For the life of me, I don't understand how "thousands of cubes" is somehow worse than "thousands of $15 Ikea tables".
It's just a matter of fads and fashion. Cubicles are "so 90's", while crappy tables thrown together in a loud frat house romper room is "2000's".
I understand that each generation has an impulse to differentiate themselves from the previous one. But in this specific case, it is absolutely a productivity and quality-of-life downgrade. The purpose is for management to save money, period.
> The purpose is for management to save money, period.
Is saving money the real purpose, or the fig leaf for the actual purpose?
If saving money is the real purpose, then Work From Home (WFH) drops putative facilities costs to zero. Forget shaving a square foot here or a tenth of a square meter there: send everyone to their home offices, drop it to zero, call it a day, and collect the bonus check on your way out. No leadership recognition of the valuation assigned to the negative productivity impact of open offices signals that there is no quantified impact for WFH either, despite claims to the contrary. One can't have it both ways, claiming one can measure the productivity impact of WFH and not open offices. In the absence of actual quantification, if saving money on physical plant/facilities was the real purpose, WFH would win.
Well yes, there are also elements of power and control. Management worries that employees will do less work if they are not present and under observation (sad truth: for the bottom 90% of employees, they're probably correct). And open floor plans, as the high-tech sweatshop model that they are, provide the lowest cost and maximum observation.
But to my point about the degree to which fads and fashion come into play... it's bizarre that so many peers either:
(1) argue in favor of open floor plans ("More collaborative! More fun! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(2) argue in favor of work-from-home ("More productive! Less distractions! Not all old and stuffy like cubes!"), or
(3) both, from one sentence to the next.
Open floor plans and work from home are POLAR OPPOSITES. The only thing they have in common is that they're both "not cubes". So it's bizarre to me that there aren't more moderate voices calling for on-prem workplaces of higher quality.
I suspect what is happening is no management team of a category killer company exists that comes out and says, "we treat our developers right, that is our key to success", or even a softer version of that, sufficiently to develop cargo culting by management in other companies. I don't think quantification will help in this situation, and thus even higher quality on-prem workplaces lose out, as the productivity metrics are confounded by too many factors, and are not simple to communicate to finance.
If I was on a management team of a category killer that figured out doing the opposite of what everyone else was doing was helping my company, then I wouldn't be broadcasting that. In this case, if I figured out that high quality workplaces (whether at home or on-prem) conferred substantial competitive advantages, then I sure wouldn't be telling my competitors that.
If it came out that Apple for example, consistently put in high quality workplaces for the teams that developed their category-killing products, and took steps to hide that fact from the world because they recognized its competitive advantage, then there might be some recognition and cargo culting. Much of management is a social activity as much as an analytical activity.
I want a cube because it's not the noise that bothers me but the constant motion on the periphery of my vision.
Cubes can be setup properly. They don't need to be row after row after row of cubes. We have them setup in pods that hold 6-8 people, one pod for each dev team. Only one way in or out, so there's no traffic moving through, with a small table in the middle that's mainly used to eat lunch or store treats that people bring in.
That. My previous employer was a subsidiary of a large US company. The subsidiary was all hip and open plan and I hated our office, even after I got some mild adaptations done (moved team assignments to "positive space" islands and install a 20" sound partition between teams' desks so at least teams had some privacy). The mothership had these neat Herman Miller layouts with team pods. It looked (to my European design sensitivities) butt-ugly, but I loved sitting there. So quiet, and the only bit of interruption you had was probably relevant because it came out of your team. Not a random sales guy strolling by (sorry, sales peeps - love you, but you're a noisy bunch ;-))
I've worked in tons of cubes for the first seven years of my career. I thought nothing could be worse, until I discovered the hell of open plan offices. I've been stuck in them for the past six years and it's a new level of hell.
Have you been in a cube? You don't have to watch other's pick their noses. It's way better than open workspaces.
