Flex

Since recent, I have given my 'official' office (see How I work), and have gone Flex. This means that I have no regular office, but can reserve an office anywhere. I work two days in Menlo Park (Tuesday is our staff meeting), and three days in Santa Clara. Each office is fully equiped: phone, SunRay, paper, pens. The things you give up is a place for your books and your pictures. My files and books are in a locker in Menlo Park. But that isn't a big deal, since I hardly used them. Googling for information is much faster than trying to find something in a book. Here are a couple of more pictures from the Sun Microsystems Santa Clara campus.

My old office - for nearly 8 years, this obscure building (MPK24), about 3/4 mile from the main Sun Menlo Park Campus has housed my windowless office. Sure this warehouse style building provided big lab space, but it was remote from the action at the main campus.

Here are a couple of picture from my current flex office at the Santa Clara campus.
A view from my current flex office:

The restored historic clock tower building (originally part of the Agnews Insane Asylum - how ironic) . The office shot (above) was taken from the left windown at the second floor.

Technorati:Sun Microsystems

Our next vacation destination: Lake Wobegon

A recent post on the Google research blog discussed the hiring strategy of Google:

We rely on the Lake Wobegon Strategy, which says only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees.

I didn't stand still at the name of the strategy, until a colleague pointed out it is a reference to a fictional place in Minessota part of radio show on National Public Radio (NPR). Lake Wobegon, where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all children are above average". Wikipedia (always to the rescue), points out the term has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others. The Lake Wobegon effect, where everybody claims – impossibly – to be above average, has been observed among drivers, CEOs, stock market analysts, college students, and state education officials, among others. Know anybody else suffering Lake-Wobegonitis? Well, now at least, the name of the Google hiring strategy and curve in the blogpost make a lot more sense to me.

Technorati:Lake Wobegon Google