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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."
"Freedom" from cubicles means freedom to work under constant observation of the overseers.
No they fired people for being unproductive. From the article, "But some proved unproductive and were fired."
unproductive != antisocial
Did I miss something?
I read the article, but didn't see what you were referring to.
Folks, the article is a little misleading. It isn't that these workers don't have offices, period, but rather that they don't have permanent, assigned offices. Sun is pushing smartcard technology that lets you take your session to whatever cube you find available. It's a step down in terms of workplace quality, but it's not the end of the world. (fact: if you are made to feel you are temporary/replaceable, your working attitude will adapt to correspond).
The telecommuting issue is a bit different, and I am looking for a situation exactly like that. I would kill to work at home instead of sitting in traffic all day. If you have the dedication to be productive from your home (and if you don't, you'll be sh*tcanned), then save yourself the hassle of sitting in traffic. Bonus: work without pants! Seriously folks, driving back and forth to the office everyday is going to be a thing of the past, and thank God for it.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
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.
Who said anything about anti-social ?
Some of us like to be able to concentrate in order to get work done, and find it difficult to switch off from everyone around us. It's just too easy to get distracted by all the conversations around you, joining in when you feel like it.
Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.
It's just the latest management fashion. Instead of senior managers using intelligence and common sense to work out for themselves what is a good, productive environment, they just follow the latest fashion that everyone else is talking about.
Give them another five years, and the fashion will be back to individual work areas, with some separation from others, so people can be "more productive".
... 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.
Maybe in a web design firm, or a consulting company, but if I have a really thorny technical problem, I'd far rather have one anti-social genius than a full team of developers who give great meeting. :p
My ADD doesn't affect my ability to write software - I'm a damn good programmer. It affects my ability to filter out noisy distractions and movements in my peripheral vision.
If an factory worker were required to work on a slippery floor, he could legitimately complain that the environment limited his productivity, not his own inherent disability.
And as for paraplegics, If Cambridge (or is it Oxford?) didn't supply wheelchair ramps, would it make sense to fire Stephen Hawking? In fact, how about people that can't work in the rain? Should the building have a roof just to accommodate them?
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I work at home, and have off and on for a long time.
I hate it!
I do have a dedicated "office" room, but the space isn't the issue... it's that there are no people around. Or if there are, they are here to socialize.
I think it's a Good Thing on some very deep level to be around other people while working, at least some of the time. Programming for twelve hours straight without seeing another human being tweaketh the mind in harmful ways.
Since I work for myself, there's not much I can do about it right now. However, as soon as Profit allows, I will rent an office somewhere and arrange for others to share it, even if they aren't working for me.
Oh yeah, and I need a cute secretary...
This Like That - fun with words!
Amen! I thought I would just burst when I got my cube. I shared a desk in the Computer Room (used to be in Operations) for 8 and a half years and while I did set things up a bit (I had 1 Drawer), I could not really hang a pic of my son on my desk or anything else. When I got my cube it was festooned with pics of my son on day one. I also took a picture that was hanging in our old computer room and put it in my cube as kind of a reminder of where I came from. That cube is MINE. It may be a cube...it may only have 2-3 walls, but it's mine. The only thing I want more is to work from home.
Gorkman
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"
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.
To me the big downside is that others may not always know how to find you
:(
... I'm not sure what exactly, but I've observed that the smartest and most productive people (even in management) that I know have whole bookshelves (sometimes 2!) full of really useful reading material.
I can think of another. Who is going to move my technical books each day? Due to limited shelf space in my current cubicle, I only have a limited supply as it is. One shelf full, and an overflow stack on my desk. And even now, I often regret not having a certain book on hand when needed.
Going off-topic a bit, the solution is, of course, online books. I am tired of lugging 3 or 4 hefty books home every weekend! I've actually considering purchasing another copy of some of my most referenced books just to reduce this problem. Public transport just wasn't designed for carting books about, as I have discovered
It says something about the people proposing this scheme
How about four lone social outcasts barricaded in offices independently working on different pieces of a project, be it top-down or object-oriented design or what-have-you, that are neatly integrated by a manager/project coordinator? There's plenty of effective ways to manage a team that don't necessarily require socialization.
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.
Yeah, people without good social skills are scum! They should NOT be allowed to earn a living, in fact, they should be shot in the streets like the loathesome dogs that they are!
Jeez, what the hell are YOU doing posting on slashdot?
Not everybody performs well in the same environments. Some people work better alone, when they are left to their own devices, while others need to be in a team where they can share their skills with others.
Its blind and stupid for a company to force all of its employees to submit to one form of work or the other. What they would do, if the decisions weren't made by idiots, is that they would have the social people work in groups to augment their productivity, and let the loners do their projects by themselves to keep them productive too.
Anything else is shortsightedness that borders on nazi human ressources management.
And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness?
"Unpopular people need not apply"? Will they have you bring your high-school yearbook as references?
You can't take the sky from me...
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
Then find a job with an environment that suits your needs. Don't force others to adapt to you, because like it or not, you're the odd man out: not them. (See Darwin.)
They had, now the idiot boss is following the trend-of-the-week and changing the rules on them. They are going to loose many of their best elements, and end up loosing a lot (see Darwin).
The color of your skin, or the god(s) you believe in will have no effect on your ability to perform a job function.
What if your job has you workin on sabbat? What about low blood sugar during ramadan? There are plenty of factors that affect productivity.
Being friendly, charismatic, and relatively good-looking had done far more for me than my IT skills ever have or ever will.
Well, that says it all. Really.
Have fun enjoying your pasasitic life, brownnosing for your salary. Fortunatly its going to be very funny when your office is full of incompetant people socializing with each other and nobody's doing the job : )
You can't take the sky from me...
Eh, telecommuting has it's days... (I've been telecommuting full-time for almost 4 years now, the main office is a 5 hour drive away).
/.'ing.
On the upside, I rarely get interrupted by walk-ups, most communication is via chat/e-mail (which is good because I have poor aural memory). I can listen to the music that I want, or work without and I don't have to listen to the person 3 cubes down talking about their marital problems.
The bigger benefit is that I don't have to commute 90 min/day. My 2-year old car only has 9500 miles on it. I get paid a salary that would be under-average if I worked/lived at the main office but is above-average for the area where I live.
Flexible schedule: It's near-trivial to schedule doctor appointments, etc.
Now, the downsides...
Even us anti-social hermits need some amount of face-to-face interaction. Back when I was traveling up to the main office on a monthly basis, I'd say I was a little happier. (The recession has cut trip frequency to twice per year.) I don't pick up on the undercurrents as easily (I have to specifically ask about situation X).
The self-discipline is tough... have to keep a solid routine (rise at 7am, bed at 11pm) or you'll find it difficult to meet your goals. The job needs to be something with measurable (and multitudes of) mileposts. Very easy to spend a few hours in unproductive web surfing or
Self-reliance helps, because unlike the office environment, it's more difficult to get an answer to a minor question (rather then just asking your cubemate).
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.)
The last problem is that I'm never "off-duty". When you work in a formal office environment, people are very hesitant to call if you're not in the office. (There's a social barrier.) When you're telecommuting and they always interact with you over the phone, they can't tell that you're trying to be off-duty. Learning to say "no" helps a lot though.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
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