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Large Tech Companies Moving Beyond the Cubicle
statemachine writes in with a story from Silicon Valley about how Intel and Cisco, among other companies, are experimenting with cubeless, open, and unassigned seating. "Beginning this month, [Intel] will set up three experimental work sites. Open areas, comfortable armchairs, extra conference rooms and tables where people can plop down with laptops will replace the ubiquitous cubes that have been standard issue for decades. Each morning, Intel employees will log onto the corporate network using wireless connections. Their phone numbers will follow them. White boards that employees use to sketch out business plans and project strategies will be outfitted with electronics so drawings and plans can be transferred to laptops and e-mailed to colleagues. 'People feel much more comfortable coming up to me. It's more of a friendly atmosphere,' Cisco senior manager Ted Baumuller said. 'I hope I never have to go back to cubes.'"
I was moved from a single office, with a door, to a double up office, to a cube farm in a call center with cube walls one foot higher than the desk. This was intolerable and clearly designed to get people to 'volunteer' to work from home. We still have a so called visitor center but unless you have ITN installed on your VoIP on your PC you don't have a portable phone number.
I don't mean to sound insulting or presumptuous, and I don't claim to know nearly enough about you or your work to make this claim with much accuracy, but perhaps you have adult ADD? I know someone who has it, and described nearly exactly what you said. They can't block out sound/visual input well and basically any sensory input not related to the task at hand, and once they get side tracked they have a hard time being able to regain focus.
Or it could just be simple boredom/frustration/fatigue with doing a task for long stretches of time.
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
What's stopping you from bringing your own noise canceling headphones?
I have adult ADD, and work in a cube. It's a lose-lose scenario. I used to listen to music on headphones all of the time to keep from being distracted, and was told that it was giving everyone the impression that I didn't want to talk to them.
Of course, it's still better than some ridiculous open seating plan where I couldn't customize anything. I have three monitors at my desk that I scavenged when everyone else was getting rid of their CRTs. Being able to have so much simultaneously-visible working space is great for my concentration. I use it kind of like the display in Minority Report - moving various windows around depending on what makes sense for any given moment. I had to use a single screened laptop for 2-3 weeks when my PC died and it cut my productivity in half.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
They did this when I worked at Andersen. It made sense there because hopefully you were out at client sites more than in the office. With a job where I go to the same place every day people will start to stake out their areas, not unlike seating in college.
;)
For fun I used to move all around the room and sit in other peoples seats. They'd freak out at first but I'd actually talk about it, make friends (or enemies) and then move somewhere else. If the people weren't complete assholes (maybe 10% were pricks), the entire class would lighten up and become friends. I only had one class where that didn't happen. Ah, the think they're better looking and smarter than they are whores, how could I ever forget them
It will become a turf war if these people aren't actually out of the office more than they are in it. One more worry people have to take on (assuming they're anal retentive, which seems to be almost all the engineers, programmers, etc. that I know).
In the photo (in TFA) there's bad posture and trailing cables. How this got past health and safety I'll never know.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I wonder how much of this is due to the Hawthorne Effect?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Just been on the other side of this decision: planning our own office layout for our new office. We're currently in the big open plan space (no cubes) setup and the noise is deafening at times. You can just see people's heads swivel as soon as an interesting argument/discussion breaks out on the other side of the room. Of course, as many have said they then need ages to get back in the zone.
Cubes seemed too horrible to us and private offices seemed a bit lonely and isolated.
What we went for in the end was a set of 3-6 person rooms, some of which can be combined if required. The idea was to merge the benefits of each approach - you get a dedicated "project room" where ad-hoc conversations, whiteboad design discussions, etc. are encouraged. The team gets to personalise their space, as does each of the workers (for at least as long as the project lasts).
On the other hand if a team is in deadline mode, they can shut the door and agree between each other to be quiet. Similarly if a team wants to play music they don't disturb others, etc.
We'll see how it works out... Anyone else tried this sort of approach?
I work in a "War Room" now and its the worst idea ever conceived. Programming requires being able to quietly concentrate on your work, but the war room atmosphere is noisy and makes for a lousy enviromnent for the developer. Its all part of this FrAgile process... the next job I take will not be in such an environment.
I'm a programmer stashed away in an exposed set of 8 cubicals, in what amounts to a closet of a closet, at the farthest end of our building, where I'm bathed in a gazillion watts of fluorescent lighting.
I have to walk a hundred paces just to see the outside. If there was no seating assignment, I'd at least have a chance to get my fair share of natural light -- especially in the winter months when the only daylight I see is on the drive to work.
When it comes to personal effects, programmers (at leas the ones I work with) don't really seem to exhibit anything they're too attached to. And with personal laptops, you can keep some mementos stashed there.
I'd have to give up my plants, and my facetious posters, but it would be well worth it to work in the presence of natural light at least some of the day, instead of these cold buzzing demon tubes that seem to have just the right color temperature to make my eyes feel strained and my head ache. And if you gave me ample facilities and the freedom to use them whenever, I'd probably find being in the office a bit more tolerable.
It may not do anything for my productivity, but it might keep me around longer.
Of course, giving me a private office in the front of the building would probably achieve the best of both worlds, from my perspective.
Move all sig!
And I'm sure there's tons of others. If I, as an employer, were to institute this system, I'd ensure that the employees had the flexibility to organize the space as they wanted. If I, as an employee, were to be part of this system, I'd design a tightly knit squad of nerf-enabled roombas to guard my personal space, and lead assaults on other employees during lunch hour.
It will be interesting to see how removing any sense of personal ownership in the office space works out for the companies that try this.
It's not really a new idea. Here's a still from Orson Welles' "The Trial" (yes, from the Kafka novel), and that was made in the 1960's. The only difference now is that there's *nothing* kept on the desk - in the old days, there was at least a typewriter. Over time, other objects appeared; in and out boxes, pencil holders, etc. And that's when the concept of "assigned desks" and the cubicle took over, out of a necessity for both better working conditions and more productive workers.
This is a regression backwards; there's nothing new about it, and it's not what workers want, that's for sure. Management loves it in theory because they can keep an eye on many employees at once. They know who is there, they know who is working and not just staring at the ceiling or throwing darts at their cube walls.
But employees hate it, and I know this from experience. My previous job didn't quite go so far as having empty desks where employees could sit anywhere, but we did have a completely open office without walls. What you invariably end up with is as many people crammed into a room as the employer can fit, because there are no boundaries telling anybody "this is enough space for one person". At my office, this was easy to do because the whole office was just a series of long metal tables pushed together, so when we hired somebody new, everybody just scrunched down a little more. And because nobody has any claim to any personal space, or any "ownership" of it, they end up throwing garbage everywhere and not ever cleaning it up. So it's cramped, crowded, smelly, and there's no privacy. It's like what you'd imagine working in an office in the Soviet Union was probably like. Or some sort of sweatshop.
Cisco probably hasn't gotten to that point yet, but I guarantee their employees already hate it. And eventually, it'll become intolerable and everybody will be clamoring for the days of cubes again.
This is just another example of somebody thinking they've stumbled onto a great idea, not thinking through the unintended consequences, and not realizing that countless other people have tried the same thing many times before, without success.
No - I think the main point here is for very technical jobs, the employees are required to load up a large amount of information into their mind to solve large, complex problems. Anytime a person comes into their space to ask them about something unrelated this causes a context switch in the employee. They have to unload some or all of the information for the task they are currently working on to contemplate the topic that person who interrupted them wants to talk about. Once the interruptor has left, then the employee has to figure out "where they were at" which is essentially re-loading all the information needed to perform the task they were working into their mind.
Having a cubicle or an office at least establishes the notion of a boundary. In an open area, there are no boundaries and that typically makes other employees feel as though they can interrupt you for any reason at any time. The employee then becomes less productive due to the increased context switching.
Personally, I think for highly technical jobs that do not lend themselves well to multitasking, an office or telecommuting is best. You can lock your door, put your phone on DnD if you're working on a deadline sensitive task that you can't afford to be interrupted from.
We'll make great pets
As a dweller of cube land (and one of those people with no personal effects in my cube), I'd argue that the only reason people become defensive of 'their spot' (be it a cube or a chair in college) is because it is defined by a physical object or location. You remove the physical delimiter of 'my space' versus 'your space' ... and it's hard to fight over space. The same story has been done in a million TV shows. You have two characters that have to share a room, and they fight constantly. One of them has the brilliant idea to put a line down the middle, so each has one half. The moral of the show is that the line always makes it worse. Suddenly everyone is hypervigilant of the line. Remove the line, and no one notices if my stuff is three inches over it.
In college we had our regular table in the library, but if it was taken when we showed up, we had no problem sitting at another identical table nearby. I think people sit in the same seat in class out of habit, not because they fancy it 'their seat.'
I'm sure after a while people will fall into a routine in this open office environment, but I think the danger lies more in distraction than turf wars. You get a ton of people in an open room working together, and they are going to talk. I guess it depends on what kind of work they do, but I know as a lowly programmer, I can't think straight with people around me talking all day. At least for my job, I wish I had an office with a door AND a big common area. The office doesn't even have to be mine (or very big)... just something I can reserve for the day and shut the door to get some work done. The common area is absolutely necessary for team work. Ever try to work with people in cubes? I always feel like I'm invading their space and want to run away.
Self-referential Sigs are cool on /. these days...
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