"It gives you access to other cube mates fairly easily" If those cube-mates have to spend a lot of time thinking about things, this can be very bad news indeed

"It gives you access to other cube mates fairly easily" If those cube-mates have to spend a lot of time thinking about things, this can be very bad news indeed. I see it all the time, and I think DeMarco poked at it in Peopleware all those years ago. If it takes someone ten to fifteen minutes to get into a mental flow situation, holding the context of their task in their head and thinking about, a cube-mate leaning over to ask something they could have looked up for themselves in a minute saves that cube-mate one minute, and costs the interrupted thinker several minutes to get back into flow. I even see it reach the point where people who know they really need to think about something gather up their paper and disappear elsewhere in the building.