Robert X. Cringely Quotes

I hadn't really worked in an office before Shutterstock, so I didn't have the experience of building a culture, nor did I understand how important that is for attracting and retaining the best talent.

As our company has grown, how we configure and design our offices has been a crucial part of how we foster connection and collaboration throughout our teams.

The office-as-playground trend was made famous by Google and has spread like an infection across the tech industry. Work can't just be work; work has to be fun.

I've worked in an office. People are sitting down doing their stuff, or pretending to do their stuff, and they're bored. I've heard a car tire screech and 30 people went to the window. That was a piece of excitement in their day, that a car might have had to stop quickly, you know. You don't need dinosaurs, you know.

If I was going to go into an office I wanted it to be with people I would choose to be around even if we didn't have to work together and so that was one of the major reasons why I decided out of all the different companies we invested in to work with Zappos.

The attitude of the leader affects the atmosphere of the office

You cannot foster a collaborative environment when people's offices are completely locked, where you cannot even see the assistant because the offices are so big.

It was never tough [ being the new guy]. It's just the warmest group of people [The Office stuff] you could ever hope to work with.

It's doubtful that anyone with an internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.

Open office plans, cell phones, constant notifications: these are all things that fight against sustained attention on a task. For some people and some tasks, that doesn’t matter. But for a lot of important work, it matters a lot.

The less important you are in an office, the more they expect the happy smile.

What I'm trying to do is to create excitement. So people looking at the Bloomberg's office building say, "My goodness, what's going on here? There's something different about this company." You want the employees to get psyched. And it's a chance to meet each other. My job is to get people to work together. With free food and no offices, even for Bloomberg, this might be considered one of the world's great corporate headquarters.

some of my happiest funniest times have been spent in offices. Perhaps because the work was mudane, even the tiniest of distractions become wildly hilarious and wonderful. Actually, I'd say that 90 per cent of my doubled-over-gasping-with-laughther-laughing-so-much-that-you-can't-breathe-and-you-think-you-might-die laughing has occurred during slow days in offices.

I simply constructed a project to try to snap Kurt [Cobain] out of a frame of mind. I sent him a plane ticket and a driver, and he tacked the plane ticket to the wall in the bedroom and the driver sat outside the house for 10 hours. Kurt wouldn't come out and wouldn't answer the phone.

Lampoon was exactly the opposite. The work was a lot of fun, but the office environment was hell. You cannot put 20 humorists together.

I'm working on the Star Wars script today and the people in my office have covered up all my windows with black paper. I guess they wanted to make sure no one could see what I was doing. It seems rather extreme.

There's what is on screen and then for us, it's if you get along with the people and enjoy showing up at work.

I'm trying to sum up President Obama's first 11 months in office. He gave billions to Wall Street, cracked down on illegal immigrants getting health care, and he's sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. You know something, he may go down in history as our greatest Republican president ever.

I've been in office and I've been out of office. And if I were to choose, I'd rather be in office.

What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.

I hung up the phone, jubilant, and threw myself into a wall, then pretended to be getting electrocuted. I do this when I'm very happy.

It's a very collaborative environment [making The Office]. We always do takes of how it's scripted, but then we also mix it up a lot too. And it's kind of a crapshoot, you never know which one... I mean a lot of time improvisation doesn't go anywhere and it's not good at all but, so what was written is often times better.

Flying has always been to me this wonderful metaphor. In order to fly you have to trust what you can't see. Up on the mountain ridges where very few people have been I have thought back to what every flyer knows. That there is this special world in which we dwell that's not marked by boundaries, it's not a map. We're not hedged about with walls and desks. So often in an office the very worst thing that can happen is you could drop your pencil. Out there's a reminder that are a lot worse things, and a lot greater rewards.

I wasn't prepared for this big room with clattering typewriters and teletype printers. You could hardly hear yourself think.

Sitting in an office for TOO long is not natural, perhaps, so that's why we should change it. I didn't say that out-and-out capitalism, which reduces humanity to dollar figures, is natural.