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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."
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!
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.
Hi:
If it's such a good idea, I expect that management will be joining us.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
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.
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
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.
...are doomed to repeat them. Viz. this famous disaster at TBWA Chiat/Day.
The idea (with Sun at least) is that you don't need to know where you are going to work for the day. You come in find a desk in the nice comfy lounge or what ever and log in. The log in gets you to your "desktop", sets up your phone, etc.
To me the big downside is that others may not always know how to find you. I know sometimes I would rather walk over someone's desk/cubicle and have a conversation then do it through email or chat. With people logging in at different machines day to day it could become a hassle to find people.
Plus having your own workspace is always nice. I like being able to put what I want up on my cub wall, in a shared environment this could not happen. Not a huge deal, but people do like having a place to call there own, even if it is just 3 small walls.
man
No manual entry for
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.
There was so much chit chat where I work when we moved into these common offices, that I was forced to move to the back corner of a storage room, just so I could concentrate. Several others with the same goal followed me. The article stated that "Executives with several of these firms noted that getting workers to share space fosters a team-oriented atmosphere that increases productivity." My experience was exactly the oposite. These mobile offices killed the sense of community, and now you often site around people you barely know, and can not ask favors of, and do not have the time to do favors for in return. Another little nice benifit is that they give you a tiny amount of locking storage space which you have to walk half way across the building to get to. So when we moved out of our offices, all of the less-critical stuff was thrown out or moved to common-libraries where they quickly wandered away. And as predicted much of that stuff turned out to be very-critical. Also, most of us have had our tools, which are now hard to secure, wander off as well. I sure hope it saved my company a ton on real-estate costs, because it cost us dearly in other ways.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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
Seems to me that anti-social people might have fewer problems being distracted.
Actually, I think it is the other way around. The anti-social types (like me) tend to be more easily distracted, more easily bothered by unscheduled interruptions. Most of the messages I've read in this thread seem to indicate that these "anti-social" people have some kind of mental dysfunction. Quite the opposite. Most of the "anti-social" developers I know are very hard workers who simply want to be left alone to work efficiently, and resent being pulled away from that work without good reason. They get labelled "anti-social" by people who really should be sitting at their desks doing their jobs rather than wandering from cubicle to cubicle being "social". Furthermore, if one of those "anti-social" programmers snaps at one of these "social" types because they broke his concentration and cost him a few hours of development time, it's no more than they deserve.
At the company where I currently work, there is a large central area where most of the electrical and mechanical engineers sit. The fellow that managed the software staff had enough clout with the owner (and enough common sense and experience) that when the building went up about seven years ago, the software people got their own room full of cubicles. The rest of the entire plant is subjected to loud music played through the ceiling speakers (honestly, if I have to sit through "Jive Talkin'" or some other incessant pounding rhythm one more time I'm going to go nuts.) Our old software manager understood the need for programmers to concentrate, consequently the speakers were turned off in our room. A year or so ago he quit, and suddenly the speakers went live again because the owner doesn't think his programmers are anything special and that we should all be treated equally, although I've noticed there is no music playing in his office.
As a consequence of this, none of us are as productive as we were previously, and I personally have never been as productive in a corporate environment as I was as an independent developer. I'm sorry to disagree with some of the other, less-well-informed posters, but programming is a job which requires intense concentration and attention to detail. We tend to get irritated when our concentration is broken by well-meaning IDIOTS that want to discuss the latest episode of Star Trek: Enterprise or some other trivial reason. If that makes us "anti-social" so be it, but management that places its software development staff in the way of too many mental roadblocks is simply engineering employee disaffection and a significant loss of productivity. There are many aspects to the software development process that are only dimly grasped, if they are recognized at all, by most forms of management and this is one of them.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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?
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
But some proved unproductive and were fired
I bet that the cost of firing and replacing these employees was larger than the savings associated with the open seating plan. By far.
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.
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
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.
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.