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At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door,
by floren 8y ago
At my previous employer, I worked in an office with real walls and a real solid wood door, in a cubicle with a sliding plastic door, in a cubicle with no door, and in a couple of larger open areas with between zero and three other people sharing the space. The real office was by far the best, but having a cubicle with a couple cabinets and a sliding door was almost as good.
I've experienced an "open plan" setup that worked; we based the setup on Bell Labs' Unix Room after visiting them. The Unix Room model is actually great, but it's different from your standard open-plan setup:
* People in the Unix Room seemed to be largely working on either individual projects or projects involving only a few others.
* The room itself was not actually very big, so you couldn't jam too many people in there
* Workspace was pretty generous, you weren't expected to tuck your elbows in lest you rub up against your neighbor
* Everyone in the Unix Room also had their own private office with a door, which I think was the key to success.
The last point is the biggest challenge: implementing a good open-plan workspace is going to require even more space than a traditional cube farm.
Edit: I work from home now, in a shed in the back yard. It's the size of a nice office, has doors and windows, and if I decide to work with the door open I get fresh air and birds chirping :)
- floren 8y agoPosting a follow-up rather than editing: I also wonder if open-plan offices are a symptom of the increasing centralization of tech companies. These days people seem to think the first step of starting a tech company is to move to the Bay Area. If we were founding companies in Redding, Rochester, Yakima, Grand Rapids, or Albuquerque, could we afford to give everyone an office with a real door for the same price as a San Jose hellhole? We've got better connectivity than ever before, but we insist on clustering up more and more. Cray was out in the Wisconsin woods. Microsoft got started in Albuquerque. DEC and Data General were both well outside Boston in small towns.
- Latteland 8y agoPeople start companies in these clusters because there are lots of programmers (to a lesser extend vc money) in those places, and you are more likely to be able to recruit programmers to those places.
- ghaff 8y agoIn all fairness though, DEC and DG were part of the Route 128 cluster of computer companies. They were just mostly scattered in small towns around the region (as were their manufacturing and other smaller offices) because being located in a city was not really something that tech companies did at the time. [ADDED: AFAIK all of these companies mostly used the typical for the time mix of high cubicles and offices for managers.] Boston metro was still losing population up to around the late 90s and, when Teradyne moved out, that was basically the last major tech employer in the city proper. The current fascination with urban living (in certain specific cities) by a certain young professional demographic is mostly quite recent.
- BoiledCabbage 8y agoI don't understand this comment: > In all fairness though... "In all fairness" to what? What is this referring to?
- floren 8y agoI had used DEC and DG as examples of tech companies starting in small towns, he was pointing out that while they may have been in small towns they were still in a "tech corridor" right outside Boston. Which is a reasonable point to make! I guess he means "in fairness to" the modern silicon valley trends I'm criticizing.
- nateroling 8y agoI found one picture of the Unix Room, on Twitter: https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/896161131894419457 https://twitter.com/rob_pike/status/896161131894419457