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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.
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.
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
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.
Employees now work in shared areas or from home or elsewhere outside the traditional country.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe for creative design since that is a collaberative process but on the tech side only during the architecture and design phase does this work well. Once you're coding...your total output slows to a crawl. Been through it twice with a team of 46 due to management forcing it down on us. We went from completing releases once every month to having only 3 per year.
The problem occurs because of two major issues. One, you simply can't work efficiently in that chaotic environment and two everyone's minor problems hold up people on projects who aren't even involved as they get called into meetings simply because they are happening in their area.
The best set up we've used so far is a common area used during project architecture then we move off into 2 man offices broken down by function for the project. That is you're always sitting with someone who's doing the same basic job as you. Finally we group all the offices together for one project to make communication better. We also have video conferencing gear and session sharing software for impromptu help sessions with those not in the office and no one "owns" an office as we rotate in and out of them. All we own is a laptop that we plug in to the docking station in our new office when we get assigned to one and a rolling file cabinet/box with our "stuff" in it.
It's a cluster fuck when commmon workspaces get implemented and it's a classic example of short sighted management looking at building costs only. Good luck to those MBAs who think this is a good thing and implement it.
Then how do you explain that the vast majority of patents on file list fewer than 5 inventors? It doesn't make sense. Surely teams of 5 friendly people should come up with more patentable inventions if they ALWAYS outperform the grumpy loners. I'm sure we'd all be much better off if everything was designed by committee.
Just sit on your t-shirt from yesterday. Like I am doing right now (or was that more than you needed to know?)
Lookup Mythical Man Month and one-ten engineers. These are the men that do the real work in any engineering firm. They are the men that can do the work of ten others and who's work needs less error checking because the design is cohesive and standardized, not to an arbitrary standard but to the only one that matters, internal cohesiveness. Many but not all of the people who fit the definition are introverted. They look into themselves to solve the problem and do not do well with outside distractions. They are often ADD or mildly autistic, it's the flipside of many geniuses.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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.
You are aware that keyboards, mice and especially telephone handsets have a far higher bacterial count than e.g. toilets?
I agree that ADD is misdiagnosed alot. My son was diagnosed and I have always disagreed. My wife had him put on drugs and it became WORSE! Took him off and he was better. Not cured, but better then he was on the drugs. My wife finally agreed with me. All we had to do to get him to pay attention was remove the thing he was obessing on.....close the blinds, lock the door with a lock high off the ground so he could not reach it....all of a sudden when we told him he needed to stay inside, he did.
On the other hand, with the cube thing, not everyone can work in a cube. Also, management and HR needs to learn how to handle the nuts who can't stand smelling a little gas cuz you ate a burrito for lunch. My dad taught me to suck up and work even if I did not like the person I was working for/with. You are there to work. Not to talk or smell your neighbor. I don't mean you can't have a little fun while working, but when things bother you when you are working, you need to let it slide and do the work.
Gorkman
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.
...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 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...
What a load of crap. The three most productive people in our workplace are the ones who sit down, shut up and get on with their work.
Unfortunately we are forced to share our workspace with someone who simply cannot shut up - he is forever finding the most inane and stupid things to attempt to make conversation with, which inevitably interrupts us.
People are not cattle and should not be treated as such. A bit of privacy and a workplace in which they can get away from loud-mouth social climbers on mobile phones can do a considerable amount for productivity and company morale.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
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.
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.
Yeah, these people are great, right up until the time when they leave, and leave a morass of code that works well, but is indecipherable, and takes 5 people to decode it ANYWAY. I've seen the programmer that you talk about, and some of them are TRULY great programmers, able to both produce brilliant, functional code very quickly AND make it accessable to anyone. (I worked for a summer for a professor like that. I saw him hand optimize TCP/IP code in assembly, and implement a TCP/IP 'replacement' over UDP for testing purposes in about 3 hours. AND I could read and understand his code.)
However, I've seen the flipside. Brilliant programmers that don't feel that they should have to follow any rules, write their own code, and generally don't get along with anyone. In the end, these people end up being a liability. When they inevitably leave, you can't work with what they left without a considerably longer ramp-up time, and you usually end up re-writing their code anyway, 'cause while it was well designed to do what it was originally intended, their goofy style ends up being inflexible as well.
Programmers that can follow an arbitrary coding standard are, in the long run, more useful than programmers that generate a lot of code that nobody can use.
That's fine if you're looking at management or sales or getting-laid, but creative people often need peace and quiet so they can fill their heads with variables.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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...
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.)
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
"These are the men that do the real work in any engineering firm. They are the men that can do"
Do you supose they could be women as well?
A friendly word from a geek who has remained employed throughout the recession...
The days of the techno primadonna are over. If you were part of the social group associated with the beginning of the computer age, cool, but you need to understand that inability to communicate or work well with others is and always has been a liability. In the heady days of signing bonuses and six figure salaries, the idea was that you had to tolerate sociopaths if you wanted IT talent. Today's rule of thumb with regard to IT labor goes something like this - is outsourcing your job to an Indian programmer who will work for 10% of what you make more difficult for me than dealing with your bad attitude?
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
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.
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.
I wasn't talking about people who are unable to effectivly communicate, I am talking about people who's best work environment is NOT in the middle of a high traffic area with lots of distractions. You can be antisocial and still communicate effectivly. I do it all the time. Whenever there are large meetings which do not pertain to my job I tend to duck out because they make me uncomfortable, I do the same thing at large family gatherings. Yet in my day to day job I have to interact with many customers on different technical levels, everything from receptionists to IT admin's who know easily as much about the product I am fixing as I do. I do that part well but I would be miserable if I were forced to work in the middle of a bunch of noisy distracting people. Facts of life, not everyone has the same best work environment and any HR plan that doesn't recognize that is going to come up with an inefficient solution.
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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.
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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 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
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.
> Programmers that can follow an arbitrary coding standard are, in the long run, more useful than programmers that generate a lot of code that nobody can use.
Whether you are able to follow coding standards or not says very little about whether you are useful. Code that nobody can use is useless of course, but so is code that follows coding standards but doesnt solve the right problem. Truly brilliant programmers produce code that is *eaiser* to understand than average programmers. In almost any project with real complexity, the problem is very vague. The difference between brilliant programmers and average programmers
is the problem they choose to solve rather than the code they use to solve it.
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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.
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.
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.
Not wanting to work in fishbowl does not indicate a lack of social skills. I have no problems talking with my coworkers, aranging conferene calls to solve problems, etc. I consider many of my coworkers at least aquaintences if not friends.
But at the same time I need some privacy to get some actual work done without hearing 10 other people chatter about what they're doing. Plus it's just a question of basic human dignity to not always be under obvservation/monitoring.
Perhaps that's true. However, you'd think someone with such an obvious knack for coding would be able to do something as simplistic as follow a standard that has been set. It isn't that much of a burden. An anti-social programmer with no actual respect for authority (which is what a coding standard is - at least in part - an extension of authority) is not a good person to have on a team.
And while you're right about complex problems taking a special kind of insight to solve, the truth of programming is that it's largely simplistic tasks broken up by the occasional bout of complexity. Usually, that complexity is easily decomposed into many more mundane tasks. Usually, working hard can almost be a substitute for being clever.
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.
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.
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And how is discrimination based on social skills any different from discrimination based on race, sex, religion, or right-handedness?
It's different because it affects your performance at the job.
Ok let's say you're a big smart genius programmer. But your team mates do not feel comfortable talking to you. Performance suffers because of your inability to communicate with others to ensure that the project is being developed in an optimal way. May be you're so smart and efficient that you've foresaw the necessity to write library X but didn't tell anyone so your coworkers spent a few days developing the same thing, and if they came to let you know of this new development you said "I already got it done jerkwads." All of a sudden the fact that you're brilliant and efficient does not make up for the fact that you're more or less useless to the team due to your attitude and resistance to open communication.
being black, female, hindu, or left-handed does not have the same negative impact.
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And while you're right about complex problems taking a special kind of insight to solve, the truth of programming is that it's largely simplistic tasks broken up by the occasional bout of complexity. Usually, that complexity is easily decomposed into many more mundane tasks. Usually, working hard can almost be a substitute for being clever.
:). So I believe that's really an orthogonal issue to programmer brilliancy, but it certainly is an issue that should be addressed with all programmers on a project (addressed as in having code reviews that check for conformance).
I think you've hit the nail on the head, but there's two sides of this I think still make the brilliant programmer stand out.
First, the brilliant programmer recognizes this and doesn't get flustered by the complexity. They just attack the problem in a thoughtful and efficient manner. That probably includes doing the appropiate amount of design work to get a non-crappy solution.
Second they can quickly implement the mundane tasks. Often times "average" people have trouble implementing even mundane tasks, it's really pretty scary.
But certainly everyone should be following coding standards. Your previous complaint seemed to be "a morass of code"; but you seem to be forgetting that any programmer, brilliant or otherwise, could produce that and still follow coding standards
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.
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.
I'm a programmer with a business and consulting background. I interact with customers, managers, etc., and I do a pretty damn good job of it. However, when I'm writing code and solving problems, the last thing I want to do is to break up my work time with idle chitchat, listen to some adjoining worker's cell phone conversation, or have to deal with someone's ruffled feathers. When I sit down and code, I do NOT want to expend the mental resources having to deal with other people - I just want to get work done!!!
Think of it this way. If it takes someone 40 minutes to get their brain back into gear to remember and manipulate a 4000 line piece of code, do you really want to interrupt their concentration? A couple of days of not being able to get any work done because of interruptions can turn the most friendly, interesting person into a raving psycho.
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.
> Do you supose they could be women as well?
Oh, we all so wish this could be true!!!
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.
You don't want this trend to catch on in Europe. I used to work in the UK and we used to have a huge big room with 12ft ceilings amongst three of us and we couldn't be happier. Big bright room with three desks in three corners. Mmmm... those were the days!
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