Cubicles look bad especially when you use a matrix-era picture, but if you’re not getting a personal office or work from home, it’s the best option.
Sure would rather have one of those than the open office landscape I have now.
Some people really undervalue the idea of having workers not feel pressured and having some privacy. You might get 10-20% more productivity out of them in the short term, but it raises stress a ton, destroys their mental health, and you probably lose that extra efficiency in burn out and depressed workers anyways. Over the long term it taints everything the company touches. It destroys morale, makes every interaction with a customer slightly worse, makes every work they do worse. It breeds resentment and a culture of dishonesty and irresponsibility.
Open layouts are terrible, humans are not designed to exist in an environment where they are constantly monitored. People have to take breaks sometimes, people have bad days sometimes. Everyone probably has a day at least once a year where they just really need a nap and a workday at once. The way you deal with this from a management perspective is you look at their average efficiency over longer periods of time and judge their worth based on that, but while preserving their humanity and autonomy. Humans are not meant to be drones, and good workers come from having happy and healthy workers. Give workers space, give them privacy, treat them well and they will care about your company, and if they don’t then they are just not good people and never will be, so you should just let them go.
Efficiency also isn’t everything. Life is not meant to be perfectly efficient. I understand capitalism makes this very difficult but real efficiency tends to be many micro optimizations over time without the actual workload increasing. You should expect that every worker is going to have some downtime everyday if they are working more than a few hours per day. This is not an issue, there are so many other ways to increase efficiency besides abusing workers.
I’ve had two open office jobs and in both of them I ended up spending like 10% of my time at my desk
I’ve had a couple of months in a cubicle ones and I found it kinda eerie. I think it’s because it’s very clear that we were 20 people in the same office each of us pretending to be alone. I’d much rather have a shared office space with, like, 10 people…
Are you sure? If you’ve tried it fine but it you’ve not tried it…woof
that’s wild to hear, cubicles sound great compared to the boiler rooms we have now
Shared office is even worse, everyone is loud, you’re missing the attenuation you had in your cubicle. Impossible to do phone calls / video calls without noise canceling headphones and good noise filtering. Ans when you’re at home trying to talk to someone on-site, you can hear three other colleagues chatting in the background. Hate this shit with a passion
Where I’m at now we have those phone booth-style boxes for (video-)calls. They are pretty horrible but a big improvement over having people making calls in the shared space.
It depends on the type of work and the people involved.
I worked in a team of developers and everyone who visited us commented how quiet it was…
in the 2000s I started a contract with 200 other cubicle workers (software support), but they decided at some point to cut it down to 20… so after a few months it was a cube wasteland with a core of ubercubes - each with 4-10 devboxes and displays for ad-hoc test environments… and it was like that for 8 months then we all got the ‘we’re not eliminating your positions, but the jobs are going to New Mexico, you want to move to Albuquerque right?’ axe.
Our Japan office went through a renovation after many years of the same old (like 30 year old) desks sitting side by side in an open space to a more modern open space. One big change though: no one has an assigned work space. You put your stuff in a box and then work out of that at whatever position you get that day. Meanwhile, the boss, went from sitting with everyone else to have his own private office with all his MLB, NFL, and other crap all over the walls and shelves.
Luckily I don’t work in the Japan office.
Hot desks means it’s time to leave, good work
So unhygienic! Definitely don’t want to sit on someone elsees fart cushion all day.
Cube farms weren’t that bad.
The children yearn for the cube
I mean, compared to the chaotic and loud open space bullshit? Yeah! I yearn for the cube 100%!
Most people think the cubicle is a downgrade from what we had before. I think this comes from people believing these people would be in offices if not for the cubicle farm. In reality most of these people would be in a open environment with desks next to each other. The cubicle was the upgrade.
I worked in open spaces with more than 300 desks per floor aligned next to each other and no walls. You can’t talk, you are always making eye contact with people you don’t even know, your screen is constantly visible to the others and you can’t keep anything personal next to you. A cubicle would have been a dream in comparison.
I also sort of blame it on the social media culture of being “constantly connected.” In some workplace cultures, (especially outside the dev space), not being constantly visible and grinning is the same as not consistently posting happy updates on your feed and consuming them.
I remember in my last job we had an “open office” plan after buying and renovating a huge space, and I found a niche little area to set up my desk without people staring at me and when people came to ask me questions they would say shit like “oh so this is where you’re hiding!”
Yes, on company property in the main workroom seated at my company desk using my company computer.
Thankfully my new job is fully remote, so fuck all that weird social noise when at the end of the day I’m just whoring my brain and fingers out so I can pay my rent and buy groceries
My first tech job gave me a cubicle in an office. Then at Amazon I had a desk in a team room, which was nice. Then we got moved to open layout, which was dogshit fucking horrible. I’ve long since left that hellish company and enjoy my own office at home, but yeah I totally agree that cubicles were much better than at least the tech industry norm these days.
My first job was all small rooms of 4-6 desks. Rigid desks, with stuff like drawers where you could keep stuff. Enough space for a few desktop computers, crt monitors, in trays, out trays, reference books and files and still space to work.
Way better than the open plan that came along and the desks gradually shrank down to a small square on a single large shared table who’se thin badly supported top is vibrating from everyone else typing.
I’m sure a 70s typing pool type situation would have been worse - but personally my situation has regressed a lot closer to that now. WFH is more productive just because i have enough space for the way i work.
I’d love a cubicle office - never actually worked in one - but I doubt it be as good as the small room setup was .
Small room with enough desks for just the immediate team and plenty of space in the desks would be my dream. Maybe a whiteboard or two. That would be excellent.
You don’t even get a cubicle anymore, here’s a lopsided ikea desk you share with three other people.
Yeah, it’s both funny and terrifying how cubicles were a symbol of a dystopia, and now, with open space offices, people would kill for the cubicles.
Yeah, I’m kind of sad I just missed out on this entire phase of human civilisation. I guess the year 1999 when every Hollywood film was about cubicle workers being sad must have killed them off, plus of course open plan being cheaper and allowing less privacy.
Also now your boss can stare at you from his glass office door and see if you’re laughing too much and then Lumbergh you
Yeaaaaaah…I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday…9am…
Missed the memo about the TPS report?
I kinda miss my desk cubicle. Now I can see other people and I have less desk flair now with hotdesks. Still, get to work from home in my own personal bombsite.
WFH pros: you don’t see your coworkers and don’t even need to leave the house!
WFH cons: you don’t see your coworkers and don’t even need to leave the house!
My biggest pro was my social life vastly improving after switching to WFH. As a naturally introverted person, I burned all my social energy at the office and nights/weekends went into hermit mode. Now I’m sitting on my charger all day while I work and actually have the energy to see my friends.
Different strokes for different folks. I liked talking to people at the office - but you don’t have to like it which is why it’s great if WFH is optional
I don’t like to talk about my flair.
Corporate Accounts Payable Nina speaking, JUST a moMENT!
AI crap. The lady on the lower left has a cardboard box for a monitor.
Is AI policing of old photos the new Transvestigation?
We have come so far people don’t know what a terminal is
That’s not a cardboard box, that’s a microfiche viewer.
That looks more like a specialized terminal for some kind of data.
I don’t think this is ai. It’s too consistent
Perhaps she’s new and lied on her resume.
It looks like a microfiche machine. How old is this photo?
Very little info online. This is either an IBM or Ericsson office circa 1995.
95? Looking at woman’s hair I would have thought more 80s than 90s
The clean crisp white office and the way the people are dressed is screaming 90s to me.
It absolutely can be earlier. There is zero definitive answer.
Look at all that collaborative productive work culture!
Almost thought this was LinkedIn for a second.
LinkedIn Park.
craaawwwwwling iiiiinnnnnnn my cuuuuuuuuuube
I applied so hard
And gone so far
In the end
They didn’t even hire
I really hate the half-cubes. So distracting anytime someone even just stands up.
easy work in an air-conditioned office
despair
I do feel like a dick sitting in my office going “oh my fingies is cold, burrr” in the middle of summer watching the laborers at the office building nextdoor tarring a new roof in the baking sun.
That looks just like the call center I used to work in.
So dumb that it’s ai when places like these are everywhere…
