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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.
Two of the biggest problems I have with cube farms are noise and visual distractions. Being at the end of a row of cubes where through traffic is rare helps with the visual distraction somewhat. Try and be sure that the cubes aren't just laid out in an open grid where people wander every which way. If you can get them formed into halls of cuves with ends to them and you can get into one of the end cubes, you've got a leg up.
It's also possible to get walls that are as much as seven feet high. This helps too, as you don't see people's heads floating by all day.
Why not a open floor? Works for us (import company, not a tech company).
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."
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Pros:
Cons:
So, I like it more than your Office Space style cube farms, but much less than my own office
--
Mando
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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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.
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.
Let me get this straight, you're going FROM offices TO cubes?
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:)
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.