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Building a Cube Farm that Sucks Less?

Posted by Cliff on from the coders-in-sardine-cans dept.

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."

3 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. why cubes at all by BigBir3d · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why not a open floor? Works for us (import company, not a tech company).

  2. What worked well for us by octover · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I worked at a web developement company that had cubes. The cubes were roomy, and fairly open, we had four developers with our backs to each other. A table in the middle for small ad-hoc meetings. The heating/cooling for the building was handled thru water pipes so we had a white noise that made it virtually impossible to distract anyone except for maybe your closest neighbor. You were only heard if you wanted to be heard (the boss callling us all in for a meeting, etc.). Pretty much everyone worked with music playing all day, and you did not hear it, even if you turned your music off to take a call or something. The white noise was real annoying to me at first, but after a few weeks I rarely noticed it.

    Really it all depends on the worker's ability to adapt. I now work in an office that is open. I really like this way, I can collaborate with the designers and other developers without moving. Granted sometimes it is a little crazy when people are collaborating and others are on the phone, but all in all it works well. We had a designer that could not handle that he wasn't at least in a cube. He couldn't concentrate on anything.

  3. uhhh by Tumbleweed · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Let me get this straight, you're going FROM offices TO cubes?

    Time to add your company to fuckedcompany.com, methinks. Put a 'SELL' on that those shares, too. Eek. My condolences on your upcoming loss of peace of mind.

    A previous poster mentioned a ban on speakerphones, which is a great idea, but doesn't go far enough. Separate out the people who use the phones a lot (project managers, sales, etc.), and move them far, far away, otherwise you'll hear their ringing phones and phone conversations all day long. "Joel on Software" has a lot of strange ideas, but his essay on this topic is spot-on in my experience. Check it out here .

    Make sure your new spiffy partitions are very high - as high as possible.

    Make sure the ceiling absorbs sound. Dropped ceilings suck, but they do absorb more sound than the trendy 'industrial' bare concrete ceiling look.

    Overhead lights - kill them. I had to get out the ladder and remove the fluourescent tubes multiple times before maintenance understood this point. $10 torchiere lamps from Ikea make for much better lighting.

    If you want to try to avoid the asking for help syndrome, check out the software at AskMe.com - an interesting idea, though I've not used it. If not this, set up some type of knowledge base intranet.

    Make sure people's phones can be set to "do not disturb".

    If people listen to music at work, make them use headphones.

    Look for a new job is probably my best advice. :)