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Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

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Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#41

Post by [deleted] »

sgsz101 wrote: post #37
rayiner wrote: post #24

Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…

...your point still stands, but with regards to Apple - many engineers actually have offices, rather than cubicles or open-plan. You can be pretty sure they'll be staying at the new campus, or there would be an outright revolt.

[deleted]

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#42

Post by itafroma »

rayiner wrote: post #24

Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…

> I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money, spend gobs of money on huge office campuses, then inflict open plan or cubicles on said engineers.

It's largely due to the conventional wisdom created in the 90s by Microsoft's Jim McCarthy known as "21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time".[1] Rule 6 (or 8 in his later talks[2]) is "beware of a guy in a room":

> Specialist developers who lock themselves away in a room, going dark for long stretches, are anathema to shipping great software on time. Without regard to their individual brilliance, before investing a developer with a significant assignment, it is essential that they understand and agree with the type of development program you intend to run. They must be capable of performing on a team, making their work visible in modest increments and subjecting it to scrutiny as it matures. Some people find this intolerable, and though there is a role for people of this disposition in the software world, it is not as part of a team devoted to shipping great software on time.

[1]: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/david_gristwood/archive/2004/06/24/1...

[2]: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oY6BCHqEbyc

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#43

Post by abalone »

rayiner wrote: post #24

Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…

Do you actually know if the new Apple building is open plan? I believe they currently have offices.

Pixar, the previous Jobs-designed office building, gives employees a lot of control over their personal spaces. Designers actually get their own mini house. (Kind of like an Ikea showroom.) They have lounge-like common spaces you can work/meet in too.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#44

Post by jodrellblank »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #30

Remember that what we're asking folks is to self-report on what they like or not. This may sound either pedantic or highly-controversial, but what people like and what might be best for the work they are doing are two different things. We do a great disservice to both to confuse the two. I would like to have a great big office. Better still, I'd like a cabana at the beach, a laptop, and a hammock. What's best for my…

We could take an anecdote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"(+) - speculation on why some scientists do great work and go on to win Nobel prizes, and others don't, even if they are also clever and hard working. It includes this paragraph:

Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.

It might be similar with open plan offices - less pleasant and more difficult to concentrate in today and tomorrow, but resulting in better, more competitive, more coherent software in twelve months.

(+) http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#45

Post by goggles99 »

>The bottom line: workers in enclosed offices were by far the happiest, reporting the least amount of frustration on all 15 of the factors surveyed. Workers in cubicles with high partitions were the most miserable, reporting the lowest rates of satisfaction in 13 out of those 15 factors.

Really? you don't think that he people with personal offices are not in better, higher paying, less menial jobs to begin with? I think that would be obvious and clearly a better reason that they are happier. If there are some distractions and lack of total privacy, but you love what you are doing, do you really think that you are going to be miserable?

Please stop with the correlation posts where there is more obvious potential conclusions. So annoying.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#46

Post by abalone »

itafroma wrote: post #42
rayiner wrote: post #24

Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…

> I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money, spend gobs of money on huge office campuses, then inflict open plan or cubicles on said engineers. It's largely due to the conventional wisdom created in the 90s by Microsoft's Jim McCarthy known as "21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time".[1] Rule 6 (or 8 in his later talks[2]) is "beware of a guy in a room": > Specialist developer…

I remember that one. It doesn't literally mean "don't give engineers rooms." It means there should be regular public (to the team) milestones that force engineers to show their work.

The room thing just comes from the visual of a rockstar coder coming into work and locking himself in his office and saying don't worry, everything's fine, trust me I'll have it done in time. Beware of that.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#47

Post by objclxt »

throwaway1460 wrote: post #38
rayiner wrote: post #24

Unsurprisingly, private offices score the best, by a huge margin. Right now, I've got a huge office to myself (separate from a two-person office next to me by an open passageway). It's super quiet because there are bookshelves full of books to absorb any noise, as well as thick 1970-era carpeting. It's the most productive place I've ever worked. I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money,[1]…

> Apple's new spaceship building (in the middle of a faceless suburb) > will cost $5 billion and have 2.8 million square feet of space … that no employee below VP level can afford to live near. It's OK, though; Apple doesn't have to pay them for the tenth of their lives they waste commuting. And above the entrance these words appear: “My name is Jobs, CEO of CEOs: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”

I don't think it's the affordability that's the problem - or rather, I know plenty of people at Google / Facebook / Apple / any other company in the valley who make the choice to commute not because of any cost saving, but because they don't want to live somewhere with very little going on socially and pretty much constant need for a car.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#48

Post by itafroma »

abalone wrote: post #46
itafroma wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have no idea why tech companies would pay engineers gobs of money, spend gobs of money on huge office campuses, then inflict open plan or cubicles on said engineers. It's largely due to the conventional wisdom created in the 90s by Microsoft's Jim McCarthy known as "21 Rules of Thumb for Shipping Great Software on Time".[1] Rule 6 (or 8 in his later talks[2]) is "beware of a guy in a room": > Specialist developer…

I remember that one. It doesn't literally mean "don't give engineers rooms." It means there should be regular public (to the team) milestones that force engineers to show their work. The room thing just comes from the visual of a rockstar coder coming into work and locking himself in his office and saying don't worry, everything's fine, trust me I'll have it done in time. Beware of that.

> It means there should be regular public (to the team) milestones that force engineers to show their work.

While that is part of the underlying point, "beware of a guy in a room" is very much "don't stick a guy in a room by himself and let him do his thing" (he emphasizes it more in the video I linked to). The larger, more figurative point about having regular, public milestones is rule 4, "don't go dark", of which he claims rule 6 is a special case.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#49

Post by DanielBMarkham »

jodrellblank wrote: post #44
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #30

Remember that what we're asking folks is to self-report on what they like or not. This may sound either pedantic or highly-controversial, but what people like and what might be best for the work they are doing are two different things. We do a great disservice to both to confuse the two. I would like to have a great big office. Better still, I'd like a cabana at the beach, a laptop, and a hammock. What's best for my…

We could take an anecdote from Richard Hamming's talk "You and Your Research"(+) - speculation on why some scientists do great work and go on to win Nobel prizes, and others don't, even if they are also clever and hard working. It includes this paragraph: Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have th…

I coach teams to perform better, so this topic is a bit of a sore point for me. I think Hamnming was on to something.

I've worked in about every possible configuration, and I've seen teams work in about every possible configuration. In addition, I've coded in all of these environments.

After working from a nice, quiet home office for many years, I'm trying out coworking. When I'm not with clients I drive an hour to an office to work with random people.

Why would I do this? Don't I value my time? Sure thing. But I find that the hassle and pain of being interrupted actually helps me to a reset to think about whether what I'm doing or not is important. Without that reset, I'll just grab on to some problem and keep tweaking it. I'm like that -- and I suspect many others are like that too. We desire uninterrupted time because we desire a deep problem to dive down in and forget about everything else. And sure thing, there are problems like that.

But 99% of the time problems are not like that, and we hurt ourselves more long-term than we help.

All of this is just conjecture, mind you. But this is an area where I see the natural inclinations of technology people diverge for what looks better for the effort as a whole. It's non-intuitive and uncomfortable. But that's the way life is, right? Dang humans.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#50

Post by mathattack »

I would like to see something that talks about the efficiency of both approaches - ideally from a controlled test.

The reality is offices are much more enjoyable then cubes. Many years ago I was part of a consulting project that cube-farmed a large organization previously used to offices. Everyone but the senior-most execs were pushed out of offices. It was done under the guise of improved teamwork. I saw lot of theoretical support for this, but never did see empirical evidence. Maybe it exists - I'd like to see it.

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