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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?"
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.
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.
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+
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 think the only overall answer to this problem is a variant of Natural Selection. Companies like gasp Microsoft (despite all their internal/architectural/legacy problems), and I hear Google as well, manage to beat companies that don't "get it". And this is not just a component of why, but evidence of the understanding their management has about at least some of the things that are important.
Yes, try changing your organization to being 6 times as large and then you'll find that the unrealistic assumption of TFAS:
"It is not, and we all know it"
May become slightly more true.
</sarcasm>
I mean the whole concept that "we all know" that cubicles / open-plan offices are bad is bullshit to begin with, so there's no way we can simply "communicate" this "fact" to management.
Every company I have ever worked in has used open-plan offices with 8-20 people and there has not been any problem.
If the stupid precept TFAS was trying to get across was modified to say "open-plan offices are bad for 40+ people" then I might agree, but at the moment we're being asked to prove something that simply isn't true.
A lot of us don't work in offices with more than 10 people and the idea of shutting people away into offices is dumb, as is the idea that everyone will be able to communicate effectively if they are all at home. I can't believe I'm reading a question that says open-plan offices are bad and raises telecommuting as a sensible way to run a business. It's telecommuting that's the dumb idea, and the managers all know it. Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication. Unless you really are just stuck in front of a terminal all day doing your own work which never interfaces to anyone else's, telecommuting does not work.
But here we have a situation where all managers are supposed to be "idiots" that need to show humility to the uberknowledge of the geeks; whereas the geeks show absolutely no inclination to look at the subjects sensibly or from a business-oriented perspective. The evidence is in the careless way the precept is phrased - such as to make it not even true. Yeah, people, let us all go to our managers and tell them in absolute terms that open-plan offices are always bad with no evidence or even common sense to back us up. That's "communication", right?
Or maybe it's just the rise of the pointy-haired programmer.
It's telecommuting that's the dumb idea, and the managers all know it. Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication.
Well, yes and no. As with the claim that cubicles and open-plan offices are always bad, this also depends on the task.
Historically, technical people have often collaborated very effectively via print media. The reason is well understood: There are a lot of technical concepts that can't be expressed easily in English or any other "human" language. To communicate effectively, you need to use a blackboard or a piece of paper - or email. Things like equations, diagrams and software can't be communicated effectively via a speech medium; they can only be expressed in writing.
I've seen this on a lot of projects. Very often, I end up just listening quietly in meetings, because it's obvious that people aren't communicating very well. Afterwards, I'll type up my analysis and suggestions, and email them. That's where the actual communication takes place. Then management wants a meeting to discuss things, and we have another meeting where people are talking past each other, and again I mostly sit and listen.
Note that I'm not claiming that this is always true. Some topics can be discussed verbally. And if the group's problems are mostly personal, verbal interactions can be the fastest way to get to the crux of the problems.
But saying that telecommuting is a dumb idea is itself a dumb idea, as bad as claiming that open office plans are always wrong. Some of the most effective computing projects have been done by groups that never meet face to face. I've done some successful projects with people that I've never met. And I've seen group meetups that were quite enjoyable and successful social occasions, but which didn't contribute at all to the project's progress.
It all depends on what you need to communicate, and what's the best language for that communication.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.