I've worked at companies that had completely open spaces, individual offices for everyone, and cubicles. By far my favorite is cubicles.
I hate open offices and will actively avoid them. They are noisy, distracting, stressful, and not conducive to productivity. They are conducive to collaboration though.
Offices are stifling. They put too many barriers between talking to people, and I found everyone tended to rely on chat and email a lot more. Offices are fantastic when you really want to put your head down and focus.
Cubicles are a nice balance between the two extremes. Collaboration is possible and still happens, but privacy and space is still available too.
Susan Cain in her book "Quiet" advocates for a space that is basically an open office in the center, with private nooks around the edge, so people can consciously decide when they want to collaborate versus concentrate. I've never been in an environment like that, but it sounds nice.
I like my office, and I don't feel that it adds any additional barriers over a cubicle, unless I want it to.
I like initiating communication with chat or email, with the option of an impromptu face-to-face meeting if necessary, or the option of being able to defer that meeting when I need to focus.
I keep my door open when I don't mind a visitor (like a cubicle), but I can close my door to indicate to people that I am in focus-mode and should not be disturbed. I didn't have that choice with a cubicle, because anyone could walk up at any time and cause me to shift that focus.
The office also makes for a good place for uninterrupted collaboration when the meeting requires it, which is something else you don't get with a cubicle.
>I didn't have that choice with a cubicle, because anyone could walk up at any time and cause me to shift that focus.
This isn't true of all cubicles. I used to work at a very large microprocessor manufacturer and before they "compressed" the cubicles, the cubicles were 9x9. Someone had to physically come into your cubicle to get your attention (or pop their head over the wall, but only 6-foot+ people could do that). To deal with disturbances, we actually had "DO NOT DISTURB" signs assigned to us which we could hang across the cubicle entrance to keep people from bothering us. These signs were frequently used, and to very good effect.
Personally, I wish I could go back to that environment. It was the best of both worlds when I had this nice-sized cube with privacy, but was also seated next to a coworker I frequently needed to collaborate with. It was great being able to pop my head over the wall when I needed to, but without worrying about being distracted or disturbed by other people for less-important stuff, and especially not by random passers-by the way I am in open environments.
I have seen very workable open office spaces. The key seems to be room size. I consulted to Gateway Computer Company back in the 90's and I would work in their Poway, CA offices which were open office format. It actually wasn't bad there because the space was essentially a large warehouse with very high ceilings (more than a couple of storeys high as I recall). The nearby sound and noise wasn't directly reflected back and there were enough people that the general din was closer to a white noise.
My prior job had this setup, but with low walled cubicles for everyone. We kicked the executive team out of their offices and instantly had a ton of conference room space. It was great and prevented a lot of wasted time that normally went to scheduling spaces for meetings.
I also think the type of cube makes a difference. I currently work in a cube with high walls (at least 12 inches higher than my head when seated) and somehow the psychological effect of that is much better than a low cube where you're staring in someone else's face all the time.
Yeah, we have "high" cubicle walls, but the last 12" is glass which defeats the purpose. I face a walkway and people's heads are in my view as they pass, which can be incredibly distracting.
We get a lot of natural light this way which can be great, except when the sun rises right into your eyes with no way to block it.
I'd like to add to this that I had a setup like this not long ago, and it was awful. I got stuck in a "cubicle" with low walls right next to a busy corridor, so I had to look at every single person who walked by me in the face (in one direction at least). It was extremely distracting and annoying.
The thing is: who leaves at 5pm? It's 8:15pm and I am still here (OK, I work in an office, but still). I think working from home you can get free time simply being more productive. I know I would do that. At work, you have to be there, even just to wait that your boss is finished with task A, so that he can finalize task B with you. Then you have the commute, mine is 90 minutes per day.
Bottom line: I don't have time, I get home very tired, the work I do could be done in less time or better distributed through the day.
Are you serious? I'm out of the office by 5 at the latest: I have to catch a bus that stops running at 6:15 and I have a 45-minute commute.
I tell my boss when I have to leave, and then I leave by that time. If he needs something from me, it will have to wait until tomorrow unless it's an emergency.
Did you get in at noon? Why would you work somewhere that requires those kinds of hours? With a 90 minute commute on top of that? Not trying to be condescending, it's just that those kinds of things would be a huge motivator for me to find another job.
I found a place 15 minutes from my house, and everyone in the office is gone by 5, sometimes earlier on Fridays. I hope you find a better job soon.
The general HN sentiment is one of finite work hours, great work conditions and great pay or people quit. In an ideal world, I love that notion. Many people here are fortunate enough to have the leverage granted by the current job market to insist on those things (or quit and walk into another better paying job the next day).
Unfortunately, for those that are not engineers, or don't live somewhere with incredibly high job demand, many people take what they can get and suffer. The alternative is often losing your mortgage, not being able to pay for college, etc.
There may also be other factors keeping them at that employer (particularly if they are in a rural area and there literally aren't any other options closer).
So as much as I agree with you in spirit, the pragmatic part of me is wondering what will happen to people with this attitude when the economy shifts, and suddenly the job market isn't so hot anymore.
Let me answer your question: they will be treated as low level engineers and they will have to suck it up or will have to go into management and work 10 hrs days. How much gets an average RoR nowadays? How much did he get when the tech was shiny new? Coding per se won't get the million $ salaries they want, it's bound to go down. Even today, they look at what the best 5% gets and they think all coders get that, most coders don't, most coders in West Europe get very average salaries.
It's ludicrous to see people making the point of their perfect >40 hours job now, let's see in 5 or 10 years when the market is saturated.
While that's a fair point, I would say that you always have a choice to make. 3 years ago I was doing customer service, driving an hour both ways, and getting paid a very mediocre salary. I wasn't happy, so I taught myself to code and after a year of that got a job as a front end developer, for a lot more money and a much better commute.
While I understand that everyone's situation is different, you can always try to change and improve it.
That's not really fair. Some people enjoy working like that, some people find that the salary they are making (and enjoying) require those kind of hours, etc.
Do you think they are at the office 24/7? I'm sure they are driving kick-ass cars to and from work, wearing high end clothes, eating awesome food when they get home to their kick-ass house and just generally enjoying the overall secure feeling of having a good paycheck.
I really like sitting in the office when everyone's left and have my dinner while researching or actually doing my work. As opposed to meeting friends/family over dinner.
I am always gone before or at 5. I am always here before 8. I am never late, I don't take lunch breaks, and I never stay late.
I've never had an employer complain about this. I've had some bosses who regularly work past 5, but they understand that I am in the office before they are each morning and that although I am flexible when big projects are due, there is a limit to what I will tolerate before I start looking for work elsewhere. I learned the hard way that you have to draw those lines yourself, otherwise someone will draw them for you.
While I typically don't leave as early as 5 (unless I skip lunch), I don't stay much later, either. I'm always out by 6 unless my coworkers and I went out for a ridiculously long lunch or something.
It doesn't have to. Look for a distributed company, tolerant of people in different timezones (likely also tolerant of those with different sleep patterns). 1pm where you are is 8am somewhere.
Or look for a place that needs people willing to do nighttime deployments, finish up things that have a next-day deadline, infrastructure, etc. A lot of people are happy not to have to do that, so having people that prefer it anyway is valuable to them.
I personally am most productive when I'm head-down plowing into some big problem. And from that POV, I do my best work before sunrise in a private office, and I've thrived in environments where I have my own office with a door, and where I've worked remotely.
My current employer is all open-office, but also very remote friendly. I live hundreds of miles away so I work remote from my home office, but I've spent a few odd weeks in the office and the environment is actually pretty good for getting stuff done.
That said, remote-friendliness is something that's hard to adjust a company's culture to. I've found that heavy use of Slack and the right personalities can lead to a very productive and the sort of spontaneous sync-ups that are somewhat easier to happen in a physical office.
Ultimately the real test is whether your company's culture fits with your company's offices, and whether you fit into that culture.
It's important not to over-value pithy quotes from Steve Jobs (or other successful figures). For starters, it's difficult to say if this particular assertion is even well-founded; less likely still that implementing his rhetoric will simply translate into similar success.
Work from home actually works for a lot of people. Some of those people are just as creative, collaborative, driven and successful as the folks that work in offices.
My favorite pithy Steve Jobs quote, from when I was giving him a demo of pie menus on NeWS, is "That sucks! That sucks! That sucks! Oh, that's neat. That sucks!"
In an earlier job, we moved from a cubicle office to an open office. The open office was supposedly there to facilitate group work. But we were soon told that since everyone could hear and see what we were doing, we were no longer supposed to meet and talk with colleagues at our desks as we had been doing (too distracting for others).
I'm nervous to start conversations with the idle person next to me, because the person 2 desks over looks like they're concentrating and I don't want to knock them out of flow.
What happens in our open office which is half engineering is that nobody says much of anything. It doesn't help collaberation. If we had cubes or god forbid OFFICES with CLOSABLE DOORS we could have 1-1 conversations whenever we like.
In fact it's saving X from area A, where increasing the costs of area B by Y, where X is orders of magnitude smaller than Y, but the manager of B can still claim a bonus for the savings.
Cubes get a lot of hate, but I honestly prefer them over an open office. Maybe even better than a solitary office: in my experience, having my own office just felt isolating.
I've worked in a cube. I've had my own office. I've shared an office with one other person in a variety of desk arrangements. I currently share a large office with three other people (might as well be an open plan).
I'd probably rank the cube second, with sharing an office with one other person as the best (with desks arranged so both our backs are to the wall).
Open offices are terrible, terrible things. Next time I interview, I'm going to make sure to ask what their office arrangements are, so I can avoid that situation.
I was involved in some new-office cost discussions at one point, and while I feel management likes to say open offices are about collaboration, it was really really really about furniture and space costs and employee density.
So one answer is given "up the chain" (cost/density) and another is given "down the chain" (collaboration), and that's not cool IMHO.
My feeling with open offices is that sales/marketing people like it and most developers can't concentrate. It's not an extrovert issue -- I'm pretty extroverted at times, but coding is one of those things you need to minimize distractions while doing.
No, its not. There is a "concept" behind them to justify it in a way that doesnt just spit out "hey, we dont really value you as an employee more than we value a thumbs up from our shareholders". Solitude is necessary for creativity, open floor plans are terrible for cross-collaboration because nobody can concentrate to begin with.
The concept is bullshit though because either everyone is having to fight the distraction of someone else's collaboration or everyone stays quiet so to not distract anyone.
I think modern office layouts try to get the benefit of "sharing an office with one other person" with huddle rooms. Of course, the problem there comes when you inevitably have to relinquish the huddle room :-)
I can completely relate to the first two points: I shifted from my own office to working remotely (same job, same colleagues, which makes it a nice experiment) and I find it no easier to do the actual job ,although it's a lot easier to fit 8h of work into the day without the commute.
I do miss physical meetings. Not "meetings" but discussions about work problems happening at the coffee machine. You know how you describe a problem to a coworker at the coffee machine and often figure it out as you talk, before you even get an answer? That doesn't happen to me at home. I can explain to a rubber duck but it just stares at me and the insight never comes (neither from it nor from me).
I also feel "invisible" at times, which I'm sure is partly just perceived, but that doesn't help.
I think the ideal setup is working from home 3-4 days a week, and commuting 1-2 days. As for the office itself, I think open/cube/office is mostly a matter of taste. Offices with doors that open to a shared space is great, did that a long time with good results. If you commute 1 day a week just to get social, open plan is fine (or even better because more social).
Forgot to add, my only exception is when working on a team project it helps to be in the same room. Otherwise the open office is a surveillance scheme where everyone is watching everyone else.
2. Career advancement
The gripe: Working in a cubicle enslaves you to micromanaging bosses.
My view: Working with other people keeps you engaged and visible.
Is it anyone's experience that micromanagement is different depending on remote vs. on-site? Maybe micromanagers are less inclined to take remote positions because it could theoretically make it harder to micromanage, but at least in my experience, you can find that attitude wherever you go.
It's better than open office. Adapting to noisy environment can be challenging. I have circumaural headphones for cases when I need more concentration.
For anyone unfamiliar, circumaural headphones are "full size" in that they encompass the ear and are the easiest to block out noise by the physicality alone.
Next down in supra-aural that presses into the ear (rather than around it), and then you get to earbuds and in-ear headphones.
A lot of responses often focus on solitude for creativity vs. distraction and interruptions. Something that I don't see mentioned often is the need for distraction.
I'm pretty good at tuning out distractions when I'm focused, sometimes too good (you may need to wave your hand between me and the monitor to get my attention). Unfortunately, sometimes I overfocus and get mental tunnel vision / can't see the forest for the trees. I need to step away from the screen, pace around, maybe grab a clipboard and sketch a diagram, or clear my mind some other way.
In my own office, I can do that and the computer's right there when the mental switch flips, the gate opens, and the ideas start to flow again. In an open office, I have to leave the building and may be 10 minutes away from my desk (and subject to several interruptions on the way back). And of course, you always have the feeling of being watched and judged whenever you step away or do something at your desk that doesn't appear to be diligently working. So open offices (or cubicles) can be worse even when you do need distraction.
The emphasis on "face time" is just laziness. Laziness is, however, inevitable. I say that; I've done more good with a five minute hallway discussion ( in terms of heading off an "oh heck no" idea ) than any other technique.
but the entire "we need to socialize in order to be successful" thing is sorta mind-numbing. The word that comes after "social" is "engineering."
Communication without face-to-face time is still difficult in many ways. A couple of years ago I worked remotely as a software developer.
The boss would only give me tasks through email/JIRA and we would have standup meetings daily.
Almost every time I was assigned a task, I would be given an extremely vague description. Now normally, this is what we need to deal with as developers, but I could barely get an idea of what we were trying to accomplish with the task. I usually just finished the task with what little information I had and it would have to be re-rewritten almost every time because the boss wanted something different.
This was all through email. Some people just don't know how to effectively communicate in writing.
They let me go after about a year because they could hire '4 people in India for the cost of my salary'. I had to chuckle.
I've dealt with something similar but the manager in that case was a "hunt and peck" typist. Once I saw him typing it all came together. I wouldn't like typing either if it took me several seconds per letter.
His arguments about length of work day and saying "okay, work's done" don't ring true in my opinion. There are plenty of folks in my office who both stay at the office late and do work from home after hours. I think that particular behavior says more about the person than where they work.
Personally, I split time between the office and home, and find that works pretty well.
I don't think this is so much about the cubicle as it is about someone who has made themselves comfortable in an enterprise setting. A place where you have to come into the office 9-5 or you're taking PTO, a place where have to put in plenty of face-time so the boss knows you're working hard, and a place where once you leave you have no problem forgetting about the work.
Interesting book "Cubed" tells history of offices. Starts with Harry Potter type scriveners before any machine aids, through industrialization where you are just a cog in a vast office pool of business machine operators, through the open offices of today.
I hate open offices and will actively avoid them. They are noisy, distracting, stressful, and not conducive to productivity. They are conducive to collaboration though.
Offices are stifling. They put too many barriers between talking to people, and I found everyone tended to rely on chat and email a lot more. Offices are fantastic when you really want to put your head down and focus.
Cubicles are a nice balance between the two extremes. Collaboration is possible and still happens, but privacy and space is still available too.
Susan Cain in her book "Quiet" advocates for a space that is basically an open office in the center, with private nooks around the edge, so people can consciously decide when they want to collaborate versus concentrate. I've never been in an environment like that, but it sounds nice.