Research: Cubicles Are the Absolute Worst
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[1] Office space is expensive, but not that expensive relative to an engineer's salary. The going rate for class A space in Manhattan is about $70/square foot per year. That puts a 10x10 office (assuming 85% usable space) at about $8,000 per year + build-out + maintenance.
[2] 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. One World Trade Center (in downtown Manhattan) will cost $3.9 billion and have over 3 million square feet of class A office space. A lower-profile project, the New York Times building in Midtown West, was constructed for $850 million and has 1.5 million square feet.
Apparently Google spent almost $2 billion on a squat 18-story structure in Manhattan with an over-abundance of depressing window-less interior spaces... I'm going to assume it was the difficulty of getting 2.9 million square feet in one place rather than just bad taste.
EDIT: I'm not saying Apple's offices are open plan. I have no idea what Apple's setup is. I'm pointing out that companies are certainly willing to spend a lot of money on these big suburban office parks, multiples of what it would cost to just buy a couple of skyscrapers in SF. Thus, cost does not seem to be the motivating factor (except maybe in a penny-wise pound-foolish sort of way).
A firm is a hierarchy, and this is a form of social control.
> 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
And above the entrance these words appear: “My name is Jobs, CEO of CEOs: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
I also know people who work for those same companies who have long commutes for affordability reasons, but they seem to be the exceptions rather than the rule. Even in their case, it's usually for reasons other than there's just no way they can afford to live in the South Bay. More often, it's because they are determined to have a really big house with a really big yard and are unwilling to concede on that (such a thing is quite a luxury in the South Bay). Even then, they're accepting the commute for because they want to, not because they have to. It really sucks that housing is that ridiculous in the Bay Area, but it's not like any of these huge companies are going to pick up and leave and build their giant new campus out in the middle of the desert or something.
> not like any of these huge companies are going to pick up and leave and
> build their giant new campus out in the middle of the desert or something.
Typically a programmer's daily work product can be moved half way around the world in a fraction of a second, for a fraction of a cent.
Perhaps there should be an addition to Latency numbers every programmer should know:
Programmer drives to work .... 3,000,000,000,000 nsSan Jose, Santa Clara, Campbell, and even parts of Cupertino and Sunnyvale are far more affordable than SF. This is especially so for couples and families.
(Suburbia is a far cry from SF in terms of culture, obviously, but that's a different topic)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
As long as corporate programmers think of themselves as socially below doctors, lawyers, professors (who tend to get paid less!), accountants, etc, then management can continue to treat them poorly ("Everyone should be working late into the evening this month, but don't worry, free pizza!" ...I doubt those sort of tricks would work well in other professions.)
It's because cubicles can be depreciated as furniture, over 10 (or 7, I've never been clear on the difference) years, whereas internal walls and doors get depreciated as real estate over a 27.5 year schedule. The CFO has to do something.
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.318767....
We are animals. We get physically and psychologically uncomfortable when our vision is restricted and our backs are exposed. It means we are vulnerable to predators. As such, cubicles are pretty much a nightmare.
[1] Christopher Alexander wrote about architecture, but his terminology was adopted by the design patterns movement in computer science, so it's familiar to most programmers. It's one of two building architecture books I recommend to programmers - the other is Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn".
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).
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. In an open office, every conversation and set of footsteps feels like a potential disruption.
I love open cube "bullpens" for a team of 4-5 people working on a shared goal, but a completely open office where anyone can disturb you has given me issues in the past.
* Exaggerated a little, I'd probably drive myself nuts in an office alone.
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 you can become more productive.
For my part, I avoid phones anyway - which seems more commonplace than I'd imagine, amongst other technically-minded sorts.
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.
I have to say I wasn't a fan. There was a lot of background noise, and it was very difficult to have a private conversation. I constantly felt like someone might look over my shoulder (a problem if dealing with sensitive documents), or interrupt work I'd struggled to get focussed into. It was also hard to have private conversations about sensitive topics without having to search for a space away from everyone's desk. Previously we'd just talk about stuff without moving.
My biggest frustration, though, was the fact it was very hard to be anything other than corporately bland in our attitudes. When we were split into floors and rooms, it was much easier to laugh and joke, and I often saw people bring something in to announce someone's birthday and make a fuss of them.
After going open-plan, it seemed the only way to celebrate anything was to interrupt the entire office, which put a large dampener on it.
There's also the issue that if you tend to be introverted, open-plan offices can be exhausting.
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 team or the project I'm on? Different things entirely.
What disturbs me is this idea we see repeated over and over again that if I like it, it must be good. No, that's not true at all. Going to medical school and having a brutal internship are not things you like, but they are things that take you somewhere you want to go. Life is full of things that are unpleasant yet work out for some greater good. We cannot blithely assume that we can follow our instincts on what feels good with every project we engage in. It doesn't work that way.
This may turn out to be one of those things. Or maybe we get our cake and eat it too: what feels good is what's best. But that determination has not been made, and this study doesn't advance the conversation along these lines at all.
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
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.
I wish more startups had cubicles.
Problem was mixing different types of work/communication (engineering and sales), and management who did not care about the impact.
If you were in an open plan coffee shop things would be different as you don't expect someone to tap you on the shoulder with some arbitrary "urgent" bug to fix or fix the printer because you're "the I.T. guy".
So you actually begin real work rather than only do tiny chunks of busy work.
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 talking can interrupt lines of thought and beyond a certain point limit mental ability.
I really hate it when I'm deep into coding up something and someone just starts throwing questions at me.
I much would rather prefer an IM if someone wants to bounce ideas. If needed, putting down something on my calendar for a quick meeting works too.
So now it takes less effort to interrupt another persons work-flow and potentially make them restart a long train of thought. http://ubuntuone.com/27zU9Q5Tlqkoohp6cO4sF2
Only if either A, your interruption costs them less time then it saves you, or B you believe your time is more valuable than theirs.
I think its a good idea to establish within a workplace, esp. an open seated workplace, a way of broadcasting the price of interrupting you. Sometimes this is informal with headphones as a sign, other times people make DND signs or lights, etc. Its just much easier when everyone has an office- you can shut your door.
Exactly. The problem is when the guy beside you is trying to focus. Your ideas bounce off the analyst, but they also bounce off your neighbor whether he likes it or not.
There are technologies that allow you to get immediate responses like instant messengers and email. If you absolutely want an audio or video conversation, a better place for that would be in an isolated area (like an enclosed room) where you won't disturb anyone else.
I've been in an open workspace that had three or four people to a desk and it was a nightmare. Now I work at an open workspace where everyone is spread out and it is much better. The closest person to me is ~2 meters away.
If you were at the islands, you were working and available to be called over. If you were in your private cubicle, you were to be left alone unless it was really important. From total openness to decent privacy in a few steps. That's as good a balance as I've seen.
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.
The research seems to only deal with employee preference and not much with performance.
I'm surprised there is still so much disagreement on what works best and even more surprised how popular open plans are. Open plans only work for the very few people who either never need to talk to anyone and/or are comfortable with do-not-disturb headphones on.
I think it comes down to the person, why not offer both choices?
By the way that graph near the end woke my inner 80s teenager: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1sLICo-Cxo
"They pretend to house us, we pretend to work" type thing vs being a bit more driven resulting in, on average, more grouchiness.
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.
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.
Then we would be picking on how they measured productivity and whether the results held up over long periods.
Wrong, you lack the same basic, problem solving logic that I am referring to.
A good researcher would have asked additional questions such as "On a scale of 1-10" - "how enjoyable is the actual work that you do here?", "how satisfied are you with the amount of money that you are making?", "where do you see yourself in five years". These aren't the best quesions that I could come up with, I am just giving examples off the top of my head.
It would be easy to see how unhappy these workers are with other things in their lives rather than if they were in a cubicle vs a private office.