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Building a Cube Farm that Sucks Less?
"In our office, developers are all intermediate to senior. They have a good knowledge of the software package they are working on as well as the business that they are serving.
In this environment, people can generally work for a day or two without having to ask questions. If questions arise, people don't mind walking over to the right person. The cube vendors' breezy assertion that we'll boost productivity by being able to shriek out questions, and overhear conversations (naturally they'll all be related to what we're working on) doesn't seem to fit our work flows.
My guess is that we're basically going to want to retrofit our existing work patterns into a sub-optimal cube environment. We can design in some workrooms with full walls and doors that shut.
Here's what I'm thinking at the moment: Cubes should be quiet, quiet, quiet! Meetings, pair-programming, collaboration or highly hairy coding should be restricted to workrooms, which would be set up with a CPU to Remote Desktop (WinXP) back to the developer's primary development machine.
But this is just what I've dreamt up on my own. Has anyone experimented with this setup? If so, how often do you need to get out of your cube and shut yourself in a room? Is it useful to have white noise piped in, or is it better to have an oppressive rule of silence imposed on everyone?
Many thanks."
Make a maze so that you have to walk at least three times around the room and reverse directions twice to get from your boss's office to your cubicle. Put a coffee machine somewhere on the route to further distract him. Finally, there are these "half-height" cube walls, usually used for making a service desk type thing -- put them up for one wall of your cube, but HIGH, not low, and cover the low-down opening with a table or desk. This enables you to crawl away to the next cubicle if your boss does make it, also you don't have to walk so far to get out of the building.
P.S. Double height cube walls prevents the Prairie Dog effect.
That would be an especially important suggestion.
Another good, earlier suggestion was to put plants around the top of the cubes to give it a friendlier jungle look, which I like.
But making the cube walls double height will prevent a bad situation from happening when cube dwellers happen to stand up at the same moment that the plant mowing blades are being used to trim the plants.
At MyCorp, we've found the productivity of programmers typically falls about 97% after their heads have been mowed off like a prairie dog that popped up at the wrong time under a riding mower.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
... don't put me next to that weird guy with the long beard and the sketchy "green" sweatpants!
You need lots of weapons, CWM's (Cubicle to Worker missiles). Each worker must have a sidearm and senior programmers get mini guns too. By the end
youve turned a boring cube farm into a real life version of Worms Armageddon / BattleZone.
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Prairie dog effect: When a loud noise in a cubicle area causes dozens of employees to pop up from their cubes to see what happened? Wanna see it happen? Drop a phone book on you desk and see who pops up :)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
In order to really maximize worker performance, the latest trend is towards more community. Rather than isolate workers in private offices, they are located in a larger room with partitions commonly refered to as "cubicles". Unfortunately this term has garnered a quite negative connotation despite the clear benefits of such an arrangement.
The ideal goal is to bring people closer together. To that end, we recomend dispensing with walls completely. Instead, simply lay down some brightly coloured tape on the floor to mark work areas. Now workers can not only easily hear one another but see them as well! Imagine the gains in productivity due to enhanced communication.
We also recomend installing a sound system to bring in music for the workers. This will make everyone work better. Muzak is an excelent choice here, or if you are on a budget, the local adult contemporary radio station.
Finaly, one of the biggest enhancements to worker productivity is to provode a day-care service. And since parents want to be close to their family, the day-care should be in the same room. Now the children can see their parent any time they wish! And what's more, no day-care personel are necessary since the workers can keep an eye on the children, saving your company money.
If I recall correctly, Intel's executives have cubes.
One trick around this is to call the war rooms "Break rooms".
However, the best approach is to convince management of the need for these rooms, so that they will support you.
I suggest the use of hidden cameras, prostitutes, and extortion. Also effectatious are blunt force trauma, cattle prods, and capsacin coated toilet paper in the executive bathroom.
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