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Companies Move Away From Cubicle Culture
Makarand writes "According to this Mercury News article companies are
freeing employees from
their cubicles to save on corporate real estate costs. By eliminating the
need for offices for thousands of employees they are reducing their building
needs by thousands of square feet.
Employees now work in shared areas or from home or elsewhere outside the traditional cubicle.
Those who prove to be unproductive when they have to share space with others risk getting fired. This trend is expected
to accelerate
as wireless technologies are making workers more mobile and capable of working from anywhere.
About 13000 of Sun Microsystems' 35000 employees working in Santa Clara (CA) currently lack offices."
just for being antisocial? I think that we now know why Bill Joy left! Some of the best geeks I know are antisocial miscreants who given a project and deadline will outperform 5 of their peers but who do NOT want to have to deal with others on a minute by minute basis, they can basically handle weekly update meetings and the like but they would HATE to be in them all the time.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
This is the awesome. I always wondered why they made cubicles. I mean, you could just arrange the desks the way they are and save money by not purchasing those cubicle walls.
There just have to be three rules. No loud clicky keyboards, no speakerphone voicemail (shouldn't do this anyway) and headphones for winamp/xmms.
Open workspaces are awesome, I hope lots of people who can't handle it get fired so I can get a job more easily when I graduate.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I guess it's a good time to be antisocial, sack veryone that likes talking to their co-workers when they sitt next to each other.
The perfect worker is the one that stares into the computer screen, completely unaware of what goes on around him/her.
And here I thought moving away from cubicles would be a GOOD thing. Sharing a room with 5 other people doesn't make ANYONE productive. I've done it. It just doesn't work.
Huzzah! I can finally work nekkid at home and get paid for it! Better make sure I have plenty of clean towels to sit on....
Treating employees increasingly like cattle doesn't serve to help workplace productivity at all. The culture went from people having their nice productive office, to sharing an office with 2-4 other people (in the same 15'x15' room), to cubicles, and now to not even having a workspace? How can that be productive when you don't even know where you're going to be working for the day?
This seems like a good trend for the environment too, because reduced traffic jams, means reduced emmissions, and reduced pollution. Plus you become more productive working from home. You don't have to shower, or dress up (spend lots of paycheck on classy wardrobe), or spend the time it takes in traffic every day to get to work.
Obviously some jobs will require you to be there, but for development, it's not necessary. There are arguements for having devs in work, because people fear they might be slacking off, but the proof is in the pudding!
Yes, I think this is a Good Thing (tm). I experienced that working in a shared room, improves creativity. It happens quite a lot to me that I'm stuck at a problem, and after discussing it with a colleage we find a solution together. Now, I think that if you're working in a cubicle, you'll have less contact with your colleages due to the wall borders, and therefor will lack some sort of shared creativity.
Of course, there's the risk of workers losing productivity, but I think we have to face it: we're there to work, not for fun talks.
In need of reliable and affordable server monitoring?
Companies have decided that a physical body is too expensive and have moved emplyees to brains floating in a VAT.
"Freedom" from cubicles means freedom to work under constant observation of the overseers.
I originally thought working from a home was a good idea, until I actually tried it. I has disadvantages.
There's something about actually phsically going somewhere in order to work that makes you feel ready for work. The only problem is if you have to travel too far to get there of course.
Because of this some home workers have a dedicated study to work in.
While this is better than a cubical the employee is paying for it. Another way to reduce pay in effect?
A blog I run for the wealth
Use part of it for your business and claim it as a tax deduction
Those who prove to be unproductive when they have to share space with others risk getting fired
Finally. It's scary just how many otherwise intelligent adults have massive hygene problems or creepy neurosis. (Nuts afraid of germs in the office, nuts who lost their train of though at the slightest unexpected noise...)
Now, with any luck, the smelly ones will be openly ridiculed by their annoyed peers, and the nutty ones will be driven over the edge by the close proximity. Once they're gone, the workplaces of the world should generally become much nicer places.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I think it is a good thing. You are among people. So those people that have trouble beeing social get everyday training. Not realy something you should laugh at. You will feel you are more a part of the team. On the other hand. It can be hell in the beginning if social is a problem for you. Not to mention the weird sounds and smells everybody than you seem to create :P.
I work for the City of NY and we are starting to see the same thing rolled out here most people are reffering the term as Mike Bloomberg's Bull pens everything is starting to get redesigned to look like his traders floor at Bloomberg LLC, no matter senority or status ranking in our company.
- I came I saw I Conquered
I work for the military and that's how we've been doing it all along. Computers are scattered throughout many of the buildings. It works fine, though some locations can be more popular than others, such as the machines in the break rooms. There are offices but they are shared by multiple people/shifts. When ever you need to do a little "one on one" (chew their ass) with someone you just find an empty one. For quiet undisturbed work, take a short walk out to one of the out buildings and you'll have the whole place to yourself.
Soon these companies will realize that by kicking programmers, the most unproductive and self-important group of employees ever, out of their offices and cubicles, they'll be able to fit in more business majors -- the pinnacle of productivity and efficiency!
Maybe this will spark a whole new level of management! Lower lower middle middle management!!
People doing pair programming, eXtreme Programming, and other agile methodologies have been doing their best to leave cube world behind anyway. It may sound odd, but they are voluntarily leaving their cubes behind and have no desire to return to that enviroment.
FairlyGoodPractices has photos of our layout. Business people use the semi-cubes in the center (there is only the one wall running along the center of the cubes and it's made of glass).
A lot of smaller XP groups simply take over meeting rooms for the duration of their projects. The onsite customer usually has their own desks but the coders share workstations and because of pair programming move from workstation to workstation frequently.
No Zen is good zen
...are doomed to repeat them. Viz. this famous disaster at TBWA Chiat/Day.
Some of the best geeks I know are antisocial miscreants
Then I certainly wouldn't want to spend any of -my- time with them, let alone share the workplace with them.
I don't care how productive or geekily intelligent someone is. If they can't communicate effectively or deal with other people, they have no place in most workforces.
A team of 5 interesting, friendly people will ALWAYS outperform a lone social outcast barricaded in his single office.
GeekNights!
Late Night Radio for Geeks!
I have severe Attention Deficit Disorder, and putting me in such an environment would result in me being one of those "unproductive" employees. The Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) would prohibit doing this for 3-5% of the adult population of the US. That 3-5% is packed with a disproportionate number of engineers, scientists, etc, since ADHD tends to affect those with above average intelligence more than other groups.
In this situation, cubicle walls can be interpreted as "adaptive technology" which companies are required by law to provide.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Windows developers, on the other hand, should continue to thrive
...
Thrive?
Sorry, I wouldn't get up in the morning for what the Windows "developers" make at my work, cranking out lame GUI junk in Visual Basic, and trying to port my server code to Windows, struggling with it all the while, furrowing their brows in confusion
If it doesn't have a "wizard" to help them out with their "coding", they're utterly helpless. It sure is funny to watch, though. I'm optimistic all this deadshit work can all be outsourced to India soon, and I won't have to put up with their basic programming questions and general cluelessness any more.
Employees now work in shared areas or from home or elsewhere outside the traditional country.
I know what he's talking about. I can't stand their unwashed mullets, preteen anime T-Shirts, and faggot romps in the company bathroom. I can't wait until something like this drives them out of work.
until i realised that all i need is a headphone and some music to ignore others...
Same approach at the Sun Java Center in NYC. They have this web-app - you log in & register for a slot (workstation+desk+chair, in a shared office) for a given day between say 9am to 1pm, and the slot is yours if available.
Ofcourse, you can't store your books there, or put up your feet or have a messy desk with papers & stuff, cause you have to be out by 1pm. You can't even use the workstation for development, since you have to check out by 1. So you basically work on your laptop, but use this slot to ftp your work to the server, & that's it.
You feel quite disconnected from your team, since you never meet your colleagues unless there's a scheduled group-meeting. Everything gets done by email & phones.
Sounds ideal but in reality, its far from that. You are spending far too much time communicating, booking these slots & doing admin work when you should really be coding.
It didn't work out for me...but some of my former colleagues have gotten used to it. I like having a dedicated cubicle to myself, some bookshelf space, dedicated workstation, colleagues bumping into each other so we can bounce off ideas, exchange gossip at the watercooler etc I guess I'm too old-fashioned, but work to me means camaraderie, not living out of a laptop.
I hate working in the open. We have an open-plan office because internal walls (and indeed, dividers) are expensive. Nobody has a cubicle. The CEO has his own office.
The noise and interruptions are hurrendous. I am working from home two days a week now because it's impossible to get things done at work.
The general noise level from the other areas is unacceptable. I know we are also guilty of making a racket, I'm not saying we're perfect.
But when I'm in the guts of the server side, and we have a very complicated core server component, I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes by laughter, walk-ups, casual questions from co-workers. Team player bullshit or not, I'm there to engineer a fast, reliable, robust component. When I'm interrupted a lot, my defect rate (number of tickets at 'Defect' level entered against me per release symbol) goes up. Really up. A lot of people wear headphones to block out noise, but there's evidence to suggest that if the brain's cultural centers are engaged, engineers don't make creative leaps. I think this is true.
Plus, as you may know, creative work is usually performed in the psychological state of 'flow', which is intensely focussed concentration. It takes 20 minutes of hard concentration to get into 'flow' and then you can be snapped back out of it instantly by a question or a ringing phone.
I would LOVE to have an office. I would even share it with two other engineers, provided I could pick them.
Hell, I would love to have a cubicle, actually.
The ergonomics of offices and the human aspects are well discussed in Peopleware, but if you don't think you can make change in your organisation, don't read it because you'll be left depressed at how offices are *supposed* to be run.
I have a dedicated office, but I live in a small city close to Toronto where the real estate costs are much lower, so I end up renting a 3 bedroom townhouse for the price of a 2 bedroom apartment in Toronto. It works out great for me.
... the way using nothing but Microsoft software "promotes choice."
I'm incredibly lucky to work at a company where I -- not as a manager, but as a regular ol' code monkey -- have my own office. Cubicles suck. Open space environments suck even worse. I know; I've done both in the past, and never will again if I can help it. The "old paradigm" of the office became the standard for corporate work because, guess what, it works. Just about every change since then has served to increase worker stress and decrease productivity.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
if you have a hefty mortgage or rent, you can deduct home office expenses from taxes. you can pay for your nice home office and then some with what you save on taxes.
Being from a country where cubicles never really caught on, I've always worked in an "open office". There are pros (being able to talk to colleagues easily) and cons (unless you happen to have your back against a wall, you'll not do much private stuff, like reading Slashdot ;-)). For my part, I wouldn't mind trying some cubicling, it would be nice to at least have a semi-private space.
...and towards a culture of pods where your body heat and waste products contribute to the bottom line. And the proper balance between work and homelife is maintained by never letting you go home.
...is that once they realize that people can work from home in the same city, they'll start realizing that people can work from home in some underpaid third world hell hell and they'll save even more money.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Anything that does not have to be done onsite in the office can be outsourced to India and China and elsewhere.
so eventually it all could go over there, leaving a twisted dried up hulk of an economy behind in the USA. When you take 500,000 high paying jobs and ship them overseas, you may have saved the companies big bucks. but you have also reduced the market for your high price goods by that much.
Do this enough times, and you get a situation like you saw in manufacturing in Detroit. When was the last time you heard stories of the incredible economic opportunities in Detroit (even if things have improved somewhat after 30 - 40 years).
Manufacturing says they are doing this to increase efficiency and reduce costs. Efficient systems are not always robust, because you tend to eliminate redundancies. Redundancies give you your backup capabilities. Efficient systems tend to be more vulnerable.
And so it is with businesses.
But in the meantime, instead of building and maintaining their prize market, they drain it like parasites...
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If you have to deal with HIPPA regulations, you may just find your cubicle replaced with a locked office one day soon..
Or walls will suddenly appear around your group, isolating you off from the rest of your co-workers...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
On the other hand, having hotel offices for the person who comes in everyday, works 9-ot-5, ... is dumb. And I doubt many companies would do that.
For turning your radio on full blast and yapping away on the phone while they are trying to do actual work instead.
Just yesterday, I spent the afternoon at my office, packing up the contents of my desk and taking all my stuff off my walls. Over the next few weeks my company is renovating our suite and expanding into the next one down the hall. Private offices for non-executives will pretty much be abolished in favor of large common areas. This seems the smart way to go, because the way the office is configured currently we have a ton of open space in the suite but none that is usable as a place to put a new employee with a desk.
In the new configuration, the system integrators' space will be open, with individuals' desks lining the walls and a long bench in the middle (complete with copious power and LAN connections) providing a work surface for when we have to prep client machines.
The database developers will also get a large room, with self-contained rolling workstations that can be pushed together when multiple people are working together on the same project.
and my GOAL IN LIFE is to work from home. this is great news, i hope it continues over the next few years..
Too bad that most of those working from 'home' will be working in shops in India where they can live on 75% less.
Sun should start with the real big offices. McNeally's ought to free up quite a bit of wasted space. Maybe he should interract with his employees more. That way he can figure out how not to be such a f#!k head. And not lay workers off by the hundreds just to boost the stock for a day or two, just because he can't figure out how to run a company profitably with long term growth.
Ok, so if you're deaf- that makes you less able to do most jobs. So deaf people shouldn't be able to work? How about the blind? What about someone who can't walk, or needs a cane? Fire them, doom them to a life of living of the government, or homelessness if they're too proud to do so?
A quadraplegic can't be a fighter jet pilot: it would be insane to require the Air Force to implement "adaptive technology"
Nice extreme example there. The difference is the parent post(of your post) suggests that companies are making it more difficult for people with ADD to work; it's not like it was reasonably possible for a quadriplegic(note correct spelling) to fly a jet and the air force suddenly changed things so they couldn't.
Companies are not making any accommodations for people with disabilities- disabilities which are rather easy to make accommodations for- just give them some quiet space, or group them in smaller numbers together with other typically quiet employees(ie, no sales/marketing types)...
It's really sad that the parent post which pointed out problems for ADD people got modded -down- first. I hope it doesn't get modded down any further. Everyone likes to crack jokes about people with ADD, don't they?
Please help metamoderate.
This could be devastating for the Dilbert cartoons. If no one works in a cubicle, how will we relate to Dilbert's cubicle trials? We'll all just sit there and go "Huh, I don't get it"!
Priorities, people, priorities!
Long live Schrodinger's cat...
This is the IT quote of the year:
If it's such a good idea, I expect that management will be joining us.
I think our management is just slow to do what they did to the workforce - lay off 35% and move the jobs to India. Oh I forgot, they can't disturb their stock options and can't be bothered to worry about the company since they collectively own 0.003 of the outstanding stock.
Early in my programming career, over a decade ago, I worked for a small company that was based in a former medical clinic. They were too cheap to pay to renovate the building, so we had to make do with a warren of smallish rooms. One of the larger was known as the Bullpen; it was a 15'x20' conference room. There were eight or 10 of us crammed in there on tables. We had one phone. I was only able to get work done because I brought my DiscMan with me everyday. I don't know how anybody else ever got any work done, it was way too noisy.
Anyway, this sort of arrangement might work for sales guys who only actually come to the office once a week, or marketing and management types that spend all day in meetings anyway, but for programmers it just doesn't work.
What will you do in 12 months when a NEW, IMPROVED dev methodologies are developed?
After all, you must keep current!
<sigh>
You are aware that keyboards, mice and especially telephone handsets have a far higher bacterial count than e.g. toilets?
Or worse, you don't even have your own desk, and become a wandering nomad. And where exactly am I going to store my reference books, and that huge stack of ICDs and other documents? (Dead trees are here to stay, baby... deal with it). I suppose they could give me a company-issued shopping cart to wheel around. I could store it in my empty parking space when I leave for home.
Morale = productivity.
Morale also = less turnover (I might stay in my job due to seniority and comfort in my niche).
I am an Engineer. A professional does professional work. I can "work" under adverse conditions but at maybe half productivity. I'll bet my salary is more expensive than your cost savings.
And yes, I have spent lots of time in the machine room from the old mainframe days, but the pace and expectations were slower then; we were not on "Internet time".
If your Vice President says "work anywhere", say "Fine! I'll work in your office today! I'll be over here in the corner, you won't even notice me."
I'm one of those roaming Sun employees now and it actually seems to work quite well. In addition to the JavaCards that lets employees log into a SunRay and work from any Sun building, most of us have laptops that can be plugged into the network - Most Sun locations offer wireless too - when we need to sync code or check corporate email and such, while still allowing us to work on them without having to physically be in a Sun building. I've tried working from home as well as in a public library with free Net access for laptops, both with much success.
My team still meets weekly for lunch discussions but the rest of the time we use IM and email - with the occasional cellphone call - to communicate quite effectively. Today's generation of young University kids grew up on IM so they will have little difficulty adapting to using it over face-to-face contact with co-workers.
Can't wait for user friendly and dilbert to tear this to screads.
...at least in my experience they do.
At some point, a poll was circulated around my company, asking people what the ideal office size was. It was basically only programmers that answered 3 or 4. Everyone else wanted to share with as few people as possible. Artists, designers, whoever.
I work with 3 other people in my office now, and I really like it. I'm REALLY lazy most of the time, so not having to get up to ask someone a question, and just yelling it out to my office suits me just fine. As well, my two immediate team leads are right near me, so if I have a question about a design decision that I'm making, I can clear it with them if it's sketchy. Why would you want to be in an office by yourself? I've had the office to myself before, and it's usually just kinda lonely.
I have had an office, an "open space" desk and a cubicle. I love the office and the cubicle, but I truly hated my desk that was stuck in the middle of the floor. See, programming requires a lot of thinking, especially at the early stage of the development. Whenever I was writing something on a piece of paper or tried to concentrate on thinking, at least one person would stop by and ask something. Then there were certain managers who loved to get a progress report update everytime they went past my desk to get some coffee. Then there was a tech support dude (Level 1) talking on the phone for hours and hours a day.
Most of these people were doing their jobs and I had nothing against them; however, with time the unwanted interraction became a royal pain in the rear. I could cope with the tech support representative because he was was aware of his impact on the "free space" people. Unfortunately that was not true for a couple of women from the sales department...
On my opinion, the best way to improve efficiency is to have a relatively big office with several people whose job is related. I remember sharing an office with a dude from India. We got along pretty well and concentrated on our tasks while helping each other.
I think this move could be very good companies and communications, but for people with ADD/ADHD this is all very bad. An open environment leads to extremes in distractions. People moving about, people talking, speakers blaring (headphones only rule needed), top-level and upper management weenies watching production - all this would drive a person with ADD/ADHD to insanity (and/or unemployment).
As a person that deals with the rollercoaster ride of ADD/ADHD, I would like to see a 'compromise' solution. Keep the top-level management (Pres, VPs, CEO, etc) in offices (just shrink the offices), move the upper-level into cubes, eliminate middle-management, and push groups into group-centric open environments. Groups could move cube partition walls as needed. Leave some 'isolation tank' cubicles (high walls with extra sound dampening) available for people with ADD/ADHD.
As for the wireless 'shared' space - great idea, but where do you put your paper? Forms, documentation, books, etc. all the usual paper that you may need for work needs to be stored somewhere. I suppose you could dream of a paperless office, but I doubt most offices could pull that off effectively. Maybe I'm just 'old school', but my CYA work requires print-outs (since I cannot email these items to a home address). Still, great to see corporations working with wireless.
I can't say I'm surprised at its failure.
Humans may be by and large social creatures, but we are also territorial. We need space to call our own, for all the reasons cited in the Chiat/Day failure--space to store paper files, meet with clients, place to think in quiet.
If I want to confer with my co-workers, I can generally find them, because they have an office. When I'm done conferring and want to think and/or work uninterrupted, I go back to my office. It's a sign to those you work with--I am here to work and am available for consulting, but I'm not open to constant, distracting chatter.
Working in the common area of the engineering building while in college was great for group work and socializing between classes (gotta take a break once in a while), but if you wanted to work uninterrupted, better break out the headphones. I doubt Chiat would have approved of headphones, being a "personal" item.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I work as a programmer here in the UK and have never had to work in a cubicle. I have seen the whole cubicle thing on television and in the movies but didn't realise it was quite so widespread.
The office I do a lot of work from is completely open plan (150 people per area, 4 areas per floor). Working with 150 people around is perfectly OK. We have satellite television installed so when the Cricket / Football / Rugby / Tennis is playing we can all watch it as we work. If you want to listen to music you tend to wear headphones though. We also have a pool table for those moments when you need to take your mind off things.
I guess it is whatever you're used to.
Yes, I believe there is a special pink form that has to be completed to get one of these "wall-less" cubicles...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
All animals are created equal but some are more equal than others.
There will always be excuses why upper management work needs more perks than people who actually do the work.
Fortunately small companies tend not to have this culture. If they implement that plan, they'd likely place their space right in the middle of the action so they can get a sense of what's going on without having to ask for a zillion "status reports' which filter out everything that means anything.
There are around 13000 employees worldwide that lack a permanent office. The Santa Clara campus doesn't hold that many people. :) [That line of the article was poorly written, IMHO.]
One of the other problems of the article is that it fails to mention that there is a sizable number of people (who may or may not be iWorking) that report to someone who isn't in their geographic area any. What's the point in going into an office if you're the only one from your team there? [Of my current team, only three are physicially located in the Bay Area... and that does not include my manager.]
I've been working from home for quite a while now. [I was one of the early adopters.] I love it. It is one of the reasons why I like working at Sun. I can run errands, play some video games, whatever during my work day. As long as I get my work done, no one particularly cares.
FORWARD
I never thought I'd be in a work environment which would make cubicles look _good_. So now I'm reading job ads again.
The whole humerous aspect to this article is that a lot of people have been clamoring to be freed from the "office" i.e telecommuting, flex-time, etc. But it was always been turned down because people needed to be "supervised" ("managed"). But now that managment sees dollar signs, the idea of moving the worker away from "offices" (into ones the worker's paying for, no less. Burden shifting.) sounds appealing. The average worker has been "downsized" (Would you like fries with that?), and "outsourced". Laden with more hours, and more work, with the same or less pay, and reduced to nonexistent (pension plan plundered. Co-pay increasing) benifits. Let's not kid ourselves, every corporate action is for their benifit, and the fact that we gain something is a side-effect.
I think this is overall a good thing -- if they have the sense to keep the right people in cubicles, the right people in medium shared rooms, the right people in large shared rooms, and the right people at home. No, it is not wise to have the president, manager, or team head all over the place.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Never mind the fact that workplace ergonomists consulting with the PHBs are way more into following trends in their own field than in actually noticing what are the needs of employees who will be working in their designer environments. They fail to examine whether certain team members are more productive working in solitary and interacting with others only at the weekly meetings, while others actually are more productive in a common team space. Individualisation is the keyword, but workplace ergonomists fail to understand it.
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
Yes.
I think that in the context of tech jobs, the key here is "think in quiet". Any decent programmer spends a lot more time thinking than actually coding. And yeah, a lot of that thinking involves looking things up in manuals (and no, damn it, online references are not a substitute for dead trees!), doodling diagrams on convenient pieces of paper, etc.
Programming is not assembly-line work. The more PHB's try to turn it into an assembly line, the more they get crappy, bloated, buggy code.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Do you talk dirty to epileptics, too? "Quit shaking, you sissy!"
Stephen Hawking's job is to "think" and the slashdotter you're mocking seems to be employed to write software, not to chit-chat.
Personally I like to have a social space available, but I'd like some private space for things like reading documentation and thinking/learning.
So what's wrong with providing the anti-social geeks with a room of their own? Would you rather they starved to death?
We take care of people with problems - that's what's makes us human - and it's been my experience that some (not all) of these anti-socials are smarter and can understand things faster than most.
Some of them have adapted to the group life, but they took it slow with baby steps.
Every developer I've ever talked to has indicated that they do their best work when alone. Yeah, you need group meetings periodically, and every once in awhile need to bounce some ideas off a colleague. But when it comes down to finishing up some new module, or finding some tricky bug, focus and the ability to concentrate are key. This will become a lot harder in an "open" environment. So all that money saved in real estate costs will end up being gobbled up by lost productivity.
The other thing is, I bet you any money, managers still have offices. They had them before in cube-land, and they'll have them now. The difference is that the divide between lowly-developer and management will become even more pronounced. This doesn't lead to a very egalitarian work environment, meaning less job satisfaction among employees, which again translates to decreased productivity.
So why the transition to an "open" environment if there's going to be a decrease in productivity? Because saving costs on real estate is something that can be immediately quantified and measured by management. "Loss in productivity" is one of those wishy-washy things that can be attributed to half a dozen different things without any real certainty. Took longer to get version 2 out the door than version 1? It was because there were more complicated features to do for version 2, less skilled developers on the team this time around, etc, etc. (Of course, the one reason that would never be suggested -- at least by management -- is management's decision to change to an "open" work environment.) Being able to quantify something and show a short-term benefit on a balance sheet, while being oblivious to consequences that are less easily quanitified and more long-term, is what management types excel at.
The best environment I ever worked in was when I was at IBM and we had shared offices. There would be two developers to an office, one senior, and one more junior. That way the more junior developer could always have someone there to ask a question when he got stuck and the more senior developer was not just relegated to an isolated office to code all the really hard stuff by himself. That was several years ago; unfortunately, from what I've heard, since then IBM has also been moving to cubeland. (On a bright note though, even first-line managers get cubes, so they're "down in the trenches" with the developers, which is a good thing.)
Now you know why Microsoft netmeeting's popular. Anyway you'll notice were we're headed with all this "convergence" technology. You'll be at home with the "videoconferencing" setup. Big plasma screen, with a great sound system and web cam. With broadband running out the back. Throw in some net appliances, and other "office" gadgets and "moore's law" clusters from eBay, and you're just shy of being a SOHO in name only.
Oh and did I mention all the wireless gadgets that make certain we will never escape work, as well as the fact that we're paying for it all instead of the boss. Hope you have a big card limit.
Somehing about the tone of this article bugged me and it took a little bit of soul-searching to figure out what it was.
Let's start with my personal experience in cubicles. Back in the 80's a firm I worked for went through a major remodeling of office spaces. Being concerned with money (what company isn't), the economics of cubicles versus hardwalled offices was researched pretty thoroughly. In fact, it was actually cheaper to provide hard-walled (drywall, however hard that is) with doors than it was to provide "cattle-stall" cubicles. In addition, feedback from the employees indicated that they felt they would be more productive with the ability to close the office door and kill annoying distractions while working.
When all was said and done, they went with cubicles! Why? Because this wasn't an issue of economics. This was an issue of control. The managers of the departments did not feel that they had any control over their workers unless they could look over the cubicle wall and see what a worker was involved with at any time.
Now, that being said, I do believe that such an environment as described in the article would be more productive. But to think that such an environment will be the norm in a few years is a bit naive. Unless there is a radical change in the ways that managers think and work in corporate America (the only environment I have any experienec with), I don't think this will be the norm (in America anyway) anytime soon.
There are also other issues with floating office spaces. In my work (embedded firmeware) there is a significant amount of hardware setup that I need to be able to work. It takes a signicant amount of bench space to setup and test hardware associated with my compnay's product. In addition, there are manuals and schematics that, although computer generated and viewable, I find easier to work with in hardcopy and need to have available while debugging. How in the hell do you expect me to carry that around in a floating office? I do soeme work at home now but that was accomplished by the simple expedient of duplicating the physical stuff needed at home and then transferring the latest data back and forth between home and the office. This is actually more expensive but since the company does not pay overtime (read, time I put in outside the office) it is more cost-effective for them in the long run.
What this reminds me of is how the Feds are made to work in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash: the first ones in in the morning take the desks nearest the door and management can tell at a glance who's the most dedicated to the job.
I think this is the plan. Instead of management having to understand what their business does, they just assume the drones are substitutable or know what they're doing as much as anyone else and then hire or fire them based on how much they're willing to surrender of themselve to acheive the corporate "vision". Whatever that is today.
It's a fairly inevitable outcome of seeing employees as commodities or resources. How else can you discriminate between them? It's not as if management are going to bother learning their names for God's sake!
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
I'm a member of a large worldwide "virtual team" at Sun, and at least a third of our team works out of their house. It works surprisingly well, and our productivity is off the chart (the last metric "exercise" had us working at a 225% efficiency level!)
Granted, everyone on our team busts their hump every day, but we're managing our workload, and we're not TOTALLY buried all the time. I *do* have an office, but I also have the freedom to work remotely on days when I need to - it's great, I can watch my kids if my wife's got to go to the doctor's, then I head down the street to the local coffee shop that's got free wifi and login from my Powerbook. Thanks to wifi and my cellphone, I'm totally mobile, and I save the hour and a half commute into the office on the days I do need to work from home. Everyone wins.
As another poster said, you'll start to see this more and more often. People who goof off and abuse the privilege of working remotely won't succeed, while those of us who thrive will advance. It takes some technology and a slightly different management style to pull this off, but it's very doable, and can return huge dividends for both the employee and the company.
I started out working in a more open spaced environment. Then we had a cubical wall thing setup in our work area which is kinda nice. It took away the distractions of everyone else and gave me a decent sense of privacy to work, but it was open and still a shared space.
The openess was great for collaborating with a fellow developer and helping him or having him help me. What sucked about the openness was I had to listen to his country music, foot tapping, and other little things that were distracting and anoying. I'm sure I had some mannerisms that irritated him. If given a choice, I'd want my own cubical that doesn't let me hear or see other people. That way I can code in peace.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
...when something that was in a cyberpunk novel a few years back actually starts happening? This almost sounds like the "hotdesk" model from Slitscan in the book Idoru by Gibson, as well as Fedland from Snow Crash. And to me neither of those sounded like companies I'd want to work for...
This isn't the first time I've made this observation on Slashdot, either. I always thought most of the cyberpunk novels painted a worst-case view of the world, but I start to worry that they were more accurate than I'd like.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I have a co-worker who I work really well with. Thankfully, we have separate offices because on days where his stomach is acting up, boyahh! I've seen him leave his office it stank so bad. I don't have ADD, but I am very sensitive to things in my peripheral view. It's just the way I'm wired. I would not take a job where everyone has waist-high cubes. But a company that puts me in one after the fact? You just screwed me and my productiveness.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
My company relies largely on IM for communication,whether from home or in the office. Most of the programmers don't even have and "office" phone in their workspace. I like it this way, although I find it strange that in the settings I have been placed in with this company in the three years I've been there (cube - very short lived, office with three people, office with two people) we tend to be averse to communicating verbally even with our office mates (the people who share the same room with us).
I've lost count of the times I've asked someone to relay a message because the person I was trying to contact was not at his/her desk only to be told email him or IM him when he gets back. YOU'RE SITTING RIGHT THERE FOR CHRIST SAKE!! Is it really that hard to turn around and say so and so was looking for you?
I think the social effects of IM as a primary communication tool is something we ignore all too much. Programmers, as a geek species in particular, tend to be somewhat solitary people. The added convenience of not having to talk to someone face to face only makes these habits worse IMHO. Sure, it's great for productivity. I get a massive amount of work done just from the benefit of not having to talk to anyone. I can answer and instant message by touch typing without even thinking about it (especially in linux as opposed to finding the window in the start bar in windows which distracts me greatly), but there is more to everyone's heirarchy of needs than just being productive.
Cutting off the sociable ability of being able to physically converse with someone face to face is something we should not let deteriorate without consideration. I can go for hours (at least 4 at most 6) without even using my vocal chords. I, for one, think this is a very dangerous trend.
The english language is in beta. It's evolving but has not yet reached a level of usability.
It's a pain because I have to take them off to talk on the phone, but it does drown out the noise from the over-social people.
This idea suffers from the law of the Commons: since no one owns the office, no one will care about the condition of the office. Those who ask for a new chair, or ask that the boogers be cleaned up, or that people put their magazines into their personal storage area will be marked as "troublemakers" and eventually fired.
Consequence: dilapidated offices of the worst sort.
What a pathetic story! Congratulations to the Wired writer for an evocative description -- the litte red wagon was a perfect detail.
And for a reality check, the Bionic Office!
The US is still a huge market for manufactured goods, including cars. Even if Detroit is depressed, the rest of the country is doing rather well. I suspect that the big three automakers would be the big zero instead of the big two if they didn't attempt to reduce their costs to compete with the Japanese: the fact that they haven't reduced their costs enough by kicking out the unions and their expensive, lazy workforce means that year over year they lose even more business to the Japanese on quality and price and to the Germans on quality and luxury.
What you are begging for is more protectionism: the only way to get what you want the way you want it is to tax imports to allow American companies to compete. Guess what: the vast majority of Americans who aren't affected by the outflow of jobs to cheaper labor markets don't want to pay more for lower quality.
I, for instance, will not buy an American car unless and until they do something to reduce their total costs, which probably means destroying the major labor unions, reducing pay for line workers, and exporting a large number of jobs. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels the same way.
What I'm doing to protect my job from being exported is not sticking my head in the sand: rather, I'm increasing my skill set and indispensability to the point that I'll be in the last 10% of people to be laid off because I have lots of specialized knowledge that a cog in India or China wouldn't have. It sucks if you (generic) need to go into an entirely different field to achieve this, but I have very little sympathy: I don't want to subsidize your inflated wages.
[ home ]
reason for programmers to go independent and reject "permanent" positions.
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
I work for one of the global HR outsourcing firms that tracks corporate trends. In most cases we have about a five year waiting period before we actually implement these tends within our own organization, but in some cases (for instance, if there is money to be saved) we are actually one of the first to implement.
A few months ago, one of the PHBs came up with the idea that we can save corporate real estate by moving away from the cubicle model, as mentioned in the article. However, our solution did not encourage mobility and teamroom type environments. Instead, they are now putting two to three people in each cubicle (in the space formerly occupied by one). Rather then do away with cubicles altogether, they are "Maximizing" the space in each cubicle.
This hasn't affected everyone within our organization yet. They have started it with our lowest skilled workers, but the "Success" stories I have heard can only lead me to believe that it wont be long before the rest of us join them. Considering the number of corporations that take HR advice from us, it probably wont be long before the majority of you join them as well.
The moral: It is better to be treated like a cow than like a sardine.
Now we issue you a badge'' with the option to work anywhere, Vass said. ``It's instant productivity.''
Sure, if you're a paper-pusher.
If you're a software developer or hardware engineer, it takes a certain amount of isolation in order to be productive. Even though I have an office (shared) at work, both of us in there find that we get our best work done after all the interruptions have gone home at 5pm.
Chip H.
You're a fucking moron. Calling people who disagree with your idiotic views treasonous? You, sir, are un-fucking-American!
By the way, your "analysis" might appeal to six year olds (or Eric Raymond), but it's clear that you're a sigma or two below a typical IQ. Are you black, by any chance?
they probably just meant people became unproductive because they started talking too much instead of working :P
I think the real group to blame in situations like this is management. Supervisors and middle management love to be able to keep tabs on their employees so they like to have them grouped together (physically or virtually) so that they can keep an over-head on what is being produced and in what (timely) manner. If management could develop a means of sorting out the social from the introverted then they would have a truly cohesive workforce. I personnaly beleive think-tank work practice is the best because of a tendency for creative criticsm and a more reliable means of levying out ideas that aren't feasable. However, a lot of your loner types have a tendency to put out qualtiy work simply because they AREN'T there to socialize. They have a goal, they have 12 hours to reach it and that is what they do.
If management could simply grasp the concept that their employees are individuals, they could mold the workplace to suit everyone so that issues like this wouldn't occur. If you like working at home, work at home, you work better in a group then so be it, and if your that "hermit" who works best alone though wants the interaction of at least BEING there then that could work as well.
When I was in Special Projects for a while I saw all these situations occur. I had employees come to me complaining that they didn't feel productive at home, that they needed the interaction of fellow employees (at least available) to have criticsm readily available. I also noticed that we in management didn't meet those needs. As a result people felt less cared for and lost affinity with their employer. Once we instituted a means for personal preference to become a factor in our employment and dispersal capacities, we notice a significant increase in productivity.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
Add that to firing people who don't work well in the new system (hm, sounds like an excuse for a targetted RIF if you ask me), and it's an all around lousy way to do business.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Some places where I have consulted have been stacking developers 2 or 3 to a cube for years. Too many times, I've seen 6 to 10 developers crammed into a small, converted conference room. All in the name of saving money and "increasing" productivity. All it succeeds in doing is lowering moral and slowing production.
This isn't socialization. It's Veal-ization.
Ryosen
One man's "Troll, +1" is another man's "Insightful, +1".
Amen. When they come to work still wearing their "furry" suits from their sicko weekend orgies, it's just disgusting.
One of the ways they were cutting down on office space was allowing people to work from home as well. In this sense, it is easy to see how they would have to fire some people for being unproductive. Some people (myself included) have trouble focusing and staying motivated when working at home.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
- The Squirrel: In some circles, squirrels
are known as "nature's random number generators". These managers are constantly implementing random-ass policies and badgering (squirreling?) you about your god-be-damned TPS reports. Sadly, unlike squirrels they do not hibernate, or hurl themselves in front of cars.
- The Lemming: Being the hip motherfuckers they
know they are, they leap with gusto off of any management cliff (ie, trend) they can find. These
are the curmudgeonly fuckers responsible for heinous crimes against humanity such as High Performance Teaming, forcing workers to take on the role of their own management, which leads to some seriously bizarre Lord of The Flies shit going on between the workers, and allows the manager, who is now free from the task of fucking his employees over, to go fuck his secretary.
That's not all though. Then these clueless motherfuckers wander around the office with that stupid cup of coffee all day, starting each sentence with "uhhm..," or "yeeeeah, hi". Then they move you to the dank fucking basement, and take away your stapler. Fuck management. And fuck you, because only a brown-nosing fuck would ever try to claim that "management are workers too".A section from the article sums it up...
"Unlike the rest of us, they no longer harbor fantasies about working on the beach. And they're more aware of the delicacy of the bonds that link a company's workforce. Spencer learned one other thing: "Deep down, we're all still cave dwellers," he says."
There's the problem...cave dwellers...
Of course they don't want to work on the beach(for example); It's bright, nice, relaxing, inspiring...everything that a proper knuckle-dragger would hate.
How can you waste time complaining about/searching through the clutter in your office(who made it, I wonder?) when all your documents/info is on a nice widescreen laptop and backed up on the serverfarm??
How will secretaries drag things to a halt by yapping about piles of photos they drag into work everyday?? Let alone bug I.T. about using office resources to scan in pictures to put as their backgrounds(see also;webshots)?
How can you download mp3's/porn/play games during work unless you have a big honking 'desktop' pc & 21" TUBE monitor(whoops,less room,need bigger desk/office) to store them on, and screw up with spyware/virii instead of a low-TCO thin client or laptop?
Yes, privacy is good(walk further down the beach/work from home/grass hut on the beach) but if 'open areas' are filled with people chatting, then guess who has to shut up and get back to work??Hmmmm?
I mean DAMMIT PEOPLE!!!It's almost 2004 for shitsakes!!
You can either run a business with a bunch of 'cave-dwellers' who will drag you down as their JUNK drags them down(Idiot in the article who had a freakn little red wagon of crap), OR have an efficient mobile team.
Unibrows who wander aimlessly from coffee pot to any open office door and pester people with such 'insight' as:
"see the game last night"
"hot/cold/wet/snowy enough for ya"
"did you see what X did on tv show Y last night"
"someone's got a case of the mondays"
are a cancer on businesses and should be given the axe ASAP.
The technology is THERE! NOW!
Cut away the luddite cave-dwellers, they'll only pull you down...
I am a teacher and until they figure out a way to lecture about the French Revolution from home in my PJ's while still keeping students engaged, I'm going to have to watch from afar. :) I do wonder, though, how much the cubible-less world may lead to the wall-less school. :)
It's been proven that an exceptional programmer can outperform mediocre coworkers by more than a factor of 5.
Couple that with the fact that some technical activities thrive in an environment condusive to focused concentration.
It's not at all inconceivable to see that forcing people into a more social environment that they are comfortable with can be detrimental to productivity as well as employee satisfaction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
simply because during the formal hours I am constantly distructed by a barrage of questions from novice programmers, QA people. Some project managers who have nothing better to do are constantly comming up with stupid jokes and expect everyone to listen to them. Supposed 'architects' come to my freaking cubicle and ask me to solve various problems for them etc. This eats my time like nothing else, so I stay after-hours so I can concentrate on my problems at-hand and finally do some serious coding.
When I code I do not need anyone distructing my attention because it is not easy to get back into the 'zone', where you are running the program you are currently working on in your head. I am serious, I need my head to run the program that is not created yet in it, so I can copy it from my memory into the computer's memory. If only there was a faster interface than 60 words per minute.
You can't handle the truth.
I think I left my brains floating in this VAX.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I think that most folks will agree that Apple is a first-rank company when it comes to both creativity and developing code. At Infinite Loop in Cupertino (the center of R&D), all of the engineers are in offices no cubicles, and their productivity is *very* high. I think they're onto something there.
--Paul
Then there was the x factor - the people who happened to live nearby the agency. They'd dart in at six in the morning, grab equipment, hide it somewhere, and maybe catch a couple more hours' sleep before the virtual workday began. This didn't sit well with Rabosky and others: "Damned if I was going to get up at six in the morning to get a phone," he says. "I had to put my foot down. I told my assistant, 'Go in there at six in the morning, get me a phone and computer, and hide it till I get there.'"
Just like a PHB to admit to something like this and not see why it's wrong! He could have wrangled with the execs to stop this madness, but instead he (ab)used his assitant to 'fix' it for HIM.Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Since then, Silicon Valley real estate has become a lot more expensive. To stay in Silicon Valley, Sun has replaced their US work force with H-1b workers overwelmingly from India and China and proceeded to loose over 90% of their shareholders value.
I personally,think it would have been a wise business decision to set up a campus someplace like rural Utah or Oregon. If present trends continue, it appears likely Sun will eventually move operations to India or China.
Basically, there is a workforce that has proven itself able to build a company like sun-but they aren't real productive in high-rent situations. There is another workforce that is much more unproven. We haven't seen really major IT innovations out of India or China yet. We may, but that is still somewhat speculative.
It looks to me like Sun, HP, Compaq, Lucent are all killing the geese that have laid the golden eggs form them.
Many folks point out that it's going to be difficult to locate someone in these floating offices. That's true. However, all they need to do is develop those cool locator systems like they have on STTNG.
"Computer, where is Creative Director Algers?"
"Creative Director Algers is in the Can."
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
Last I heard, Sun is close to going under, or is at least being given a run for their money by Microsoft. Maybe there is a correlation between employee satisfaction and corporate success after all. Employees should vote with their feet. Don't like it? Gowork foro a competitor. By the way, how are working conditions at MS?
PS I am not a coward,Slashdot wouldn't log me in.
The most productive office environment I have ever worked in was one where all of us were in one big room with no deviders or walls or cubes. We had 14 people in the room with those big old government desks. It was so much easier to get things done 'cause when we needed info or help from anyone you'd just turn your chair and talk to them. Plus, since there were no percieved walls the conversations were much quieter since we didn't have to yell over the partitions and no one played their music loud. This works best with groups of developers or engineers but can also work for any team.
--
If I actually could spell I'd have spelled it right in the first place.
...then tell me: who is going to buy your products or services?
It's like many fishermen living off one limited supply of fish in a lake: for each fisherman, it maybe better to bring home as much fish as they can. For all fishermen combined this would mean a dire future.
This miraculous thought is summarized under "Shadow of the future" in philosophical theories. - "Exploiting good for one and for short terms, exploiting disastrous for all and for long terms."
100% efficient production from all producers mean 0% profit margins...
Imagine you are exceptionally competent and exceptionally lucky and you are the last one whose job is being exported: any ideas of how you'll sell anything you produce?
Free markets only work on scarce resources - often heard but true. And the employment market is anything but scarce, as potential employees are abundant in every known profession.
Every job could be exported to low paid, but highly qualified people of the third world. If these countries cannot build up a high level of income and prosperity, meaning high wages in relation to consumer goods prices, they will never be able to buy any of the goods the first world is buying today. So you can exhaust your market if you don't build up high level incomes to sustain your businesses in a decade from now.
You should see a difference between real efficiency and simple economic vampirism (aka greed).
Take for example the sport shoe market: nearly 95% of all sneakers from nike et al. are made in very poor countries, in low paid sweatshops - manufactured and transported for maybe 4-10 dollars a pair, sold for 100 and more. This cannot be sustained forever, sooner or later either your sweatshops revolt and demand higher wages (won't happen anytime soon) or your target consumers have no more money to spend. (assuming other industries take a similar approach in business practices)
you can't afford to be in business. Yeah, you could save a ton of money by eliminating workspace for all your non-management employees, but many people prefer to come in to work and sit down at a desk. If you want people to work for you, but you are too cheap to provide a workspace, how generous are you going to be when it comes to benefits, raises, or actually giving a crap about your employees? People who run corporations like these are idiots. The next great decision is going to be to stop paying people, and staff entirely with unpaid interns, because, hey, it's a lot cheaper, and young college students are willing to do anything to say they were connected to a company like Sun. Why not take full advantage of that? The quality of the product is unimportant, it is how much money we can pack into the bank accounts of the "quality people," our managers and CEO's, right? Everyone else is just a warm body, surely.
No, this isn't a troll, or a fanboy comment. Think about it.
Sun employees are able to work from anywhere they site because Sun uses the X Window System -- famous for remotability of applications. You can truly call up any application from any location and it runs. Your home directory is, quite literally, your desktop.
Not so easy for Windows-using companies. Yes, I know all about Terminal Services. I deploy it for customers all the time, and therefore I know that it isn't nearly flexible enough for this type of work. Can you have lots of different apps running from lots of different hosts on your screen at the same time? Maybe, but you have to deal with each of them running in a 'desktop-in-a-window'. Forget about cutting and pasting between them. And god forbid the user saves something to their 'C drive' and tries to pull it up in another application.
Windows users and Windows applications think very much inside the 'My Computer' mindset. Not only is it the name of the little icon, but it's the way the whole framework is set up. Attempts to free Windows users from a single desktop almost always fail. I've seen it. People move to a different computer and wonder where that file they saved is. They wonder what happened to their bookmarks, or some other obscure setting they selected. Truly, the only way to get Windows users to roam effectively is to give them all laptops.
Unix and Linux users, on the other hand, are truly free to roam. Case in point: Largo, Florida. Remember the architecture they described? Every time they deploy a new application, they bring online a server to run it from. Then they have a few integration servers coordinating the desktop framework and firing up those apps, wherever they live, and sending them to the desktops, wherever the user happens to be. You log on to any computer and your desktop is there. And since Unix/Linux has been saving user preferences and user files in your home directory for three decades, as long as you have the same home directory NFS-mounted everywhere, you're good to go. I've deployed this, too, and I can attest that it works beautifully.
Want to ditch the cubicle farm? Ditch Windows first.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
It would be a much simpler matter to redesign the workspace to allow for both kinds of work to go on simultaneously -- that is, split the total square footage between group-oriented workspaces, and more isolated cubicles or offices for individiual work. The current thinking of workspace as terriority, or as a place to "put" someone where they can be found easily by others, must change before this can occur. Forunately, wireless tech like Blackberries, WiFi laptops, and PDAs are going to start trickling down out of the executive ranks in 2004 (IT budget cycle is coming round...), so a few of the more daring (or small) companies might start experimenting in that direction.
===========
Together, we will drive the rats from the tundra.
"Another issue is that there's no "decompression time" built into your schedule. A commute of 10-15 minutes is a good thing if you work a high-stress job because that's just long enough to set the stress aside before you get home. (Your family will thank you for that."
"
Your family will. Everyone else on the road will not.
Apparently, they were oppressed by their personal space.
In the article, they're talking about saving money by not leasing as much space.
You're talking about being able to walk to a building that doesn't have anyone in it.
But that does have an unattended computer or at least a network connection.
In that situation, I'd see people setting up their own offices again. You say that the space is available.
In the article, the space is not available.
As you can see, electronic books are a long way from being an adequate replacement for paper books, though I'm looking forward to digital paper which will alleviate some of the problems with electronic texts, being an absorptive display technology and so not requiring a constant power flow.
that for the duration of that project, those people have an area that is specifically their's.
They don't have to show up early in the morning to stake a claim to it.
But that does not sound like what the article was talking about.
Bonus: work without pants!
"Frank, every time we have a phone meeting you just have to announce that you are not wearing any pants. Well, we are tired of it. It is not funny. You're Fired!!!"
As much as I'd enjoy working without pants, there might be some disadvantages to it.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
I'm probably a much better engineer than you, because I have a full office to myself. I also get paid $120K per year, and all I have to do is write a little Java. It's ridiculous.
Someone sounds a little bitter... why don't you try to learn a real skill? Get some creativity, or people skills? Something to differentiate you from people who might take over your job.
workplace ergonomists consulting with the PHBs are way more into following trends in their own field than in actually noticing what are the needs of employees
Well said. I think this phenomena is common enough that it should have a name.
--Lawrence Lessig for Congress!
There are some tasks where you need peace and quiet for hours of uninterrupted concentration to be really productive - you keep the ideas you need in your head and get into a flow, and if that's interrupted a lot you lose productivity rapidly and spend all your time in slow-start, and you need all your books right at hand on your bookshelf. There are other tasks where your biggest needs are communication with your customer, so as long as you've got a cellphone and laptop it doesn't matter if you've got a desk. There are tasks where you need to be interacting a lot with the other members of your team, so cubicles or open lab-table space work fine. And there are tasks where you need hardware to mess with.
I started my career at Bell Labs in an environment with two-person offices, which was usually excellent for most work. It's quiet enough that you can think, but you're not isolated (so if you're the type who needs other people there to stay motivated, you've got that, and if you want to have conversations about what's going on you can.) If you needed to ignore everybody and focus, you went to the library.
The last 10 years, in different parts of AT&T, I've usually been in cubicles plus home office - the last six months I've mostly worked from home, because I'm on the phone a lot, email constantly, supporting people who are out of town, and I go to the office once or twice a month. But for the first year or so doing my current job, it was really helpful being in the office to absorb the relationships and corporate culture and politics and current events. That's one thing I miss when I'm working from home, but the office is usually relatively empty, and we're not hiring new people very often so the fact that I'm not there to help socialize them doesn't get lost. Part of the reason our San Francisco office is relatively empty is that it's expensive real estate, so the Corporate Real Estate Goons decided everybody should have small shared cubicles, and most of the people were sales people who can spend time at their customers' offices or work from home, so they got the hint and stopped showing up.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
I've had times when that was the kind of work I was doing, and you're right on about it - and when I read the first paragraph or two I was thinking about Peopleware :-) At Bell Labs in the 70s-80s, we normally had two-person offices for most of the workers (1-person for supervisors, 3-person when we were short on space, or 4-5 person when we stole conference rooms for office space, but mostly 2-person.) It was usually quiet enough to focus, but social enough to communicate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
kasparov wrote: "Some people (myself included) have trouble focusing and staying motivated when working at home."
No wonder you're only drawing with all those chess playing computers,
take a bit of pride in your chess playing. I would've assumed that almost
ALL of the previous grand masters had to work from home.
http://jesus.everdense.com/
I worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill when the building was gradually being converted, one hallway at a time, from old-style offices to cubicles. It was a huge project. And almost nobody who had to work in the results was happy with it. Specifics varied from hallway to hallway, but generally you had a bunch of 3/4 height walls for most people, two to a cubicle, and the management types got "offices", or cubicles with full-height walls.
when it came time for my group (6-8 people) to move in, we cut a deal with our business unit's leader: expand our lab space, give us two pseudo-real offices, and you don't have to give us any cubes. the result was wonderful: we got a largish lab, where we all set up our workstations (with convention essentially resulting in each person having "their" workstation), we had a place to go for one-on-one meetings, personal phone calls, or naps (we brought a couch into one of the offices), we had great information exchange, and it was just plain fun. we took all our technical books and put them in one of our new shared offices, essentially creating a library, again increasing the benefits of pooled knowledge. it was the best work environment i've ever been in.
the model we were going on was actually found in-house, existing for years: 1127. this is the Bell Labs Research group that made C, Unix, and most else that's still good about computing. everyone had an office they were hardly ever in. mostly, that core group hung out in the Unix Room (so called because, well, it's where Unix (and later Plan 9) was created). today, i work in two different locations for my employer. in one, everyone's got their own office (real offices, even!). in the other, it's open plan, with three offices and a conference room. i much prefer the later. i find myself more productive, more aware of what's going on in the rest of the company, and (being in IT) more able to respond to issues other people are talking about. in the former office, i'm routinely blind-sided by issues people have been complaining about - to themselves or their office mate - for weeks. the open environment hugely helps exchange of ideas and improves productivity, even after factoring in the seemingly "lost" time people spend just chatting - which, of course, makes the place a lot more fun to work, and improves morale.
good ideas require interaction. nobody - and i mean nobody - is smart enough to see all possible ends on their own. ask ken and dennis if they could've done what they did without easy collaboration from their peers.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
They can't tell the difference between crappy, bloated buggy code any more than they can tell the difference between a great programmer and one who can't code his way out of a paper bag. To them programmers are just cattle (Or "Resources") and are interchangable. To them, programming is an assembly line process.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
High school nightmare all over again!
Damn, I was so glad those days of being unable to give the right anwers so people wouldn't pick on me were over..
1. Online docs are easier to update. The author changes the source and if you are pointed at that source you have the update immediately.
2. Online docs are more portable between work environments. I could lug around 50 pounds worth of docs between my work and home offices; instead I can access onlines docs from either with any computing device.
3. Books can be loaned but not copied too easily.
4. Online docs are much cheaper than books.
Books are fine if you are working in a relatively static environment. When your technology and your location changes though books can be a hassle.
This is true in my office. However as people learn more about the available offices and their neighbors their patterns can change. Maybe an office that was unbearably hot in the summer due to sun exposure is now comfy in the winter. Or you change departments and want to sit near your new coworkers. Or a new neighbor likes to yell into their speakerphone. The advantage of flexible officing is all of these things can be accomodated without changing the system.
Next, there's the human factor. No definable workspace that's "mine" gives the impression that I'm temporary, simply a cog in a machine. Plus, remember high school? Everyone will gravitate to an area and stake out turf. They will consider that space "theirs" and resent any intrusion. Plus, the "cool kids" will undoubtedly stake out the good areas, leaving the less powerful to wander the office aimlessly looking for a place to work.
Shared space sounds like a pure utopian ideal that would never work in the real world. The assumption is that everyone on your team gets along perfectly and never needs time apart. I'm part of a pretty good team, but if we all had to share one big cube, we'd be at each other's throats. What happens when you have to work on something with someone? Two people have a conversation with an unwilling audience of three. Either you whisper or you bother everybody else.
Count me out.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
You don't even need to analyze the wiley super-genius to get it. Just walk around a university and observe the behavior. You have a population presented with every environment from cubicle to bull-pen, indoors/outdoors, social/anti-social, highly personalized/utterly sterile as well as, in many cases, the bar. Guess what? People use every space depending on need, mood and appropriateness to the task. However, undisturbed, quiet solitude is where most will perform the tasks that require concentration and accuracy especially under pressure. Lesson: To ensure maximum productivity, provide access to all of the above.
Flexible officing is not necessarily about cramming folks into cubes. My building is almost entirely flex, and just about everyone gets a closed office with a door and everything.
To make this work you have to have the right technology. You need fixed phone numbers that follow you wherever you go, and we have that. You need an easy way to access your computing work environment; our work sessions come up in a few seconds after the insertion of our employee ID into our terminals. It helps to have the ability to access work from outside the office, and we have that as well through VPN. You also need a reservation system to tell you which workspace you are using (so people can find you) and which workspaces you want to use in the future.
For some folks who come into the office every day like clockwork and always reserve the same office this system doesn't make much sense. But most people aren't really like that. People move around inside a company and sometimes need to change location. People have car repairs, kids, doctors appointments and other things that take them away from the office during work hours. Here in the Bay Area many people have awful commutes that are ameliorated by working from home on occasion.
Buildings change too; sometimes workspaces are reconfigured or upgraded. Equipment breaks, making the office unusable. New buildings are built, leased or bought and old ones are decommissioned for the same reasons.
Flexible officing makes it easier to accomodate all of these things because a flex worker can just show up at their new office and they will have a computer, phone, printer, etc ready and waiting for them with no red tape or extra service. And if space is planned properly you can save costs by buying less total space.
Solving flexible officing problems also helps you with other emerging trends, like distributed workgroups and working from home. Ideally you don't just save money on real estate. You also make your workers happier by allowing them to work where they want.
Check this article
Some people argue that open office spaces enable 'free flowing communication'. This is not a good thing, as it can be very distracting. If you can't be bothered to send someone an email, call them, or get up and walk 75 feet to see them, then what you were going to say was probably unimportant anyway.
Excellent points, especially about people being territorial.
Your post smacks of maleness!
What about Citrix or publishing applications via Terminal Services? Everyone is already working on a central server and no longer tied to the workstation.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Thank you for the reply and comparison jetscootr. If I had any moderator points I'd try to mod you up. I believe that the reason that ADD/ADHD hasn't been explored on Slashdot (at least recently) is because most people don't want to believe they have a mental disorder and/or they cannot analyze themselves objectively. There are, most likely, some that don't want to admit a problem either.
I've known I am ADD/ADHD since I was in elementary school. I couldn't sit still and couldn't focus on any subject. Eventually my father relented to the powers-that-be that I should be medicated instead of twice-monthly beatings. The FDA had just approved Ritalin and I was a guinea pig. After six months they couldn't get the dosage low enough to suit me. I always went to zombie-state after taking the pill. I have heard they are much better at dosages now, but I want nothing to do with it. I try to manage by using diet, exercise and meditation. It also doesn't hurt to have a job that fits people with ADD/ADHD.
Getting back to topic. The best thing a company can do, with regard to ADD/ADHD employees, it to analyze the situation and determine whether an employee is adversely affected by the environment and proceed from there. Unfortunately, most companies would rather just threaten the employee and then dismiss rather than work through the issue. Companies should setup office workspaces with the employees and work to be done taken into account. Use some Myers-Briggs type tests with ADD/ADHD screening, and then place people into workspaces.
My Boss: I would have to ask you to go ahead and move as far back against the wall as possible. We have some boxes and stuff..... so if you could pack your stuff and move, that would be great. Thanks a bunch Milton!!
...no... no. I was told ... no .. that I would not have ... to move again. Mm .. Ok ... I.. could ... set the building on fire.
Me: No,
> Do you supose they could be women as well?
Oh, we all so wish this could be true!!!
I hear alot of jokes and comments involving working in "cubicles" (e.g. Dilbert, this article...) - but here in the UK, I've never worked in an office that has them.
I've worked in large companies/corporations (the BBC, IPC Magazines) and seen the inside of many more (BSkyB, Cisco UK, Diageo) as well as several smaller outfits of about 50-100 employees, and apart from a couple of dividers here and there, I've never seen an office divided up into cubicles.
It sounds like hell on earth! Are they just American?
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
"I don't know about you, but if I could put 15% of my after-tax take-home back in my pocket every month, I'm all for this 'pay cut'.
Just because the company spends something on you as an expense doesn't mean it is a direct benefit."
Which goes out in higher utility bills, and other expenses. Expenses that wouldn't have been as big because you weren't home as much.
You save on one end, and pay out on the other.
Yourdon wrote about how to get a project done when there's not enough time. Besides ruthlessly pruning features and compromising quality, his recommendation was to put the developers in offices. There's no substitute for concentration.
Yeah, and of course everyone is just like you, aren't they?
That's the single biggest problem with most of the fashions in the working environment: they assume that what's good for some people (read: those making the decisions) will automatically be good for everyone. I have news for you: people are different. Otherwise everyone would be equally good at their jobs... What's good for one person won't necessarily be good for another. Some people thrive on personal contact, others find it distracting. Some work best under great pressure, others find it stressful and counterproductive. Some can juggle umpteen tasks at once, others have to concentrate on one at once. Some have the self-discipline to work at home without getting distracted, others perform best in a work environment. Some enjoy new surroundings every day, others prefer somewhere familiar that they have a bit of control over.
I think Scott Adams had the right idea. One of his books laid down his management principles, one of which was along the lines that people are generally capable and willing to produce good work; the function of management should be to give people what they need for their job, and then keep out of their way and let them do it!
Ceterum censeo subscriptionem esse delendam.
I worked in the space management department at IBM, and during an influx of 300+ more workers than we had space for, we had to move some existing employees around to get new people close to the departmens/teams they were gonna be working in. Well, one guy that had been working there for 10+ years threw a hissy fit when we went to move him from his 4th floor window office to a 1st floor window office. He complained to his manager, and to his manager's manager. Even though he was going to be moving in to the same size office and such, some people get extremely territorial over their offices.
I've also worked in many "2 wall" environments, and find it bothersome that other people bug the hell out of me for working quietly. While I merrily type away on whatever project i'm doing, others will constantly bug me, usually just to tell me that i'm "so quiet". Or worse yet, they feel the need to distract me with conversation, wanting to know what I did for the weekend and such. The one thing that pisses me off the most is that if someone brings in food for everyone, they refuse to let me not eat anything despite my hefty need to diet. Everyone around will tell me to "get up and get some", or "go eat", and "don't just sit there". Why can't people just let me do what i'm being PAID to do! I hate working with women, especially because of this. It's as if they can't sit still for more than 15 minutes without having to talk to someone, and don't even think of getting any work done if someone brings in photos of their baby/vacation.
If I ever get to a point where I can negotiate my contract, a private office will forever be first on my list ahead of any salary or benefit requirements.
Here's an interesting question. One of the things that determines if you are an employee or not is if the company that is paying you provides you with a place to work. If they don't, or you have significant external presence (working from home!) could you be considered a "contractor"?
If yes, I forsee a lot of lawsuits when Cisco/Sun/etc figure out that they don't own the copyright to their code anymore. Copyright rules for contractors are very different than employees.
Jason PollockI'm an engineering intern at a local TV station. Originally, I had no place in the building to call mine, so I was free to do any desk work anywhere in the building. It was a pain at first because I didn't have my own computer, so making wiring diagrams and stuff like that was a pain. I bought an iBook since I will need a laptop for school anyways and that made a differnce. I started to desk work up in a studio, which was OK for a while but got kind of dull because there was no one to talk to. One day , I noticed there was free cube by where my other boss works with a nice Power Mac G4 on it, so I asked him about it and he said "Sure, the Mac needs to tested anyways". I sit there now and I like it mich better because there's people around that I can talk to while I do to work. There's a TV in there too and actually I find it kind of nice because that way there isn't a constant humming noise in the air or any annoying music being played on the radio.
None of those companies are growing. They're all shrinking. This "hoteling" stuff looks just like downsizing.
Wow, this is one of those rare times when my past military experience lets me understand what someone is talking about.
No offense but then again the civilian side isn't very well known for it either, unless of course you are talking about nit-pick job descriptions and contract agreements (not my job) and making sure they get all their breaks and overtime.
Charcharodon is refering to civilians who work for the Government. They are ultra picky about "job descriptions" and will not perform any task, no matter how simple and/or critical, that isn't explicitly listed in their job description. The civilians who don't work for the government are generally nothing like that, unless its a union job.
freeing employees from their cubicles to save on corporate real estate costs
They fire them.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
They've taken away job security.
They've taken away the benefits.
They've taken away overtime.
They've taken away the promotions.
They've taken away the adequate salary.
And now, they've taken the furniture.
It's not funny.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Funny, There are a lot of schools abroad where one do not have any personal space at all (like locker). One just come everyday with all stuff needed for today and leaves with it, which sucks.
Johnson Wax, 1936
The difference? Your place is built before a great depression, the Johnso wax building is built at the end of one. David Byrne says, "Watch me work. Ah, work, work." Now get back to it, slave. That or revolt to take your life back. Home is a place you take care of and take comfort from your spouce and children, not simply sleep and change clothes. Then as now, the non freeness of forgeiners leads to our own. Fight for your life and that of others.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
This article from Stanford Business School talks about research showing workers reactions -- they fear virtual teams may make them obsolete.
Basically: work virtually, put all your knowledge on the company intranet for others to have, and why would the company need you any more?
That's a simplistic assumption, because the value of an employee is primarily in what cannot be communicated or written down easily (otherwise rules engines would be able to replace us all), but executives might just assume that once you've been "milked" of what you know, you are expendable. In your place they hire some cheap incompentent, and tell them to read your digital history.
If you ever worked with an asshole with ugly kids, you know this is not a troll.
i dont feel like reading all the other posts, but i just wanted to say this. i hate working in the same room as other people. i'm the only person that knows anything, so they always keep comming to me and asking me questions and such. i then have to stop what i'm doing and help them. i need my privacy so that i can actually accomplish something.
023AD01("Child", "Evil");
Given my short temper it's a Good Thing.
Seems people are very hung up with the cubicle "life."
But isn't it what you have chosen?
If it's not then why are you doing it?
If you don't like what I write don't be a CS and mod it down. Refute it.
Yea I can't spell. So what is your point?
This discussion reminds me of how study halls were handled in my high school (back in the early '70s). If you had no intention of studying, you went to the cafeteria, where the noise level approached infinity. If you wanted to study without being bugged by anyone, you went to the auditorium. If you were studying but open to suggestion (wandering teachers sometimes had interesting things for us to do) or wanted to study collaboratively, you went to one of the back stairwells or the foyer to the teachers' lounge. In each case, the location tended to select for a given type of studying ("work") and made it plain to anyone why you were there. Anyway, interesting in light of the different work environments being discussed, and how one's behaviour naturally follows.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
People are naturally scared about their jobs, but this is not a particularly good reason to be scared (at least in semi-rational organizations (maybe we should be scared, but the problem still requires a closer look)).
Simply, if you are not one of these incompetents yourself, you will not be able to put even 1% down because you know too much and a large fraction of what you know will be less explicit than is reasonably easy to put to coherent, flowing prose. Furthermore, hopefully you'll be learning new stuff at some clip, so they'll constantly be a gap. However, this isn't the major reason not to fear the incompetent, the major reason not to fear the incompetent is that he is incompetent.
Such an incompetent reading your how tos, handy tips, cautionary notes, etc... will not be anything near a replacement of you because he lacks the implicit and/or foundational knowledge and the intelligence to make much sense of what you put out there except in the same context.
The two greater threats are your competant coworkers in combination with downsizing, and bright, but less experienced entry level folks. The degree of a threat they pose is related to how close they are to your level in other ways... sorry but you do have to differentiate yourself somehow. That really doesn't seem too harsh to me.
Further, if you like actually doing things, maybe even something new from time to time, it is far, far more enjoyable to work in an environment where necessary information is fairly easy to get at. I personally wouldn't trade that for a fiefdom, however secure, and I say this even though I am not in a stable work situation myself. I don't know, but certainly suspect that some of the more vocal people about this issue are incompetents themselves... they ARE replaceable with a couple dozen howtos so naturally don't want to write them.
Were this a just world where I was running things, I would want to take into acccount additions to the corporate knowledge base. It is productive work, and it does matter. OK, so you can only change future pay, and you can only do it on past information. So what? That's always the case. Past experience isn't a perfect predictor of the future, but it's not so bad, and I'd be just fine with compensating people partially in relation to how much information they made available to their peers and how useful it was to them. Granted, that's hard to determine, but it's worth trying.
That's a very different thing from being able to do productive work in a room with 100 conversations going on on all sides.
I think I'm pretty good at communicating with people, but that's what meetings and lunches are for. When I'm done communicating and dealing with people, and it's time to do some intense thinking, I don't need four different meetings, half a dozen tech support calls, and twenty tinnily-audible sets of headphone music going on in the same room.
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
Actually, I was referring to the lunchroom. By October, every clique has their table staked out for the year. I foresee that same dynamic playing out in the workplace, which would suck even harder.
Interociter
-=What do I want? I'm an American. I want more.
Hi,
I actually agree with you, but your argument is flawed.
You have not considered the possibility that the inventing type people might more likely stick alone. So if you are comparing you should compare in proportions of 5 inventor type people sticking together vs less than 5 ppl. The fact is there *may* be lots of inventors who work in groups of 5 which could account for the statistic you pointed out.
Can't afford cell phones for every worker? How much does it cost to set up a land line for every worker? I'm curious to see some actual figures since it seems like setting up wired phones would be rather expensive. There's the cost of your own voicemail software, salaries for whatever staff maintains your phone system, the line leases themselves, long distance charges, equipment, etc. In new offices you even have to figure in the cost of running the wire. (At some point in the distant future, perhaps we won't need to run phone wire everywhere in the office?)
If you try leasing a single office, a single line with voicemail etc. is about $110/month.
Of course the downside to wireless is that it's less reliable, but you get a worry-free voicemail system, you don't have to administer your own telecom staff, and you can let the wireless company worry about upgrades and maintenance.
Human Resources believe that people are merely equivalent to capital-intensive equipment.
:
Tech jobs in the UK are rarely advertised with a requirement for more than 4 years experience - this is purely to reduce cost, because the value of experience is difficult to quantify (and older workers may come with 'overheads' that make them hungrier for more pay such as family commitments and maybe dependants, god forbid.)
You have to wonder where the race to the bottom for cost reduction is taking corporations next.
I think payroll employees will disappear altogether to be replaced with temporary project teams supervised by stake-holders utilising super scalar Project Life-cycle Management packages PLMs.) think auto-text message to your mobile that tells you
"Profit Centre XY, project AB222 thanks you for your contribution. We will be in touch for any future requirements."
Desks were implemented using Citrix for the PCs and Sunray for Solaris. Lockable drawer units could be wheeled around easily between offices. Easy, but not what you want on a daily basis.
The economics for Citrix suck as it is always cheaper to have the mips in a workstation than a server for a PC. the telephone system allowed users to login and logout of the phone so you could take the phone wherever your desk was. If you really want to be mobile, but you don't need mobiles then DECT works quite well. For real mobiles, it depends upon your deal. We paid a much lower rate between the office and the mobile.
Cool idea for management consultants. Bad idea for almost anyone else that happen to be office based. Forget books, and as for leaving documents on the server, some very interesting docs were compromised their (Restricted supplier policies/bids, contract rates, etc).
As a developer, we ended up moving every couple of months or so. Still a tremendous upheaval and altogether a dumb idea.
On the other hand, it is probably useful for some staff who mainly work elsewhere or on the road. I was on one gig where I was out most of the time doing consultancy, seriously overseas. When I was in the office, I didn't need too many books as I was mainly there for face time and to organise office support (i.e., filing, copying and so on).
As a final point, if you build an open plan office without conference facilities - best employ deaf developers. Personally, in such environments, good headphones that exclude ambient noise are wonderful.
See my journal, I write things there
> One just come everyday with all stuff needed for today and leaves with it, which sucks.
I don't think carrying around seven 10-pound books all day sounds like a good idea.
> At some point in the distant future, perhaps we won't need to run phone wire everywhere in the office?
I spoke with some Cisco reps recently about IP phones. They also had wireless IP phones, which worked pretty darn well. So to answer your question, no, we won't. You don't have to now.
Theres no reason why in this day in age most people couldn't work from wherever they wanted.. From home, shared cubicals, picnic table, etc. We have the technology, the only thing standing in the way is PHB's.
Studies have shown that people who work from home are more productive and work longer hours. The last company I was at didn't mind if you work from home but in my current position they like to see your face from 9-5. Basically it comes down to trust and unfortunately, alot of managers out there don't trust their employees.
If they could get past that, there would be tremendous real estate savings.
Shared space is ideal for people who work from home but are in the office 1-2 days a week for meetings, etc. Other than that, I don't see much of a point.. why not just knock down all the cubicle walls and push people closer together.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
You no longer need your cubicle because someone in a foreign country now has your job at 1/10th the costs to us. Oh yes, don't bother going there because their country doesn't reciprocate and allow Americans to work there.
This is one more example of the American middle class being put out to pasture.
Right now, I can hear at least 6 keyboards, 2 people on the phone and a couple of conversations and i'm in cubicle land. Its distracting as hell.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
> > PHBs are way more into following trends in their own field than in actually noticing what are the needs of employees
> I think this phenomena is common enough that it should have a name.
Substitute "customers" for "employees" and it's called "The Nineties."
And dont let the door hit you in the ass as on your way out the door.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't think carrying around seven 10-pound books all day sounds like a good idea.
Which is exactly what we in India do. And it's more than just 7 books. It's atleast 8 books and 8 notebooks to be carried to and from school!
Lockers are just too expensive and occupy too much space, i guess
Humans may be by and large social creatures...
s/social/sexual/
Everything that humans do is to eventually have a go at reproduction. Social hierarchies and other structures and behaviors all facilitate this in one way or another.
Why do professional women go to work looking like they just got laid? Why do men strive to look and appear like the silverback in a jungle? Why do people put loud stereos into their cars on the way to work?
It's all about the babboon's ass and the bullfrog's call, even at the height of human business and technology.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
Yes, perhaps you don't absolutely have to now, but I don't think anyone will build an office without phone lines for at least 5 years.... IP telephony needs to become more common than traditional phone products first.
The subject says it all.
Those who prove to be unproductive when they have to share space with others risk getting fired.
And if you actually follow the link and read the Mercury News article:
The noise of shared work spaces bothers many people, while others regard offices as status symbols. Some can't get any work done without a regular place to sit.
Encore Technical Staffing, a headhunting firm, closed its Redwood City office about three years ago to avoid a rent increase and asked its 40-or-so employees to be mobile. But some proved unproductive and were fired.
So, there you go - companies decide to save on rent, even though it means their productive employees become unproductive and need to be fired, and new employees need to be screened, hired, trained, and brought up to speed.
Makes you think someone didn't think this 'saving' through real well...
What is the robbing of a bank, compared to the founding of a bank? -- Bertolt Brecht
The fact that your actions are able to be scrutinised by peers, would in theory lead to better quality work. I do however understand that everyone is different when it comes to productivity. And that employees should have the right to decide how thier work enviroments are arranged to some degree.
AEnertia
Witty, tag line goes here