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Offices vs. Cubes For Developers?
k12boy asks: "The company I work for has just announced that we're going to move our corporate headquarters (locally, but to a new building) and our facilities folks are currently searching for the new space. My intuition tells me that the developers on my team would be a lot more productive if I could give them offices (even shared) instead of the cube space they currently have, but I don't have any data to back it up. Does anyone have a pointer to any studies that prove me right or wrong?" Studies aside, can anyone think of a time that programmers actuallly did work more happily or productively in cubicles? Might there be advantages to more open workspaces compared to closed office doors?
programmers get privacy from others, quietness, play music w/o others being able to hear, more decorating space for things like magnetic dart boards, more storage space for books, toys, etc. the list goes on....
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Either have offices (quiet and private) or a true open plan office (no partitions)
Cubes are the worst of both with no benefits.
0xB
I am in a cube in a machine room with old raised flooring and IBM mainframe era air handlers, along with about 50 feet of rack systems. It's very noisy, but having my own cubicle with a door I can close, is FAR preferable to sharing an office.
Single Office >= Quiet Cubicle >= Noisy Cubicle >= Shared Office
I have worked at least a year in every permutation of office vs cube, and shared vs not. Obviously a shared cube is the worst and a solo office is the best, but I personally _much_ prefer a solo cube to a shared office. I think having to share an office (or cube) puts a significant amount of social pressure on a person to interact with the other person, and also makes it much difficult to have private conversations or to avoid hearing the private conversations of the other person (or the not private conversations of the other person). For me it is a night and day difference between sharing and not sharing, whereas cube vs office is not that significant.
too much privacy leads to a lack of motivation, in my experience. While I don't condone the use of Big Brother technologies to track programmer productivity, I find that the knowledge that someone can easily see what's on your computer screen makes us (myself and the programmers I oversee) more likely to stay on task.
That said, it took my five minutes to write this because I had to keep alt-tabbing over to my "real work". Sigh.
The trouble with cubes is the complete inability to tune-in/tune-out to the general area chatter. Sometimes you want to hear if a technical debate is starting up among your co-developers so you can decide if you want to contribute your two cents worth. Sometimes you want to concentrate on a particularly tricky design and want complete quiet. An office provides the opportunity to close the door.
Generally, most of us leave our office doors open. If I need to make a short personal phone call, I'll close mine. Working in a cube farm requires finding a small "meeting room" from which to make the phone call. I suppose this cuts down on excessive personal calls, but I doubt most people abuse their phone privileges. The really nice thing, is that when you want to have what is likely to become a lively debate, you don't have to get together and find an available "meeting room" -- you pick the office of someone hosting the debate, and close the door.
Now, you'd think this contradicts the desire to be able to "tune in" to the pulse of the work group. But, I've found that such conversations tend to start through open doorways or in the hall, and migrate to an office if necessary.
You could've hired me.
Funny seeing people demanding fortresses of solitude. Actually, there have been studies of better working environments and isolation tanks didn't rate.
s p?theisbn=0932633439&vm= ) describes an IBM effort in this direction which ended up with people working in shared team areas (not fully open plan, not tiny shared cubes either) with backs to the centre so that each others screens could be seen.
Peopleware (by DeMarco and Lister -http://www1.fatbrain.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.a
More topically, Extreme Programming actually has quite a lot to say on office layout. You can see one example here: http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/c3space.htm
I have to agree to some extent with the naysayers though. Interruptions to flow can be a disaster in shared spaces if there is no check on interactions. If you can get people to shut up for a few hours a day though sharing an office space is fairly productive.
-Baz
I work in an open arrangement. The benefit is I can shout to whomever I want to ask a question. And I might get an answer but from someone else. We had great moral for a while and were very productive. Two things spoiled it. First we moved to a room that just did not have the same layout ie. no more Razor track or dart throwing corridor. Also the room has a lot more traffic since a lot of people use it as a short cut.
Second is as moral was great and caused people to feel better and hence moral got even better the flip side is true as well. So as the group's moral slide it caused at rapid decline. This led to less productivity and people putting in less to no overtime.
From my experience from being a programmer, architect, manager, etc. is moral. I don't really think people care were they work as much as they feel like they are helping to build something and get rewarded rather than enriching a select few aka Enron.
Case in point. I worked as a programmer for a company that moved HQ from the first factory to a small 3-story building. Sure the building was nice, quiet, etc. However in the move the executives were now on their own floor. They were more isolated. The company went from outrageous growth 4-digit to double-digit growth. Why because the employees that did the day-to-day work felt that now they weren't part of the company but enriching a few executives (this was made worse because few people were promoted from within). You use to walk down the hall and poke your head into the CEO's office. Now it required card key and an appointment or getting lucky enough to run into him. Moral plummeted and so did the revenue growth.
Take care of your employees and they will take care of you.
Not anonymous just not stupid when being negative about my employer
I'm a fairly senior engineer, currently in 6 by 9 cube (only managers get offices). I hate cubes - I have a movable screen across my cube opening, and I wear headphones the whole time because of my co-workers on the phone, the meeting rooms nearby, people walking up and down the hallway... Other people might not mind the noise as much, but I get 2-3 times as much work done at home where I can actually concentrate.
If you're doing a lot of group work, a truly open office space would probably be great, but for coding, writing white papers, etc., you need to be able to concentrate imho.
==================================
neophase
Read any book on managing programmers, and you'll discover that programmers are much more efficent in an office than in a cubicle.
Read: This article
Basically programmers need concentration to work, and being in a cubicle all day mean that they are constantly being interuppted.
Not good!
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
This site: http://12simplesecrets.com/management.htm says that the productivity rate is 2.5x better for people in offices over those in cubes. They draw on several other studies to come to that conclusion.
:) And having one with a real wall that has a window on it is the best. I do find that now that I have my own office I tend to get a lot less done. Nobody to look over my shoulder and see I'm not on task.
My personal opinion is that as long as the walls are high and thick enough to block some of the other person's nasty choice of music and hang up cabinets, then cubicles seem to be ok.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
I have worked in both formats and found the better environment to be a mix of the two.
...". I shut my door and people leave me alone. If anybody needs anything, I get e-mails or they just knock on my door and I open it.
When a group of people are working on the same (or similar) projects then having them in an open environment tends to make them more productive. Communication between people is easier, quick meetings to hammer out problems are easily held and are usually very productive (usually because you are coding during the meeting and once the meeting is over the code is fixed).
When people are just thrown into a cubicle farm where the person next to you may or may not be working on anything even close to what you are working on then productivity goes down. Too much noise is created by "irrelevant" (to your project that is) conversations. People shuffle around and the office and stop to chit-chat. Meetings with team members have to be scheduled and have to be held away from the working area so the "bounce" effect is magnified. In general it is the most distracting unproductive environment I have ever been in.
If your company is going to use a cubicle farm approach push for cubicle assignments that reflect work assignemnts and enforce the philosophy that a change in projects dictates a change in cubicles. This also gives a benefit to management in that they know that the Accounting programmers always sit on the NE corner, the HR programmers always sit on the NW corner, etc.
If it is possible to get offices, get large offices that can COMFORTABLY seat 3-4 programmers in a room (don't cram 4 programmers into an 8x12 office).
If you are a lone programmer working on a project, I would recommend isolation. I am currently the only programmer in my department and my productivity has noticably increased since I moved from my "veal fattening pen" to my office. I don't have to listen to co-workers family problems, I don't lose time with social graces "Hi, how are you today
The best compromise between the 'fortress of solitude' attitude that single person offices cultivates, and the complete lack of privacy that most cube farms generates, is the 2-3 person office.
You still get a more private environment, you have a door you can close, if you all agree in tastes, you can play music without headphones. But you're not isolated... you can still easily ask questions or pair program or have another pair of eyes debug with you. In a pinch, you can squeeze in a small team for team meetings when all the conference rooms are filled.
It may not be as ego boosting as having single offices, but in my experience, it's a far better arrangement. Especially when you can drop a whole team into a couple of adjacent offices... you make it easy to find people, and you get some team building for free (as long as you can live with your officemates).
The main reason individual offices are avoided? Expense. You'll likely get that as an argument for a cube farm, regardless of what studies you can quote about productivity. I encourage you to stick to your guns, though -- point out short term cost gains vs. long term productivity of other arrangements. Office walls and cube farms both cost money up front.
If you do end up with a cube farm anyways, make the most of it. Give neighbors the right to have music turned down, and encourage or even require use of headphones. Some nice noise-cancelling headphones are even better.
When I worked in a cube farm, several of us made signs:
Do Not Disturb
if you really need to reach me:
- try back later
- send me email
- leave a message
The signs were on strings and hung across the cubical entrance to physically block the way.It took a while (it would have gone quicker if I could have given a shock to people who ignored it :-), but eventually people learned to respect the signs. Even the execs.
When I worked in a cube farm, I found myself working very odd hours. One of the main reasons I needed to do that was because I have a very bad habit:
I talk to myself.
Especially when debugging code.
This wasn't a problem in the minicomputer days, when each lab held four rather loud machines and there was enough space so my mutterings at machine 3 weren't audible at any of the other machines. When my desk became the lab, and the noise level was much, much lower, I used to get complaints about my dialog with myself. (I used to be ribbed about it, too. No, I won't elaborate.)
Now, what I have found is the floor-to-ceiling cubes are very nice for people like me -- cheaper than a "hard" office, and it contains the noise quite well. With the proper layout of openings, you don't even have to have doors.
I'll be interested to hear if the bean-counters don't squash you flat...
One theory is that the part of the brain that's mostly involved in creativity and general insight is easily interrupted by outside noises, including music. They found the same results among people who like to work with music and those who don't.
They further point out research that shows that good programmers tend to have bigger offices. It's not clear whether the better programmers get jobs at better companies, or whether bigger offices tend to make programmers better. But as Fred Brooks said about this study, ``Who cares what the reason is!?'' Big Offices are obviously a good thing.
My company, a little over a year ago, moved offices. The software developers (including myself) went from private offices to cubes.
As you can guess no one was (or is) happy about it, this topic is the source of endless debate and complaints to this day. Now, we have really nice cube, with pseudo "doors", but it doesn't help.
The higher ups called the new layout more "collaborative". We collaborated fine before, now try to squeeze two people into a cube to try to work together. The conversation carries across half the office, disturbing everyone else. The only advantage is I yell across the room to others without getting up where before I had to actually go into the hall (gee, what a plus).
Here is a short list of other complaints (besides noise):
Lighting: I 'm really sensitive to glare from florescent lights, trying to unhook the ones above me isn't an option since others around me prefer to no sit in the dark.
Temperature: Our old offices had adjustable air vents. They really didn't work great, but what little they did was helpful to those who are cold/hot all the time.
Privacy: I know the intimate details of all those how sit around me from their personal phone calls. I've gotten good at talking in code to my wife about personal issues, that's a plus.
Walls: Hard to hang Pictures, whiteboards, posters, calendars, on cube walls.
Have and Have-nots: Some people have offices, some have cubes.
1.) The cubes are sonically isolated from people who use the phone for actual work (like sales people).
2.) The cube inhabitants listen to music on headphones, unless they can get a general agreement that their chosen volume level is low enough to make the music perfectly inaudible (music that you hear at the edge of your perception can be more distracting that blaringly loud music).
3.) People show each other respect when interrupting each other. The proper way to interrupt someone in a cube is to stand silently in the entrance until they choose to break away from their work and acknowledge your presence. If they actually don't see you in the doorway, you can quietly say, "knock, knock," and wait for a response. This way the person can continue their train of thought for a few minutes, and then , if necessary, they can say, "I'll come see you when I'm not busy."
4.) People are generally quiet - cubes just don't work with overly talkative people, but people who are generally quiet tend to find a decent level of grouping together between cubes and shooting the shit (which can be really good for your development team, in the appropriate quantity).
I have found that cubes can really work with a tight development team (where everyone is not off working on totally isolated projects). I have also watched people who didn't understand the concepts of concentration and personal space really piss each other off...
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
Companies often know that it is in their best interests to keep you happy, so they are often happy to salve your wounds with meaningless treasures. It makes you feel like you have some power (whether or not you had any real choice in the matter) and it makes you feel like you got something in return for what you lost (from the companies perspective, at least - maybe you like cubes, but don't tell them that).
When we got moved into cubes (even though we had no choice), we said, "you can only put us in cubes if you get us incandescent lighting and let us ban all fluorescence from the cube area."
So they got us all halogen desk lamps and floor lamps which we could point at the walls and ceiling.
It was wonderful. There was no direct light; it was all reflected off of some diffusing surface. The cubes were placid and quiet because of the subtlety. When people in other departments were stressed, they would sometimes lie down on our couch because it was so peacefull where we were.
Anyway, my point is, if you can make the company think that you don't want it, you can sometimes get something in exchange. Like, "you can take my office away and put me in a cube if you buy me this expensive ergonomic chair which I have been drooling over."
Why is Grand Theft Auto a much more serious crime than Reckless Driving?
i've worked in a single-room office containing about a dozen cubes all lining the wall. each cube had a large opening facing the center of the room. there was be a table in the center of the room with a chair or two, drawers, and a few computers set up as terminals/vnc's.
this made it easy to wheel over and converse with a co-worker or go to another office and work with people there. talk to your neighbor by pushing your chair backwards a few feet. social atmosphere is everything!
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I, personally, am in what I would expect to be a rather unique situation as a developer. My company has seen fit to provide me with both a rather large cubicle (complete with window) and a 'community' development lab that is available to all developers. What may come as a surprise to many is that I use my office primarily for storage and the displaying of my personal affects (a.k.a. Linux Propaganda & books) and maintain my primary residence in the 'development dungeon' as it has become know...
Even more, I am far from being alone in my decision to interact with my fellow geeks. Of the regulars whom I associate with in our development lab (which, BTW is a moderately sized, locked door office w/o windows), there are five of us - all architecture-level software developers within our corporation - whom maintain coexistence between the lab and our 'official' offices.
So, why you may wonder, would anyone in their right mind (especially a geek) not only resist the temptation of being solitary, but actually seek out the company of others??? Simple, to me it is all about shared learning! Everyone (ok, most everyone...) has an expertise or a forte of some sort within his or her field of interest. In a public environment such as the one I share we all benefit from our collective knowledge, experience and style in a manner in which increases our overall performance, quality and output!!! Management loves it because we pump out more code; we love it because we continually challenge and learn from one another!!!
Admittedly, I do not have any type of study or graphs (a.k.a. manager worthy content) to support my conclusions, however I do have considerable, personal real-world experience that confirms these ideas...
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. -- Benjamin Franklin
I work in one of these "shared team areas", and I think they are great. Mine has a window and four of us work in one partitioned space in an open plan office. I really like it.
The area is big enough that each of us have rightangle desks with enough space to house probably 6 desktop boxes with 17 inch monitors (I have 3 and a laptop). We all sit with our backs to the center so there is no over looking yet you can easily just spin round on your chair to chat to someone. There are a couple of extra chairs so when people come round to discuss something they can have a seat.
The partions are high enough that you cannot see over them to the other areas when sitting in a chair, this is a good thing, you feel separated but still accessible to just stand up and grab the attention of someone in the next area along. The only problem is people with loud voices and speaker phones, but in general people don't use them too often.
One of the things I really like is the fact that there are offices that you can use if you need a private chat, they are small and can be used by anyone. Each one has enough room for maybe 4 people at a push sitting around a small table, they also have power and network sockets for your laptop, and a speaker phone. I think this is what saves the whole concept, if you need some privacy for whatever reason, or a conference call then you can have one without disturbing everyone. That coupled with nice coffee bars that you can escape to with sofa's can comfy chairs, and grounds you can go for a walk in means you don't feel trapped in some cube nightmare.
Managers have offices, but then you might go to them to discuss your personal problems / problems with co-workers so I think it is fair enough. Difficult to have those sort of discussions in open plan ;)
I have worked in shared offices, and even had my own office, but to be honest I prefer my current open plan arrangement it suites my work very well, it's easy to chat with my friends, I have space around me rather than being shoved in a tiny office and I don't have to put up with the person I shared the office with's music taste ;)
If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let'em go, because, man, they're gone.
That said, of the 14 offices we have here, 8 are held by people lower in seniority than me. On more than one occasion we've had multiple relocations and I was promised one, then denied. With my current cube, it's not so bad, but the one I got before this one made me angry.
Oh well!
GTRacer
- If it weren't for other people, I might actually enjoy work!
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
I work in an open arrangement. The benefit is I can shout to whomever I want to ask a question. And I might get an answer but from someone else.
So you *liked* working in an environment where one person would interrupt and destroty the concentration of the whole group to ask a question? And you think that's productive?
However in the move the executives were now on their own floor. They were more isolated.
Having individual (or paired) offices for people doesn't mean that you can't have everyone accessible. The point of having offices is that a few people can have a conversation without disturbing everyone in the area.
And no company can sustain "4-digit growth". It's simply not possible.
As we speak, I'm in the process of packing up and moving from an office to a cube. It's a really nice office too -- windows, great view, lots of room, thick walls. The cube is a cramped, dark, inconvenient little thing. I'm gonna really miss the absence of background noise, the ravens that hang out outside my window, the ability to close the door and crank up Glenn Gould, yada yada.
That being said, I think this move is a good thing. To understand my logic, you need some backstory.
A couple of boom-bust cycles ago, my company was founded by A Leading Software Visionary. After a few initial successes, ALSV found he had more cash than he knew what to do with. So he decided he was going to build Software Development Nirvana. SDN would be a towering, innovative building with lots of unusual features. The chief among these would be the layout. There would be three floors. The first two would be your standard mixture of offices (only a few with windows) and cube farms. But the third floor, that was special.
Most of the third floor was set aside for the R&D folk. All of these people would have large window offices. (To create so many window offices, ALSV came up with this convoluted, space-inefficent design.) These were the creative people, right? They needed to be pampered, so they could go off and Create Value.
Didn't work out, of course. ALSV was fired soon after the SDN was finished. Partly because SDN cost way too much to build and maintain, but mainly because the developers never Created as much Value as was hoped. The big problem was a severe lack of teamwork. People just went off and did what they thought was important. That meant a lot of Cool Features. But it also meant messy codebases, and changes that were introduced without thought to their effect on the rest of the product, never mind QA, Integration, or Documentation impact. And of course, a lot of things important things just fell through the cracks, because nobody was interested in working on them.
The fancy offices were only part of the problem, of course. Indeed, they might not have been a problem at all if management had been at all competent. I've worked at other companies with private offices (not as nice as these, but as private, or nearly so) that didn't have these problems. Mainly because management knew how manage.
Thing is, we no longer have bad management. A lot of my coworkers would disagree. They're totally disgruntled at novel concepts, like planning their work in advance, or ignoring their personal priorities in favor of shared project goals. But an objective outsider would have to agree that current management is doing what needs to be done.
Except that management can't seem to break the Rugged Individualist model of development that still haunts us. We have meetings where people are told, "this is how we need to do things now." Sometimes they object, but most often they say nothing, and go back to their offices, close the doors, and do things the way they've always done them.
My department is no exception. (We're not an R&D team, and before I was hired, the department had cubes downstairs. But as the company shrank, there were lots of extra offices, and so other departemts found excuses to move upstairs.) We're not badly run. In fact the current manager is the best I've ever worked with. (God, I hope she doesn't read this.) But there's no cohesion. Everybody has their own idea of how things should be done, and total contempt for any alternatives.
Some weeks back, we had a department meeting where we were supposed to discuss and plan changes to procedures and technology. A major issue -- past neglect has left things get hopelessly out of date. It was a fiasco -- al evel of social interaction that wouldn't be tolerated in a kindergarten. I went on a bathroom break and never returned, because the alternative was a severe loss of temper. Afterwards I told my boss, "I've always hated cubes. But maybe a little less privacy is the only way to make these people see they're part of a team."
Well, I got my wish. Not because of what I said. But the company's growing again, and half the building's now rented out. So back downstairs we go. Should be interesting.
I get to listen to every single conversation that occurs between two developers. I also know when somebody calls, and who it is, because all calls to the farm default to speakerphone. I'm not bothered by pesky natural light. Whenever I want to communicate with my coworkers, all I have to do is raise my voice and call over the partitions. I know when people are coming and going. I have absolutely no privacy to speak with my family and loved ones, keeping me more focused on the task at hand. Yes, cubicles are the way to go.
Now excuse me while I head off to the bathroom and smash my head into the mirror there. It's theraputic.
The middle mind speaks!
By Yourdin (sp?)
Had a very intersting table listing the "features" that top 10 percent programmers had vs bottom 10% programmers. His disclaimer was that he didn't know if the features made programmers better, or if better programmers demanded the features and got them due to talent. Very interesting things on the list including the ability to put DND on the phone, office, office space, etc.
Worth a look, even if it didn't pan out
So you *liked* working in an environment where one person would interrupt and destroty the concentration of the whole group to ask a question? And you think that's productive?
It sounds counterintuitive, but it can work very well. Studies of pair programming, for example, show substantial gains in quality.
Personally, I love open office arrangements, except when I hate them utterly. What's the difference? For me, it's whether everybody in the room is involved in the same project.
If the people around me are all working on the same thing, then their conversations aren't a distraction any more than my teammates in a basketball game. The number of times an overheard comment has saved me hours of work are beyond counting. Errors, like weeds, grow quickly once they take root; best to kill them as early as possible.
On the other hand, if people around me are talking about things irrelevant to the work I'm doing, it's like having random people wandering through the basketball court. It makes me crazy, and I have to put on headphones to get anything done.
My recommendatation: project rooms (aka war rooms). But managers should be aware that this isn't the cheap way out; to reap the high-communication benefits of open offices, you must provide meeting rooms and private places for making personal calls, checking email, and any activities not related to the project!
Sometimes when I needed quiet to figure something out, I'd go find an empty conference room and hide there with listings and work out the problem. That helped a lot. If no one knew where I was, they couldn't bug me. Even a private office doesn't do that for you.
Generally I've found open-plan to be intolerable because of the noise level. Cubes can be ok. 2-3 person shared offices are fine. I agree with the comments that in a private office you can lose contact with the rest of your team, but other than that, they're great.
The 2-3 person shared office is probably the best compromise in high-space-cost areas.
Don't get me wrong, I fully understand why they wanted us to be moved with the other developers (which they moved us all to the 21st floor). However, mu cubicle is now in a high traffic area with low walls in front of the break room, with the nearest window being a good 50 feet away. I ended up snatching a bunch of foam core board from our GIS department and building walls, then going out and spening about 100 bucks on a set of noise-cancelling Sony digital headphones. Even then, I get interrupted at least 10-15 times a day for questions like, "Where'd you get those headphones?" and "Isn't my fish cool!" and blah blah blah.
Our web teams morale dropped quite a bit, and I also find myself going in about 6am to get any work done at all. My advice would be do whatever is necessary for the company, but also look at what moving the workers is going to do to their unspoken side like morale, etc.
Random Musings
They combine the worst of both worlds. The isolation of the office and the noise/distraction of open spaces without any of the benefits. When you have a office you can always close the door for privacy, and open spaces makes it easy to communicate with your group members...
Just my experience and not so HO.
You need to read a book called Peopleware. (Don't have the stats in front of me). It has EXACTLY the data you are looking for, even down to a percentage of increase of effectiveness attributable to square feet of office space.
This book is best described as an 'anti-dilbert manifesto'.
They dont scare me but the marketing geeks do. Saw them hack a company apart with their stupidy once. Never again! I have only met one sales person but the rest were more problem then their worth.
Over the years I have see this office format work well.
1) Single small office big enough for two computer but one person normally but in emergency two. Non glaring light. Enough light to keep them from going blind and to read printouts. And cool to there liking. Also a small bookshelf. Decent chair and desk.
2) Non fancy cofference room that can take the whole team with out overflow problems and mutiple computer to allow hasing thing out. Include a white board projector whatever works.
3) A quite place just to let the mind rest. You cant keep reving it up all the time. A small garden does work wonders. There is one Anime studio in Japan that has a quite garden on the roof. Works wonders.
4) Use email for all normal traffic since it lets the recepiant answer when they can and keeps the question foccus. Phones when typing would be hard or impractical. Small mail box for dropping off picking up thing that cant be NETed around that is "outside" the office.
5) A place to crash. IE to get some sleep on long mightmare project. Nothing fancy. The small office would do. Still have my old airbed and pillow from one place I work at. Came in handy. There are always these insaine schedules and thing go wrong no matter how thing are layed out. I rather have a programmer that's on a roll or been working long hours just to get a few hour sleep then have them drive home and maybe never get there.
6) The head programmer may have a bigger office but is geared to small meeting of him/her and no more than two other people. Small table and two chairs and the normal std office. Good for quicky meeting. More then that size it cofference room!
If a team need open cubical to manage then there are major problems. IE poor orginization. Sorry contant instant communication just does not work. Everyond should know what to do and do it. If problems arise then the cofference room is the best place to handle it. Can handle from 2 to its design capasity. And in a pinch forms a spare programmers room or a different crash and burn room. Its funny but the Travel Channel has a report that people feel more "secure" not in open areas but more intimate areas. It was in spending money at Casino's but is appliable here also. Guess it the old survival skills of the mind gets split with the lower logic worring about dangers.
One last thing is a sign that leads into the programmers area stating the following:
Danger: Marketing Geek stay out! Tresspassers will be eaten!
The above sounds very reasonable to my mind. Let me add that what I consider the most annoying source of interruption is telephone calls. No, not my own, but by officemates.
I'm currently in an office with three others who are on the same project team as I am. I find it incredibly distracting when someone else is talking on the phone to our customer -- part of my brain always wants to listen or is trying to analyse and understand the words that my ear hears. I get distracted and can't concentrate on my programming. (The effect is similar with face-to-face conversations but they're a fair bit less frequent than phone calls -- at least in the office.) It makes me want to have a private office.
The argument that's usually cited (let's ignore the fact that my workplace doesn't have private offices, except for the top two managers) is that having a group together in one room improves communication; it also lets you pick up things by chance that you happen to hear which you might not have thought to ask about otherwise. Well, maybe. But I still find it distracting when others speak.
Maybe it's just the way my brain works; I can't work when I'm listening to music with lyrics, either; instrumental music, on the other hand, is fine since my brain isn't constantly trying to process the sound to understand the words.
So for me, I'd probably go with private offices or small group offices (for those who can deal with that). I also really like your suggestiong of group lunches; it's a good way of being social and swapping some gossip -- and also finding out little things about how other projects or the whole company is going. (I've found that smokers often know more about how the company is going since they'll also chat during their cigarette breaks -- and since the boss smokes, he sometimes shares some information during such times as well. That still doesn't make me want to hang out with them, though ;)
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
Check out Microsoft Press Rapid Development (Steve McConnell), ISBN 1-55615-900-5. They have a reference to a study performed by IBM regarding cube vs. offices and how much $$$ was saved by allocating specific amount of office space, etc.
Yeah, right.