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

"War rooms"

[wowbagger]

You want "war rooms" - a room with a whiteboard, a door, perhaps a water cooler, and a network drop or wireless LAN.

You need several. Don't allow them to be "reserved" - no sign up sheets for these. These are not "conference rooms". These are places your people can go to hash things out on an ad-hoc basis.

You need an absolute ban on speaker phones.

You should discourage anybody from using speakers on their computer - encourage headphone use (at a reasonable volume level).

It still will suck. I went from an office with a door that I could close to a cube farm, and it gets very hard to concentrate. The only benefit cubes have over offices is that management can change things around whenever they feel bored.

Trading Floor

[Mandomania]

The place that I'm working at now is styled a bit around the "trading floor" design, or so I'm told. We have these triangular pods of desks that are staggered around an open floor space.

Pros:

• Easy to communicate. Everyone is within earshot and line-of-sight, so it's easy to get up and ask questions as needed.
• "Team building". There's a lot more of team lunch/bar/movie trips with this setup than in other cube farms I've worked at. I'm sure the floor layout isn't the ONLY reason for this, but it sure helps.

Cons:

• Freakin' loud. There's nothing worse than having a client on speakerphone and having your pod-mate scream "God! I hate these fucking clients! Were they born stupid or do they just hate me?!".
• No privacy. God help you if you accidentally misread "NSFW" as "SFW".
• Brightness. I like my workspace to be hella-dark, but no one else on the floor likes that, so the stinkin' lights are on all the time.

So, I like it more than your Office Space style cube farms, but much less than my own office :-). If I had to work in a cube farm I'd want it setup this way.

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Mando