Architect behind Googleplex now says it's 'dangerous' to work at posh offices
npr.org
npr.org
> "Cubicles are like human chicken farming. They have always been bad for anything other than kind of factory farming kind of approach to the office," he said.
Having worked both in a cubicle and an open office, I'd take the cubicle any day of the week.
Maybe a certain type of cramped cubicle is bad, but in the company I worked for we had large desks, neck and chest-height dividers, and teams faced opposite from one another, so it fostered collaboration, while maintaining a sense of privacy.
The open office OTOH had no sense of privacy, and you could hear conversations from several desks away. Wearing headphones to block out the noise was the only way to get some work done, but there was nothing you could do about visual distractions in your peripheral vision. It was awful.
> "Put people in tiny little footprint because it takes less money than an enclosed office and we can kind of keep an eye on them."
On the contrary, the open floor plan popularized by Google et al was always loved by managers for this reason, not the cubicle farm.
> Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it's easy to hang out and chat.
No, thanks. I'll keep working from home or remotely from wherever I want rather than in your open space office.
I wonder if he really does have any personal experience about working in a place like this at all.
People need order, they need to have something they can call their own. They'll keep coming back to place they were last time and will have arguments if someone has taken their spot. Teams will claim a place their own unofficially. Nobody is going to move around every day just because they can. People need predictability.
I'm inclined to think that Wilkinson himself has never been forced to work in a places he envisions.
This means we hot-desk. We do not get an assigned desk. We are likely to sit somewhere different every day you go to the office. We each get a personal locker to store items so we don't have to carry everything to/from the office each day. The desk each have at least one monitor, most have two, they are easily adjusted by height/left right and viewing angle. Each desk also has a keyboard and mouse and a USB docking station. Each desk is cleaned nightly. There are disinfecting wipes available if you feel the need to wipe down the keyboard or mouse when you arrive. Some of the desks are height adjustable. There are a few standing desks for floor as well.
Generally we are organised into semi-autonomous squads of 8-12 people though sometimes larger squads are formed. Each squad has a nominated set of desks they can claim for collaborative work. Anyone can come and sit in a squad's area if there is a free desk available. This allows for easy inter-team collaboration when required. Someone from another team can come and sit with us to work through how we will interface/integrate between our respective services.
We also have meeting rooms and other spaces available we can go work in when we need somewhere to deeply focus or have longer discussion that might impact others.
This works quite well. No one is very possessive of any particular desk or location. If you get in late sometimes you may not be able to sit with your team. Though you have the right to ask someone to move out of your teams designated area if you really do need to collaborate with your team mates.
One exception is for people that have strict ergonomic requirements. They will be assigned a dedicated desk and chair set up for their needs that don't get changed.
I don't ever feel possessive of a desk I might be using. I don't feel the need to leave things on my desk for the next day. There is a slight time cost to going to/from your locker and adjusting the monitors and chair each day to your liking - but that time is on the clock.
The biggest challenge with this arrangement is when we do increment planning. Every squad is trying to do increment planning at the same time so finding a meeting room or space becomes very challenging. Due to Covid, we have done a lot of remote working over the past couple of years and have become more adept at running meetings over Teams. So finding a physical meeting room has become less of an issue.
So to be clear… You don’t feel possessive over a desk because you have no domain to link physical comfort too. No place to put your family photos on. No place to look forward to sitting down at, knowing that the only constant of the work day will be where you’re physically located. No place to call your own.
You have no dominion.
You have no place to call your own.
You have no authority over the environment around you, that you’re going to sink thousands of hours in ever year.
Yeah, I’m sure we’re get old and look back on this fondly.
In that role I was a solo developer attached loosely to a team of engineers. I had a fixed set of collaborators ( though most of them in other countries and timezone) for over a decade. I had no need to adapt my working location based on who I was collaborating with over time.
For my current employer, I will soon move to my fourth team and project in about 2.5 years. I regularly have a different set of collaborators to work with for short terms sub-projects. This means I often change where I locate at the office to better collaborate for the work at hand.
So yeah, for me it is about collaboration. Re-locating for the short term doesn't come with negotiating anyone else's strong territorial claim over a desk.
Sure it probably costs the company less to hot desk. My current employer, however, does truly embrace remote working and the majority of employees take advantage of that to not commute to the office every work day. Not much point maintaining a dedicated desk that you only occupy 2-3 days per week.
Different employers may hot-desk but get remote working wrong or keep people in fixed projects for very long times. If my employer required clock in at my desk ready to work and clock off didn't include returning things to my locker it wouldn't be so great. I can appreciate hot-desking may not be so great for those cases.
OTOH, if I'm coding then sitting in cafe will distract me with all the things happening in mu peripheral vision.
This guy is definitely a hipster, like most architects. You can tell that by looking at his scarf. These guys are deciding what future offices should look like just the same way fashion industry grands decide what the next season's collection should look like: focused almost solely on aspect and quite disconnected from actual user's needs. What I like about his ideas is the use of outdoor spaces and that he fully understood the worker's need to balance between work and life.
1. WFH! (FTW!)
2. Private office (I had one that was super-productive)
3. Cubicle or flexible spread-out area
4. Cafes, lobbies, cafeterias, etc.
5. Dirty park benches, in the cold, with keyboard sticky with tree sap somehow
6. Rigid open plan desks/tables/pods, which usually have people too close or too loud, for my preferences
7. Shared small office
With a flexible spread-out area, individual people can kind of adjust to how and where they want to work at that time (how close to other people, how close to noise/commotion, sunlight&glare, temperature, fresh air, etc.), etc.
"Man, I hate going to the office; if you don't show up early you can't get a spot."
"Let's just build large parks instead of apartments, and people can sleep wherever they want!"
...
If there is not an abundance of these "cozy nooks" far in excess of the number of employees, then they will be real estate over which people will fight.
Have you ever taken the Amtrak in America? Watched people rush to the cafe car to claim a table, camp out there with their laptops? This is a recipe for that.
I later worked at a Google satellite office in Cambridge, and while I left for other reasons, it did not have the all-encompassing life capture that the MS HQ did, not because of any company policy (since Google has a similar HQ) but because I was not physically trapped in a company town. I imagine I would have had a better time at MS had I worked in their Cambridge satellite instead.
Is there anything in the tech industry that they haven’t made worse?
reference: https://youtu.be/2ozEZxOsanY
Well, of course they are. Those who weren’t “just fine” already left. But it’s not about how fine they feel, it’s about how healthy it is.
To me, that paragraph looks weirdly like backpedaling.
On the opposite of spectrum lies what I personally call "every 'luxurious' NYC condo": the cacophony of styles, overloaded with art, heavy, without personal touches, mostly designed to show the wealth of the owners, but not designed by themselves. Those interiors are ridiculously tacky, and each of them will become outdated within next 5-10 years.
Just like de Saint-Exupery said himself: 'Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.'