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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.
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.
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
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 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.
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?
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
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!