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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.
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.
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.
- 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!?
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!
Perhaps, but that's the mentality of the management.
- Should an employee take a pay cut for something that makes them more productive?
- Does a little goofing off really damage overall productivity?
I say a happy, motivated employee who can concentrate when he wants to get stuff done is going to be far more valuable.
Weren't we, just recently, all for OpenOffice?
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
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.
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!
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,5 - 7 is not that much people. Try 30 instead. Or 50.
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
Apparently, the modern American worker is a whiny pussy. I've worked in open plan offices my entire working life now, and currently sit in an office with upto 60 people in it. It's great. We can communicate easily without bollocking around too much. I've not heard a single person complain of being distracted, quite possibly because people have common sense and don't tend to have loud conversations over the heads of others, and they take their mobile 'phones out of the office if they need to make a call.
So yeah, it seems it is an American thing. The rest of the world gets on fine with open plan. Whine on though, I say: the whiny American workforce will only end up costing their employers more money, which in the long run will just mean more work for us as the same employers move jobs to lower cost centres.
(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.
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
I'm a non-USian who has worked in several open-plan offices and hated it.
d o-it" stereotype.
Is it made impossible to concentrate simply by virtue of the fact the office is open-plan? No.
Does it mean it's impossible to guarantee an environment conducive to concentration, irrespective of how much you really, really need to concentrate? Yes.
Does it make it more likely that any interruption to any other worker in the office will also interrupt you, or break your concentration? Yes.
Does it 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? Yes.
Does it mean that one inconsiderate person out of a whole office can damage much more than their own productivity? Yes.
(n.b. Bad managers are notoriously bad for underestimating the loss of productivity when they break your concentration for something trivial. I've had a manager complaining about my productivity who used to shout down the length of the room to ask my e-mail address, when I'd worked for him for two years, my address was in his Outlook address book and even when he had it written down in his desk drawer. And once you drop the eggs it can take half an hour or more to get back up to speed again. In a busy, noisy department with 50 people in it, you can easily go entire months without achieving flow state even once.)
Also, although of course there's a heft amount of deviation, national character might have something to do with it, too. The Swedish and Dutch people I've met tend to be very considerate and quiet, while the Americans (as a nation) to tend more to the loud, less considerate "get-things-done-even-if-I-have-to-shout-while-I-
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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.
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!!!
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.
Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication.
No they don't, but not everybody needs to communicate with face-to-face level of bandwidth continuously throughout the day. Also, there is
still this thing called a telephone, which provides more bandwidth than e-mail and IM, and is sometimes useful when telecommuting. It might
not be reasonable to run a company based 100% on telecommuting, but to suggest that it (telecommuting) is a dumb idea in general flies in the
face of a lot of experience that suggests otherwise. It just has be be applied properly, like any other tool.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
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.
Close. What I'm saying is "closed doors offer a more substantial layer of protection from assholes".
Walls and doors cut down on the unintentional noise of people around you, and a closed or locked door offers a strong social proscription against interruption. Hell, in the worst case you can just not answer the door and pretend you were out when they (briefly) knocked.
In open-plan offices some people end up being assholes without even intending it. Offices effectively raise the barrier to entry for assholedom.
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself
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
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.
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
Radios should be OUTLAWED at ALL office style workplaces unless an anonymous vote of ALL staff within earshot chose yes.
ARGH.
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!"
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?
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.
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.
It does - some European cultures (noticeably Mediterranean) do seem to respect personal space less highly than the UK/US does.
Some time ago, there was study done in the UK which showed that the personal space of a person was determined by the population density of the area that the person lived in. For someone in the countryside, the personal space is around 90 centimetres, while someone from London, the personal space is around 60 centimetres. This was made most obvious when attempting to cross a moderately busy shopping street or chatting at a party, and you found yourself wanting to take a step sideways or backwards.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
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.
Email and IM simply do not have the bandwidth of face-to-face communication.
No they don't, but not everybody needs to communicate with face-to-face level of bandwidth continuously throughout the day. Also, there is
still this thing called a telephone, which provides more bandwidth than e-mail and IM, and is sometimes useful when telecommuting. It might
not be reasonable to run a company based 100% on telecommuting, but to suggest that it (telecommuting) is a dumb idea in general flies in the
face of a lot of experience that suggests otherwise. It just has be be applied properly, like any other tool.
I used to work in a company that had remote offices that we would work with - using phone and email as the primary communication conduits. It sucked. It's much easier to work with people in your office than people you don't see face-to-face.
I'm sorry, but I have lots of practical experience that says that telecommuting is crap. We'd do that from time to time for a *break* from routine, but as a standard work practice, it's not at all very good.