what happens in the big city buildings?

Factual Questions
1

What do the people who work in big city buildings do all day? You know the ones where the entire 30-40 story high building is owned by the one company.

There must be 100’s of people in those buildings but for the life of me I can’t figure out why they’d need so many people.

A labour intensive operation like a call centre I can understand - but they are all moving out into country locations (lands not as expensive etc).

So you people who work in big city buildings tell me what do you do all day, please.

Leechbabe, who works in a little building and doesn’t do much all day.

2

Wow, there’s so much small-town charm in the question, I can’t resist.

A really large corporation can easily have thousands (not hundreds) of employees and it’s esaier to keep them all in one building so they can communicate with each other, have meetings, pass documents around, share jokes, etc. Prior to the easy and compact storage of data on computer (a phenomenon of only the last 20 years or so), whole floors might have be used to store paper records. Banks and insurance companies, with many thousands of customers, needed record space especially. Plus there’s a degree of security in having all your records and personnel in one place, short of the occasional plane crash.

Floors that are not needed by the corporation are typically leased out to other corporations, government agencies, etc.

3

True, before the wonderful age of of micro-miniaturization, a huge amoutn of office space was taken up by bulky equipment & document storage. My company has hundreds of central switching offices up and down the east coast, most ranging from six to twelve stories or more. But ever since modern high speed data switches have replaced the many banks of mechanical relays, we seldome ever use more than one or two floors in these buildings now… the rest of the floors are empty space.

Our building on 140 West Street in Manhattan is I don’t know how many dozens of stories high, but according to one of my coworkers up yonder, we only use two floors for actual switching equipment. I am sure other floors are used for administrative purposes, but I also suspect that a great many of them are vacant.

4

My company occupies maybe 2.75 big city buildings (we completely occupy 2 and lease a goodly amount of space in 2 others) and we’re packed in like sardines.

I work in pharmaceutical clinical trials so there are floors full of MDs, PHDs, RNs, LPNs, and the full gamut of admins, business folks, contracts folks, accountants, database administrators, programmers, and forms design, not to mention floors full of people that all they do is report safety issues to the FDA. Then you have all the technology folks that keep the servers going, keep the software updated, help folks like me when my system goes kablooie.

Then there are floors full of lawyers that review every word of every label, insert, document, ad, poster, billboard, paper, blurb, and blip that our company and our competitors put out. Make sure everything’s on the up and up.

There are floors full of marketing people that do…well, whatever it is marketing people do. Marketing I guess. Then you have their support like marketing analytics and outcomes research.

Then the big guys get like half a floor each, and there’s a few of them, so you got half a dozen floors taken up by big offices, staff, and shmoozing parlors.

Then you have to feed everybody so that takes up a couple floors.

Personally, my job is to help design the forms that the hospitals and clinics fill out when we do a study; review and approve the design of the database and validation programs; sort out problems such as data from Latvia not being translated; figure out names of drugs and diseases from around the world that no one here has ever heard of; do a wee bit of SAS programming; basically get everything all nice and tidy for the programmers and statisticians; work with contract research organizations that do these things for us sometimes. There are four floors full of people that do what I do.

5

Some of us write, edit, lay out, and try to sell ads/magazines. My company, which publishes a dozen or so major magazines, is currently split up between 4 different buildings (each in the range of 5-10 stories) in midtown Manhattan. Pretty annoying and wasteful, esp. as we have to duplicate a lot of essential services (network administration, mailroom, etc.) and it means we don’t have any perks in our tiny facilities (lunch room, gym, etc.). We’re supposed to be tacking a 30+ story addition onto our main building, but somehow, I still have the sneaking suspicion that it won’t have room for everyone. Sigh.

6

I work for an ungainly sprawling ad agency that’s big enough to have its own programmers to create and maintain 110-some-odd databases custom build for the people who use them, rather than buy off-the-shelf packages that aren’t so easily customized. I’m a FileMaker geek and that’s what I do all day. The IT folks are not the only ones here whose work has nothing directly to do with advertising – we have librarians, researchers, an internal travel agency, a couple chefs and a kitchen full of food prep employees, even a bartender who operates our company’s private bar!

All this to ensure that you can be harassed with more effective commercials as you try to watch TV…

7

Well, I work in a Large Building in New York City. The Large Building is owned by a real estate company who leases the building out to several tenents, including my company which occupies three floors.

I sit in a chair and write software all day.

8

See this: The Crimson Permanent Assurance.

9

Many buildings in a large city will not be owned by one company, but will have lots of smaller companies renting space in them, so you end up with a lot of companies taking up a floor or two. Larger companies do fill up a whole building, and (of course) sometimes multiple buildings.

As far as what people do? They do the same sorts of stuff they’d do if you had a complex of smaller buildings. For a bank, for example, you have traders, accountants, customer service reps, loan officers, credit account managers, credit assessors, legal staff, IT staff, HR, probably a call center, and others that I’m forgetting. If you’ve only been around small shops and small businesses you may not realize just how many people do work that’s not at a front desk, but from experience working at larger companies I can say that there is an awful lot of work that people do without being at a ‘storefront’. Also, don’t forget that buildings will not neccessarily be closed to the public - it’s pretty routine to have meeting rooms and such where any ‘outsiders’ that someone needs to talk to can be talked to.

10

I work in a 40 story office building in Midtown Manhattan. There are a few other tenants there. Mostly some well known investment banks, accounting firms, and consulting firms.

I work at one of the accounting/consulting firms as a consultant. We mostly go to clients who are in other big city buildings as well as small town factories in the suburbs where we tell them to move to other buildings in other big cities or suburbs. We don’t have permenant work areas like regular folk. Instead we use a “hotelling” or “virtual office” system where we sign up for a new desk each day.

Ironicly, the only time I’m in our Big City Building is when I have no actual work to do.

11

Wow thanks everyone. It sounds like the big city buildings are in fact little communities of their own.

I’ve only ever worked for small business and we outsource our marketing, accounts etc so it never occured to me that some companies will do this all inhouse.

How cool to have your own bar and restaurant at work. Maybe if I talk real nice to me boss :slight_smile:

12

I’m in the 4th building from the left in this picture - that’s me waving out of the 7th window on the right on the 35th floor.

Behind me are some people checking and processing various paperwork. I have nothing to do with them - I help the big boss in charge of the company, so I have office space here. In the same building are finance companies (people processing loans applications), some sort of shipping company, some insurance companies, etc.

Now, what about those old brown 3-story buildings you see in Main Street, Hicksville, where the parking meters take dimes?? The 1st floor is usually a barbershop with huge black leather chairs, or a Western Union, or a department store with a display of men’s hats in the window, or a diner. What goes on upstairs in those buildings all day?

13

Don’t really want to cast aspersions but I think there might also be a bit of faux naivete involved.

Leechbabe your profile says you come from Melbourne - a city of nearly 3.5million people and home to companies like BHP that are in the top 100 largest in the world. You wouldn’t be putting on a bit of a Crocodile Dundee thing here, would you?

14

Motog I’m shocked and horrified that you be thinking I’m hoaxing you :slight_smile:

Truth is I moved to Melbourne a couple of years ago from the Gold Coast QLD. Our biggest industry on the Gold Coast was tourism so all the big buildings were residential or hotels. I’ve been curious ever since I moved to Melbourne about what people do in those big buildings all day.

I currently work for the CIA in one of those 3 story buildings. Of course here in Oz CIA refers to the Caravan Industry Australia. What do I do all day well this here should about cover it (BTW its a pit rant).