Working at Reddit: Wired. Working at Wired: Tired. And Bummed.

I posted this story to Global Nerdy, but thought it might also belong here on the Accordion Guy blog, as the questions it raises about office life might be worthy of discussion.

One might say that for Aaron Swartz, one of the people behind Reddit, the honeymoon resulting from their purchase by Conde Nast/Wired is over.

(For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, Reddit is a social bookmarking site that got bought out by the Conde Nast magazine publishing empire. I don’t think they’ve disclosed just how much it was sold for, but it’s a safe bet that the amount was in the low millions. The Reddit employees — all four of them — are now Conde Nast employees and have since been moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts to San Francisco, where they work at Conde Nast’s geek magazine property, Wired.)

The problem is that one would be wrong — judging from some earlier entries in his blog, there wasn’t a honeymoon at all, at least from Aaron’s point of view.

Here’s a snippet from his latest blog entry, Office Space, in which he describes what it’s like to work at his new digs, the Wired offices in SOMA:

You wake up in the morning, take some crushing public transit system or dodge oncoming traffic to get to work, grab some food, and then sit down at your desk. If you’re like most people, you sit at a cube in the middle of the office, with white noise buzzing around on every side. We’re lucky enough to get our own shared office, but it’s not much better since it’s huge windows overlook a freeway and the resulting white noise is equally deadening.

Wired has tried to make the offices look exciting by painting the walls bright pink but the gray office monotony sneaks through all the same. Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first day I showed up here, I simply couldn’t take it. By lunch time I had literally locked myself in a bathroom stall and started crying. I can’t imagine staying sane with someone buzzing in my ear all day, let alone getting any actual work done.

While I’d rather have my own office, I can’t complain too loudly about the open office space at Tucows. It’s not ideal, but I’ve worked in worse setups, and it’s possible to be productive in such an environment. It may have helped that I’ve done my time at computer labs back in University, back when home machines didn’t have the muscle to run Unix and could only hook up to the network via a 14.4 modem. I understand the bit about the noise from the highway; I worked in a San Francisco warehouse building near the same highway back in 2000 and 2001 and know how noisy it can get.

As for distractions from co-workers, I don’t mind. I often welcome it, but that’s my ENTP personality type, and talking to people is part and parcel of holding the title of technical evangelist.

While I would bristle at some of the the technology diktats set by Conde Nast (standard-issue old iBooks, only one approved email client, the administrative website is accessible only via the standard-issue machines), I don’t think I’d have as big an issue with the Wired office environment. In fact, I’d probably say “Whoa! I work at Wired!” every few minutes for the first month.

I’m not as inclined as some commenters to Aaron’s post to dismiss it as whining; I hung out with him quite a bit at the first O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference back in early 2002 and consider him a friend. I don’t think that writing such a blog entry so early in his tenure as a Conde Nast/Wired employee is going to make management feel happy, but it does make for some interesting reading.

I wonder how long he’s going to stay there.

Perhaps his entry should lead you to ask yourself this question if you’re an office worker: Is Aaron having a “who moved my cheese” spell or unsuited to office life? Or is he right, and have you swallowed the Big Lie?