I've heard about this problem repeatedly before. Why are people apparently seriously building and renting offices without windows outside of Western Europe? I mean, you're spending 10-12 hours a day on sophisticated things of (hopefully) very high value that is (hopefully) rewarded accordingly in the marketplace---and yet, such a simple and essentially free thing as daylight is outside your scope? Why is this? What's the point of windowless offices? This is just quite obviously a serious factor for potentially making your people suffer in subtle ways. In tech, you don't want them to suffer, no? What am I missing?
I used to work for a fairly well-known manufacturer of disk drives. In their typical paranoia, they intentionally ensured that our labs had no windows to mitigate the possibility of corporate espionage.
There's clearly a market for it. People make shortsighted decisions based on price all the time. Often the person making the decision isn't the one with the office in the middle but the one at the corner...
You get more usable floor area per ground area if you fill your whole plot of land with a huge cuboidal office block with no inner courtyards and light channels. It's easier and cheaper to build.
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I've heard about this problem repeatedly before. Why are people apparently seriously building and renting offices without windows outside of Western Europe? I mean, you're spending 10-12 hours a day on sophisticated things of (hopefully) very high value that is (hopefully) rewarded accordingly in the marketplace---and yet, such a simple and essentially free thing as daylight is outside your scope? Why is this? What's the point of windowless offices? This is just quite obviously a serious factor for potentially making your people suffer in subtle ways. In tech, you don't want them to suffer, no? What am I missing?
I didn't even know that anyone besides sweatshop workers and miners worked in offices without windows.
Sounds totally unthinkable to me, I would never get anything done.
Guess I'm lucky working from my boat with 22 windows and a view of the sea wherever I look :-)
I used to work for a fairly well-known manufacturer of disk drives. In their typical paranoia, they intentionally ensured that our labs had no windows to mitigate the possibility of corporate espionage.
There's clearly a market for it. People make shortsighted decisions based on price all the time. Often the person making the decision isn't the one with the office in the middle but the one at the corner...
You get more usable floor area per ground area if you fill your whole plot of land with a huge cuboidal office block with no inner courtyards and light channels. It's easier and cheaper to build.
Result is more profit.