I’ve worked for six companies in my career. In my first two jobs, I worked at the headquarters office. Since then, I’ve worked out of one of the company’s field offices (in other words, a non-HQ office). If you don’t come into a new job’s office situation with reasonable expectations, it can negatively color your experience of that job. I hope this post helps people understand what to expect when taking a job where you’re not based at headquarters.
My first job was a lot of fun (yes, I used to bleach my hair!). In many ways, I got spoiled right at the beginning of my career. This was during the dot com boom of the late 90s, early 2000s. My employer was one of the hottest tech companies in Boston. We had foosball tables, video games, cool parties. There were certainly a lot of perks from being located at HQ. I didn’t really think about what the work experience was of people who worked out in the “field” because I didn’t have to.
Fast forward to two jobs later, I wanted to move from engineering into a customer-facing role. This also coincided with my desire to move from Boston to New York City. I got a job as a consulting engineer of a Boston-based company out of their NYC office. It worked out really well because since I was transitioning from life in Boston to NYC, that allowed me to work out of headquarters in Boston for a month before moving down to New York. I spent that time getting to meet people in engineering, HR, IT — folks I wouldn’t have had face time with if I had started my job in NYC. One of the downsides was knowing that my office experience would change — from the foosball tables, impromptu office parties and karaoke outings, social communities around various activities/interests to going to a small 10-person office where we basically had no perks.
It’s important to keep perspective on things. I hope you don’t take any job because of the office perks. No future employer is going to look at your resume and think more highly of you because you worked at a company known to have a fun HQ. You have a job to do, so do it and don’t worry about the perks. If you work at a field office, you likely do because you’re in a customer-facing role. Take advantage of those opportunities to meet with your customers, even if your job doesn’t directly call for it.
Don’t blame your employer for not being “fair”. Again, take a step back and think. When you have an office with a larger number of employees, there’s greater economies of scale. It’s not reasonable to think that a company can provide the exact same experience and perks for a 10 person office as they can for a 300 person office.
Social interactions in a smaller office can be awkward but they don’t have to be. Again, there aren’t the economies of scale to have wine club, running club, etc. where you can hang out and get to know people with similar interests. In a smaller office, you’re stuck with the people who are there. You can’t expect that you’ll become friends with everyone there but it’s reasonable to expect that everyone respects each other.
In that first job in New York, we had about 5–10 people come into the office on a normal day. We tried to go out for drinks a couple times per month, people invited each other to their homes for BBQs on the weekends, and we had fun lunch-time antics like this blind taste test of various sodas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI_kbTUKMyQ.
We had a good time while it lasted, but I didn’t become lifelong friends with all of them. I’ve maybe stayed in touch with 2–3 of them. That doesn’t mean our small office culture was a failure by any means.
At my current job, I was the first employee in the entire company hired in the New York City metro area (well, technically there was a guy in Princeton, New Jersey, but that doesn’t count). :) For the first six months or so, I was alone.
Again, I took the job because of the potential for growth, both with the company and with my career, not because of any “office perks”. In the almost three years since then, we’ve grown from an “office” of one to about 20 people in the NYC metro area, with ~8 coming into the office on a regular basis.
In a lot of ways, my current office situation is similar to the one back at Endeca. We’re a small team and we don’t have the same perks as the US “headquarters” in Mountain View, California. But we try to go out for drinks regularly, take mid-day walks around Soho, and it’s a good time. None of us knew each other coming into the office but we’ve made it work. What’s fun about being in a smaller office is that it feels like a startup even though you’re a part of a larger company. You don’t have access to the same resources that someone in HQ might, so you have to figure out how to make things work yourself, whether it’s something directly job related or more social.
It takes a certain personality to thrive in a small office environment versus a large office or HQ environment. Be honest with yourself in figuring out what you want out of a job and the office culture because if you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and will be a drag on the rest of the people in the office.
Your experience of a job will change as the office grows, so just be prepared. I’m sure in the next few years, we’ll have to move to a larger office, perhaps with 50 people coming in regularly. It’ll be really different from our current office experience — just keep finding ways to make it fun!
