Building The Best Workspace For Your Tech Team

Building The Best Workspace For Your Tech Team

A comfortable work space is important in order for students to thrive. The thing about “comfort” is that it’s a subjective term. For example, some people find comfort in a chaotic environment while others need a neat and orderly space to be productive. Increasingly, we’re seeing offices mimic this subjective spectrum.

Walk into any Silicon Valley office and you will see people working in a variety of different settings- employees with laptops on couches and arm chairs, folks sprawled out on adult sized bean bags, teams sitting together around larger tables collaborating, people working at their standing desk workspace and of course some people assuming the classic position; seated in a computer chair at a desk. It’s rare that you’ll see single offices where C-Level execs corden themselves off- at the core of Silicon Valley is the belief that an organization is all one team with one dream.

Although it may seem so, these techies aren’t just lounging about. In fact, they are churning out some of the most popular technologies. This begs the question- shouldn’t schools offer a variety of comfortable working environments for students? If the folks at these large tech companies are producing quality products efficiently and effectively with the help of a “comfortable” environment then why couldn’t it work in a school?

Holberton School is embracing this approach by cultivating a workspace that is conducive for many different interpretations of what’s “comfortable”, making the space an adult learner’s playground. Taking notes from our Silicon Valley neighbors, we’ve incorporated things like soft seating areas which include arm chairs and sofas and we’ve even set up a bean bag nook! In addition to the casual seating and working areas we proudly provide computer clusters equipped with a desk, computer chair, and an iMac. This computer setup allows us to welcome anyone into the space- whether they have a personal machine or not. Want to bring your own computer to work on? Fear not, we’ve furnished our space with additional empty desks to accommodate. The configuration of our desks are also varied to promote different types of communication.

The school’s space is outfitted with many different sized meeting rooms to provide spaces for small and large groups. Being that whiteboarding is at the heart of coding, we were intentional about providing an abundance of whiteboarding space.

Holberton provides both fixed and mobile whiteboarding options! When planning what we wanted out of a space, staff accessibility was one of the important points we wanted to be sure to address. The Holberton Staff are located adjacent to the main computer clusters with an office that boasts two large glass doors. The transparency in the doors signals to students they’re more than welcome! With some finer details of live plants and a few cozy isolated spots, we’re proud to have a space that is welcoming to many different types of learners.

Want to hop on the couch with Holberton? See what students are saying on Holberton’s Review Page on SwitchUp.