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Sun Discovers Dumb Terminals
Yahoo has a story about how Sun is practicing a sort of floating workforce - many employees have no permanent desks, they just come in and log on to a dumb terminal, err, thin client. Besides being a sneaky way to encourage employees to arrive ever earlier at work, it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun servers - at least for Sun.
Think more along the lines of computer user. A worker can have his own desk, and his own thin client. If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it. If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it. Same for presentations.
And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I've heard it called "hotelling". One implementation I heard about had a 'locker room' where you could store your personal effects. They got around having filing cabinets in each office by having a central bullpen for all the filing.
Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.
A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.
There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.
I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.
My father is a blogger.
Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.
Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)
Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.
The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.
Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.
The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.
Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.
I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.
Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).
Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.
If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.
Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.
What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.
Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.
The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.
However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?