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How To Get Rid of the Cubicle?
wikinerd writes "How can we get rid of the widely hated cubicle and its ugly cousin, the stressing open-plan office? Some business owners and managers cannot understand the advantages of teleworking, different office layouts, or the morale benefits of private offices with Aeron chairs. There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company. It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it? How can we communicate to them the fact that living in a groundhog warren is bad not only for the engineers, but also for the organization?"
Upper management loves stats; give them stats.
I didn't like my cube ridden environment. I quit and joined an employer who did these things better.
Evil people are out to get you.
Unfortunately, you can't.
As one of my colleagues use to say: "You can't explain to someone who doesn't understand." (freely translated from Swedish).
How can we communicate to them the fact that living in a groundhog warren is bad not only for the engineers, but also for the organization?"
I would speak to "them" with your voice (mouth, tongue, voal cords, et. al), either in person, or via telephone. Barring that, I would use a written format, such as "email" or "letter", in a lanugage that "them" would readily comprehend.
Are there some other, hidden, secret forms of communication that I'm missing, here?
Is it just me?
I have worked in IT environments in both Open plan with cubicles, Small offices of about 4 and open plan with desks.
I preferred both of the open plan options (i.e. with or without cubicles) than the small office. It may get noisy at times but it can be more sociable too.
Maybe I am just a freak...
I've worked in closed offices and in cubicles, and they each have their plusses and minuses. The best thing about cubicles is that you overhear some of the conversations that other members of your team are having. This can be really helpful for a small team working on a complex project, as I sometimes overhear something I should know about, or something I can give useful input into. In other words, working in cubicles can be really good for team dynamics.
On the other hand, the worst part about working in cubicles is the same thing-- your neighbor's loud conversation can be annoying and disturb your concentration. The lack of privacy can be annoying.
On balance, if I like the team I'm working with, I prefer working in the cube farm.
prefereably in a mainstream publication showing that, in fact, private offices and Aeron chairs are in fact cost-efective. If you can show this to management, you oughta be good to go. Showing them an article by Joel and saying "but ... but ... my concentration!" probably isn't gonna do it.
I'm still dubious. I mean, yeah, sure, I'd much rather have a nice quiet office, an aeron and the fastest desktop available connected to dual 21" monitors. Who wouldn't? But does anyone actually have some sort of operational study showing that it does, in fact, increase productivity [i]that[/i] much? Joel makes a good case, but most of it is simply appeals to our programmer instincts, and has little to do with fact.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Private offices, or internet access.... pick one. I'd say it's harder to goof off in a cubicle.
Or, at $10-$15 per square, is it worth a pay cut for an office, or commute to the burbs?
In the UK open plan offices are very common but cubes are virtually unheard of. I've heard very few complaints about open plan offices in the UK, as long as there's a decent amount of space between people then it's fine and can create a good atmosphere, too crowded and then it can be a pain.
However, people who are used to their own private office will find the extra noise disturbing and there's a problem where you can't just close a door when you don't want disturbed.
Where I work the next two levels of management are also in the open plan office. Not sure about the people above them, they're on a different floor and I've never needed to visit them.
Our company moved into a relatively nice office building, paying quite a bit of rent, just because the president of the company thought that it gave us more credibility - even though we rarely have ANYONE from the industry come to our offices.
One day, I took the VP aside and gave him some numbers - I showed him that if we were able to telecommute, we could run a t1 to every employee's home, and still come out a few thousand cheaper each month than rent. Because the VP once new someone who slacked off when telecommuting, he completely rejected the idea. Ah, well.
Even though we're officially a non-telecommuting office, that doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. When I really don't feel like going in to the office, I call and tell them that I can either work from home that day, or just take the day off. I usually get to work from home.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
Lots of selling points: No office space costs. Employees pay for own coffee. Envionmentally friendly. It is the new wave.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
If top management believes it's the best choice, no staff would convince them otherwise. The only way i see it is form some kind of petition BEFORE your company is moving to new offices or before reconstruction.
I'm not sure how the petition would work when everything is already in place.
Few complaints here and there isn't going to deter top management's belief.
Fortunately my company has open-space for some and offices for others, so all I had to do is get promoted. Some companies do not offer offices for nobody but the top-management. Then if it bothers you that much, you could either rise through ranks to board member, or join another company.
there is no issue with my network
Years ago, our company had an office that was fairly low-rent, and didn't have cubicles. We just set up some desks around the edges of the office space, and some in the middle. One of the coders, in particular, had his desk facing the wall, and everyone in the room could see what was on him monitor.
This same coder had his email client set to automatically open new messages. Yes, you can guess what it coming - one day, right after he left for lunch, he received some porn spam. Not just any porn spam, but some pretty far-out stuff, the kind that even most people who like porn wouldn't go for. The next person to walk past his desk was the VP of the company...
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I don't think the shape or layout is that important, it's how much you're allowed to personalise your space that's the issue. I worked in one company where they made too many rules about what you couldn't have in/on your desk - food, coffee, for instance. Even books were supposed to be kept in the library (!) That's terribly de-humanising. I didn't stay long. Now, I work 2 days at home in a good-sized room with a nice sound system and all I need for software development. The other 3 days I work in a small open plan office, just 4 of us, and I concentrate on hardware. There are pros and cons to both. At home no-one nicks my tools and I can really use my imagination when "dressing down", but work is a friendlier place to spend a coffee break, and the collaborative process is invaluable.
Private Offices Used for..
1) Showing higher status
2) Shagging the Intern/Teenage Junior
3) Surfing on the internet without being spotted by other employees
4) Playing music in
5) Watching TV in
6) Sleeping in
Open Plan Offices
1) being forced to do what you are paid to do as long as someone else is bothered to monitor your activity
2) Daydreaming about Orgies involving all the teenage interns and juniors until interupted by supervisor for not looking like focused on work
3) Chair Races when supervisor in toilet
4) Smelling other people's farts
5) Organising fag breaks
6) Discussing last night's TV, night out or spousal problems.
They goof off all day. That said, some managers can't do basic time management of their employees. Consider, when was the last time your manager asked you "so, what are you working on at the moment?" If it's been a long time (or it has never happened), and you've actually been doing work lately then chances are you've got a good manager. The rest of us hear this often. I have friends who get asked to provide a weekly report on what they are working on. When they submit a report that says "didn't do much this week" their manager gets mad at them, "what havn't you been doing anything?" they ask. Unfortunately, many of my friends do not reply with "because you havn't assigned me any work bozo." and instead take it as a warning that they better make themselves look busy.
How we know is more important than what we know.
some people, you just can't reason with.
--
- Whenever you're on a business trip abroad, buy small plush toys at the airport to make gifts for your co-workers.
- When you've done enough trips, everybody has at least one plus toy on its desk
- Twice a day (possibly more), when the project manager is out of the room, yell : "PLUUUUUUUUUUUUSH FIGHT !"
- Enjoy as the plush toys begin flying around.
- If this does not decide your manager to create smaller, separated offices, at least it's a good way to have fun.
;-)
This is really what happened daily a few years ago when I was working with some 20 other co-workers in an open space lab. Oh, and the fact that most of us were under 30 *did* help us enjoy itIn Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Read Peopleware and offer it to your manager for Christmas, this book is the bible about productivity in IT.
It is extensively implemented at Google (and Microsoft for instance) by letting each developer have his own desk - with the door shut - or have a small desk with 2 to 4 people inside, in order to improve focus as it is critical developers doesn't lose focus too often as it is very easy to do when you work in a open space.
A typical developer needs 15 minutes to get into the "mental flow" of productive work, so even if he is disturbed for only 3 minutes, he will really lose about 15+3 minutes because of the delay of being in the right/productive "mental flow" again.
Additionnaly this book is all about employee happiness == employee productivity.
http://www.amazon.com/Peopleware-Productive-Proje@neonux
Some business owners and managers cannot understand the advantages of teleworking, different office layouts, or the morale benefits of private offices with Aeron chairs.
Thank god someone dared to say this.
I've been looking for an just such an environment: where I can stay home, doze in a really comfortable chair with no one around to catch me, completely refuse to interact with team members except via IMs and e-mails on my own passive aggressive schedule and justify my lack of productivity on my home ISP that's like totally unreliable so it's not my fault I wasn't even logged in all morning, let alone working. I'm never going to power level my Warcraft character if I have to keep alt-tabbing out whenever my boss walks by.
Now when will managers get a clue and realize this kind of shining future would be awesome for my morale!?
"Why get rid of cubicles? It's worked so far and the programmers in India don't complain about it. If you don't like it then I can have 500 resumes for your replacement in an hour. Get back to work!"
And thus, nothing changes.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Kill the executives and management and take their offices.
Form a union and have a walk out and picket strike until you get what you want.
Break into the building at night and start a sit down down strike.....in the nice offices.
Blackmail and extortion against your bosses. (If you don't already have access to sensitive info, run a sniffer on the LAN for a few days, you should be able to pick up plenty of useful information)
Quit that job and form an anarcho-syndicalist collective with better working conditions.
Get a promotion?
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
1) People are commodities. When one quits we can just hire another one jus as good...
2) Cost, cost is everything. we need to squeeze every penny we can from floor space.
3) Everyone else does it so it must work.
4) Offices are reserved for high skill positions, like management.
There you have it, how they think.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
...but for anything other than programmer teams, I want my people talking and cooperating on fixing problems, and cubes, open offices, bullpens and the like work just dandy.
I do IT operations and development rather than programming, so they are different work types. Joel may be right for cutting edge programmer productivity. But I've also seen very productive very loud programmer teams in open offices.
Some programmers will do terribly in that environment, but many will either thrive on the noise or tune it out (or put on headphones).
Everything is looked at through the lens of the Dollar. As management listens to whatever research and advisory firms already output, let's see what Gartner, as an example, has to say on the subject.
Processor.com, July 2, 2004:
As vice president for research firm Gartner, the world's largest IT research group, he's studied the question at length and learned that just because a new technology makes something possible, it does not, sadly, make that very thing probable... "I can point to clear examples where call centers are highly virtualized," says Raskino, "with agents working almost entirely from their homes." But when he speaks to other managers about how virtual technologies are being used, they look at him in utter disbelief. "They say, 'Can it be possible? I'm sure our unions won't accept it.' The forces of inertia get in the way. They don't stop the change, of course. They just slow it down."
Gartner.com, 30 Oct 2001:
In his October 30 address at Symposium/ITxpo 2001 in Brisbane. Gartner vice president and research director Simon Hayward... enjoyed poking fun at today's cubicle environment, using the cartoon character Dilbert to help him out. "It's not just the workers who are objecting to the cubicle culture," he told his audience. "Managers also recognize that people will be more effective if the environment is better adapted to the reality of work."
CFO.com, October 01, 2006: Another factor pushing companies to reconsider office space is the widening gap between what workers need and what workplaces provide. At one time, office employees labored primarily in solitude; today, they spend two-thirds of their time collaborating, according to Gartner. But offices are still set up for the old style of work. "In most companies, you find that conference rooms are overbooked while offices and cubicles are empty," says Mark Golan, Cisco's vice president of worldwide real estate and the chairman of CoreNet. "It's insane. Not only is it wasteful, it doesn't suit the needs of your workforce."
Even if you can build the case against cubicles, you still need to be able to communicate with management. That means, y'know, diplomacy, communication skills, a lil bit of cunning, and what not.
Nevertheless, you might be heard, but don't expect them to listen.
Of course, if they've already invested in cubicles, tough luck. Nothing's gonna change their minds. Cubicles might be less productive than other office layouts, but dumping an existing design == dumping money. Bad ROI.
As for Aeron chairs? Why not demand an onsite spa and inhouse office-desk pizza delivery while you're at it?
Being a "software engineer" doesn't mean that I spend my head down programming all the time. Half of being a competent engineer is teamwork, and that works much better in an open-plan office.
I wonder whether people's objections to open-plan environments come from experiences with bad acoustics, or in offices shared between developers and sales staff that are on the phone all the time. In the open-plan offices I've been in, unwanted interruptions from other people's noise have been minimal - mainly due to good acoustic design, but also partly due to everybody being reasonably considerate and taking loud conversations off to a meeting room.
Anyway, not all sofware engineers are hermits! Some of us are sociable!
I've had the experience of working in a place where everyone had their own office, and also in my current employer (who shall remain nameless) where *no-one* has an office.
In the everyone had their own office scenario, it was great to get things done. But it was a bitch when you were new and didn't know many people. There just wasn't the opportunity to mix much. Once you get over that hurdle, it's very good.
In the current place where it's all cubicle/open floor, I find it annoying. Not because of disturbances as when I get focussed you could probably let off a bomb and I wouldn't notice. But what really pisses me off is the 'grandstanders'. Basically, you're trying to have a discussion with them, but they are talking to show their 'superiority' to the people around them - like their boss at the next cubicle. Meantime, you have to wait patiently while thinking "I know. Yeah, that's pretty f'ing obvious. Who would ever think of doing that?". It's also an environment that's difficult to have 'unofficial' conversations in. Which is how you get things done and what makes the world go round...
ws
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
In our offices you can have whichever you prefer. The cubicle walls aren't that expensive depending on which you get and we even have extra from people who decided they wanted it and then decided against it. The IT department I work in is only three people and we work extremely tightly together so an open configuration is a must. We tried cubicles and it just doesn't work when you work together that much.
I will forever be a student.
Weren't we, just recently, all for OpenOffice?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
I remember reading an article about the creator of the cubicle - he meant for modular offices to be larger.
Anyway, the reason they're popular is that they amortize as furniture instead of as a building, so the company can write it off in 7 years instead of 30. I don't think management really wants cube farms, so get rid of the tax loophole and you're all set.
As far as convincing them about better chairs, larger monitors, etc., you could pay for it yourself or find a different company to work for...
You have high taxation for businesses in the US, AFAIK.
Now cubicles count as office furniture, while real offices count as rooms, and there are different rules how to pay for both. In the end cubicles are a lot cheaper in the short term.
And we all know that CEOs only make short-term decisions, after me the apocalypse...
Granted, I can see where an open plan might be stressing in a corporate environment. Fortunately I'm not in one of those, and instead work in an office with anywhere from three to ten others. We have a few visual barriers around (bookcases sitting on desks), but for the most part are desks are all open and right next to each other. I find this the most productive way to work on things, overall. If I need to ask a question or consult with someone, all I do is take off my headphones and stand up. It also keeps me more focused on what I'm doing overall, since others can chat with me just as easily (and that tends to remind me of what I should be doing at the time). I'm positive that I'd get a lot less work done in a private office with nobody bothering me, because I'd get sidetracked on random things for too long.
My one caveat is that desks should, if possible, never be arranged such that people can walk up behind you without you seeing them. I carefully positioned my desk when moving into our current office so that I could see both the door and the hallway leading to actual offices, and that may be a key reason why I don't think it's stressing.
I'm an executive and I have an office. You're an expendable drone and you don't.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. There's team work and then there's coding. When I'm coding, I like to keep my door closed with a post-it note on it saying "Email Only". If someone interrupts me every 20 minutes I get nothing done in a day because it takes me about 15 minutes to regain context and re-concentrate. When I want to talk to a person down the hall, I have no problem walking down the hall and talking to the person.
This has nothing to do with being sociable or being a hermit. This has to do with inability to concentrate when frequently interrupted. I don't go to work to socialize after all, I go there to design and write quality code.
The Agile programming folks (Extreme Programming, etc.) say that the whole project team should sit together in one room so that barriers to communication are minimal. So a group that is going to use those development methods shouldn't have individual offices. I've never had the opportunity to work on a project that used an Agile approach, so I don't know whether the approach really delivers the benefits the advocates promise, but apparently they have many real-world examples of successes.
It might be that having individual offices is a good idea for projects using the more traditional development methods, but if the Agile methods really do provide better results, it could be that having individual offices won't be important in the future, as the Agile methods become widely adopted. On the other hand, if the people are really working on independent things (not working as a team on a single project), then probably nothing about the Agile techniques are relevant and individual offices might provide the best productivity.
So, as usual, the best approach depends on the circumstances.
Try filling out a force field analysis. This lays out the situation in a logical manner, using a well known management method.
s /forcefield.html
Write a few sentences or a paragraph under each of these headings:
1) The Problem
2a) The Present Situation
2b) The desired situation
3) Resisting forces
4) Actons to Reduce or Eliminate resisting forces
5) Driving forces
6) Actions to Increase driving forces
7a) Steps Towards Solving the Problem
7b) Resources Required
8) Sequence of Steps
Steps When How
Then lay on a 30 minute presentation for the management, with coffee and biscuits provided. Get a team of like minded staff, and have each person present a 5 minute portion of the analysis. Use A1 flip charts, or powerpoint or something similar to create the presentation materials. Rehearse it through before you book the meeting, so you can work smoothly as a team. This shows management that you've thought carefully about the problem, and are working as a team towards what you perceive to be a solution.
More info here: http://www.extension.iastate.edu/communities/tool
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
...but then I got involved in extreme programming (XP).
In that world you go to great lengths to achieve a workplace layout where people can constantly overhear each other all day, to promote communication. Since you're always pair programming and talking anyway, it really works well.
But it is a whole different way of programming. The "lone ranger" programming style where you have to focus like a laser for 30 minutes before being able to form the first line of code is viewed with big suspicion in XP. If the code is that complex, the chances that anyone else will be able to read and maintain it is very slim, so in practical terms that code is worthless if it ever needs to be changed. And useful code always needs to be changed.
I structure and trade mortgage bonds on a wall street style trading desk so I believe this falls into the financial engineering category. I share a VERY long desk with quite a few people with each of us having just enough room to squeeze four 19 inch monitors into 'our' space, not to mention we all have colleagues sitting directly in front of us with the only separator being their monitors.
Now I am VERY happy with this setup and can confidently speak for my colleagues when I say we would never have it any other way. Our mortgage desk, which actually consists of a few physical desks and about thirty five people, has a dynamic cast of characters from hardcore quants with masters and PhD's in chemical and electric engineering from MIT and Caltech, as well as veteran sales guys who never finished high school. We all get along great, we fight, we scream, we throw things at the guy who least expects it, we listen in on peoples phone calls and throw in our two cents to the guy who sits five seats down. And we are ALL better off for it.
I don't see the point of separating people who are all working toward a common goal.
Have the employees work in groups of 2-3 or so. Perhaps at most 4 or so. 5 is right out! ;-)
Seriously, I think that works best. You gain the benefits of being able to directly communicate with each other if you need to (obviously only people in the same departments should be grouped up), while having the relative silence at least compared to an open office landscape. I can't believe managers still trust in either of the extremes. What's the benefit of isolating your workers to not be able to easily exchange ideas when they need to? And what's the point with building among the most noisy and distracting environments possible?
It's actually their responsibility to know better as a proper work environment can heavily influence the company efficiency.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
This is not a problem in NZ. Is this an American thing? I work in an open plan office in NZ at an un-named Tertiary institution and its great. There are anywhere between 5-7 of us in the room at any time and the communication within the team is excellent, thought provocative and means we're not just staring at a screen all day, which needs time away from now and then.
Cheers,
http://www.webexperts.co.nz
At one of the first companies I worked for out of uni, one of my colleagues put something pretty derogatory about a particular manager in an e-mail - and accidentally sent it to that manager. (Must've been thinking his name, subconsciously added it to the list of people in the To: field - who knows?)
Fortunately for him that manager had just popped out of his office.
Cue Mission Impossible style assault on that manager's office by the employee in question, in an attempt to delete the e-mail from the manager's e-mail client while remaining hidden in case the manager returned.
Amazingly, he managed to get away with it!
biopowered.co.uk - catalytically cracking triglycerides for home automotive use since 2008. Just say no to big oil!
Comon, we are Linux installing masters of our own domain. I've been working from home for 3+ years. I even took a paycut to telecommute at first, and once I proved my worth I politely demanded a raise via a subtle threat to quit like any good highly-skilled techie. This is the modern age, dot.com 2.0+. As long as you are a hard-working skilled techie, you can call the shots if you are somewhat reasonable.
Horns are really just a broken halo.
I used to work in
the following office layouts
- private office for two
- open-style office for eight with large desks
- open-style office for 20 with small desks, everybody has only his own 2 feets of space.
My opinion - choose either
- private offices with its privacy and calm comfortable athmosphere
- or VERY cramped offices where people are forced to sit very near to each other - that can increase interworking relations and pair programming/administration benefits. If you are a good manager, you can offset low comfortability with additional money benefits, flexible time or other
Cubicles and open-styles with large desks are noisy, thus making people much less productive (even if they do phone calling, they are less attricative as managers at other end!) and also as relative distance between workers is large, personal communication is crampy. So cubicles is the worst design...
I find that the overly liberal usage of high explosives and/or the combination of liquified petroleum gas plus a source of ignition to be a suitable method of getting rid of cubicles and open-plan offices. Of course, a thorough bulldozing and proper disposal (i.e. burial at sea) should follow.
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
and.....
:)
1. Start talking really loud.
2. Stop taking showers.
3. Fart atleast once every 10 minutes.
Good thing here is if you are located very close to your manager
The problem is small, enclosed spaces.
Make cubicles bigger and more comfortable. If it's somewhere you're willing to spend 5-8 hours a day, it's a place you're willing to work. Work space is no place to start getting spartan.
The only reason why I advocate FOR the cubicle is because I work in an open office environment. I have absolutely no privacy what so ever. Being productive means being productive while someone's not watching and occasionally slacking off.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
>> I have to go over there and interrupt you just to find out whether you're busy
No you don't. I have a post it note on my door.
>> because they're not stalled all day trying to figure something out that you knew all along.
In 90% of cases, their question could be handled by Google perfectly well without breaking me out of the flow. For the remaining 10% there's email which I check every couple of hours.
if everyone in the office were caught having it off behind some cubicles then they'd definitely think about removing them.
(Actually, this comes from a "mind's eye" plan for a
"Geeks' share house" but it may work as an office...)
1. Start with an ideal orange
2. Cut a slice at right angles to its center-axis
(getting rough idea of floor plan)
3. Draw a circle with center at center of slice
4. Empty the circle, eg, for service & server gear
5. Make windows of each occupant's preferred height (for air & sun)
- or, better, maybe make windows capable of moving up & down -
each along the wall correpsonding to the orange slice's rind
6. Make flexible work areas at opposite end of each sector-shaped
work room
7. Whiteboards & occupant's choice of art blended along the other
two walls (thst divide one sector from two adjacent ones)
8. Setup windowed-walls to rotate (in part) to yield doorways
9. Services are delivered to the center (to minimize use of
materials)
10. Make a conference/meeting room one level up, but
of a smaller diameter, leaving room for sky viewing,
antennas, deck chairs, etc. on the rest of occupant's
roof area
11. Build all this above a car park (so sun isn't hitting cars
direcly
12. Since cars are All-Electric they charge at a central post
(& there's no exhaust to breath above the car park)
13. (Now, it's your turn... what have I forgotten?)
14. A large windgenerator rises up from center of conf/mtg rm
15. storage batteries are below the conf/mtg rm (among other things)
16. all of the above (built as a unit) is located up on a
very scenic hill top, with a few others like it dotting
other selected/nearby hilltops
17. The whole structure defends its occupants from weather &
intruders (physical & electronic)
18. Just a walk away is a similar or compatible structure,
which provides underground living spaces, underground.
I'm sure the EBSCOHOST database sports a host of literature regarding socio-architectural influences on organisational achievement, employee integrity/efficiency, etc
Use SCRUM !!
Create groups of 5 co-workers strap them together with ropes back to back eliminating the need for chairs or desks.
Every morning pitch scrums against each other making them run from opposites sides of the office to clash in the middle. The team that manages to push the other team back to their side of the office gets to spend half the day eating coffee and drinking doughnuts, whilst the other team is forced to refactor all the work done by the winning team the previous day.
I think I should be writting books on this stuff.
Eat lots beans, chili and other flatulence inducing foods. Then cut rank farts that peel the paint off the wall.
Stressful open office layouts? That's exactly the point. These seating arrangements are designed to maximize stress. Any oranganization that adopts them has that as it's goal.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
Just think of the possibilities!
Cube farms are offices designed by people who don't know how to design things. It's hardly surprising that they are shitty places to work.
Offices isolate the members of what should be a reasonably social job (software development) from one another, so that's no good either. who wants to work in a rabbit warren?
open-plan has problems too. some people need to have spaces where they can be approached discreetly. that's why many open-plan spaces still have some separated spaces. it's nothing to do with elitism. i have an isolated and private desk space, in a corner with a bookshelf between me and everyone else. i need this because at least half of my day is spent on the phone to clients, and even if the constant sound of my voice didn't drive my staff mad, the sound of my staff would send my clients away. my staff also need to be able to approach me with personal matters -- if not in complete privacy then at least with discretion.
if I have a developer complaining of a lack of productivity then i suggest that they work from home for a while. unfortunately, telecommuting comes with it's own set of problems, and if you let someone telecommute for too long then my experience has been that they start to disconnect from the other people in the office and become, effectively, an outsider (or worse: kind of paranoid). this situation is clearly not in anyone's interest, so my policy is that telecommuting be limited to distinct periods for specific jobs, and not be a regular way of work.
Speaking as one of "them", who was formerly one of "you", I think that offices are overrated. I've had them and I prefer the space we now share to any office I've ever had in the past.
Several months ago, I started working in an open space environment designed for ~15-20 people, where nearly 40 people are crammed in. I was thinking "it ain't gonna be THAT bad"... after all, I was the lucky guy in the corner (the neighboring corner is owned by a manager 2 levels above me). Now I'm thinking: "I'll be quitting my job next month". The noise is unbearable, project leaders are fighting loudly with management; co-workers shouting to each other across the room etc. I can make less money, just get me out of here.
Most of you have probably watched Office Space and seriously, I sometimes consider going to work to dig some ditches like Ron Livingston did... F***n A.
I'll change, it wasn't me, it was open plans fault, just give me a second chance.
You could start by adjusting your pitch:
- Sounding angry doesn't help
- Teleworking is a whole different ball game. There's a lot more factors in teleworking that just offering a potential work environment.
- Going for private offices with Aeron chairs is a long shot and it weakens your whole argument.
I'll explain:
- Nobody negociates with angry people
- Teleworking can decrease communication within the team. In my experience phoneing the guy working from home is harder than just turning your head and talking to him - this does not affect discussion of "immediate and important" factors/issues but does affect all others. Above all, the person working from home will be much less likelly to "absorve knowledge from the shared knowledge pool of his collegues" (in other words, that person is less part of the gestalt that is the team). Also, some people work beter out of home, either because of their personality (some people work beter working alongside other people) or because their home environment is not conducent to concentration (for example, due to noisy kids).
- Two points:
a) In our current corporate culture, private offices are still seen a symbol of status, which in practice means they're a management perk.
b) Why are you going for expensive chair associated with the excesses of the dot-com bust?
I sugest aiming for group offices - closed spaces with 5 or 6 people. Big enough for a team, small enough to significantly reduce noise and visual distractions. Best of all, it helps build team spirit.
Ok, I'll raise to your bait. I'm in the UK and I hate open plan offices. There you go! one more complaint to add to your "few" :-)
/social grooming ("how are the kids? did you see the football last night? let me tell you a funny joke..."). And... standing in the doorway means - 1.5 metres from somebody in the open plan area's desk!!! So we get the disruptive social chat.
I'm a PhD student in a department of the Open University (yes there are on-campus postgrad students at the Open University). I work in an open plan office. I'll say up front we get a generous amount of space, a big desk, our own shelf space, comfy chairs. There are 24 spaces divided into 6 areas. These are in the middle of a whole floor single room area. But not everybody 'lives' here: this is how the building was designed, but then the senior management insisted that they needed offices, so offices for the more important people were built the length of the floor on both sides against the windows. So we have offices down the sides (one and two person) and open plan up the middle.
I can't concentrate in the open plan area: there is too much noise. It's ok if I just want to do routine work, but if I have to think hard then there are just too many noise distractions. I think there's some basic sociology happening here: I don't believe 20 or so people can all be on the same work rhythm. 4 people in an office maybe: you can negotiate when is 'heads down hard concentrating' time and when is 'ok lets let off some steam and chat about tv/sport/whatever' time. I just don't think this can happen with 24 people. Particularly in an office like ours where people keep different time schedules. I don't think people are being selfish, they just forget other people are maybe in a different head state at different times. Some people can work with headphones on listening to music, but me, I just end up concentrating on the music....
Add to this the offices down the side: I've noticed an interesting effect: people will go into the rooms to do serious business and have their meetings, but as they leave the office, standing in the doorway, they have broken out of serious business mode and that's the place they carry out the chit-chat
Also at one end of the floor is the entrance, at the other end is the meeting room. So we get passing meeting room traffic. Another distraction. Grrr. Life in a goldfish bowl when you are trying to do the hardest work of your life. What do I do? I pay for a broadband connection and work from home....
Sorry about the length of the post, you can see this has been therapy letting off some steam, grin!!!
I used to work with cubicles and one of the first things I did was take away the walls of those cubicles. People were amazed about the size of their desk. Also the noise went DOWN, because they could see if their neighbour was there to ask something. Productivity went up because people started to actualy talk to each other. Communication is almost always imprtand, even if you have drones just entereing numbers.
At an other place, the floor was just too big, so seprations were set so that teams were seperated from other teams, as to keep the groupsize of about 20.
So you need to look at each situation individualy. Also re-organize where people sit from time to time and let the people choose (partly) what they want and where they want to sit. Make it a group efford or part of a teambuilding.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Not gonna happen, when even some developers have been brainwashed into believing that open-plan and/or cubicles are a good idea. Some developers actually tout the supposed advantage of "I can be so much more productive when I can just yell over the cube wall to ask Joe something."
Unfortunately this is a very self-centered and short-sighted view; since they are neglecting to consider the effect of the constant
distractions on **everybody else** within earshot. Between noisy conversations, "over the wall" yelling, ringing phones, speaker phone conversations
and all the other disrupting factors found in a typical office, I find it amazing that anybody could actually advocate cubicles / open-plan. <sigh>
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
open-office?
There's a pretty obvious implicit assumption in the article that private offices (I don't know what Aeron chairs have to do with anything) are better than open plan offices. There's plenty of research that suggests otherwise, at least in some lines of work.
In response to others posting in this subthread, yes, I work in an open plan office with around 25 other people on this floor, and yes, we have a couple of guys who work in other one-man offices and effectively telecommute. The extra impromptu conversations, which are the main advantage of being open plan, are very helpful. For the rest, there's not much that can't be addressed with some simple courtesy to fellow workers, providing enough properly-equipped meeting rooms and using them sensibly, occasional on-site visits by teleworkers, etc.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I really like Paul Graham's view about great hackers and their aversion towards cubicles. Google may be a great company to work in with all their star hackers and what not, but it has not got its offices done right. For instance look at the Google's Australia office with the long rows of tables for their programmers.
Compare with the plush private offices that Microsoft provides to its developers developers developers.
As a side note, I had posted the links on this same topic some time ago, but can't seem to find it on slashdot now.
It's not an "American", "Canadian" or any other nation's "thing".
Some companies just don't treat their staff with any respect or dignity.
But the whining about open offices is just that -- whining. I've worked in cubes, offices, data centers, and most recently, an open office exactly like the article complains about.
People were quiet, respectful, we had good communications, and excellant equipment (Reserve America.) It was also one of the most skilled teams I worked with over the years.
During those years, I've run into no shortage of "experts" whining about their desks, their chairs, their monitors, their computers, the contents of vending machines, the brand of coffee, etc. There is just no pleasing some people, so their contracts don't get renewed. They aren't good enough to be worth the hassle.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
a recent study made in Belgium came with the stunning results that tele-working creates more traffic. basically when you go to work, you just make two rides. You go in the morning and come back in the evening. But ppl that work from home, often do other tasks at the same time, like driving kids to and from school, Doing some quick grocery shopping etc... on average, tele-working peeps are on the roads more often.
But does anyone actually have some sort of operational study showing that it does, in fact, increase productivity [i]that[/i] much?
Productivity definitely takes a massive hit when your top programmers leave to take jobs in offices with more appealing environments. I don't think you have to show massive productivity improvements, only that it doesn't cost any more than what they're doing now.
Custom environments would never fly in some of the state government offices I worked in. If anyone had any type of office that was unique or different, like trying to bring in a TV, microwave or frig, the other workers would pick and whine about it until it was taken away. It's like they all had to be at exactly the same level of misery.
The best "office" I ever worked in was a project at a large service company. They were remodeling their offices and didn't have anywhere to put contractors, so we took over part of an equipment warehouse. We took sections of chain link panels and made a perimeter so we could lock our equipment up at night. We fastened white boards around the inside which gave us privacy, security and lots of white space to brain storm. Taking one of their flat bed trucks out we picked up old furniture people put out for the trash and bought some cheap covers for them, our tables were plywood sheets on saw horses. Got a TV, cable, high speed internet, a refrigerator, microwave, blender and cappuccino machine. While we were out scouting for furniture we ran across a basketball hoop and snagged that, too. Set it up in the opposite corner of the warehouse. We wired our display monitor to the fence but were otherwise free to fashion our working space to our tastes. I called it the Half-Life office, but it was the most fun and productive environment I've ever worked in (the team personalities were a big factor in that as well). It was pet friendly...at first, anyway.
The customer was a little skeptical at first but we were seriously punching out the code. After a while they'd start getting their daily update around lunch and hang around to shoot baskets afterwards. By the end of the first month the execs would come down, grab a soda out of the frig and plunk down on one of the couches, just to hang out for a while. Mornings were quiet time until about 3:30 when we'd crank up the music to get a little energy going.
That was one of the few jobs I really looked forward to going to work every day. We'd arrive early and stay late and it didn't seem as much like a job. The DBA on the build ended up being hired on as a VP.
I'd take a cut in my charge rate to work in a more comfortable office. Life's too short to be stuck in a cubicle.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
We went from high cubes to low cubes and it sucked. But I didn't mind my regular cube. It afforded a certain amount of privacy and had plenty of space. If people have to work together in an office, high private cubes are probably the kindest model to individuals. Low cube sweatshop environments are demoralizing.
The real answer to this question, of course, is: telecommuting.
I do nothing at my job that I can't do just as well from home. And at home, my costs are a buck or two a day for internet. No rent. No air conditioning or heat. No plumbing. No insurance. No parking. High availability.
Telecommuting is superior in every way to going to an office. Oh well.
But then I learned how bad open-plan offices can get.
I'm sure that open-plan offices can work, but only if everyone understands that sound carries. When you have an office full of Loud Howards who alternate between shouting on the phone and shouting on the phone to be louder than the other Loud Howards, it gets completely unreasonable.
The supply room in your office shouldn't stock foam earplugs because people need them. People shouldn't need to wear noise-cancelling headphones and have their supervisors buy white noise generators just to block everything else out and be able to concentrate their own work. These are signs to management that either people need to respect the space they're in, or they need to give everyone their own space.
My employeer tends to have "semi-private" offices (meaning a couple people per room based on size) and then have a number of team rooms. In our corporate offices you tend to work multiple projects at a time, so dedicated team rooms don't make sense for us.
Now as for my client, they generally just throw people in to the cub farm, and see what happens, unless you're a high priority project, then they find a room, so right now 7 of us got split off into a seperate room. It's been a lot better for team collaboration, except for the fact we have no whiteboard space, only 3x4 boards, but that's a problem with the size cubes. I've been thinking of just buying a board for the team, putting it up on the wall, and moving on.
Buy the boss a copy of the book "Peopleware" for christmas. It goes into great detail in documenting how stressful environments do not make economic sense, in a way that is believable for business people too.
That said, private offices are not necessarily the best solution. People who work together on the same thing can get great benefits from sitting together. The tragedy of the cube farms and open plan offoces is that they are almost never used for what the whole point was: to rearrange frequently according to needs.
My ideal office has "project rooms" that can house a handful of people working together, and shielded them fom disturbance from other groups. Enhances communication, less disturbance overall, and the noise there is is less of a problem, because noise from someone working on the same thing as you is much less distrubing than noise from unrelated activities.
But a good and often more realistic runner-up is to just lobby for the opportunity to use the capabilities that cube systems and open office plans offer: arrange your project group togeter. Use a lagoon layout (sit back-to back) so you get a "safe" and cohesive "inside" area, a good perimiter to shield against the rest of the world, and easy access to scoot over to your coworker when you want to show or discuss something. Avoid the more obvious island arrangement (face-to-face), where monitors act as walls betweeen project partners, and you ahve to take a walk to see someone else's screen, the outside world stresses you out behind your back, anf the feng shui is just generally destructive.
sudo ergo sum
It has nothing to do with 'productivity'.
It's designed to constantly remind you of your lack of importance.
You can bet the boss has an office.
Same reason telecommuting isn't popular - it means fewer boot-lickers on display when the PHB's golf-buddies come to visit.
I worked for a long time in the US, in a cubicle, and I hated cubicles (I hate shoulder-height 'half cubicles' even more, though). I can't say why, I just hate them, and I think everyone agrees with me.
In the UK, as you say, cubicles are very rare and open-plan is the rule. Where I work now, there's about 8-16 people, working on roughly the same sort of thing at the same level, in one room. It works fine. But at most places I've worked, entire floors or half-floors are open plan -- maybe 200-500 people per floor. This is awful.
The reasons it's awful are:
1 -- the 'Space Odyssey' effect. Cielings tend to be pretty low in new build offices, and when the ceiling is low and goes on forever, covered in striplights, the dazzle effect when you look into the distance is horrible for me.
2 -- higher proportion of flourescent lights. In a small room, people bring in lamps if they don't have a window. In a floor of 500 people, there's no point, so unless you are right at the edge the only light sources are flickering ones. argh.
3 -- distraction. In a real classic UK office, I'm within 'being annoyed by personal phone calls' radius of maybe 50 or 100 people!
4 -- fear. The fact that there are always people moving around behind me translates into constant alertness (for me at least).
5 -- despair. A grid of 500 desks just makes the fundamental pointlessness of work a lot more obvious.
I have worked in open-plan places (in America & Asia) that take steps to improve things -- for example, giving the open-plan zone an irregular twisting shape helps a bit, having private rooms around the edge helps a bit, having gaps or balconies helps, and actually open-plan offices like this, where you aren't exposed to the whole floor all the time, aren't bad. But London in particular seems to go for the 'endless bright white expanse of flourescent lights' and it's really grim.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
The IT industry needs to take lessons from the automobile industry. Why, in 2006, with dozens of virtual meeting software solutions available (both free and not free), team work applications, secure networking, and remote desktop access does the world bother "going to the office"? I have remotely administered datacenters for years without ever having to step foot into them, yet I have to come into an office so I can sit at a computer terminal (that I could have always accessed from home via VPN). With only 1 meeting a week, I only talk to the people I want to about what I want to, and it usually is never work related, and usually occurs out of the line of site, and over top of the cubicle. If hardware needs to be fixed or updated, I can see coming in to work. Hell, I can even see coming in to work to have "team meetings", but forcing people to drive into a cube forest, to sit for 8 hours a day, to do something they could easily do at home, and STILL have the same amount of communication options available, is rather ridiculous. Why is the IT industry so anti-technology? I'd argue that using a virtual office is IN FACT more productive to an IT workforce. This forces you to leverage your workgroup tools, as opposed to getting up, away from your computer, email and telephone, to walk over, sit next to someone who is going to "show you something", and then proceed to talk about absolute nonsense for the next 30 mins until you get back to your desk. "telecomutting" doesnt mean "anarchy". You can still have enforceable standards such as "logging in" at a certain time and not logging off until a certain time. As mentioned in previous posts, just because you "show up" to an office doesnt mean your working, just like sitting there staring at a wall doesnt mean your not working either.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
If you're going to get management to understand the reasons for better treatment of programmers, you have to make a business case argument. The simple matter is to argue (in the sense of making a proposal, not in the sense of expressing anger) that it is more cost effective to do it this way.
Software developers are skilled professionals - or they should be, anyway - and professionals need proper tools and resources to be at their highest productivity levels. Higher productivity means more value for every peso spent. No one would expect even a moderately competent surgeon to work in a dark and cramped operating room with dull tools, doing every job in the operating room with no support staff, and expect anything but sub-par, low grade work with a very high mortality rate. And you wouldn't expect it of a world-class surgeon either.
And this is exactly the state of software development today in the places that don't make it possible for their software development staff to do anything but sub-par, low grade work with a high probability of failure and an strong likelihood of cancellation of projects as unfinished and a waste of valuable resources.
The purpose in having a programming staff is to deveop the software tools that allow your organization to obtain the one thing that no other organization in the world has: a competitive advantage and a reason for the customer to select your company over all of your competitors.
Every piece of hardware you can purchase commercially, and every piece of shrink-wrapped software you buy does nothing but give you the same tools as your competitors have, because you all can (and do) buy from the same suppliers. Software either makes your company more efficient - that it can get more done with less resources than your competitors - or it gives you the capacity to offer products or services that are markedly better than anyone else, or potentially unavailable from anyone else.
If software isn't there to give you a competitive edge relative to your customers, then what do you have software developers for? Why even bother to have them if you aren't getting something more than every other company with a checkbook? Fire them all and use off-the-shelf applications. If you have software developers, the whole idea is that what they are capable of doing, that no other people can do, is supply you with something different that no other company has, that you can use that difference as a competitive edge that makes your company more valuable to your customers than any of your competitors.
An advertising company can purchase office supplies from anyone else, they can hire - or freelance - artists to do drawings, photographers and models for ad campaigns, announcers for voice overs, but none of these things can give them a competitive edge because everyone else can buy from the same suppliers, and none of these things will make a difference other than in the technical quality of the ads they produce. The competitive edge is in the people who can think up a great idea for an ad campaign that works to sell the customer's product or service. That competitive edge is something you can't buy, you need high-quality people who can think to get it.
If you're in the business of selling a commodity product or service that they can buy from anyone else, your sales people are the stars that allow you to make a difference because your salespeople can give your customers new ideas on how to use your product or service more effectively, or show your customers reasons to use your product or service over anyone else. And for that, sales people are paid high salaries, or they get special compensation packages. Because the extra resources that they get provide the company with a competitive advantage.
The same thing applies to any company that uses software developers to create software used in their business. If your business is the development of software, this is an even more imperative issue, because the software you sell is the only thing t
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
As with anything controlled by management, you simply apply yourself. Management-think is controlled by a very small number of factors. Dollars and Time are the major ones. Personnel, to an extent, although they're just a fancy representation of bits of Dollars and Time. There's also Prestige, but it's a minor factor to be applied after D and T. You all know how management thinks. You all know the arguments they use. You're probably a type who learns new computer languages and logic structures for fun. So why not learn the very simple language and structure of D, T and P? Management has no clue. They rely on data (anecdotes) and guesses, which is why most of their policies couldn't touch reality with a really long stick. The data should be supplied by you. The guesses are based on arguments in D, T and P, which if you're smart will also be supplied by you. In short, take a couple of days to learn a new language and then management will do 90% of what you tell them. Hell, I've done it often enough. Killed stupid projects, gotten upper management in trouble, launched multimilliondollar projects, talked my way into the CEO's office, reversed policies, and redefined my job to be, effectively, "whatever I want to do", at a pay rate higher than any of my direct bosses. About the only step I could have taken to make it easier would have been to write a spiel generator and a GUI. Click to upgrade your cube, click to get a pay rise, click to have your boss spanked by the CEO.
- or have a small desk with 2 to 4 people inside
How do you get two to four people to fit inside your desk? Especially a small desk?
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Its obvious in my opinion why employers put everyone in the open. It is to increase transparency. It is already hard enough to get employees to give an honest days work without worrying about them doing their Christmas shopping at work. All it takes is 10-15% of "lazy" employees to ruin it for everyone else. As someone who employs over 80 people I like the open environment where others can "see" you screwing around. After I changed from closed offices to open, our productivity increased about 10% not decreased. You ALL know people those people that screw around at work and have to be looked after all the time. If everyone did their job there would be WAY less of this. Argue all you want, but after hiring more than 250 over the last 10 years I know what I am talking about.
There are whole scenes in "The Matrix"(TM) that would have to be cut if we didn't have cubicles!
Ok, so this was probably the only post on /. that didn't have a reply with some geeky reference to "The Matrix"(TM), until I posted this.
America, Home of the Brave.
You are a manager, right? Managers love open plan (for their staff, not themselves) : they can step out of their office and immediately see if anyone is not working, reading a magazine, surfing the web etc. They can see who is or is not in. They can summon people personally without the "indignity" of going to them. Their own office emphasises their own status. They know that open plan inhibits people's personal phone calls.
Also, management can increase density just by phoning an "Office Solutions" company to come in at the weekend and shove all the desks closer together. Unlike a small office where there is a distinct limit (legal?) to how many it can house, they clearly regard a large open plan office as having infinite capacity.
OTOH, compared with 2-4 people in a small office, what is in it for the staff? I never know when I am being watched. I must put up with the chatter of the group of people (mental age = 15) 10m away. Several mobile phone with irritating jingles are singing away unanswed. Someone else mentioned the unease he feels with unseen people moving behind him (in a bar for example I always like to sit with my back to a wall). People are walking past my desk from the drinks machine, sloshing coffee all around. Someone else is has control of whether the windows are open and the setting of the thermostat. That's if there *are* any windows left after the managers' offices have been built against them.
Don't know what planet your UK is on, but on mine I rarely hear anyone say anything good about open plan, apart from managers.
I quit a long time ago since I'm an old fart (and a PHB).
I just quit. Programmers need solitude. While I quit, others may look for a different strategy.
It is my opinion that people tend to employ a strategy in life that they feel will help them get ahead. Most look for acceptance by the group and tend to be very gregarious. For these people, figuring out what is politically correct is the first order of business. The second order of business is to look good and fit in. Given a difficult decision to make, these people will tend to want to put it to a vote. Given a technical or scientific or mathematical problem to solve - they will tend to fall back on the strategy they know best - and will tend to try to put it to a vote AS WELL . A good example of this is the debate on global warming. Science in general and global warming in particular are not subject to public opinion. Yet look at the dimension of the political pressure that is applied on both sides of the issue.
Programmers and engineers, technical people in general, tend not to be part of this group. These people need to deal with real science, math and logic. Programs and bridges are not open to politics and popular opinion. If there is a bug in your program it will crash regardless how popular you are and being politically correct likely won't help your bridge stand up if you are an engineer. In fact, many of the disasters which have happened are due to trying to applying political solutions to technical problems. The sinking of the Titanic is probably a good example. Double hulls were in use for over 100 years and high bulkheads to fully compartamentalize the ship were also well understood. These were eliminated or compromised. Even the breakneck speed the ship was travelling at indicates a clear lack of respect for reality and the powerful, yet subtle desire to gain status in a peer group.
Managers and supervisors tend to be in the "people oriented" group. Since they see their strengths as comming from the group, they want to round everyone up (like a flock of chickens in some cases). Often they simply cannot understand that technical people cannot work in such an environment.
This is compounded by who makes the money. Sales people tend to be gregarious. Customer service people tend to be gregarious. There is a simple test one can do to confirm this.
Suppose you have an issue with say billing from a utility. Suppose you just simply refuse to pay the bill until they fix the problem. Your other option is to attempt to call them and they will put you on hold for hours and try to make you listen while their robots annoy you with elevator music.
The thing is that you cannot simply tell them "hey - you have a problem - please fix it". For some reason these people cannot seem to work unless they have you on line and are wasting your time. See the need for "personal interaction"?
Ok.. so you undertake to not let them waste your time. If you don't pay the bill - you know they will eventually have to call you up. At least you avoid most of the robots. Again - you are unlikely to be able to get them to do anything to correct your account unless you are willing to let them put you on hold.
IMHO part of the rift between the sexes falls into this area. Women have always carried the lion's share of the responsibility of raising the next generation. Babies and children need constant attention and were it not for their mother's propensity to talk, babies would propbably never learn to speak. Given this, is it such a surprise that women tend to like careers that are "people" oriented? People like this tend to view solitude as punishment, certainly not an opportunity.
Back to cubicals. The rift is that the people who manage the company and who tend to bring in the revenues via sales and marketing all tend to be "people oriented" and see their strength in the group. When they go off on their own they tend to shut down. It is di
There are still people in high positions who seem to think that stuffing a bunch of engineers into a noisy landscaped office is the best way to organize a company. It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it?
We all know it, do we?
I don't know it. I'm a developer, and I absolutely believe that open plan and physical proximity is the way to do.
Telecommuting is all very convenient, but there's no substitute for sitting or standing face-to-face with someone, seeing their expression, their body language. A physical whiteboard is a far better communication tool than a screen-sharing application.
I'll tell anyone willing to listen that I am *at least* twice as productive when working in a team of 3-8 people all of whom are within hollering distance, than working with the same people over phone/IM/email.
My employer wanted us all to become home workers, but we successfully argued this point and persuaded them to rent us an office.
I have been in about 5 "open-plans" now and the all suffer from the same type of issue: because barriers are gone, people are more compelled to come up and ask you things. I find the communication process gets far too chatotic and the number of times people are interrupted during the day is insane. I am thankful my new position has an office, with a door that closes.
Class - that made me laugh :-)
Insert
Cubicles were not adopted because they are a better way to physically organize office space. They aren't. They were adopted becaused of tax law.
Businesses have government-mandated depreciation schedules for capital items. These schedules have varying lengths depending on the nature of the item. In the U.S., buildings depreciate on a 40.5 year schedule. Office furniture, including cubicle walls, depreciate on a 7 year schedule. So, building a real office with real walls means that you have a much slower depreciation schedule.
Businesses are always trying to maximize what they take on depreciation. The more they can take on depreciation in a given year, the higher their "expenses" will be, and therefore, the lower the taxes that they have to pay to the government. So then the government gets very involved in saying exactly how long it takes to fully amortize a capital expense.
If you're an executive looking at the tax exposure on cubicles vs. real office walls, guess which one you're going to choose.
This has nothing to do with the relative merits of cubicles vs. office walls.
... the number of people leaving for positions at companies with real offices, like this job at ArgonST? Having worked both in cubes and in real offices, offices win hands-down.
The researcher who invented/championed function point analysis for IBM (Albrecht) also wrote a study that proved that, on the whole, programmers were more effective if they shared no more than 4 people to a work area and the personal workspace was about 200 square feet. Unfortunately I can't put my hands on the analysis right now, but someone could look it up. Again, this was on the whole, meaning averages. In a case like this, I'd be interested to know what the exceptions were, particularly the exceptions that produced the highest productivity.
Another former IBM'r, Tom DeMarco (Guru of Structured Analysis and Entity diagrams) wrote a book called, "Peopleware", and his conclusion was that programmers needed good-sized office space with no more than two people per office.
A number of the best architectural engineering offices I've seen use an open plan that promotes workflow. I suspect that a drafting table plus workspace produces enough anti-crowding to promote effectiveness.
A call for a new office plan is useless unless it solves a problem. A problem is a discrepancy between the way things are and the way you want them to be. If the discrepancy is a performance problem, jumping to solutions without a full analysis is probably counter-productive. (I've seen hundreds of thousands of dollars spent implementing changes that don't have any effect on the actual problem.) There is a good book, "Analyzing Performance Problems" by Mager and Pipe, that truly simplify the process, and another, "The New Rational Manager" by Kepner and Tregoe, that teaches a more formal method.
If your manager says he would commit to spending $100,000 on a new office plan, could you GUARANTEE $300,000 payback on the investment? (Pick your amount...$100,000 is just an example.) If not, you don't have a problem well-enough defined. Try a different approach: Read, "The Goal" and "It's Not Luck" by Goldratt, and figure out your bottlenecks. It's surprising how often the bottleneck is not an environmental problem, but a policy.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
...and you'll blubber with joy to get a cubicle.
rj
IIRC, HP had an article in the HP journal ca 1990(?) on office plans. The problem with the private office was it was difficult to find people, wide open spaces in desk farms or cube farms suffered from noise. Their solution was a hybrid cube.
In this construction, private offices were build with glass in the top 1/3 of the wall. Two panes of wire strengthened plate glass were tipped out about 15 degrees. This construction keeps parallax down, permits people to see around the space, and serves as a pretty good noise barrier.
Strictly speaking, this could easily be made into modular cube type construction, the glass panels could be made of plastic, also. The overall lighting could be set into the low V formed by the glass panel, and be directed upwards as a glare free light source, and task lighting would be specific to the individual. Seasonal Affective Disorder could be addressed by localized brightness in the work position.
I am sure that themes and variations can be thought of - like using the upper reaches as semi-sealed planters, etc. Low maintainence, and all that green could act as an air purifier, if the right foliage is chosen.
This is progress?
"we all know it" is not proof, with merely demonstrating this to the idiots in charge being all that is left to do.
No wonder you have a problem proving it, your mind is weak. The scientific method starts with a hypothosis, not a conclusion, then it tests to see what is really going on.
Get back in the box until you can think.
Different people respond to cubicles and open-plan offices differently.
Management tends to consist of extroverts. They're in meetings or on the phone with lots of different people all day. This energizes them. Spending an entire day in a closed office typing code on a keyboard is the worst torture they could think of. They understand that you like it, but they have no idea why. At least with cubicles you're able to chat with your neighbors while you work so that your experience with the company isn't so awful.
Engineers, especially the good ones, tend to consist of introverts. Spend an entire week with nothing but a problem to be solved and your tools and you're in heaven. Meetings and chatter with your neighbors are not good things: they're interruptions. Worse, they're draining. The definition of torture is that you accomplish nothing all day due to constant meetings and chatter. Its exhausting and not in a good way. If you're lucky your music headphones at least let you pretend that your alone so you can occasionally get some work done.
Its a personality trait thing. Any good psychologist could explain it.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Putting people in cube farms is how a business tells you:
1. Your job is easy to do.
2. You are not vital to the companies goals.
3. You are easy to replace.
4. You are not likely to find anything better.
Are they wrong?
Our company has two sites (SF and LA) and one has almost entirely cubicles and very few offices (SF). The other has mostly offices and very few cubicles (LA). The productivity of the SF office is higher in my department, and while there are many reasons for this, most people in SF will tell you the open plan design keeps the whole team moving forward faster. In fact, we have people who are supposed to have offices who refuse to move out of the cubicles because they like them better.
Of course, I've never found the "need 15 minutes to start working again" to be true for me or my co-workers. I also work with great people who respect when I don't want to be interupted. We also have a few usually-empty conference rooms with workstations in them where people can go if they need to have a louder/longer discussion.
We also do have Aeron chairs and dual 21" monitors. The cubes are totally not a cost choice for us.
I think some of this may be dependent on portion of the industry, but I really think most people here would benefit from a well-run open layout. The people in LA want offices, but I think it's just a status thing and if no one had them, no one would care.
More details:
- 2006 -- Large Display Research Overview
- 2005 -- Large display user experience
- 2004 -- Display space usage and window management operation comparisons between single monitor and multiple monitor users
- 2003 -- Towards characterizing the productivity benefits of very large displays
- 2003 -- Effects of Visual Separation and Physical Discontinuities when Distributing Information across Multiple Monitors
And to support arguments for a closed-door office:- 2004 -- A Diary of Task Switching and Interruptions
... but there's probably more specific research out there on the topic.Even at 9% improvement, it'll easily pay for itself in a few weeks when you consider the total cost of keeping an employee (typically 2x their annual salary) [Note -- it mostly relates to people working on multiple tasks or dealing with large amounts of information, so it may not hold true for all tasks, but you can just forget to mention that part to your boss]
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
As someone who used to be an engineer for a Tier 1 backbone provider, I can tell you: it's not about the bandwidth. It's not even about the fact that T1s are symmetrical in throughput, and most DSL is ADSL, and thus asymmetrical. It's about the reliability.
When I was telecommuting, a lot of my work consisted of working on restricted infrastructure through SSH2 connections.
I could have, and actually often did, do this from a dialup connection, like when I would be on call, in a remote location, and an emergency would come up.
However, a T1 gives you rock solid performance, and when it doesn't, you have a lot of information on your router's interface to clue you in to what's wrong with it.
Not to mention, the telco will take your* call and test to the smartjack.
Try troubleshooting in detail a DSL line, or getting a telco to test the line at all, not to mention right away. If you're connecting to an ISP at the other end instead of your company, try getting your ISP to handle troubleshooting the DSL properly, and getting telco to test. To really test the full DSL loop, they have to get a truck out to your premises -- there's no smartjack. There are things they can test to, in your subdivision or in the box at the end of the street, without rolling a truck, but they can't test all the way. (The tools some DSL modems may have are not enough)
*assuming you're the company paying the bill for the T1 line itself. If it's your ISP, you often should be calling them.
Just like the airline VP's who eat their own airline food a couple times a week, make the VP use a cube for a week or two and then let him decide. If he's still able to concentrate, make phone calls, etc... then he probably won't change his mind, but if he's not, perhaps he'll understand.
At the very least he'll know a bit more what it's like.
Attn gay Linux users: please join us at gaybuntu.com
As an aside, it seems to me that it could be useful to have similarly tailored releases that cater to assorted special groups. I'd bet there are other groups doing similar things. Is there a more general effort to coordinate such tailoring? I'd think that people working on such special distros could benefit greatly by talking to each other and developing general tools to support such efforts.
I've been getting tempted to switch my RedHat linux server over to ubuntu, just to get familiar with it. Getting mixed up in such an effort could be a motivation to sit down and do it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
"As long as you are a hard-working skilled techie, you can call the shots if you are somewhat reasonable."
Agreed. That's why I'm doing this from India.
Many years ago I was a programmer in the marine corps - and our office was in the top of an aircraft hanger. The interruptions could include a sergeant that wanted you to empty waste baskets, carry some boxes around - or an A4, F4 or maybe c-130 racing up its engines directly outside of our door.
So, ear-protection was standard issue - and we simply got accustomed to working at our desks with this equipment on. And we got work done.
Years later, I've worked in all of the environments described here, and I prefer open-plan with a small number of coworkers (7 or less). A common understanding of the "rules" is required (no music, no hollaring, etc, etc) as well as some maturity from the participants. But this beats the pants off offices in my book - in which you deliberately sever communications between team members.
This is especially true if at the same time you're wondering how you're going to implement methodologies such as pair-programming: with two people per office you typically don't invite a third person in your office for daily programming sessions. So, where exactly would this occur? In some additional conference rooms? Unused offices? Well, assuming an infinite budget for real estate I suppose this is possible - but in the real world there is seldom so much vacant space.
WHere Sam Lowry has an office and a desk (nothing more than a slab-like fixture) sticking out of the wall. THe desk however slides out of view when the office dweller next door decides to use it. Sam only has to work half the time then.
Mr. Warren: There you are, your own number on your very own door. And behind that door, your very own office! Welcome to the team, DZ-015
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate, make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration, mean you're in contact with many other people, so your "chance of being noisily interrupted" must be multiplied by the number of people in the office, mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity?
They're called headphones.
Yes, headphones are anti-social, can be overcome by determinedly difficult people and can have difficult managers demand you take them off. All of those remain true for doors and private offices too.
They're quite a bit cheaper than remodelling too.
No really, I've been trying to talk my employer (company of about 30 people) into getting some cubicle dividers, or just some sort of separation between desks, for some time now.
What we have now is I guess what is meant by an "open office" plan... by which is meant, desks right up against each other in clumps, with very little in the way of dividers or walls, except for maybe a couple bookshelves. We're pretty packed in right now, and I suppose it's par for the course for a growing company -- you're going to be strapped for space now and then. The company has seems to have to move to or expand into a larger space about three times a year, and have plans underway to do so again early next year.
I would kill to have a little more separation, and I've had a couple of my co-workers also say that they would prefer cubicles over the current arrangement, so long as they were spacious enough to get two people into, so that pairs of people on a project can work collaboratively when needed, and there wouldn't be too much barrier to communication. The new office floor plan looks like they're organizing it according to large projects, although realistically any one of us is usually involved in multiple projects.
The people I work with are generally very considerate about trying not to interrupt each other much, but occasionally there will be just a lot of hubbub and loud conversation going on, like if a client visits the office or if the sales department is all hyped up over something.
Anyway, what's got me clamoring for something more cubicley is that my next-desk neighbor has some kind of medical condition I guess, that causes his breathing to be very loud and labored and peppered with gross snorting noises. It puts me on edge something fierce. No one else seems to notice, but then no one else is sitting four feet away from him eight hours a day. I can break out the headphones and put on music, but depending on the kind of activity I'm doing, music can be a distraction too. And besides, wearing headphones for several hours at a time makes my ears sore. To make matters worse, the guy has... how can I put this... a rather strong odor. Point is, it would be much easier to work with him if I wasn't *forced* to be right up against him all the time.
I don't imagine that my situation is anything all that out of the norm, though; so I don't think enough discussion is being given to this aspect of things. I don't think that separate offices are realistic, cost-wise, for most companies I would want to fork for. And in any case, when I picture such a situation, it feels like *too* much isolation -- I envision communication being very reduced, which seems counterproductive to working on a project team.
Plus dividers make for convenient places to hang up cheat-sheets, charts, a personal whiteboard, etc. I could really use that.
I think the cubicle gets a bad rap, frankly. But there are also probably better and worse ways to do the cubicle thing. People you need to work closely with should be easily accessible, so I like the idea about arranging them around a central space. Likewise, people need to be considerate about interrupting one another for any office arrangement to work.
I preferred both of the open plan options (i.e. with or without cubicles) than the small office. It may get noisy at times but it can be more sociable too.
What I find is that people have different preferences. Some like a bit of solitude, some like a more close-nit clubby feel. Some kind of adjustable cubicle may be the way to go.
As far as getting a "real office", not likely to happen. If your work can be that isolated, then your job is ripe for offshoring. Thank globalism if this bothers you. Managers need closed offices so that they can talk about sensative issues without eavesdropping.
Table-ized A.I.
Cubicles are considered office equipment and on taxes, you can take an immediate depretiation on them over one years timespan. Compare this to office walls(construction) which takes 20 years. ... that's the real reason why we've got cubicles here in america and why in more enlightened places overseas you don't get as many cubicles.
The office i was working at about five years ago decided to "upgrade" everyone to Aeron chairs. In my opinion they sucked. Maybe if you want to sit with "perfect posture" all day they work fine, but i tend to shift around all day and sometimes cross my legs, and whenver i did that the hard frame would start digging into me and be incredibly uncomfortable. On the plus side since they were getting new chairs for everyone they had no use for the old ones and told us we could take them home and keep them if we wanted, so i now have a very comfortable office chair at home that has far outlasted my employment at that particular company.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
I heard that Google does not have any offices. Everyone works in cubicals even executives.
When working at one of Intels newer R+D campuses I purchased 2 of those squishy "stress balls" made up of a laytex balloon filled with sand. One went into my office (8x9 cube) the other went home - niether got used --- too busy :) After 9 months the stress ball in my office (while untouched) looked like it had been through a tour of Iraq ---- the stress ball at home looked basically brand new.
That told me there was something wrong - really wrong with the whole "environment"
I'm now making a lot less working as a Technology Facilitator at a large local high school - low stress - I share a large office with a couple technology teachers .... and have a window I can actually open. The kids are a kick as well.
Its not the years, its the mileage
"It is not, and we all know it, but can we prove it?"
How can you know something without first having proved it to yourself? This suggests you're using something other than reason as a tool of cognition.
And miss out when your coworker in the next cubile farts or belches. I wouldnt know what time of day it was without someones radio playing and hearing the same commercials everyday. If your cubicle is next to a very busy area, where lots of people gather, then you dont have to watch the news cuz you hear everyone everyone talk about current events, sports and what they did over the weekend 8hrs a day. And you know its near lunch time when you can smell popcorn (regular or burnt), greasy burgers, stinky seafood, or whatever else they blew up in the microwave. It only encourages you to leave for lunch for awhile so the smells can subside.
I should have prefaced my comments by saying, "if you want a T1, here's why," or something. :)
I agree that DSL is probably fine for most people who work at home -- provided they're not doing anything mission critical.
For mission critical, I'd rather have T1 or even ISDN.
awesome, thanks for the links. THIS is what I'm talking about.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I always love discussions about open office space-they quickly bring out people who talk about the "creativity" of modern offices, talk which has been shown again and again to be inaccurate.
Then there is the talk about face to face communication, and how there are things you can't do via telecommuting that you can do in person. I'm still not sure what, exactly, those things are, and people get very vague and ambigious when you ask them to give examples. (Heck, you can ask for TPS reports via email as well as in person.)
The main result I see of the cubicle farm and the open office space is the creation of a Panopticon environment where work gets done at a glacial pace, if it all, because managers spend a lot of time interrupting people with URGENT TASKS! which are generally not that urgent, if they actually need to be done at all.
I spent time as a tech support guy, and as a "knowledge worker" who churned out a lot of reports. There was very little in those jobs I couldn't have done from home, or from an apartment near home. (It can be difficult to work from home, specially with small children, but I think of the distraction provided by people asking questions they either a) know the answer to b) could figure out on their own, if they searched their email or c) discussing a sporting event, the internet fad du jour, a tv show, a movie or the private lives of celebrities, and I think it's a wash between home and work.)
But when I talk this way, I get accused of being a radical (and I do sound like one radical I know of). So I generally quiet myself, and go back to work in my cubicle, expending a lot of effort for little output, and then drive home to my family, in the process polluting the environment and tightening energy supplies just a bit more, along with the millions of other people doing just the same. It's cowardice, but one has to provide for one's family, and if you fail to play the game, it's very hard to do so, unless you have inherited wealth, are among the first people to get into a field (and you'll be bought and/or forced out and replaced with the usual corporate drone later on) or win the lottery.
All hail capitalism! It's just like socialism, except with larger private plots, a slightly less murderous secret police, and much crappier propaganda.
Someone needs to read "The Dummies Guide to Political Correctness". The comment didn't apply to all people in a particular race, so it wasn't racist, it was an ethnic slur.
Ethnic slurs have a higher potential for comedic value than racism.
You're my hero.
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
With correct design you can do away with the high wall cubicle but you cannot work in close spaces without Cubicle Level Protection.
_ can_do.htm
. htm
o mes.htm
CLP is a group of design features that block peripheral vision for a concentrating worker.
In the 1960's normal features of the physiology of sight were discovered to cause mental breaks. The "special conditions" that allow exposure to visual Subliminal Distraction are so simple that you can be exposed other places, homes, dorms, student apartments, or small business offices.
The problem can be demonstrated with a simple psychology experiment.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/a_demonstration_you
Herman Miller introduced the Action Office 1 in 1964 but had to modify it by 1968 creating the first cubicle.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/modern_cubical.htm
Subliminal Distraction can and has happened almost everywhere.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/
Several Russian space missions have been shortened because of "psychological problems." There was a psychotic mental break on Soyuz-21.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/Astronauts_Insanity
Arround the world there are mental events that defy explanation. They happen where single-room too-small living spaces are used.
http://visionandpsychosis.net/Culture_Bound_Syndr