Building a Cube Farm that Sucks Less?

cubiclist asks: "It has been decreed that our company is moving from private offices to cubicles. We all know that Peopleware has hard data to warn us away from this, but it cannot be helped at this point. Now that we know that we are going into cubes, what can we do to make it suck less? In research on the web, I cannot find any advice on office layouts for developers in cubes. I have found some threads on improving cube interiors from places like ThinkGeek and Ikea, but I am really interested on some best practices for the overall layout of the floor.

"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."

Comments

if I had control over the cubes ....

[Shaleh]

Things I have observed:

*) *NO* speaker phones. I always seem to be stuck next to someone who spends his day chatting on the phone.

*) quiet cell phones. People with the star spangled banner, show theme songs and what not just need to be shot.

*) headphones at decent levels. My current cube neighbor has headphones but may as well be using speakers.

*) tall cube walls. Prevent gophering and helps with the noise.

*) people who need to work together should be near each other. Sales and marketing should be nowhere near the engineers. They tend to violate the first two rules above. It should not be difficult to wander near the people you need to talk to. Avoid mazes.

*) easy to acquire rooms with doors and either no windows visible from cube land or easily covered ones. My current employer has accordion blinds which is a good solution. Nothing worse than managers wandering into meetings to steal people.

*) some number of the easy to acquire rooms should be set aside for war rooms and not be reservable as meeting spaces. Sometimes you need to get 3 people together and hash things out. This is not limited to programmers either.

*) a whiteboard (or 2) in every cube

*) as much as possible the major flow paths should not have cube openings on it. People constantly walking behind you is not conducive to productivity.