Reaction to revisit of old ideas

[Chris Moore]

I have recently been reading a blog that is about 18 years old and I see so many points in it that are still applicable today. For example, this post from April of 2000:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/19/where-do-these-people-get-their-unoriginal-ideas/

The place I work has just remodeled one of the work-spaces to eliminate a few of the open cubicles so they can add twelve new offices around the perimeter of the space that have doors but leaving a sixteen open cubicles in the center of the room. I know from personal experience how hard it is to get back to what I was doing after an interruption.

Thoughts

 

[Elliot Dierksen]

I know from personal experience how hard it is to get back to what I was doing after an interruption.

I know exactly what you mean as well. The core problem (IMHO) is that you have decision makers who don't understand different personality types. Frequently it will be sales types that thrive on noise and commotion, so it must work for everybody if it works for them. I think the article you referenced put it more eloquently than I have, but I have had the exact same argument about interruptions and the lost productivity of having my train of thought broken. Sadly it always seems to feel like an outtake from Groundhog Day. :-(

 

[garm]

We spent the last three years rebuilding all offices to activity based spaces, which is a fancy way of expressing that some people believe we will be more like google or Spotify when in reality all they do is cram more bodies into smaller spaces. Personally I need to work close to the engineers but at the same time I need uninterrupted days as well. So my solution has been to work from my home office when I need not to be disturbed. Not everyone can do this, and I hade hoped that the new office layouts would allow me to choose on site if I needed quiet or be easily accessed, but no.

 

[Constantin]

I have been fortunate enough to have an office for all of my working life. Shared in the beginning, cinderblock walls, a rusting window that never shut properly, but nevertheless, an office. Plus, the buildings were designed to have no more than 20' from the user to an operable window. That was the old design philosophy before the advent of AC.

Unfortunately, the trend towards the "veal-fattening pens" that the blog post describes continue and have become the new normal. I'd argue that the potential for alienation in the office has only been worsened by this trend as people don headphones or other means to isolate themselves from the pandemonium around them. Never mind being able to place professional phone calls for work. No wonder more and more people want to work from home. But there are significant potential downsides to that too.

For me, the point of an workplace has always been having a place where people can come together, enjoy the mission, and get work done. Sometimes that means working in groups, sometimes that means giving people the opportunity to isolate themselves to get a task done. That's where an office with a door is ideal. Leave it open when you can / want to interact with everyone, close it whenever you need to be isolated.

Once a company has reached minimum-efficient scale, I don't see why people can't be given the choice of having an office or working in a pod. Cater to their interests.... the current trend towards 'hoteling' across all industries (where you don't even have a set workplace) is emblematic of companies who hoover for pennies rather than focus on how to make their employees as happy and productive as possible (and make more $$$).

Sure, hoteling works for people who never are in the office, but those of us who need to keep resources with them to get their job done simply gape in wonder. Companies have gone so far as hire monitors to ensure that the same spaces are not reclaimed by the same set of people on a day to day basis (i.e. that company doesn't even assign spaces meat-counter style, it's a free-for-all).

 

[Chris Moore]

No wonder more and more people want to work from home. But there are significant potential downsides to that too.

I need access to the hardware for my work, so it is not an option for me even if my work allowed it.

Once a company has reached minimum-efficient scale, I don't see why people can't be given the choice of having an office or working in a pod.

Most companies don't make that an employee choice. Where I work, very senior management get offices, everyone else gets a pen and the new pens are worse than the old ones because they are smaller for one thing and they have shorter walls. The old cubicles were almost like offices with no door, but these are just big enough to walk in and turn around if you don't have anyone else in the cubicle with you. Not enough room for two chairs for sure.

Sure, hoteling works for people who never are in the office, but those of us who need to keep resources with them to get their job done simply gape in wonder. Companies have gone so far as hire monitors to ensure that the same spaces are not reclaimed by the same set of people on a day to day basis (i.e. that company doesn't even assign spaces meat-counter style, it's a free-for-all).

I don't get that. We do have assigned spaces with dedicated hard-line phones and computer systems and we can keep a small amount of personal effects in the cubicle, but these new cubicles are too small. I am going to need to discard many of the records that were stored in my cubicle before as there will be no room for them now. It makes me want to find a better place to work. Sadly, many companies appear to be even worse than what we have.

 

[Jailer]

I have a job where I work with constant interruptions. I much prefer quiet time to concentrate. One thing it does force you to do is figure out ways to bookmark work as you go so you can resume with minimal downtime. Once thing I've been doing lately is coming in to work 2 hours before my scheduled start time. Luckily I have a job that allows that flexibility. It gives me a 2 hour head start before my crew arrives and I find those 2 hours to be my most productive hours of the day.

 

[jgreco]

One of my earlier jobs was at a medical electronics manufacturer where we had '80's Steelcase style cubes. Tall walls and it was reasonably pleasant. Because I did a lot of hardware work and sometimes had servers running in my cube, I tended to get larger cubicles, and for awhile I managed to nick a corner of one of the underused electronics labs. Some of that time was at the Cozzens & Cudahy Research Center, which was very nice because it was basically an office ring in the middle of a wooded area. Everyone had a window. Well, except for me when I moved into the lab. It was intentionally quiet and kept somewhat separate from the main campus. It's totally possible to create a pleasant, or even amazing, environment with cubicles, but you probably need to start out with that idea as a goal.

For awhile I also had a client in downtown Chicago, "the Loop," right by LaSalle and Jackson. They had much more "modern" annoying half-cubes there, but the software development team interacted quite heavily via IRC, and the area was basically at one end of the suite. I can absolutely see how that would be so annoying if you had a lot of foot traffic or interruptions, but it just didn't seem to happen much. I have to think it was part of the culture there. Another example, I think, of working to create a pleasant environment for people to be able to focus on their work. Also, the view out the window was great. I actually miss that.

Most of the rest of the time I've had hard wall offices. With doors.

 

[Constantin]

Company culture is definitely a big determinant re: how people treat doors / interruptions / and so on. I've tried very hard to instill in my charges that figuring out a problem on their own should be a first priority, followed by grouping problems and considering solutions / opportunities in advance. Only then come to my office with a stack of them and let's work out 5 issues in 5 minutes as a stack rather than 5 minutes per issue 5 times separately.

Ha... just found an image from work a few years ago. See how narrow all the older buildings are, other than the last 2 additions (HQ in the center and the glass blob in the upper left). My first office was in the building all the way to the right, we looked at a canal / creek and some trees. According to company folklore, the industrial process for making Captain Krunch cereal was developed in the building to the lower right.

 

[rvassar]

My degree is actually BSci Geology, I came to software by doing some graduate level work modeling ground water movement & contaminant transport, etc..., and needing what was in the early 90's a "Workstation" class computer. I've been in my share of Steelcase cube farms, but they all beat working out of a pickup truck, wearing steel toe boots and rain slickers, and having to listen to drill rig workers curse and call me "college boy". ;)

I remember reading that blog entry when it first came out... When I started at Sun Microsystems, I was at the Menlo Park campus that was built in the early 1990's. Each engineer got a hard walled office with a door that had a small window. MTS 1's & 2's got to share a double office. When you made MTS 3 or 4, you got a single office. When you stepped up to Staff Engineer or took a management position you got one of the outer wall offices with a window. Then they built the Santa Clara campus in '99, similar arraignment, but they swapped out the doors with sliding glass doors like you might have at a house here in the US. This reduced privacy, but at least you could still carry on a phone call. I transferred to Texas, and found a similar configuration in Austin. I deliberately refused the window office when I made staff level, and kept my interior office near the lab. I spent one third of my time in the lab anyway, and I didn't like the visual distractions a window presented when I was coding/scripting. Keep in mind though, the goal in the mid to late 90's was each developer producing 25 lines of "proven correct" code per day. It was also accepted that a 5 minute interruption resulted in 15 minutes of lost productivity while the developer got their head back in the code.

The trend since has been to low-wall cube farms, distractions, and listening to your cube-mates talk to their kids teachers, or their doctors, etc... Some companies provide "phone rooms", or "focus room" that are really just small meeting rooms, but overall the trend has been disappointing. I'm older, I have kids, I sometimes have to take personal calls at work. I remember when I was an MTS 2, having an internal beta effort completely blow up, wheeling a server across campus at 11pm, starting a tape restore, and sleeping under my desk in 90 minutes chunks while the tapes read in... No way I'd do that in a low wall cube farm.