A Lego Office Experiment

1 minute read

Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will be your Lego Office … This week is Devoxx in Paris, for the occasion, we decided to stream a Lego office experiment that my team did.

What are Lego Offices

I wrote about Lego office in a previous post, as a concept and a set of material that would allow teams to easily configure their workspaces as they wish. At that time, I thought of :

  • laptops
  • extra monitors
  • tables and chairs on wheels
  • movable walls
  • movable white boards
  • movable wall screens
  • a good Wifi

Our experiment

Meeting area in the empty office Work area in the empty office

The last floor of our building in Paris has a nice (really) open space area with rolling tables that we could use. We moved all the team there for one week. As we don’t have laptops with Wifi, we simply asked for enough power and network plugs.

Setup work area Setup meeting area Setup rest area

The place is large enough to have dedicated rest and meeting space. We managed to create a visio setup using our build monitor. We even had a remote lunch once, which we should repeat more often !

What’s missing

Obviously, this was a quick experiment, nothing like a fully architectured Lego workspace, still it helped us to discover issues and blocking points. It turns out that cables are an issue !

Cables on the floor

After getting some feedback throughout the company, it turns out that some developers would never trade their high end connected desktop workstation for a Wifi laptop. Our C++ build can be pretty CPU and network intensive … I guess that means that a real Lego office might require one of the following :

  • A technical floor with all the place required to bring any kind of cables to your machine
  • Powerful servers in a data center to do the grunt work for you
  • Single cable machines (Apple’s USB-C is the only one I can think of right now)

Last minute question

Thinking of it … could different remote offices such as your home, or a co-working space be considered as Lego blocks ?

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