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Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

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Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#61

Post by porsupah »

tieTYT wrote: post #53
toddmorey wrote: post #17

This fascinates me. I find open-plan offices really hard to work in. Meanwhile—perhaps surprisingly—my favorite places to work are coffee houses or college libraries. I'm surrounded by strangers, but their anonymous presence starves off the feelings of loneliness that I can get working from home. I think the difference between a public place and an office is that it's really unlikely for any of those strangers outsid…

> I think the difference between a public place and an office is that it's really unlikely for any of those strangers outside of an office to interrupt your work. Yes, I think this is the difference. The noise around you becomes background/white noise. But honestly, I don't know how you can work in these areas. Doesn't it prevent you from making phone and conference calls? Assuming yes, maybe that's another reason yo…

I'd agree. Back when I was working on campus (now, mercifully, purely remotely), I'd sometimes head off to the main coffee joint instead of the completely open-plan office. Whilst it was hardly any quieter, it somehow worked much better for me, probably just as you describe.

For my part, I avoid phones anyway - which seems more commonplace than I'd imagine, amongst other technically-minded sorts.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#62

Post by ArbitraryLimits »

humanrebar wrote: post #40
001sky wrote: post #29

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. A firm is a hierarchy, and this is a form of social control.

As a counterpoint, there are companies that have open floor plans or cubes for everyone all the way up to the C*Os.

Yeah, but the CEO always ends up commandeering the nicest conference room as his de facto office, or else he's always on the road.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#63

Post by SamuelMulder »

tieTYT wrote: post #57
beat wrote: post #28

Anyone who has read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language"[1] can easily extrapolate his ideas to cubicles. Alexander pointed out that if you drop any human in an open field with a tree, within a few minutes they'll be sitting with their back to the tree, facing the sun. We are animals. We get physically and psychologically uncomfortable when our vision is restricted and our backs are exposed. It means we are v…

Why would you want to face the sun? Wouldn't that blind you? I'd think it'd be better to sit with your back to the tree facing away from the sun.

Probably depends on whether you are in Minnesota, trying to get warmth, or in Phoenix trying to stay in the shade...

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#64

Post by VladRussian2 »

beat wrote: post #28

Anyone who has read Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language"[1] can easily extrapolate his ideas to cubicles. Alexander pointed out that if you drop any human in an open field with a tree, within a few minutes they'll be sitting with their back to the tree, facing the sun. We are animals. We get physically and psychologically uncomfortable when our vision is restricted and our backs are exposed. It means we are v…

>We are animals. ... As such, cubicles are pretty much a nightmare.

and open space plan even more so if you don't get your desk placed so that your back is to the wall and you're facing "the space". In low density office this results in people's desks placed along the walls with emptiness in the center, ie. waste of space compare to cubicles, in high density - people in the middle are miserable (speaking from the fact, we have 2 very similar buildings on the campus - both open space, one is low density and another is heavily populated).

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#65

Post by rayiner »

itafroma wrote: post #58
slm_HN wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel strongly that 99% of the people who are responsible for making this decision have no idea who "Microsoft's Jim McCarthy" is, other than maybe Jenny McCarthy's husband.

I agree that it is now conventional wisdom, passed down from manager to manager to entrepreneur to entrepreneur without regard from whence it came. But Jim McCarthy is somewhat of a legend, particularly in Microsoft circles, having led the team that created Visual C++ and helping to form the basis for the Microsoft Solutions Framework. Jenny McCarthy doesn't have a husband, and Jim McCarthy's spouse is Michele McCart…

Isn't Jenny McCarthy married to Jim Carey.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#66

Post by owenmarshall »

goggles99 wrote: post #45

> 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 t…

While I share your (healthy) skepticism about scientific reporting, a good researcher would've attempted to structure their experiment to control for this very effect.

I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter mistaking correlation for causation.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#67

Post by jebblue »

toddmorey wrote: post #17

This fascinates me. I find open-plan offices really hard to work in. Meanwhile—perhaps surprisingly—my favorite places to work are coffee houses or college libraries. I'm surrounded by strangers, but their anonymous presence starves off the feelings of loneliness that I can get working from home. I think the difference between a public place and an office is that it's really unlikely for any of those strangers outsid…

>> Meanwhile—perhaps surprisingly—my favorite places to work are coffee houses or college libraries.

Totally agree, on days when I WFH, I drive my wife a bit crazy in that I like the TV on, yet get a bit perturbed if she interrupts with something not too important. :) The TV eases the pain of silence and does not require me to answer it. At work, there are at least a dozen direct potential possibilities for someone to interrupt me at any moment.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#68

Post by w0rd-driven »

com2kid wrote: post #34

Open spaces are interesting. Some problems get solved really quickly because of them. The number of times the person who knows the solution overhears others having a problem is astounding. But then there are problems that just cannot be solved due to the level of noise. Especially some collaborative problems, where a problem requires two people to focus on it really carefully. Distractions just from hearing others ta…

This is never a positive thing to me. It helps when everyone has the same level of problems but it really sucks when you never need help from others. This is a personal problem with the open office I deal with now. I had a coworker that would make disruptions interesting and light hearted. Now its just me and a junior and his disruptions are everything from eating to talking to himself to having conversations with others at volume level 11. The last is not really his fault when someone else leads that charge but a fidgety person is not a great fit for an open floor office shared among 4 people. A much bigger open plan where that can be dissipated by the distance between others. Right now it just feels like someone is constantly in your ear eating potato chips loudly. I purposefully eat potato chips with my mouth closed and always think about my "audible footprint" but when someone else doesn't it's just so fucking annoying.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#69

Post by pekk »

owenmarshall wrote: post #66
goggles99 wrote: post #45

> 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 t…

While I share your (healthy) skepticism about scientific reporting, a good researcher would've attempted to structure their experiment to control for this very effect. I don't have ScienceDirect access so I can't check the research or methodology, but from reading the abstract & the tables I can see it appears the reporter's conclusion came directly from the experiment, so it's far less likely that this is a reporter…

A good researcher would have the cash to hire hundreds of people and intentionally randomly assign them to different work environments, I guess.

Then we would be picking on how they measured productivity and whether the results held up over long periods.

Re: Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst

#70

Post by abalone »

itafroma wrote: post #48
abalone wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not to be pedantic but he's making a point about "preeminent developer types" not office space. Specifically don't bet the schedule on one rockstar developer's word alone.

It really has little to do with the physical office space configuration. This problem could happen in open plans too, assuming a sufficiently complex project that can't be assessed by merely glancing over their shoulder.

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