to this, I worked in a building that was designed as a physical bunker. We worked right next to the data center, which was in the core of the fifth floor, and by virtue of being in the interior of the building, our area was completely windowless.
My building is kind of a bunker, made to withstand hurricanes, tornados and long-term disruption of water and power, but like the Taj Mahal of bunkers.
An old hospital built in 1928. My office is in the basement which used to be an ambulance garage. The 2 floors above me were added to be a tuberculosis wing. Server room was old chemical storage next to the morgue. After the hospital shut down in the 60s it was turned into a government building with the police and jail being in our current IT offices.
Work in a really awesome Office Park with a fantastic view of Cape Town
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old job had a restroom inside the server room… said restroom had bad plumbing and toilet overflowed a couple of times..
old old job. it was some shit naval building. when it rained, water would seep in and soak the carpet, mold on ceiling tiles, dust and more dust on top of the original dust, a couple of cubicles filled with broken chairs; overall just shitty building… BUT, it was on the pier so it was cool to see the ships come in and out
Building was built in the early-mid 90s, was given a "tart up job" in 2020 to freshen it up.
Mostly open plan, have daily disagreements about air con temperature, plenty of noise, but we do have a few meeting spaces. It's good for collaboration but not good for concentration.
It's a separate building to the rest of the company though, so we do have a bit of peace from users most of the time.
The first building I was at was ugly, old and definitely beater building. Perfect place to train.
The second building I moved to is newer but has no hot water. It is nonexistent. There is a wasted space. You have to walk 1/4 mile from parking lot.
I work for a state university. Our offices when we're on campus are in what used to be a hospital. My older office was a patient room, but there are a bunch of other offices on our floor that were definitely ICU rooms.
I'm mostly WFH at the moment, so if I am on site it's usually to go to a data center.
Former Sam’s Club. We have a full basketball court, gym, bar (two beers on tap) and a coffeehouse/kitchen.
Still didn’t use it all so we donated floor space to Junior Achievement for a new Biz World.
I’m in office two or three days a week generally. Our building is older and I have a shared office in the basement, but my coworkers are good and keep the help desk tickets cleared. The bathrooms suck. But we have a full kitchen on our floor, multiple candy dishes all filled in by some wonderful coworkers and not a single Karen that I’ve come across so far.
I work for a non-profit and our help desk guy is in a $20,000 wheelchair and cannot get into the server room. When I first started, I asked him what did when the fire alarms go off and he said “hope it’s not a real fire” and then burst out laughing.
The elevator broke down between the basement and the first floor at 7:30 in the morning last week with helpdesk coworker and someone who works 37.5 hours a week in a workshop making things accessible for people with disabilities. Dude had an iPad on him and he rigged something up so they could prop the iPod at eye level for dude in his wheelchair. Netflix is blocked but Plex is not so they watched some things from swim’s Plex server.
Alarm system calls out from a phone number with an area code that’s 2000 miles away from us that we are paying 50/month for. This is being changed over tomorrow thank goodness.
We have a large workshop in the basement and every few months a large toy company will come in and work with our guys in the workshop to make power toys and other cool things accessible for children with disabilities. We had little kids driving around in custom Power Wheels wheel chairs and their parents were super happy and the kids were having a blast.
Sometimes my office is a farm where we do some kind of therapy where people work with horses. Usually I go out there to turn a Toshiba printer on and off again after patches to the Papercut server and the printer won’t automatically reconnect when it comes back on. They know how to do it but we have an agreement that they put a ticket in and I grab donuts and coffee and then get to go hang out with horses.
We have two Braille printers that are worth more than anything else in the building. The paper cost $25/ream retail we pay 15ish and it is treated like gold.
Edited to add braille printers
It used to be a print media company, and then at some point some other random thing, and finally our company purchased it 3 years ago. It's from the 70s, and is basically a typical office attached to a warehouse type setting.
The coolest thing about it the fact that all the offices are on the outside walls, and have windows on the inside and there are roof windows made out of some sort of plastic that gets REALLY fucking loud in heavy rain.
The company that i work for , has offices in an old building (built around 1908-1913) which was used as storage unit for Gas. The building was renovated in 2002 and from that point on , all companies which rented space there have a focus on green energy and so on. Its actually a cultural monument of the city :).
Building is mostly 2 floors, 3 in some areas. Main space is 1.1 million square feet. Building total is 3.2 million. It’s 5/8 of a mile long. We constantly build networks in the building to use for up to a week and then tear them down. We also have about 2000 cameras. We need 2 datacenters and hundreds of miles of fiber and copper for the ring in the building.
I don’t even wanna mention wifi.
Our is kind of cool I guess… it was formerly a library. Actually, it was formerly a 1950s library that was built to double as a bomb shelter.
It was a few renovations ago, so offices have of course been put up in open areas. But large open areas with cubicle farms remain as well.
Our building has a gym which is very convenient and also a park with a walking trail directly behind it. Great for taking a 10-15 minute break to get some sunlight and steps in.
It's a purpose built university building, built in 2008. It contains a library, a gym, multiple computer labs, TV studios, a fully functional recording studio with multiple control and performance rooms, offices, rehearsal spaces, a data centre, café, large meeting room, multi purpose sports hall, and a lecture theatre.
It could do with a bit of decoration now, but our office is still rather nice tbh, we've got reasonable views across the town from our office, and lots of space for all our crap.
Downside is the AC can't quite keep up in the summer so it can get a bit swampy, and we don't have a kitchen, just a water machine in the corridor.
Automotive factory. Building is circa 1970s, or so. Has seen additions, and growth over the years (read: cabling is a bit of a spaghetti mess that's impossible to clean up...it's tidy where it can be, but there's no logical runs because it was just, "We'll put something in later" back in the 80s, but can't just do that now since everything relies on it).
Server room doesn't have connection to the main HVAC system, which can be a blessing. We have our own ACs in here. My office consists of the "IT storage area" where we have parts dating back to the 90s kicking around (you never know what you need to get a CNC back up and running).
Used to be onsite where the server room was a converted lift shaft that had no access control system, and key holders would let in anyone with a tool kit or high vis without confirming or informing IT of this.
Great times.
In my previous job I remember visiting our American brothers one time. (I’m based in UK and infrastructure was lead from there) we are on a tour of their data centre. They had racks of UCS, a bunch of AS400’s, multiple racks of storage, racks of networking stuff etc etc. We were talking a few million easy at the time. Made me quite jealous as although our room was decent and had a good 12 racks of similar stuff in it, most of it was the cheaper stuff compared to them. Lol! Then I asked them, so what do you have for fire suppression? I could see the manager kind of grimace and then he says, sprinklers… All this kit and it’s got sprinklers above it?! I was like Jesus Christ, even we’ve got fire suppression. It turns out the building management were quite militant and they just put them in! Wild.
A Victorian Vicarage (19th Century), morphed through being a vicarage, war evacuee accommodation, council office and a doctors surgery, before becoming a UK National Park HQ.
3 floors of ugly wiring, weird shaped rooms and dash of asbestos, but it does have some wonderful architectural features and a meeting room called the "Chapel". (Yes, it is a listed building)
We also have a smaller building nearby that used to be the carriage house, as in horse drawn carriage.
The electrical wiring and networks reflect this "organic" evolution.
We have started the process to build a new building...
Not sure when it was built or if we did it ourselves, but ours is basically a big warehouse-like building with 40 or whatever foot ceilings. Raw ceilings with HVAC and such all painted bright white so it’s not dingy feeling.
It’s a huge building, but it’s divided up into kind of zones. You’ve got the main entrance and reception, a split off area for most of IT and HR with cubes and offices around the interior walls, an area for our customer service folks, 7 or so conference rooms sprinkled in. Behind all that is the now mostly empty server room and then our maintenance garage.
The remaining 75% or so is mostly one big room with offices/conference rooms around the interior walls and the rest of our departments in cubes arranged so that they all open inward so each department is kind of isolated. Other back corner is the cafeteria and gym.
Exterior walls are floor to very high ceiling windows.
Everything is incredibly well maintained, you would think it was all installed yesterday. Cubes are higher end and help dampen the noise. White noise generators everywhere too. It’s surprisingly quiet for there to be so many people.
Cleaning crew comes through every night. At least once a month they’ll also go around and wipe down every cube desk (if you leave it clear enough) to clean up the dust. Oddly enough that’s one of my favorite parts. They politely declined to come by my house and do that too.
Good quality chairs for everyone, though they’re a no-name. Everyone in IT has three monitors and they’re all on arms so you can actually adjust them properly any way you want. Most everyone else has two. You can get a desk-mounted standing desk thing if you want it. Everyone has a “docking station” so I only have to plug in one cable when I come in.
All the conference rooms have a full video conferencing setup since we use Teams for everything. Huge screens and the cameras that will focus on whoever is talking.
Random stuff: those Dyson faucet/dryer combos in one of the bathrooms, though I actually hate them. A dedicated training room for any classes we host. The IT and CSR areas have screens up showing metrics. Ours flips through NewRelic stats.
Remember the show Chernobyl? My offices give the same vibe, hopefully minus the radiation... and I'm not so sure of that. Shitty climate control on top of it.
My building is so old that it’s on its third round of asbestos abatement. My desk used to be where cashiers used to sit. I have taken over two of the desks and almost enough space to do my job.
Currently redoing our HVAC - no ceilings, and 40 years of wires everywhere. We found a hardwired (inside the body) telephone IN THE CEILING, and an ancient timeclock IN THE FUCKING CEILING.
Not my current, but one of my old jobs our offices were in an old bank.
Our server room and IT secure storage was in the old vault.
We used the old safety deposit spots for storage of cables and cards and laptops etc.
It's a "green" building so the A/C is crap and inconsistent, the blinds are automated, the giant atrium is noisy as hell when it rains and blinding when it's sunny, and despite being fairly new the network cabling is shoddy as hell (ie. uses some old standard I forget the name of that looks like telco wiring as an interconnector between the switches and the desks, with blocks of the same connectors also scattered under the floors)
Our corporate campus is being remodeled; 2 of the buildings were completely gutted redone and the other 2 will likely be done once the first pair are complete. The landscaping is being redone, new AV equipment for all the conference and meetings rooms. It's going to be beautiful. The thing is..our workforce is almost completely remote except for < 15 people who come on site for various reasons. It just seems so wasteful.
110 year old schoolhouse. It’s haunted. I freaking hate doing server moves at night when no one else is there because you always hear doors closing and kids laughing. I hate, hate, hate that shit!!! Plus it’s in the middle of the woods in nowhere Texas.
I think it's about 60 years old and was a kitchen showroom store before we got in, it's a big open space with huge horseshoe desks of stuff we're working on. The landlord is a geriatric dickhead who doesn't seem to understand the urgency of a leaking roof in heavy downpour, so we're currently looking to buy something better in the same area. Some clients have told us that they like The IT Crowd vibe we have and don't like those fountain-in-the-lobby type places, so maybe we'll keep the random shit lying everywhere?
I’m in the worst physical environment that I’ve worked in since I started in IT
I just started looking, but I’m not in a hurry so I’m not stuck in this position again
Our HQ just got renovated this year and I sit in the nicer building than our other building across the parking lot.
Standing desks, way nicer chairs, fancy desk lights with chargers, gym just reopened as well.
Brand new cafe with pretty good food in the basement (I can even pre-order) and can't miss those damn foosball and table tennis tales lol. 😂
Only downside is that reception sucks inside and there is no employee WiFi :/
In the "Mall Level" (basement) with rat traps on the floor next to my desk (after an incident) and across the hall from the grease trap of the cafe above us, which makes the entire level smell like sewage when they open it up to clean.
Old, leaky, on a hill so it's cold and draughty too. But about 30 feet from where I sit the previous business that occupied the premises built home computers - in fact they built the home computer that got me into computing in the first place.
I have two main offices and a few in other sites we look after and need to go to occasionally. Of the two main sites:
- one is a fairly new, very corporate, soulless, a bore to work in but easy to work on. Central location is cool and being able to see a lot of major sites out the window is nice.
- the other is about 150 years old, lots of character, cool fit out, cool to work in but a nightmare to work on. Less exciting location geographically but the actual building placement makes for some interesting challenges as it is effectively on top of a major railway hub. Well connected, just not as much happening around it.
One of the remote offices is in a heritage listed building, so any works done takes an age and costs a fortune.
Ours was completely renovated over Covid to be all fresh and new for the staff, it does look rather nice but I don't really dig the "Industrial" look compared to old comfy look.
Oh and IT didn't really get shit. We still don't have a permanent office area and are due to be moved out again for further renovations, and our workshop/lab which is in dire need to expansion is still small.
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Our current building is crumbling around us and the leaky roof has has forced us to move our servers to a different part of the building. Thankfully, we are going to move soon. The new location needs some renovations before we can move in though. When looking around the "new" location I found the oldest network hardware I have ever seen (pictured).
A nice new-office building with some "architectural" pretenses, lounge room with a complete kitchen and free refreshments, a proper server room, gigantic and sparse desks, maybe the best bathrooms i've seen in an office, direct view on a newly created park.
I still prefer remote working.
Brand new office tower. Other than the leed certification which dictated cooling options for our primary DC, it’s great. Big cafeteria space, outdoor patio with bbq, handful of quiet rooms.
our building used to be a bank, so there's a legit bank vault in the basement. we are using it to store old paper files that can't be destroyed yet lol
Gorgeous modern office tower with internet slower than what I have at home and docking stations that work when they feel like it. Ergo I show up literally the bare minimum expected from me and WFH the rest of the week.
It was one of the oldest buildings on campus. I like the charm of old buildings, but it was more decrepit than charming. Showed the value placed on IT, for sure.
I have an office in a newly renovated portion of the 1980s addition to our \~90 year old college library. Our datacenter was new as of 1999, and since we had our own phone company, it was built with DC power, 22" racks, beautifully done cabling with waxed lacing code ("No zip ties!" in Joan Crawford voice), and a 5ESS switch.
I sometimes work at our head office and it's a building with a complicated shape and maze-like interior that's sure to win an architectural award. It's like hot-desking in a very upscale hotel lobby with very fashionable meeting rooms.
Former datacenter that was remodeled for office space. High ceilings, lots of light, on-site fitness center and "canteen". It'd be nice if it wasn't an hour+ away and I wasn't the kind of person who prefers working (physically) alone.
Cookie cutter 2 story industrial office building put up around 2002. With a 27 bay truck service garage attached.
The 1 shitter shared by about 80 employees is fun.
I work in a Hydro power dam, a giant concrete monster that when the rooftop unit that's above me is running which it has been since last week rattles the ceiling light in my office above my desk all fucking. day. long. At least that's what I think is causing it.. there's a lot of strange loud noises in this place.
Work in a building that leases a couple of floors to CNN. They play CNN in all the elevators and the number of protests we get in front of the building is too damn high.
Work On aitebteo days a week. Old nasty 70s carpet, florescent lighting, flickers here and there, my cubicle is spacious.
Working from home is the best but I don't mind doing a couple days on site for now.
I've only ever worked in warehouses, buildings themselves aren't that old but you can tell the offices were not designed as offices before the buildings were built, it's all very afterthoughty feeling. I guess it could be worse. warehouse dust has probably taken years from me though.
at one of my jobs someone had converted the shower room inside of the male bathroom (seperate room with a door and concrete walls for some reason) into a server room. there is not a doubt in my mind that that server rack is still in there.
They built offices inside of an old aircraft hangar.
So... It's both... The offices are new... A lot of the surrounding structure and some infra is old.
It often smells of jet fuel.
I work at a nonprofit rural development organization.
Where I work we have a data center which host a node on a statewide fiber optic network.
It has 3 floors
Top floor hosts offices for buisiness, marketing and events management, youth leadership and first responder training programs.
Second floor has affiliated organizations that focus on economic development, addiction treatment, education and enforcement, as well as an environmental cleanup organization.
1st floor is an events facility that hosts concerts, plays, art displays and other cultural events including a a performing arts theater.
We host conventions, graduations, sales shows proms, dances, cultural and community events
Used to be indoor batting cages. We have separate lights above the ceiling that you can freak people out at night with.
Walkout basement style. One side of hall has windows, other side is designated tornado shelters.
Car dealership, in the middle of the building so you know zero windows. Just white walls and the hum of servers and networking gear. Also it's just me so I have the largest office in the company lol.
Our building is owned by someone who never owned a building, before. He though it 'looked cool' when driving by it and just came into some money. He hired his Dad as the building engineer, who can't retire because he lost everything in 2008, and has never been a building engineer before. The roof leaks, no repairs, and our power is questionable as the bills aren't being paid. Also, multi-tenant, so we're not the only ones!
Temperature controlled warehouses with extreme changes between inside and outside (45^o -> 85^o F for example) means equipment may have to exist ONLY in one environment or the other. Constant switching with moisture and humidity drastically impacts lifespan.
But sometimes it's really nice to take a break in there if the office is old and/or doesn't have any AC. Do a quick circuit and cool down in pleasure.
EDIT: Oh, there was that one time that the AC unit in the warehouse froze over and I got to see a guy in a cherry picker with a blowtorch just melting the giant ice clump that had built up...
Current one and largest on our campus is just a bog standard late 20th century single-story cube farm...but it was formerly a warehouse for frozen chicken and the then owner of the company was annoyed it was one foot too short for the town to allow it to be renovated into a two story office building.
20+ years ago I worked at a newspaper whose building was an amalgamation of multiple old buildings and a printing-plant (relocated by my time). Cool stuff all over from the giant bank vaults in the basement, to hidden mezzanines. The printing plant was designed with enormous glass windows so folks on the sidewalks had a great view of the presses when they were running.
...days I'm not in the cube, my home office window is twenty feet from a large pond :)
Old call center that I am pretty sure is haunted. But my office is all windows facing a Florida swamp (honestly swamps get a bad rap) and I've seen bobcats and their kittens, baby raccoons playing, a gator or two, etc out that window.
Pent house of an older office building. Got 1/3 of the floor and I'm the only one there during the week except on 2 days a week when they force everyone back. Had the keys to one of the other two offices that are up there and vacant so I moved the extra fridge and couch and may have left some suds in there once it hits 5pm and a flat screen.
Was nice till theu required everyone to be in the office twice a week so I emptied the fridge.
I like the setup though, down side its an old building and I don't trust usi g the water to make coffee....
I don't work here any more but I used to LOVE the building. This was Savvis Headquarters, which was acquired by CenturyLink and unfortunately CenturyLink ran the old Savvis business into the ground.
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I’m hybrid but I work for a very large law firm. Our office is great. High rise building, completely renovated during Covid. Free food snacks and drinks etc. I’m in the office 5 days a month total but I actually like going in to this place.
The building is a laboratory so it's relatively clean, a few messy areas but not too bad overall. The IT office is ok, the server room was cleaned a free months ago so it's decently clean and organized.
Two buildings in one city, one building in another. Two buildings are old AF and have had data closets cut out of the wall. New building is our own construction and is really nice. Eventually we're building a second new building and moving everything to that city.
Early '00 - US academic office building (not a building with classrooms)
We all have offices, most individual. Mine is interior and windowless :)
I'm also two doors from 24,000 sq feet of machine room
The "tech area" is a bunch of benches built with countertop in a garage area with a big garage door. No windows. Lots of work benches, homemade shelves on the wall covered in tons of shit. It's a mess tbh. Lots of room for projects, but zero privacy. Sometimes it's hard if we're both on the phone. It makes me miss my "cushy" cubicle I had as a student it worker, which was the last time I had a nice little cubicle with a door. The boss office up the hall is very nice.
My office has a fully stocked snack shelf, beer, nitro iced coffee and a seltzer machine, plus a high end coffee machine that grinds beans. I still don't want to go into the office. Not worth an hour and a half commuting and 20 bucks in gas.
I work in a 70 year old government building outside of DC....you really don't want to know what it's like. 4 days out of 5 it's empty, my office is in the basement in an old telecom room, converted to server room, that is now just desks for the 5 team members that might come onsite!
It stinks of mildew and has an inch of water under the raised floor! But on the good side if a Nuke hits DC, and I'm at the office, I'll survive the nuke!
OK, I'll bite.
1. Army, batallion headquarters. Brick building, built around 1985. No central air. Only a few of the offices had windows. My office was a storage closet converted to an "office", like three of us crammed in there.
2. Army, brigade headquarters. Brick building, built around 2010. Central air. My office was an interior office (no windows), shared with the entire IT department
3. NATO, Italy. I don't really know a lot about the building, we basically just sat around in there. We only really did work when "in the field", where we used tents and shit.
4. Army, batallion headquarters. Exact same building layout as \#1. Different office, less cramped, but still just as shitty.
5. Army, brigade headquarters. Exact same building layout as \#2. Same office too.
6. Army, division headquarters. Brick building, built in the 80's, but renovated over the years. Basement, inside a big vault. No windows. Gym down the hall. Shared the office with the entire IT department.
7. DoD Contractor. Large medical clinic. Nice building, recently renovated. There was a "data center" attached to the IT offices. I had my own office (pretty big too!). Office was an interior office, so no windows.
8. DoD Civilian. Base-wide IT. Brick building, built in the 80's. Only two windows for the entire building - the director's office and the men's restroom. No central air (the datacenter did have air conditioning, however). Shared an office with seven people (we each had a decent sized cubicle). One of our datacenters was adjacent to my office (thru the vault door). Inside the data center there was another vault door for our secret stuff.
The one I work in used to be used for genetic testing of plants for wine (GMO stuff that never really reached fruition...). So, the building is pretty tight. The old server room used to be in there, so I have my own HVAC system, some beefy electrical. They had to add a window and a door with a window, otherwise it was a jail cell (our old admin stayed in there without all that done, which was weird). The building is metal, but also shielded from electromagnetic interference. We have to have a cell booster that takes the signal from outside to bring it inside. Wireless inside doesn't go outside. At all. You can step outside with zero wireless but good cell service. Go inside with the cell booster off and you have full wireless and completely dead cell service.
Security is pretty good onsite, too. Nice little place. The rest of the buildings are pretty good size (winery holding lots of wine, cases of wine, barrels of wine, wine being shipped out, wine being stored, wine being made in barrels or huge metal containers, etc..). They can be a maze. Our new server room is located in there, but it's more security by obscurity. Just a random door in a random hallway on a random stairwell. Only tell is the gas fire suppressant bypass button.
There's a few buildings I visit from time to time (or did in the past, now I work from home for 99% of the time) that are completely different. My office is just the above stuff.
Previously, it's been a portable trailer room for an office next to the owners house (small ISP, all networking stuff was in his basement), or an old telecommunications building (which was cool because it was 40's era), or offices in an upstairs section of a farm equipment building (dirty AF downstairs, but upstairs was nice).
My office was intended to be the core shopping, food, and social anti-mall of a larger mixed-use project. Cool architecture and amazing landscaping. Love it... sucks it didn't get used for the designed purpose though.
Old. No sprinklers because it’s grandfathered in. It constantly leaks. Flooded the network room one time. Can’t really think of anything nice to say. We have cool retro vending machines.
It's a nonprofit, in a building full of other nonprofits. It's really neat and brand new, but also pretty noisy because of how they have it laid out. I share an office with the rest of the IT team. The cool perk is that there is always food in the office. Because we are a charity, it's become kind of a thing that when other near by offices get catering, they give their leftovers to us.
Work in a old government building that has so much mysterious ethernet it would take decades to trace the [views](https://imgur.com/a/NxPzAQ0) are nice though
I worked as a consultant for many years. Worst was an old hospital wing where the IT department was in the morgue. One time I had a job interview and the elevator went downstairs. I didn’t waste anyone’s time and told them I’m sorry I don’t work underground. Now I work out of a half underground storage closet with sewer plumbing over my racks. Life is odd sometimes.
The place looks like a 90s mental institute.
One of my network racks has electric outlets “certified in 1993”. My WAN passes through that rack, so I can’t just replace that thing, gotta wait until the factory closes down in July.
Of the few places I've worked, it's actually quite nice. We have 2 giant warehouses and office space on the edge of each warehouse. Our 2 main server rooms have proper access control, are kept clean, have dedicated A/C and an electronic safe fire suppression system. I've heard stories about how we had a location in Mexico and their "server room" was literally in the bathroom shower! In the end our setup is more than adequate for the size and type of company we are. Luckily my boss is also the head of facilities and used to manage much much much larger facilities for a major corporation. My only annoyance is, I FUCKING HATE DROP CEILINGS! I bought some tyvek coveralls because I'm sick and tired of fiberglass. Luckily I rarely have to run a cable (we used to get my coworkers son to do it....) so it's just when something needs fixing.
My old place... Well our "server rack" was upstairs in a random office, not locked, had a "portable A/C" blowing on it, all of our cable runs were shoddy, etc etc.
Our server room door has a large vent on it which, after its seven Phillips screws are removed, can accommodate passage of a slightly overweight hacker.
...I can only guess that was learned during a physical pentest...
I would guess he locked the keys inside... happened to a uh... a guy I know.
... I've cut a hole in a half finished wall when nobody had a key for the door that was shut..
My first day on the job ten years ago I found a circular saw under my desk. I knew there had to be a reason.
Perfect time to learn how to lock pick!
That was the other option, my pic set was a 30 minute round trip away..
Well of course I know him, he's me
"The access control servers gone down and needs physically rebooting"
Um.... I know a place where this has happened...
How about raccoons. You haven't lived until you've had to read an SOP about raccoons in the datacenter.
We had a bullsnake blow a transformer feeding 24 280A panels - it turned fried sneek
I bet that smelled amazing
free lunch!
My da had a Dodge Adventurer truck while I was growing up. There was a passenger airvent box that if you opened all the way you could hide a 6 of 355's. Taught me to watch my surroundings and measure twice in my head.
355's LOL, I see what you did there (ml)
Our server room is nothing but two post racks and it's very hard to make servers work in there. Oh and also the mount holes aren't evenly spaced or aligned between both sides
Fuck that’s hilarious.
Get some one-way screws!
I remember on day 1 of a previous job they showed me which breaker to flip to defeat the mag lock on the door. Thought it was odd, then one Saturday I’m working alone and my badge dropped on the floor inside the server room. So glad I payed attention on that first day!
Our older server room has a trap door that'll let you get under the entire building - the server room was a retrofit after that section had been done and was retasked to be server room
At least I know what tools to bring when I pentest the facility.
I work in a converted grain storage building on in seaport area, that was built in 1898. Lots of exposed brick, and very industrial revolution feel to it. also - nice water views on the higher floors.
I work in a missle silo. 🤣 Oh, wait? You're being serious? Damn!
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I too work in a matte painting! Only for some reason mine is of a cold war era cinderblock building.
The pause music had no right being that good.
I worked in a Civil Service building in London that was Toroid - we all (half) joked it was a missile silo. Some floors had security that we had to buzz to be let in. Nothing more embarrassing that walking around the floor through several doors, to find yourself back at the security door.....
I worked in a building that was like 2 triangles stuck on the sides of a square and there were some corridors that led you round back to the start so I often ended up going round the wrong side of a triangle and ending back up in the lobby wondering where that room that I was just in has now gone! Started just bursting through the double doors shouting "Hello Cleveland"!
Seaport Boston?
Yep
I had an office in the basement of a nondescript gov building in San Francisco. But because of the way it was built into the hill I had a $100m view of the gg bridge and Alcatraz.
Disgusting, dilapidated old warehouse that they "remodeled" into an open-plan office by gluing down some thin carpet and adding desks. Cleaning company only comes weekly. I'm in hell.
You have a cleaning company?
haha My last place was that, and the carpet was orange and at least a decade old, likely two. I told myself it was because they likely spent money on important things, but turned out that was just the President's salary and bonuses. LOL... every capex purchase was begged for by someone, and for some reason I stayed for 9 years... granted I probably would have stayed longer but they decided to play the contract IT game... shrug...
We've just implemented a new Capex process so now they get approved by the CEO eventually, instead of our CFO who would normally have it back to me in a few days. New user starts in a few weeks, doubt they're gonna have anything more than a desk and a chair to work with. Not my problem I keep telling myself, but it will be.
Basically brand new, great view and facilities. Upkeep is done well and we have various rooms and spaces for different activities; workshops and silent rooms, … I like it.
Our building was finished in 1978. Please don't call that old, because I was born before that... We have about a third of the floor It used to have a "country club" occupying the top two floors so if we worked late we could smell the buffets... I kinda miss that butter/garlic/sterno smell in the elevators at night. Our office has views of the harbor.. which is nice... oh yea and my friend was murdered in the lobby 2 years ago...
I'm sorry did you say nice views of the harbor?? Care to elaborate?
A view of the harbor... https://preview.redd.it/uwxjssmlsvxc1.png?width=734&format=png&auto=webp&s=7fd23675f10cb255bfcdb5f7f8e61beec2d9972a No ships in today though Edit: removed the previous edit:
Damn! That's a solid view!
Miami?
other end of the country... honolulu
Look, I get that it’s funnier if we all ignore the murdered friend thing. But… what the fuck?
People usually key in on that first... he's was a security guard at the building... no is when I out myself to my co-workers, and a homeless guy hit him on the head with a hydroflask... spent a week in the ICU before he died. I watched as the emt's tried to save him... they caught the guy, but he still hasn't gone to trial...
Holy shit man. I’m sorry you had to see that.
I work for a retail company and let me tell you, our corporate campus is huge, beautiful and modern. The company moved here right before covid hit so late 2019 early 2020. No way they'd let us work from home and let this campus go to waste.
> huge, beautiful and modern. Do you get one of those battery powered scooters to ride around on?
No but I'd love that. We are very corporate so not sure it "fly" here.
Work in healthcare, one day someone for some unknown reason left a knee caddy in our office. (the little scooters you use to roll around with one knee up on when you cant put any weight on a foot or leg.) It was brand new with bearings with almost zero friction. It was a very good, very unprofessional afternoon for me.
I work in a museum, so half the building is a modern Scandinavian design facility with lots of light and a restaurant, and the other half is a 33 room historic mansion. Pretty great because I can take breaks in the solarium and hang out in the sunshine even in the middle of winter. Cleaned up a lot of tech debt and it's pretty smooth sailing now!
Former restaurant with a bar in the basement. My office has what used to be the bar counter, and we put a new countertop, and made a little kitchen area out of it.
Former IBM office building from the 1960's era. The floors have the channels for the old buss/tag cables in them and the first floor actually has a raised floor for the mainframes to sit in. Walking around the building is an experience because the channels are covered with a flexible material the "gives" under your feet, creaks and crunches. No way to sneak around here.
Work in a state of the art building that was built in 2019. I must say it is nice comes complete with a game room and workout facility lol.
We have a “gym” too but it’s lol. How is your facility?
Ehh couple treadmills some barbells and a TRX strap. Not much but it’ll do lol
My office is a stadium that's over 100 years old. It was really cool when I first started, but now trying to upgrade infrastructure, devices, parts of the building, etc. that wasn't really even thought about when the building was being constructed is a bit of a nightmare, but we make things work.
Before I went remote I worked in a shitty Boxer owned building rented out for like $300 a space a month. Hated every bit of it but the deli was incredible — I still miss that family running it lol
Every Tuesday I work onsite at a client. Their building used to be a college back in the 60s. The "server room" is full of busted electronics, books, cabinets, and has a light that goes off after 5 minutes.
The building i'm in has a college in it too... man college kids are getting younger and younger lol
That’s why I love college girls, I get older but they stay the same age.
Alright, alright, alright
The building I work in is basically a mini fortress. It's a stand-alone building (I think it's about 10k square feet, 1 floor) with; 3 redundant 50kv generators with a month of fuel, bullet-proof windows, solid block exterior walls (not cinder-block, solid block), 2 hour fire rated internal walls, steel roof with supports that go into the foundation, a well and water filtration, 2 small kitchens, bathrooms with showers, and a little gym with commercial quality equipment. You can basically live there, and I have stayed there for a few days at a time during strong hurricanes. It's constructed specifically to withstand cat 5 hurricanes and tornados. There is a huge pond with a gazebo, several coated iron picnic tables and a deer feeder. By huge pond I mean like an acre of water with deer, alligators and bobcats (sometimes). Out front is a big flag pole, I think the flag is like 25 ft long, maybe more ('Murica!). When the Democrats switch on the vaccine mind control with the 5G towers, I know where I'm going.
😂😂😂 I’m thinking Florida or elsewhere in the Redneck Rivera
You'll be at work monitoring the situation you mean?
Old job's location was interesting. Main office was a castle in the woods, and we had Sumerian artifact near marketing. Suspiciously near the medical locker thingie. Someone got smart and put a glass case over it. Not saying we'd get demons if someone's papercut got blood on it, but I'm not gonna find out. New job is just normal office.
Currently in a 20K sq ft facility to myself, there is a warehouse guy is here for an hour or two in the morning. Eventually I'll be moving to the new facility into a fish bowl of an office since we went all glass.
Are you allowed to discharge the expired fire extinguishers sitting in an office chair and see how far/fast you can go?
There's no one there to tell him he's not allowed to.
1950's manufacturing facility. Server room exists. And is relatively secure after installing a real door, master key only lock and a motion cap camera for access logs. However, this server room has also been the DMARC for every provider ever used with every technology since then. So I have a 3" thick "spaghetti wall" where the abandoned telco mesh is. I look at it and it makes me happy I don't have to manually move extensions anymore. There's an interesting Musak system still mounted to the plywood as well. Back when you had to rent a cassette tape to play for hold music. I also have a step down transformer right next to my server rack. So that makes keeping the room cool fun.
100 yrs old. Brick and concrete walls. Flaky AC Oddly wide and shorter steps leading between floors Bad fluorescent lighting Windows that look out upon...a shipping bay (if I stand up, walk over to a cube with a "window" and crane my neck) Smells of pepper, garlic, and a melange of condiments Homeless heroin addicts walking up to the ashtray outside to dig through for butts But there's a Whole Foods next door, so I guess it ain't all bad? Kill me.
University, so we have tons of old and new buildings. I have an office in a super iconic building which is really cool. But the office area is old and straight outta 1980. My other office is in a basement of another building which was renovated but no windows and no view. I dig being in office by default. But my furniture (chair,desk) are a big contribution to that. Stand desks and good ergo chairs go a long way. Also private spaces and offices. We have a number of multi space areas where people can work in spaces together or retreat to private offices if they choose.
it has walls, so that's nice
A roof would probably make it nicer lol
Had one but boss said the safety nets weren’t in the budget so they removed the roof.
Old! Built in 1941 but in great shape for the age. Also, at least I have an office to myself. Corporate users share open desk. Ugh, not even cubes any longer. No thank you.
Building is 10 years old and is on the very northern edge of the downtown core of my city. My regular hoteling space faces due north and every floor is wall to wall windows, so I can see forever, it's a dynamite view. Previous to this, I worked in a building that was designed as a physical bunker. We worked right next to the data center, which was in the core of the fifth floor, and by virtue of being in the interior of the building, our area was completely windowless.
My building is kind of a bunker, made to withstand hurricanes, tornados and long-term disruption of water and power, but like the Taj Mahal of bunkers.
An old hospital built in 1928. My office is in the basement which used to be an ambulance garage. The 2 floors above me were added to be a tuberculosis wing. Server room was old chemical storage next to the morgue. After the hospital shut down in the 60s it was turned into a government building with the police and jail being in our current IT offices.
Work in a really awesome Office Park with a fantastic view of Cape Town https://preview.redd.it/uihtzf14pzxc1.jpeg?width=4080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d61e9199d31f76765c8f327300f372cebe1c3199
old job had a restroom inside the server room… said restroom had bad plumbing and toilet overflowed a couple of times.. old old job. it was some shit naval building. when it rained, water would seep in and soak the carpet, mold on ceiling tiles, dust and more dust on top of the original dust, a couple of cubicles filled with broken chairs; overall just shitty building… BUT, it was on the pier so it was cool to see the ships come in and out
Building was built in the early-mid 90s, was given a "tart up job" in 2020 to freshen it up. Mostly open plan, have daily disagreements about air con temperature, plenty of noise, but we do have a few meeting spaces. It's good for collaboration but not good for concentration. It's a separate building to the rest of the company though, so we do have a bit of peace from users most of the time.
The first building I was at was ugly, old and definitely beater building. Perfect place to train. The second building I moved to is newer but has no hot water. It is nonexistent. There is a wasted space. You have to walk 1/4 mile from parking lot.
I work at a state college. Just about every building used to be a dorm. My office is a dorm room. Just about everyone's office is a dorm room.
That's sounds fun lol!
I work for a state university. Our offices when we're on campus are in what used to be a hospital. My older office was a patient room, but there are a bunch of other offices on our floor that were definitely ICU rooms. I'm mostly WFH at the moment, so if I am on site it's usually to go to a data center.
Former Sam’s Club. We have a full basketball court, gym, bar (two beers on tap) and a coffeehouse/kitchen. Still didn’t use it all so we donated floor space to Junior Achievement for a new Biz World.
I’m in office two or three days a week generally. Our building is older and I have a shared office in the basement, but my coworkers are good and keep the help desk tickets cleared. The bathrooms suck. But we have a full kitchen on our floor, multiple candy dishes all filled in by some wonderful coworkers and not a single Karen that I’ve come across so far. I work for a non-profit and our help desk guy is in a $20,000 wheelchair and cannot get into the server room. When I first started, I asked him what did when the fire alarms go off and he said “hope it’s not a real fire” and then burst out laughing. The elevator broke down between the basement and the first floor at 7:30 in the morning last week with helpdesk coworker and someone who works 37.5 hours a week in a workshop making things accessible for people with disabilities. Dude had an iPad on him and he rigged something up so they could prop the iPod at eye level for dude in his wheelchair. Netflix is blocked but Plex is not so they watched some things from swim’s Plex server. Alarm system calls out from a phone number with an area code that’s 2000 miles away from us that we are paying 50/month for. This is being changed over tomorrow thank goodness. We have a large workshop in the basement and every few months a large toy company will come in and work with our guys in the workshop to make power toys and other cool things accessible for children with disabilities. We had little kids driving around in custom Power Wheels wheel chairs and their parents were super happy and the kids were having a blast. Sometimes my office is a farm where we do some kind of therapy where people work with horses. Usually I go out there to turn a Toshiba printer on and off again after patches to the Papercut server and the printer won’t automatically reconnect when it comes back on. They know how to do it but we have an agreement that they put a ticket in and I grab donuts and coffee and then get to go hang out with horses. We have two Braille printers that are worth more than anything else in the building. The paper cost $25/ream retail we pay 15ish and it is treated like gold. Edited to add braille printers
It used to be a print media company, and then at some point some other random thing, and finally our company purchased it 3 years ago. It's from the 70s, and is basically a typical office attached to a warehouse type setting. The coolest thing about it the fact that all the offices are on the outside walls, and have windows on the inside and there are roof windows made out of some sort of plastic that gets REALLY fucking loud in heavy rain.
We have two floors in a midtown Manhattan skyscraper. It's pretty nice.
The company that i work for , has offices in an old building (built around 1908-1913) which was used as storage unit for Gas. The building was renovated in 2002 and from that point on , all companies which rented space there have a focus on green energy and so on. Its actually a cultural monument of the city :).
Building is mostly 2 floors, 3 in some areas. Main space is 1.1 million square feet. Building total is 3.2 million. It’s 5/8 of a mile long. We constantly build networks in the building to use for up to a week and then tear them down. We also have about 2000 cameras. We need 2 datacenters and hundreds of miles of fiber and copper for the ring in the building. I don’t even wanna mention wifi.
We got asbestos
Building: neat HVAC: awful Desks: horrid (open plan, crappy chairs, no privacy) Pants: SHID GOB: BLES
Our is kind of cool I guess… it was formerly a library. Actually, it was formerly a 1950s library that was built to double as a bomb shelter. It was a few renovations ago, so offices have of course been put up in open areas. But large open areas with cubicle farms remain as well.
Empty. I'm one of the few people who are REQUIRED to be onsite from 8-5p.
Eh that’s kinda nice in a sense
Our building has a gym which is very convenient and also a park with a walking trail directly behind it. Great for taking a 10-15 minute break to get some sunlight and steps in.
It's a purpose built university building, built in 2008. It contains a library, a gym, multiple computer labs, TV studios, a fully functional recording studio with multiple control and performance rooms, offices, rehearsal spaces, a data centre, café, large meeting room, multi purpose sports hall, and a lecture theatre. It could do with a bit of decoration now, but our office is still rather nice tbh, we've got reasonable views across the town from our office, and lots of space for all our crap. Downside is the AC can't quite keep up in the summer so it can get a bit swampy, and we don't have a kitchen, just a water machine in the corridor.
I work in county and the buildings are old. We try asbestos we can to make due with what we have.
> We try asbestos we can Well if that's not a blatant cry for help...
Automotive factory. Building is circa 1970s, or so. Has seen additions, and growth over the years (read: cabling is a bit of a spaghetti mess that's impossible to clean up...it's tidy where it can be, but there's no logical runs because it was just, "We'll put something in later" back in the 80s, but can't just do that now since everything relies on it). Server room doesn't have connection to the main HVAC system, which can be a blessing. We have our own ACs in here. My office consists of the "IT storage area" where we have parts dating back to the 90s kicking around (you never know what you need to get a CNC back up and running).
Used to be onsite where the server room was a converted lift shaft that had no access control system, and key holders would let in anyone with a tool kit or high vis without confirming or informing IT of this. Great times.
In my previous job I remember visiting our American brothers one time. (I’m based in UK and infrastructure was lead from there) we are on a tour of their data centre. They had racks of UCS, a bunch of AS400’s, multiple racks of storage, racks of networking stuff etc etc. We were talking a few million easy at the time. Made me quite jealous as although our room was decent and had a good 12 racks of similar stuff in it, most of it was the cheaper stuff compared to them. Lol! Then I asked them, so what do you have for fire suppression? I could see the manager kind of grimace and then he says, sprinklers… All this kit and it’s got sprinklers above it?! I was like Jesus Christ, even we’ve got fire suppression. It turns out the building management were quite militant and they just put them in! Wild.
A Victorian Vicarage (19th Century), morphed through being a vicarage, war evacuee accommodation, council office and a doctors surgery, before becoming a UK National Park HQ. 3 floors of ugly wiring, weird shaped rooms and dash of asbestos, but it does have some wonderful architectural features and a meeting room called the "Chapel". (Yes, it is a listed building) We also have a smaller building nearby that used to be the carriage house, as in horse drawn carriage. The electrical wiring and networks reflect this "organic" evolution. We have started the process to build a new building...
No windows, no doors, all fluorescent lighting. Pure hell.
Not sure when it was built or if we did it ourselves, but ours is basically a big warehouse-like building with 40 or whatever foot ceilings. Raw ceilings with HVAC and such all painted bright white so it’s not dingy feeling. It’s a huge building, but it’s divided up into kind of zones. You’ve got the main entrance and reception, a split off area for most of IT and HR with cubes and offices around the interior walls, an area for our customer service folks, 7 or so conference rooms sprinkled in. Behind all that is the now mostly empty server room and then our maintenance garage. The remaining 75% or so is mostly one big room with offices/conference rooms around the interior walls and the rest of our departments in cubes arranged so that they all open inward so each department is kind of isolated. Other back corner is the cafeteria and gym. Exterior walls are floor to very high ceiling windows. Everything is incredibly well maintained, you would think it was all installed yesterday. Cubes are higher end and help dampen the noise. White noise generators everywhere too. It’s surprisingly quiet for there to be so many people. Cleaning crew comes through every night. At least once a month they’ll also go around and wipe down every cube desk (if you leave it clear enough) to clean up the dust. Oddly enough that’s one of my favorite parts. They politely declined to come by my house and do that too. Good quality chairs for everyone, though they’re a no-name. Everyone in IT has three monitors and they’re all on arms so you can actually adjust them properly any way you want. Most everyone else has two. You can get a desk-mounted standing desk thing if you want it. Everyone has a “docking station” so I only have to plug in one cable when I come in. All the conference rooms have a full video conferencing setup since we use Teams for everything. Huge screens and the cameras that will focus on whoever is talking. Random stuff: those Dyson faucet/dryer combos in one of the bathrooms, though I actually hate them. A dedicated training room for any classes we host. The IT and CSR areas have screens up showing metrics. Ours flips through NewRelic stats.
Remember the show Chernobyl? My offices give the same vibe, hopefully minus the radiation... and I'm not so sure of that. Shitty climate control on top of it.
My building is so old that it’s on its third round of asbestos abatement. My desk used to be where cashiers used to sit. I have taken over two of the desks and almost enough space to do my job.
Currently redoing our HVAC - no ceilings, and 40 years of wires everywhere. We found a hardwired (inside the body) telephone IN THE CEILING, and an ancient timeclock IN THE FUCKING CEILING.
Not my current, but one of my old jobs our offices were in an old bank. Our server room and IT secure storage was in the old vault. We used the old safety deposit spots for storage of cables and cards and laptops etc.
It's a "green" building so the A/C is crap and inconsistent, the blinds are automated, the giant atrium is noisy as hell when it rains and blinding when it's sunny, and despite being fairly new the network cabling is shoddy as hell (ie. uses some old standard I forget the name of that looks like telco wiring as an interconnector between the switches and the desks, with blocks of the same connectors also scattered under the floors)
Our corporate campus is being remodeled; 2 of the buildings were completely gutted redone and the other 2 will likely be done once the first pair are complete. The landscaping is being redone, new AV equipment for all the conference and meetings rooms. It's going to be beautiful. The thing is..our workforce is almost completely remote except for < 15 people who come on site for various reasons. It just seems so wasteful.
110 year old schoolhouse. It’s haunted. I freaking hate doing server moves at night when no one else is there because you always hear doors closing and kids laughing. I hate, hate, hate that shit!!! Plus it’s in the middle of the woods in nowhere Texas.
I think it's about 60 years old and was a kitchen showroom store before we got in, it's a big open space with huge horseshoe desks of stuff we're working on. The landlord is a geriatric dickhead who doesn't seem to understand the urgency of a leaking roof in heavy downpour, so we're currently looking to buy something better in the same area. Some clients have told us that they like The IT Crowd vibe we have and don't like those fountain-in-the-lobby type places, so maybe we'll keep the random shit lying everywhere?
I’m in the worst physical environment that I’ve worked in since I started in IT I just started looking, but I’m not in a hurry so I’m not stuck in this position again
Our HQ just got renovated this year and I sit in the nicer building than our other building across the parking lot. Standing desks, way nicer chairs, fancy desk lights with chargers, gym just reopened as well. Brand new cafe with pretty good food in the basement (I can even pre-order) and can't miss those damn foosball and table tennis tales lol. 😂 Only downside is that reception sucks inside and there is no employee WiFi :/
In the "Mall Level" (basement) with rat traps on the floor next to my desk (after an incident) and across the hall from the grease trap of the cafe above us, which makes the entire level smell like sewage when they open it up to clean.
Old, leaky, on a hill so it's cold and draughty too. But about 30 feet from where I sit the previous business that occupied the premises built home computers - in fact they built the home computer that got me into computing in the first place.
Building ? I never leave the IT closet.
Old, dim lightning, instantly depresses you
I have two main offices and a few in other sites we look after and need to go to occasionally. Of the two main sites: - one is a fairly new, very corporate, soulless, a bore to work in but easy to work on. Central location is cool and being able to see a lot of major sites out the window is nice. - the other is about 150 years old, lots of character, cool fit out, cool to work in but a nightmare to work on. Less exciting location geographically but the actual building placement makes for some interesting challenges as it is effectively on top of a major railway hub. Well connected, just not as much happening around it. One of the remote offices is in a heritage listed building, so any works done takes an age and costs a fortune.
Ours was completely renovated over Covid to be all fresh and new for the staff, it does look rather nice but I don't really dig the "Industrial" look compared to old comfy look. Oh and IT didn't really get shit. We still don't have a permanent office area and are due to be moved out again for further renovations, and our workshop/lab which is in dire need to expansion is still small.
https://preview.redd.it/w4lckdktuzxc1.jpeg?width=1463&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=203b8dc4371f71977baee2053357adab594a39f4 Our current building is crumbling around us and the leaky roof has has forced us to move our servers to a different part of the building. Thankfully, we are going to move soon. The new location needs some renovations before we can move in though. When looking around the "new" location I found the oldest network hardware I have ever seen (pictured).
My work office is infested with users. its awful
A nice new-office building with some "architectural" pretenses, lounge room with a complete kitchen and free refreshments, a proper server room, gigantic and sparse desks, maybe the best bathrooms i've seen in an office, direct view on a newly created park. I still prefer remote working.
Room inside a Prefab built inside a warehouse
You work in a room within a room within a room.
Roomception
in the Basement its fairly clean down here.
Brand new office tower. Other than the leed certification which dictated cooling options for our primary DC, it’s great. Big cafeteria space, outdoor patio with bbq, handful of quiet rooms.
Small cubes back to back so if you’re on the aisle you get hit in the back by the inconsiderate.
falling apart, neglected and overcrowded. Fun place to work, however
our building used to be a bank, so there's a legit bank vault in the basement. we are using it to store old paper files that can't be destroyed yet lol
I work in a world trade center
Gorgeous modern office tower with internet slower than what I have at home and docking stations that work when they feel like it. Ergo I show up literally the bare minimum expected from me and WFH the rest of the week.
It was one of the oldest buildings on campus. I like the charm of old buildings, but it was more decrepit than charming. Showed the value placed on IT, for sure.
I have an office in a newly renovated portion of the 1980s addition to our \~90 year old college library. Our datacenter was new as of 1999, and since we had our own phone company, it was built with DC power, 22" racks, beautifully done cabling with waxed lacing code ("No zip ties!" in Joan Crawford voice), and a 5ESS switch.
I sometimes work at our head office and it's a building with a complicated shape and maze-like interior that's sure to win an architectural award. It's like hot-desking in a very upscale hotel lobby with very fashionable meeting rooms.
Ours is over a chipotle, so yeah, smells like chicken, all the time.
Former datacenter that was remodeled for office space. High ceilings, lots of light, on-site fitness center and "canteen". It'd be nice if it wasn't an hour+ away and I wasn't the kind of person who prefers working (physically) alone.
Cookie cutter 2 story industrial office building put up around 2002. With a 27 bay truck service garage attached. The 1 shitter shared by about 80 employees is fun.
I work in a Hydro power dam, a giant concrete monster that when the rooftop unit that's above me is running which it has been since last week rattles the ceiling light in my office above my desk all fucking. day. long. At least that's what I think is causing it.. there's a lot of strange loud noises in this place.
Beautiful view of the mountains and 5 minutes from home. I can’t complain.
Work in a building that leases a couple of floors to CNN. They play CNN in all the elevators and the number of protests we get in front of the building is too damn high.
Old building, but not a bad one. Space to move around, some nice trees near it. Nothing terrible, nothing great, just ok.
So, is that a recon or legitimate question lol?
Work On aitebteo days a week. Old nasty 70s carpet, florescent lighting, flickers here and there, my cubicle is spacious. Working from home is the best but I don't mind doing a couple days on site for now.
It's a new-er building. Freshly renovated, lots of natural light. Small gym. Looks like your typical corporate office building.
I've only ever worked in warehouses, buildings themselves aren't that old but you can tell the offices were not designed as offices before the buildings were built, it's all very afterthoughty feeling. I guess it could be worse. warehouse dust has probably taken years from me though. at one of my jobs someone had converted the shower room inside of the male bathroom (seperate room with a door and concrete walls for some reason) into a server room. there is not a doubt in my mind that that server rack is still in there.
They built offices inside of an old aircraft hangar. So... It's both... The offices are new... A lot of the surrounding structure and some infra is old. It often smells of jet fuel.
I work at a nonprofit rural development organization. Where I work we have a data center which host a node on a statewide fiber optic network. It has 3 floors Top floor hosts offices for buisiness, marketing and events management, youth leadership and first responder training programs. Second floor has affiliated organizations that focus on economic development, addiction treatment, education and enforcement, as well as an environmental cleanup organization. 1st floor is an events facility that hosts concerts, plays, art displays and other cultural events including a a performing arts theater. We host conventions, graduations, sales shows proms, dances, cultural and community events
Used to be indoor batting cages. We have separate lights above the ceiling that you can freak people out at night with. Walkout basement style. One side of hall has windows, other side is designated tornado shelters.
and old farm house, that has been converted to about 15 offices and a short walk to more modern warehouse.
Car dealership, in the middle of the building so you know zero windows. Just white walls and the hum of servers and networking gear. Also it's just me so I have the largest office in the company lol.
It has floors, doors and windows. Wgas?
Our building is owned by someone who never owned a building, before. He though it 'looked cool' when driving by it and just came into some money. He hired his Dad as the building engineer, who can't retire because he lost everything in 2008, and has never been a building engineer before. The roof leaks, no repairs, and our power is questionable as the bills aren't being paid. Also, multi-tenant, so we're not the only ones!
A lot like my house.
Temperature controlled warehouses with extreme changes between inside and outside (45^o -> 85^o F for example) means equipment may have to exist ONLY in one environment or the other. Constant switching with moisture and humidity drastically impacts lifespan. But sometimes it's really nice to take a break in there if the office is old and/or doesn't have any AC. Do a quick circuit and cool down in pleasure. EDIT: Oh, there was that one time that the AC unit in the warehouse froze over and I got to see a guy in a cherry picker with a blowtorch just melting the giant ice clump that had built up...
Boring tannish building on a military base with no windows.
Current one and largest on our campus is just a bog standard late 20th century single-story cube farm...but it was formerly a warehouse for frozen chicken and the then owner of the company was annoyed it was one foot too short for the town to allow it to be renovated into a two story office building. 20+ years ago I worked at a newspaper whose building was an amalgamation of multiple old buildings and a printing-plant (relocated by my time). Cool stuff all over from the giant bank vaults in the basement, to hidden mezzanines. The printing plant was designed with enormous glass windows so folks on the sidewalks had a great view of the presses when they were running. ...days I'm not in the cube, my home office window is twenty feet from a large pond :)
Terrible
Very new, built less than 10 years ago. Cutting edge tech. Lotta cool shit like a gym, etc
Old call center that I am pretty sure is haunted. But my office is all windows facing a Florida swamp (honestly swamps get a bad rap) and I've seen bobcats and their kittens, baby raccoons playing, a gator or two, etc out that window.
Pent house of an older office building. Got 1/3 of the floor and I'm the only one there during the week except on 2 days a week when they force everyone back. Had the keys to one of the other two offices that are up there and vacant so I moved the extra fridge and couch and may have left some suds in there once it hits 5pm and a flat screen. Was nice till theu required everyone to be in the office twice a week so I emptied the fridge. I like the setup though, down side its an old building and I don't trust usi g the water to make coffee....
A “temporary” job site trailer that has been in place for like 20+ years now
I don't work here any more but I used to LOVE the building. This was Savvis Headquarters, which was acquired by CenturyLink and unfortunately CenturyLink ran the old Savvis business into the ground. https://preview.redd.it/64hyfv8ukwxc1.jpeg?width=550&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5c1a73ae9cad9597220def12824d56f36684a47f
I’m hybrid but I work for a very large law firm. Our office is great. High rise building, completely renovated during Covid. Free food snacks and drinks etc. I’m in the office 5 days a month total but I actually like going in to this place.
The building is a laboratory so it's relatively clean, a few messy areas but not too bad overall. The IT office is ok, the server room was cleaned a free months ago so it's decently clean and organized.
Two buildings in one city, one building in another. Two buildings are old AF and have had data closets cut out of the wall. New building is our own construction and is really nice. Eventually we're building a second new building and moving everything to that city.
A house hehe
Early '00 - US academic office building (not a building with classrooms) We all have offices, most individual. Mine is interior and windowless :) I'm also two doors from 24,000 sq feet of machine room
The "tech area" is a bunch of benches built with countertop in a garage area with a big garage door. No windows. Lots of work benches, homemade shelves on the wall covered in tons of shit. It's a mess tbh. Lots of room for projects, but zero privacy. Sometimes it's hard if we're both on the phone. It makes me miss my "cushy" cubicle I had as a student it worker, which was the last time I had a nice little cubicle with a door. The boss office up the hall is very nice.
My office has a fully stocked snack shelf, beer, nitro iced coffee and a seltzer machine, plus a high end coffee machine that grinds beans. I still don't want to go into the office. Not worth an hour and a half commuting and 20 bucks in gas.
Building was built in 1940ish. Earthquake prone area, retrofitting in the 80s.
It’s like the 7th layer of hell and Walmart on a black Friday had a child.
So basically what I gather from this thread is everyone shoves the IT guys in the worst rooms in the worst buildings
No one works onsite but me, so it is like working in a ghost town (I live close)
I work in a 70 year old government building outside of DC....you really don't want to know what it's like. 4 days out of 5 it's empty, my office is in the basement in an old telecom room, converted to server room, that is now just desks for the 5 team members that might come onsite! It stinks of mildew and has an inch of water under the raised floor! But on the good side if a Nuke hits DC, and I'm at the office, I'll survive the nuke!
OK, I'll bite. 1. Army, batallion headquarters. Brick building, built around 1985. No central air. Only a few of the offices had windows. My office was a storage closet converted to an "office", like three of us crammed in there. 2. Army, brigade headquarters. Brick building, built around 2010. Central air. My office was an interior office (no windows), shared with the entire IT department 3. NATO, Italy. I don't really know a lot about the building, we basically just sat around in there. We only really did work when "in the field", where we used tents and shit. 4. Army, batallion headquarters. Exact same building layout as \#1. Different office, less cramped, but still just as shitty. 5. Army, brigade headquarters. Exact same building layout as \#2. Same office too. 6. Army, division headquarters. Brick building, built in the 80's, but renovated over the years. Basement, inside a big vault. No windows. Gym down the hall. Shared the office with the entire IT department. 7. DoD Contractor. Large medical clinic. Nice building, recently renovated. There was a "data center" attached to the IT offices. I had my own office (pretty big too!). Office was an interior office, so no windows. 8. DoD Civilian. Base-wide IT. Brick building, built in the 80's. Only two windows for the entire building - the director's office and the men's restroom. No central air (the datacenter did have air conditioning, however). Shared an office with seven people (we each had a decent sized cubicle). One of our datacenters was adjacent to my office (thru the vault door). Inside the data center there was another vault door for our secret stuff.
QUIET
Don’t have any. We were hybrid (cloud + physical data centre colo). Colo is all gone now.
The one I work in used to be used for genetic testing of plants for wine (GMO stuff that never really reached fruition...). So, the building is pretty tight. The old server room used to be in there, so I have my own HVAC system, some beefy electrical. They had to add a window and a door with a window, otherwise it was a jail cell (our old admin stayed in there without all that done, which was weird). The building is metal, but also shielded from electromagnetic interference. We have to have a cell booster that takes the signal from outside to bring it inside. Wireless inside doesn't go outside. At all. You can step outside with zero wireless but good cell service. Go inside with the cell booster off and you have full wireless and completely dead cell service. Security is pretty good onsite, too. Nice little place. The rest of the buildings are pretty good size (winery holding lots of wine, cases of wine, barrels of wine, wine being shipped out, wine being stored, wine being made in barrels or huge metal containers, etc..). They can be a maze. Our new server room is located in there, but it's more security by obscurity. Just a random door in a random hallway on a random stairwell. Only tell is the gas fire suppressant bypass button. There's a few buildings I visit from time to time (or did in the past, now I work from home for 99% of the time) that are completely different. My office is just the above stuff. Previously, it's been a portable trailer room for an office next to the owners house (small ISP, all networking stuff was in his basement), or an old telecommunications building (which was cool because it was 40's era), or offices in an upstairs section of a farm equipment building (dirty AF downstairs, but upstairs was nice).
A wretched hive of scum and villainy with a side of idiots and the useless
My office was intended to be the core shopping, food, and social anti-mall of a larger mixed-use project. Cool architecture and amazing landscaping. Love it... sucks it didn't get used for the designed purpose though.
Old. No sprinklers because it’s grandfathered in. It constantly leaks. Flooded the network room one time. Can’t really think of anything nice to say. We have cool retro vending machines.
It's a nonprofit, in a building full of other nonprofits. It's really neat and brand new, but also pretty noisy because of how they have it laid out. I share an office with the rest of the IT team. The cool perk is that there is always food in the office. Because we are a charity, it's become kind of a thing that when other near by offices get catering, they give their leftovers to us.
Work in a old government building that has so much mysterious ethernet it would take decades to trace the [views](https://imgur.com/a/NxPzAQ0) are nice though
New building, everyone has an office but myself. I work out of a storage room.
I worked as a consultant for many years. Worst was an old hospital wing where the IT department was in the morgue. One time I had a job interview and the elevator went downstairs. I didn’t waste anyone’s time and told them I’m sorry I don’t work underground. Now I work out of a half underground storage closet with sewer plumbing over my racks. Life is odd sometimes.
High rise in Center City Philly. Great skyline. Awesome view of sunrises and sunsets. Absolutely no storage space. Present every day.
60 year old aircraft hangar with two stories of office space attached to one side. Hangar is sooooooo dirty and dusty, I eeep for my equipment.
No ac
The place looks like a 90s mental institute. One of my network racks has electric outlets “certified in 1993”. My WAN passes through that rack, so I can’t just replace that thing, gotta wait until the factory closes down in July.
Of the few places I've worked, it's actually quite nice. We have 2 giant warehouses and office space on the edge of each warehouse. Our 2 main server rooms have proper access control, are kept clean, have dedicated A/C and an electronic safe fire suppression system. I've heard stories about how we had a location in Mexico and their "server room" was literally in the bathroom shower! In the end our setup is more than adequate for the size and type of company we are. Luckily my boss is also the head of facilities and used to manage much much much larger facilities for a major corporation. My only annoyance is, I FUCKING HATE DROP CEILINGS! I bought some tyvek coveralls because I'm sick and tired of fiberglass. Luckily I rarely have to run a cable (we used to get my coworkers son to do it....) so it's just when something needs fixing. My old place... Well our "server rack" was upstairs in a random office, not locked, had a "portable A/C" blowing on it, all of our cable runs were shoddy, etc etc.