Meta rediscovers the cubicle
calnewport.com
calnewport.com
Cubicles were great, especially if you got one near a window. You had the outside view; desks were angular in large cubicles so you had ample space for multiple monitors; the barriers provided just enough visual and noise isolation, while you could always prop up and chat with your neighbors; the barriers also served as tackboards, and people decorated their spaces in unique ways. Et cetera.
I still don't want to go back to working in an office, even if I had a personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford, but they should bring back the cubicle. It will probably be renamed and marketed as something else, but kudos to Meta for taking the lead.
edit: some manga kissa are designed for people to watch porn, obviously those don't have windows.
The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.
Smaller companies follow these trends because they think it will make them successful. It's like reading the latest article on "Ten morning routines of billionaires", following that, and believing that it will make you rich. It's the other way around.
I've been thinking that reverse engineering skills are much more useful than puzzle solving.
I had such a question at Google. I guessed what was the problem they were trying to solve as it was a classic leetcode question (linking nodes in a tree while traversing it). So while the format is a bit different than typical leetcode solving, I'd say it's still the same type of skills and preparation involved (at least in my case).
Also, the bit about puzzles, leetcode is somewhat of a myth, mostly perpetuated by salty candidates who couldn't pass tech interview loops, for whatever reason. Puzzles were explicitly banned at Meta and Google, when I worked there, and if a question is found on leetcode or a similar site (as they eventually do), they'd get banned too. The idea isn't to make candidates jump through a series of pointless hoops, but to concretely evaluate their coding and reasoning abilities. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a lot more BS proof that just having a chat or take home assignments. Also, needless to say, more senior candidates are expected to successfully grapple with harder problems.
Why?
At any rate, there's a chance the accusation was wrong, and if you make wrong accusations and the other person disputes it, it could lead to unnecessary legal proceedings. (libel, etc.)
PS: not saying the company policy by the GP is necessarily correct, just saying what lawyers and risk adverse bureaucrats might be thinking when they drafted it.
I have never worked in one so I am only imagining here, but I think I would prefer either of the two other options to cubicles.
I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.
It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function.
15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.
I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.
For a lot of companies at this point, having dedicated individual work spaces for most employees doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have specific equipment needs and are going to come in most days.
Closed doors are like therapist room - you get to the meaning of topics fast. They allow conflict resolution and discussion.
Open concept are like libraries, everyone is silently trying to to disturb each other working. Full of visual and audible distractions.
WFH remote meeting have the lowest form of communication bandwidth. It's hard to arbitrage interactions with no visual cues, invites multi-tasking during meetings, and encourages disengagement.
So, like, if you Zoom'ed?
Which, unless the meeting is about hanky panky or massage or something, should be just as good for the purposes of technical discussion...
Can your manager just disrupt you and micromanage you in person at all times at home?
Does it even justify their role in the company when noone can see his subordinates all together in the same space?
The principle behind cubicles is to reduce the amount of open space immediately around you, with sound-absorbing material so both the sound you emit, and the sound others emit, travel more upwards than side-ways as the cubicle walls force the sound up, essentially making the environment more silent, if you are situated in a cubicle. If you were to be hanging from the roof above all cubicles, you'd get to hear basically all the sounds coming from the cubicles.
It's a pretty basic solution, something better would be actual private offices where everyone is enclosed fully, then you can make the environment really quiet. But that's also way more expensive and requires more space.
I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse.
Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices.
At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.
A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.
I think they promote collaboration, but the price oh the price of that can so often be way higher than the value.
A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently.
When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
Also working from home is not as productive.
I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more.
It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
What can be much more manageable is to have comfortable cubicles for everyone (not the cramped desks with dividers, which is what probably gave cubicles the bad rep), and also have many small and large meeting rooms where people can congregate and collaborate in. This has the benefit of defaulting to semi-private workspaces which can easily scale, and moves the noisy collaborative areas to closed rooms, so that they don't bother anyone else. The smaller rooms could even serve as rotating private offices, if needed, that anyone can book for a limited period of time.
But the open floor office only has practical drawbacks, and definitely has to go. It only got popular because it's really the cheapest option for companies; just place some desks, chairs and monitors in a huge space, and sell it as "collaborative". But if they really want to entice people to come back to the office, they need to invest in better working conditions.
Some companies like Microsoft routinely provided them
Go visit any good law firm or CPA firm.
I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
Do these companies hire thousands of employees a year? I doubt that.
Private offices for everyone just doesn't scale at the same growth rate of tech companies. Where would they realistically fit thousands of new employees per year if everyone had their own office?
> I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
And you expect the buildings to just magically expand for new employees? I'd rather not take a pay cut, and "settle" for comfortable cubicles. Or better yet, work remotely, and get a raise from the money the company is saving on not having to pay for my office space.
One approach is for an organization to use open offices while they are building out proper offices.
They have significant churn.
That said, when I worked at one, I didn’t have an office. I didn’t even have a dedicated desk.
Wasn't a problem for Microsoft and other companies. But then again, those valued their employees...
I recommend that all those who might compete with me adopt these situations and give up on the difficulties of managing office space.
It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.
Not saying it's just offices that saw the... Sun-set... but there are things companies that survive do -- and private offices ain't common.
What on Earth is wrong with traditional offices with normal doors? Cubicles always make me think of cattle, they are like open space but you have limited view so someone can stalk you without you noticing that or surprise you etc. Thank goodness we can easily work remotely these days.
I can explain this in three words:
* money * money * money
Open-plan is much cheaper.
I agree. It's like how cells with bars on three sides and a window on the wall side, are so much better than isolation cells closed all over.
When the cube farms came along it was billed as a cost cutting measure but in reality it about making office layouts more compatible with cycles of mass reorganization. In this structure, management needed the ability to shift bodies at will while still maintaining some semblance of structure. Cubes provided that flexibility while still giving the appearance of stability and status.
You would have slightly larger pens for more “important” members of staff. Higher walls were also part of the status game… But in reality, as the walls came down, the people became even more expendable.
As the nature of work trended further towards transient employment, the cube walls got shorter and shorter till they just did away with them entirely. Well, entirely for regular people. Management always had offices, even if it was just commandeering a conference room as an office.
I’m not surprised to see a new trend developing with tiny silos. I assume that they’ll add chutes below each workstation so employees can be conveniently flushed when a boost to the stock price is needed.
Also the need for meeting rooms is lower with offices.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
There would still be the long commute to deal with. Not worth it
Which, if I'm to believe "Not Just Bikes" YouTube channel¹ is common in the US due to broken city planning.
But really not in most of Europe. My cycle to an office is 20 minutes. And in the Netherlands that is considered a long cycling journey. Europe has it's car infested traffic jams too, don't get me wrong. But many of those stuck in those jams could choose to work close to home, or live close to offices. Houses and offices most often are intermixed in European (and often asian) cities.
I do that 10 minute bike ride.. to the train station.. then I take the train 1h in each direction three times a week and consider myself lucky for not having to do it every day. The trains are packed.
But a claim that some majority of people can just bike 10 or 20 minutes to the office was just a bit wild considering my experience living here in NL and taking the train so often. Having said that, it is true that I can bike anywhere in the city I live in within half an hour, and I don't own a car because I can get anywhere by bike or train. The fact that I can do these things allows me to work in another city, instead of being bound to live in a certain restricted location, without even owning a car.
But many people do drive, don't be confused. There are times when it would be really convenient to use a car, and I would be using a car sharing service if it weren't for the fact that my license is not valid here and I need to pass tests which is a long process.
Editing to clarify - by tech being centred around expensive cities I don’t mean that tech offices are in urban areas rather than suburban. I mean that the large tech companies generally are in cities and towns that are more expensive than many other cities and towns.
For example, there are cheap and pleasant places big tech workers have moved to during WFH times instead of staying in the Silicon Valley-SF region of CA. But some of these towns don’t have a big office building in sight.
It's by no means universal. A lot of tech is out in suburban office parks, some of which admittedly has its own traffic problems, e.g. Silicon Valley and suburban Washington DC.
Only that you can choose to work and live in Amsterdam, ~15 minutes cycling from work. Or Eindhoven, Nijmegen, even Enschede or Groningen. Yet many people choose to live 30 minutes car-commute (or train) from their work. E.g. because it's easier to find a place there (which suits their wishes). Reverse: I'm certain that if you live in, say, Nijmegen, you can find a job there, but many people choose to work in Arnhem, Eindhoven or Amsterdam instead travelling up and down every day.
I know. I've been there done that. In all directions.
In the US, in most places, it is illegal to have work and home close to each other. You are forced to choose between commuting and WFH. In Europe no such laws exist. If anything, the opposite is cemented in laws. Meaning it's often possible to work close from where you live and vice versa.
I often work from home. But can choose to get on my bike and be in an office with colleagues, beer, pingpong and noise when I need it.
My point was that this choice is important. And that good city planning allows for such choices
What do you mean by illegal?
I've lived in several cities in the US and always had the legal ability to live within a 10 minute walk of my office, but not the financial ability. It's about double the price of living roughly an hour away in morning traffic.
Ever since going remote I'm able to choose where I want to live based on the other quality-of-life factors in my neighborhood, and not have to worry about trading commute time for rent.
Zagreb, for example, has narrow bits of sidewalks painted to be "bike lanes" with street lamps and signs usually planted in the middle, lanes just stopping, etc.
Making a city more bike friendly for real (and not just checking off items on a politician todo list) is a long and painful process.
It'll happen, but right now it's easier to get stuck in traffic in a car than have to wade through the same traffic on a bike.
Yet this is what happens in the US.
You can probably grab a tram, metro or bus to work. OFC leftovers from "city planning" under Tito/socialism means there's more distinction between "living" and "commercial" areas than most of Western Europe. But its quite certainly nowhere near as bad as the suburbanism in the US. Which was my point.
I guess you found another client quickly?
Main point was that European cities, in general (Dublin being somewhat of an exception by my experience) don't have suburban city planning. You typically live and work in the same city. Like e.g. Downtown New York - which, I'm told is somewhat of an exception, being an "old" US city. Travel by bus, metro, bike or tram.
”In terms of distance undertaken, one fifth of Europeans (23.3%) travel, on average, further than 40 km or even more each day”
24% of Americans have a 15 min or less commute versus Europe which is 29%.
Not that different. Sure, the mode of transportation is different, but not time spent commuting.
Maybe you lived in a bubble in Europe
Also roads still exist in Europe, you know.
Average one way EU commute was 25 minutes in 2019, for Netherlands, it was 27 minutes. [0]
Average one way US commute was 27.6 minutes in 2019. [1]
Sure, there’s a 10% difference, but there are EU states over 30 minutes. The US isn’t that much of an outlier.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/4187653/10321620/com...
[1] https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/commuting/guidance/...
I was shocked at how people here, pretty much outright accused me of lying, because I mentioned that the typical commute time, from the area I live (and there are many, many more areas, even farther out) to the city, is measured in hours.
They keep whipping out that census site, and telling me that my eyes and experience are wrong, because Teh Internets Tubes says it's only 27 minutes (to travel 35 miles).
I have to assume that the vast majority of folks here, have never had to deal with a typical (and it is typical) US suburban commute.
If folks want to get a real (as opposed to complete fiction) idea of what a US commute is like, most cites have traffic cams on their arteries.
Not that I ever go into my closer office any longer but that's about a 30 minute drive to an industrial park which is a very typical sort of commute. (I had about the same with another job years ago.)
However, almost everyone that lives around me, works in the city. Many of them take the train. I know several that drive, though. They usually have highly skewed hours (they will drive in at 5AM, and come back at 3, but even then, there's a lot of traffic).
When I lived in the DC suburbs, even the suburban local commutes were crazy. I had a six-mile commute, one town South, and it often took 45 minutes. It would have been faster to bike.
Now, if the choice is office (any) vs remote, I see why offices are so bad.
An open office with 6 people? Likely fine.
Now put 2 of those people on calls all day.
Remove any sound isolation, dividers, drop-ceiling (it looks cool to have the warehouse look with exposed air ducting!), and give them hardwood floors. Is it still pleasant?
Now make it 60 people instead, and make the heavy callers 20 of those.
--
Offices are contextual, I have had offices that are 8 people properly spaced out with a couple of sound baffles in the room and they were described as "open".
I've also been thrown into a room where I was shoulder-to-shoulder with my nearest neighbours in a room that supposedly sat 45 people, with no drop ceiling, no dividers and hardwood floors... which was also described as "open".
Footsteps approaching definitely distract me, 100%, every time, especially if they're distinct footsteps like heels or boots with a solid sole on hard wood.
I don't suffer any known cognitive conditions, perhaps ADHD (but I am not diagnosed).
If it is ADHD then that affects a DIAGNOSED 13% of humanity[0], and far more people are undiagnosed, though we get better every year at diagnosing it. So if I have ADHD and this is the cause then I am far from alone here.
However, in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background, I have less anxiety from being disturbed, watched or expected to listen in. So, take from that what you will I guess.
In my situation: I suffer some amount of anxiety from being disturbed and because of that I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
I don't flip out. I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate or do tasks that were urgent or took less than 15 minutes.
Here:
> My gut reaction to your comment* is outrage honestly.
> I cannot focus, I am always "on edge" waiting for something to happen in any direction of someone trying to get my attention.
> I suffer silently, and I only discuss it in one-on-ones or on forums such as this. Which makes people think that this is not a problem- but it is a problem, because I must focus in order to get my work done.
> So instead of doing it in the office, I go home and do my actual work in my "free" time, and in the office I used to mostly procrastinate
> in Coffee Shop settings I can tune out the background
It is a little weird that much of your most explicit discussion of flipping out comes from the same comment where you insist that you don't flip out.
That you don't vocalize your histrionics doesn't mean you're not having them. Throwing an internal fit and refusing to work is flipping out. Feeling outraged that someone might point out that open offices are objectively not bad is flipping out. By the time you've admitted that you have no problem working in a Starbucks, you've also admitted that whatever your problem with your office is, it's not related to the working conditions.
That you can’t empathise is much more telling of your own sociopathy and not an indictment of my existence.
I can be very productive, but I think its obvious to everyone with a brain that if you throw someone (anyone) into an environment where they are constantly on edge then they will not be able to deliver on focused work.
We're not always there at the same time, the three of us. If the weather is inclement or someone needs to care for their child we just don't show. We've got a texting group to let each other know, but not because anyone needs to know but because we chose to keep each other informed.
It all feels very grown up and official, and it's very nice because it's ours. None of us has to ask a pointy haired boss for permission to buy a wine cooler or a new lamp, or whatever, we just do it. Sometimes we'll argue things but it's always chill. Like this week we've been going back and forth about where to place our new HomePod speakers. We just try it till we find a spot.
It helps that we're three dudes who've been friends for a good 20 years at this point. We all like working remotely, but none of us like being cooped up at home all the time.
The cost of the office space is comparable to any other office space, except for the furniture which is decidedly more high end. We're independent contractors so we've each sprung for whatever furniture we wanted to have.
I feel like this is the ultimate compromise, it works super well for us. Not saying it works for everyone, but I could totally see a world in where employees pick whatever works for them, and employers foot the bill for reasonable expenses like the space, but maybe not for the fancy couch, I dunno.
Anyway, my point with sharing this story is that as much as I love our office, I couldn't have my own room. I can't function in a completely private space. I know others can, and I respect that, but I just can't. But open plan doesn't work for me either, there's a point where it becomes too much. I feel like an office with 2-4 people who are respectful with one another is just right for me.
And maybe that's it, maybe not everyone fits the same mold, so maybe the future of a good working space is choose your own adventure? Not that it's without its challenges, it took us some 6 months or so to find the right spot!
Noise canceling headphones are a must. I can hear everything from all around and it's overwhelming at times.
In my prior role I shared a huge office with 2 other people, and later had a large office to myself with a big U shaped desk, small circle table and chairs, a whiteboard, and coworkers right across the hall. It was a great work environment.
it was awesome for years until they decided to triple our rent when our 5 year lease ended. this was in 2016. we transitioned successfully to wfh. i have absolutely no sympathy for the hurting CRE business these days, they dug their own grave through an insane amount of greed brought on by super favorable tax treatments.
i still take naps on my couch though, so that hasn't changed.
I have worked with a couple of high-end design firms that were like this (usually a staff of less than five).
It doesn't scale well, though. I've watched some of these same firms, get too big for their space, and have to go more ... Office Space.
In Portugal from universities, startups and big companies, the computer people always get the open space, with offices reserved for upper management.
Even if you get an office, it is a shared office in a kind of miniture open space.
At very least for the last 40 years.
So, he doesn't really have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work at a large software company like Meta, the same way a SWE at Meta doesn't have any personal experience to comment on what works or doesn't work for a Professor at Georgetown University. Also, to be more specific, he's a Professor of Comp.Sci., not Professor of Psychology or Professor of Workplace Layout Optimization..
I read 2-3 of his books and concluded that he doesn't know what he's talking about. His books are 10 page blog posts tortured to be 300 page books.
The only takeaway I got was that Deep Work is a bullshit term for having focus.
1. I had already been blocking out "no meeting" time of 2-4 hours a day to get work done, but during this time I would listen to music and sometimes check slack. The book got me to use focus mode on my Mac and phone, set a "heads down until [time x]" away message on Slack and work without music or any other distractions ON ONE HARD PROBLEM. My effectiveness skyrocketed and I was happier at work (the only downside was that I wanted to work more).
2. When dealing with a hard problem, taking a break, taking a walk and thinking through the problem using the framework he mentioned in the book, have used this method to solve multiple hard problems.
3. Forced me systematize how I end my work day and what time I end it (unless there's an emergency)
I am much more saner, calmer, and get more done because I adopted Deep Work philosophy in my life.
I would highly advise reading the book and judging for yourselves (for the people reading the above comment).
Because if this is a theoretical problem, with clear definitions, parameters, boundary conditions and objectives, which has already been solved, so that non-experts [such as CN] can just look up the solution, then I'd also like to see this!
Your second paragraph is a total strawman.
Look to the straw man in your own eye.
If you cannot mathematically define all the variables and boundary conditions, it is not a theoretical problem.
Branches of science concerned human behaviour dont have theoretical problems.
But I agree, many authors just pick a topic and run with it. Not having experience doesn't stop them.
Which ties into my last remark- even the largest building at Meta isn’t an 8 acre field of open offices. There are tons of conference rooms, cafes, 1-2 person rooms, open spaces and other rooms to break up the space and provide opportunities for collaboration. It’s not as nice as a private office but better then some other companies I’ve seen post-Covid, where they’ve minimized their footprint to the extent that you can’t find an open desk or conference room when another team is having an on-site.
I’m not sure whether this is an intentional misrepresentation of facts or just a complete lack of fact-checking but I was pretty disappointed in this article.
yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.
people who sneer at reinvention can be too smug sometimes. we owe all progress to the unreasonable men and women who are too arrogant to do anything but poke and prod at life on their own terms.
Or you know, alternatively you could understand where the wisdom comes from instead of being clueless about it and think that one can make things better with a snap of fingers.
I don't think gp is talking about continuous refinement of ideas, which I get the sense is more what you meant. Spending time and energy reinventing cubicles again and again every 10 or so years seems best to avoid, in my opinion.
Next up: "Should we bother wiping our asses? Hot startup DirtyButt claims to save you 30-45 seconds per day. 'If you think about it, going #2 is one of the grossest experiences people go through in their daily lives,' says Teyron Flanders, founder of DirtyButt. 'I bet I've spent more than several hours of my life putting my hands dangerously close to human waste. That's something I'd rather never do.' Now an A-list unicorn valued at more than seven hundred billion dollars, the startup offers no-wipe bootcamps, a double-thick underwear prototype, and organic options. 'What we're really giving people is freedom. Remember the run on toilet paper from pandemic times? We're going to relegate that dark chapter to the ash heap of history.'"
Stupid idea after stupid idea.
This is sounding more realistic than jucero!
Or not. Your call.
You mean the men and women who insisted on open office for everyone but themselves ?
More reconfigurable softer spaces is exciting to me. Cubicles are hard & fixed infrastructure. Having more dynamic use of space invigorates me, helps me escape a feeling of being trapped by routine.
The focus on sound absorbing material seems also extremely compelling. Sound dampening can have enormous impact & I can imagine some of these partitions doing a lot (ideally with the help of some more room treatment) to make the space pleasant.
Rather, every single study has asserted that it decreases communication.
Yet, it's clung to.
Which is why I think it's purely a cost saving (or flexibility?) move.
Office managers must love not having to care about how teams are sized? Only thing I can think of.
In an open space, you can have sound walls, pods that people can use for calls, add meeting rooms, isolate noisy places like the kitchen, etc.
Cubicles with high walls was my favorite configuration. I have a really hard time focusing when people are constantly moving through my field of view, and it makes me uncomfortable when I am constantly in someone else’s field of view. High cubicle walls solve that. They also provide a little sound absorption. But you still get the benefit of being in an office and meeting with people face to face.
Open office was the worst for me, by far. It was so noisy, with so many distractions. I would never work in an open office again. The “pit” and the low-wall cubicle were similar, though not quite as bad.
I have worked remote for many years, and it’s the best for work-life balance (emphasis on the life part), but have found that collaboration and team morale suffer pretty significantly.
Edit: one other note about cubicles is that if the ceiling is high and the windows are large, you can still get a large amount of natural light even if you aren’t next to a window. The cubicle setup felt way less claustrophobic to me than the open office.
Can someone explain to me why is top management of these companies so low quality?
They make the big bucks and take years to discover concepts obvious to high-schoolers?
Then there are the 5% of upper managers that know what they're doing. But to the rest it would be an insult if you asked them to 1-to-1 with a random employee and actually understand the real problems in the company.
Anyone feeling this is wrong is free to test it. Ask an upper manager in a large tech company to speak with your coworker who's frustrated at work. Maybe about RTO - there are many of those around now. Good luck!
We have factual evidence about Meta overpaying 50% for talent due to poor work environment and of thousands of engineers complaining about this issue for a decade.
Poor management is conclusion, not a premise.
You need to bring counter-evidence for why this straightforward issue was not addressed 10 years ago.
Maybe cost was never an issue, but collaboration was. Maybe the culture that this policy generated was more important than the extra dollars they had to spend.
Or maybe, just maybe, your "factual evidence" is actually just a casual quip Joel Spolsky threw out there that one time for quick laughs. I would really love to see your sources that state "if Facebook had single offices instead of an open plan office, there would be just as much innovation, collaboration and successful products, yet the total cost of payroll would be 30% less." I'm pretty sure that's impossible to prove, regardless whether you'll label it with "factual evidence" or not.
Story time.
I wanted to check the IT vending machine a few days ago which involved visiting different floor. My jaw dropped (on the floor) at how different life could be.
I heard laughter, cheers, happiness even, and talk lots of talk. At that point I realised I was not on a dev floor but accounting, HR and so on.
Maybe it was the time, maybe it was just a single time event, but it made an impression on me. The open office environment clearly was working for them.
I made haste to the elevator, the doors closed and the world was silent again. I returned to my little corner where I was at peace. Me, my laptop, and some books.
Basically, because of macroeconomic factors. It's been so easy to borrow money for so many years that there's been no pressure for management of tech companies to work very hard or economize much or be very smart.
Now it is hotdesking in an open plan. We sure have made progress.
Best not think too much about what we will call the ones for the test team.
I would definitely prefer to work in an open-office environment vs cubicles. I also don't want an office, because I don't even want to go to work regularly anymore.
The best option for me would be: (i) go to work 2-3 times a week to get out of the house (ii) hot desk open office layout with (iii) lots of meeting rooms.
That's fine as long as you understand that for certain types of people and/or certain types of work - open plan can be a disaster. This discussion has been bouncing back and forth for decades.
Personally speaking my coding productivity drops something like 80% in an open plan office.
I guess they are round now, maybe that was the one missing ingredient that means we will be on cubicles forever and everyone will finally understand why they are better?
TBH, I find all open spaces really distracting so I don't think it was necessarily worse than my smaller open space office. At least it felt neutral, as there were so many people you didn't know that were passing by. Kind of like a library or a uni campus, as opposed to a class room. Which I might have liked more, if it wasn't for the more noisy environment.
I'm sure that when COVID hit and we all got to work from home, Facebook got a weird peak of productivity.
I get that some people prefer to be alone, but these days why not work remotely?
Leave your walls, collaborate in the collaboration areas, care less about how loud you're being when you get animated about something you're enjoying working on or your new ideas; because you're not killing the focus of the people in their focus areas.
Good work requires variation, collaboration and focus. So, for me how it sounds when you say this is: "people who are given the capability to focus really bum me out"
As for the requirements of "good work", those vary with the nature of the job. One of the reasons I've always worked in an open plan office, aside from them being much more common in the UK, is that I work in finance, often on or close to trading floors. That's not an environment that benefits from cubicles and I believe they're rare in this industry in the US too.
But mainly, it's what I'm used to and what I like. I never said you had to feel the same.
It's the first letter that's capitalised, BTW. "Emacs", not "eMacs".
Cube farms FTW. You can get over-the-wall collaboration on occasion without the visual distraction and the cubicle walls help dampen noise/conversation from further away.
It's not as good as a closed office for heads down work, but it's a 100x improvement over open offices where you see every movement, hear every sound, and perpetually feel like you're on display.
Open offices are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than cubicles. Cubicles are there to save money because you can pack more people into them than offices.
If you like open offices, you'll love when they switch you to hoteling so you have no permanent desk, but still need to come into the office!
One does not imply the other. I also prefer open office over cubicle. But not having a permanent desk could be done in a cubicle farm as well. It's an orthogonal dimension of corporate hell.
I need my mise en place.
Ah thank you for the concise distillation of my feeling.
It's the same axis when you look at it as "how do I fit X developers a space that costs Y dollars, and I'm trying to minimize Y."
No idea why nobody does this. Japan has been offering these kind of sealed workspaces in manga cafes and "private video watching booths" for decades.
There is no silver bullet.
The most important want is that of the executive who can open the door of his office and gaze out at the sea of reportees and down-levels assigned under him in the corporate org chart. After all, he's the one who decides on office layout and WFH policies.
If you need to do actual work, an office is the best. If you're doing BAU 9-6 clockwatching type job with no real deliverables, the social aspects of an open plan office make this torture a little more tolerable for most people.
Meta packed lots of people into small spaces where everyone has crappy for audio phones in an industrial look with concrete floors. It was worse than a trading floor imho
I don't have strong opinion on the lack of privacy. I've been body doubling full-time in work for the last few years and I never felt need for more privacy. I can always go somewhere else if I need to take a break. However, ymmv.
Man, in the 80s we thought of cubicles as the cheapass option. I never did have an office.
I hope that this is the first step on the road to allowing more people to have a private office. This seems to be a temporary fix to work within the constraints of buildings that were designed to be open offices.
My solution to this was to listen to "brown noise" on my over-ear headphones while I was in there trying to work. Then I remembered my ancient Gear Iconx Samsung bluetooth earbuds had built-in storage. I loaded a 20 loop of brown noise in there so I don't have to tether it to my phone all the time and I started using that.
It really does make a difference in terms of focusing and getting things done. Even random mumblings from my office mates, hallways conversations etc. don't distract me.
Sometimes treating the symptoms is the right move, but oftentimes it is not. Local maxima.
I'm working on it.
Discussion about it from a few months back, from a NYT article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32998960
I'm not worried.
Cant remember where I read it, but I have no problem believing it.
The cubicle itself has utility, nobody denied that
When the startups became huge and successful, they didn’t go back to cubicles because the open office was what they used when they were having business success.
Then all the other companies started copying them because they think it will lead them to be more innovative like the startups.
Serious question, how would we measure that, and is there any empirical evidence for the idea startups "need" more? I imagine a lot of it is an immediate workaround for a system nobody wants to bother building, like a mailing list or design-specs.
I have the same issue with Slack, that I do with open-plan offices in the US (They actually work well, in Japan, but their culture also makes it work).
I remember visiting the Facebook (Instagram) development shop in NYC, and walking through that huge central room, with the rows and rows of desks (standing and sitting).
This was at 7PM or so, and the place was a zoo. Lots of people there. Quite noisy. The thought that sprang to mind, as I saw it, was "Planet Fitness."
The food was good, though. Facebook caters well.
Can you expand on open-plan offices in Japan ?
edit: I just read that article https://manabink.com/en/2020/12/26/why-do-japanese-like-open...
Their Shinagawa headquarters was in a huge building, with many floors. It was considered one of the better work environments.
Each floor was basically a very large room, on either side of the central elevator column, which would bisect the building.
The room usually extended from the elevators, to the windows, and there was a lot of light. You didn't have offices against the glass, like you do, in the US.
The ceilings were high, and used acoustic tiles, with fluorescent lighting panels.
There would be dozens of desks, in each room, arranged in parallel rows, with a "row," consisting of fairly small, uniform, sitting desks, back to back (so each engineer was facing towards another one, on the other side).
These rows would extend from the windows, towards the central column. There would be an aisle, at each end, perpendicular to the rows. Each row would have a fairly wide aisle, separating it from the next row.
At the window end of each row, would be a slightly larger desk, set against the last two desks of the row, so the occupant faced the row. That would be the manager's desk.
The higher-ups, would have desks behind the managers. They would be closest to the windows.
Separators were generally file cabinets. Partitions were used for informal meeting areas. The central column would have enclosed meeting rooms, and they had two floors, completely dedicated to meeting rooms (the Japanese love meetings).
What's wild, is how quiet these offices are. Hundreds of people, packed together, and very little noise. I think the interior design has a lot of acoustic absorbency, as well.
[UPDATED] That article is pretty much spot-on.
> my shoes were too noisy
The Japanese generally have "office shoes," which can be a pair of slipper-like shoes, usually slip-on. They exchange their regular shoes, for these.
My company's offices were carpeted, so you didn't get clacking of shoes.
It really does work for me. We have desks that could support about 25 people, but very rarely there are more than 8 present, so it doesn't feel crowded. I also like most of my coworkers, and that's a key part of it. I wouldn't want it to change to a cubicles workspace if I have the opportunity to just work from home when I'm not feeling like interacting with people.
After that I was still in an open office but it had no hot desking and people didn't take calls at their desk. That was a lot better. After the first one it seemed great.
Then COVID happened and I started working from home and it was amazing. I questioned whether I'd even done any work in the past few years. It was so much better.
Then I got depressed because living in the same four walls day in day out gets to you.
Now my workplace has also reintroduced cubicles and I work mostly from home still but regularly work in the office in a cubicle. This is the bet set up I've had so far. I get enough of a dose of "office" but I'm still able to actually work in the office. I get to do the majority of my "head down" work in peace in a familiar environment with no commute. It's pretty good.
I think it is official now: Office presence is a policy solely for management. Everything else is a transparent lie.
I’ll take an open office space any day of the week, and you know I actually worked in the Meta offices for a little bit. I like to see my coworkers if I have to go into an office.
In the rare occasion I needed privacy, I could go find a couch or move to a rooftop garden. If I had to join a meeting in another office then I could use one of these quiet booths (which you know, is why they exist).
I also enjoy my home office, but even there I like to move around my house during work. Limiting 8+ hours of my day to a tiny enclosed space is depressing in my mind.
Any more, I think ideal space comes down to this: What works for your team? And, I think there's a lot that points to big cubicle farm offices being a relic of a bygone, non-work-from-home era.
This, why are knowledge-based companies so bad at designing work for the brain’s best capabilities?
The dynamic was that close to zero central bank interest made it cheap to finance office real estate. That led to increased rents. That led to open office plans.
I predict that the open office floor space trend will go in reverse towards private office space.
I'm skeptical. At least in the tech sector, what I'm seeing is office space being downsized and rethought as primarily meeting and collaboration space.
I went with my dad back in 2000 to a “take your kid to work day” and got to hang out with him in his cubicle.
Honestly it was pretty cool. He had a CRT monitor and a calendar, and his desk space was minimal and clean. Others had decorated their spaces in unique ways. It was private and we could chat without disturbing others. It felt cozy? Again I was like 9 so keep that in mind.
After decades and decades there are still no conclusive results about how different types of workplaces influence productivity and mental health, but even if there were manager would not even look at them and instead make decisions based on perceived productivity and "common sense".
We are already incapable of replicating studies with fewer variables.
A survey of company success (measured in profits, or market cap) vs office layout, trying to see if there is correlation would be more useful. Even accounting for the fact that there is a lot of cargo culting, and unhappy employees.
No idea about the latter, though I'm much happier having removed a 3 hour round-trip train commute (will it turn up on time? will it even turn up? will it be delayed en route?), but as far as productivity is concerned, my previous employer, like others went fully remote during COVID, and then stayed that way, based on internal evidence.
For all development teams across the company (green field, existing, maintenance, whatever), the number of PRs almost doubled for each team, and slightly less tangible metrics such as down-time, bug reports, decreased by non-trivial amounts, and quite a few product milestones were hit early, by quite some margin. That on its own was statistically significant, as pre-COVID, I don't think they hit any milestone dates.
Of course, you can argue that all of those are due to less meetings, less interruptions, easier availability of people to diagnose problems, and perhaps even better planning is required for being remote, but ultimately, all of those have improved the productivity of my former employer.
I think that arrangement is a good balance between being able to put your headphones on and focus on your work with a bit of privacy, but also being able to turn your chair around and brainstorm things or quickly chat to an architect, etc.
Is this a cultural problem rather than a physical one? Or do people need absolute silence to work effectively?
For me (and I suspect, for many), all the movement tends to be way more distracting than the noise - you're constantly seeing things from the corner of your eye. On top of that, the feeling of someone peering over your shoulder makes it hard to focus (even when there's nobody actually doing it)
But even for engineers, it was common for them to join meetings with people from other offices from their desk. There was no other place for anyone to go - there weren’t nearly enough conference rooms to support all the people making calls simultaneously.
The building appears to be 860m long on the map: https://www.google.com/maps/dir//''/@37.4805293,-122.1563983...
It's like a work environment designed by Terry Gilliam: https://www.evanerichards.com/wp-content/gallery/brazil/braz...
You can mitigate some of the noise with a good pair of noise cancelling headphones. There are far more fundamental reasons for them paying that premium.
Also, sometimes I like having music/noise on but sometimes not.
I think I'm on my third pair of Sennheiser HD280s in 25 years, because the plastic does wear out.
I got some airpods pro for their supposedly great ANC and was really disappointed in how limited it actually was.
For me, headphones make an open office setup worse, not better. It's not mostly about the noise for me as much as it's about motion. When I wear headphones, I am more "on alert" because I can't tell if people are behind me or not.