
How workers ended up in cubes – and how they could break free - e15ctr0n
http://www.economist.com/news/international/21637359-how-workers-ended-up-cubesand-how-they-could-break-free-inside-box
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hristov
The Economist are being rather disingenuous here. They explain how the cubicle
is a bad thing, and then they go on to try to convince us that the demise of
the cubicle and it's replacement by more open plan type offices is a good
thing. But the open type office is even worse for many of the same reasons why
the cubicle was bad.

~~~
nerfhammer
They just say that cubicles are bad:

> it has become increasingly clear that far from offering a clever compromise
> between the economy of open-plan and the privacy of individual offices,
> cubicles are in many ways worse than either.

But also say that open office plans are bad:

> And last year Swedish researchers studying the link between office layouts
> and illness found that people who worked in open-plan offices had the
> highest risk of becoming ill. The reason, they concluded, was more than just
> the easier spread of infections. Stress caused by lack of privacy and
> workers’ inability to control their surroundings played a part, too.

> Open-plan offices are noisier and more interruption-prone. Too much noise
> causes high blood pressure, sleep problems and difficulty in concentrating.
> And cubicles’ flimsy walls do little to dampen sound. In studies where sound
> levels were raised from 39 to 51 decibels—roughly equivalent to moving from
> an average living room to a road with light traffic—participants were more
> tired and less motivated.

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meepmorp
Am I the only person who doesn't mind working in a cube? The small space
doesn't really bother me and I have walls for blocking out visual
distractions. Beats open plan offices, for me at least.

~~~
ghaff
Define "mind." I've had offices. I've had traditional high-wall cubes. I've
had open-ish plans. I work at home a fair bit. I'm OK with working just about
anywhere. If I had my druthers, I'd take an office given the choice--though
I've had a dark interior office and cubes with a decent view and that's a
factor too. I suppose my revealed preference is that I prefer quiet given that
I don't usually put music on when I'm working at home.

But I don't really have a lot of trouble with distraction and will just put on
headphones if I really need to focus.

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koops
They buried the lede, and put half of it in parenthesis:

"In 1994 the average North American office worker had 90 square feet of space.
By 2010 this was 75 square feet. (Executive management gained floor space over
the same period, according to the International Facility Management
Association.)"

~~~
conistonwater
There are not that many executive managers, and they get to decide what to do
with floor space. It's like setting your own salary, which they also get to
do.

Could this have something to do with economics as well? There are high returns
to working in big concentrated cities. So if rents in city centres are
expensive, but people still want to work specifically there, they will
compromise instead by paying for less office space. How much more expensive
would it be to give everyone an average of 90sqft (8.36m^2) of space?

Not that any of this is good, but to pin this undesirable outcome on a
specific cause, I think one would need more precise evidence.

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vaadu
Related article in today's washington post.

Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/g...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/30/google-
got-it-wrong-the-open-office-trend-is-destroying-the-workplace/?tid=sm_fb)

------
Mz
I once read an article about a college that put in new sidewalks and
landscaping, only to find the students and staff leaving dirt paths through
their expensive lawns. They wisely ripped out all the sidewalks and put in
lawn everywhere. They later went back and paved the pathways that were created
by people going where they needed to go by the shortest route possible.

It seems to me no one has tried something similar with offices. Maybe someone
should.

~~~
seanp2k2
I'm a bit confused trying to apply your analogy to offices; I doubt you meant
that we should install grass on the floor and nothing else :) one possible
interpretation is to start with just a big empty space, and let people buy or
bring in whatever furniture they want, but that seems pretty problematic
w.r.t. logistics, people picking things which will last / are affordable ("I
work best in this CLS AMG with leather massage seats parked in the corner").

Could you please explain your idea in more detail?

~~~
marcosdumay
The book "Peopleware" has a similar idea, in that you offer all kinds of
enviroments, and people get to pick what fits their personality and team
needs.

Altought starting from raw material and space, allocating some of them for
people, some for tasks, and letting teams roam freely also looks promissing.
It will require a lot of redesigning, but that may even be a good thing.

------
ndespres
Just this morning, my firm moved its office and now my team is in adjacent
cubes instead of an open bullpen, and I was quite surprised at my own
excitement to finally have a cube again. Semi-privacy! A noise barrier!

But there are really more choices, and I feel the article continues to push
this false dichotomy: <i>"What workers need from their offices has long been
clear. A flexible workspace that encourages movement, combined with mobile
technology, could finally liberate them from the cubicle farm"</i>

Is that really what we need? Is there really anyone who prefers either of
these choices over a private office, with ample meeting rooms and conference
tables when there need to be group discussions?

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fsloth
Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st century' raised the claim that the returns on
capital are starting to outweight the increases in productivity. Is the
diminishing of office space actually a side-effect of this? If the penny in
investments gives better returns than the penny spent in worker productivity
then open plan pens - excuse me, offices, would actually make sense.

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moron4hire
>> About 30% of the staff have no permanent desk.

Lacking a permanent desk would leave me constantly wondering if my position
were also temporary. Even when I worked for a consulting firm who kept me on-
site with the client 100% of the time, I had a permanent desk back at HQ.

Ugh, I have been getting tired of my current project and had started thinking
of getting out of freelancing and back into wage employment just for a change
of pace. But the more I read, the more I stories I hear from friends and
family still in those environments, the more I realize things have only gotten
worse. 5 years ago, everyone _knew_ management was lying about the open-floor
plan being bad for productivity. Now it sounds like people actually believe
the lie and the open-floor plan is no longer reserved for the asshat-MBA-
consultoware companies.

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mrjatx
Partitioned off open workspaces please. NOT the wide open "everyone is equal"
cafeteria setup where every single noise/movement distracts each person.

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bane
Open offices are about cost saving in facility costs...which is generally a
stupid way to do it. Your employees (and the work they produce) is far more
important and expensive to your business.

Most places are organized into small teams, small team rooms work the best.
Have a few isolation rooms for people who need intense focus and conference
rooms for cross-team communication.

It's a formula that works and works well. The team can set the room rules and
culture, people can still get stuff done and cross-communication is perfectly
available.

Nobody needs to be trying to get work done in the equivalent of the floor of a
busy warehouse.

~~~
walshemj
yep the facilities manager get a bonus for saving a few grand at the cost of
pissing of your key player.

Unfortunately some of the tail functions of a business have to much power and
only pursue their own empire building and the hell with the effect on the
other stake holders and indirectly the share price.

------
georgemcbay
Cubes? Such luxury! I'm hard pressed to find software dev jobs that aren't
fully open office these days.

~~~
guycook
Yep. I rewatched Office Space recently and found myself envious of their
working conditions (!). That's what 5 years of open plan does to you

~~~
millstone
I just replayed Space Quest 3. In the game, Roger Wilco visits ScumSoft, a
dystopian software company. Check out the ScumSoft office layouts:

[http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/sq3-15.png](http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/spacequest/sq3-15.png)

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp3Emd3jJVo/T7wcdqFTM_I/AAAAAAAAAu...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Bp3Emd3jJVo/T7wcdqFTM_I/AAAAAAAAAuQ/p3gbPZD3xKE/s640/space+quest+3+scumsoft+02.jpg)

The layout is nice, notwithstanding the whipping.

~~~
jordanb
Honestly I'd take the whipping to have full-height cubes like that.

My office is half-height cubes, but apparently there's a redesign in the works
that's going to give us "friendly clusters with low partitions" (kill me now).

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moron4hire
I'm pretty sure I've slightly damaged my hearing from long-term headphone use
during the years I was stuck in noisy, distracting work environments. Now that
I work for myself from home, I mostly don't listen to music at all.

------
ahi
After 3 years of freelancing from home I just started a cubicle job. First
addition was headphones. Next will be a sunlamp. How do people work like this?

~~~
EliRivers
_How do people work like this?_

With massively impaired productivity.

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tswartz
An interesting development of open floor plans is the addition of white noise
to reduce distraction. Has anyone seen this used at their office?

>>sound is controlled with dividing walls and “pink noise”—white noise focused
on the frequencies of human speech, which can reduce the distance at which a
conversation is audible from 50 feet to 12-16 feet. The result, the firm says,
is greater focus, accuracy and short-term memory.

~~~
Pyrodogg
I worked for about 6 months before one day there was an emergency announcement
over the PA. Before the voice actually came on, the white noise generator cut
out and it was _weird_. I had always assumed it was a noisy air duct.

What you trade off is absolute sound level for attenuating speech like noises
faster than they would naturally. So going from nothing to white noise is
going to sound and feel noisier. But you will find that you can't hear people
talking across the room as well as you could when it was quieter.

I consider it a net positive. But then again I also wear headphones frequently
to listen to music for focus (and to drown out everything).

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caf
_It looks rather like a fancy hotel: open-plan but with desks set in friendly
clusters and separated by low, clear partitions._

The company I work for uses a design like this now, albeit the partitions are
solid (but still low), and with the 120 degree angles between them apparently
favoured by Robert Propst originally. It's known as the "snowflake" design
because of the way the clusters with their 120-degree angles look from above.

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pierotofy
That's not breaking free, it's simply getting a "bigger cage".

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ourmandave
My first programming job in a cube was right between accounting and customer
service.

After 6 months they expanded accounting and so moved me to the other side of
the building, but next to sales.

After a couple days I started missing customer service.

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MattMS
I worked in a cubicle (with a window) for a few years. When given the choice
of an office, I stuck to my desk and pulled down the wall between myself and
the other developer so we can chat easier.

I now have a standing/sitting desk that I switch between, depending on the
work I'm doing. Standing also makes it easier to spot others coming over to
ask questions.

This may be due to the environment. Fewer people in the office (<10) and a
manager that doesn't care when he sees me on Hacker News.

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lawnchair_larry
Settle for nothing less than individual offices. If I don't get an office, I
work from home.

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stretchwithme
A tad biased. Light and fresh air can't penetrate cubes but germs and noise
get in with no problem.

