You’re lucky – an overhead cubby and 3 drawers. Plenty of places to hide booze.
The cubicles with low or no walls, so you can watch your coworkers eat and pick their nose are scarier.
The best offices I’ve worked at did cubicles. I don’t understand why people don’t like the isolation, maybe it’s about how much they enjoy working by themselves.
I don’t think it’s the isolation, but the endless beige monotony.
I didn’t mind my cubefarm when I was immersed in the cube, but it was hella depressing in the morning coming into that environment. Made me feel like a worn cog in the machine. Lunch, standing up to a beige hellscape, sucked all my creativity (which wasn’t great, as a designer).
Open floor plan, when that became the alternative, was worse, though.
Working from home is ideal. I haven’t been able to work for a few years, so maybe I’m out of touch, but I can’t fathom why anyone is against working from home, especially in software dev. It’s the best of all worlds – no office space fees, and most of us will work extra hours in our cosy environment.
e: I was more productive working from home than ever, and would even work outside hours without reporting it because I was just happy to be creating things. I dreamt about my project – in a good way – and implemented ideas like that. Why would a CEO who claims to have the slightest idea about things not want that, unless they’re an idiot?
e2: That’s not to devalue our worth – rereading this, I can see how it could read that way. What I’m saying is when your skills align well with what you like to do and you make a career in that, it’s a profitable combination; unfortunately, our whole economy is set up to select against that, which is a shame for all of us. Doubly so for the morons in charge.
This scenario has already inspired a lot of high-quality entertainment (i.e. Severance and the Stanley Parable).
…where they non-violently threaten your family to keep you there.
Gen X in their 20s: “Fuck these soulless cubicles.”
Gen X in their 40s: “We’re the boss now. Kill the cubicles. Open floor plan.”
Millennials in their 20s: “Fuck this distracting open floor plan.”
Millennials in their 40s: “I’m the boss now. Kill the open floor plan. Cubicles.
Millennial here. I only briefly worked in a cubicle, when I was young, but I liked it as an environment. Not sure why the previous generation hated them so much.
They probably felt like rats in a cage or something similar. Very limiting and stifling, claustrophobic little boxes. I have to say though, if this little box gives me even an extra inch of privacy or silence I’ll take it. Leave me alone while I’m working.
That and you can decorate a cubicle. Individuality still exists in a cube farm. In an open floor, you may as well be a Borg.
They hated them because before that people had offices. Then someone decided why pay all this money for offices, when we can put up these shitty dividers and pack more people into this space. Then some other dickheads decided why bother paying for these dividers when we can pack even more people into this space, and sell the idea as “open” and “collaborative”. And if you don’t like it (because you can’t concentrate for shit in this loud ass hellscape) then you’re not a “team player”.
Does that answer your question?
before that people had offices
This is kind of a myth. It’s not feasible for everyone to have an office if you have a lot of people in once space. Open floor plans were what people did.
Yeah I thought of this right after I posted this. I still think it holds for certain professions though. Like engineers had offices. Now not so much.
It kind of depends on the job and the size of the company. My father was an engineer and spent time in offices and open floors full of drawing tables. The small companies could accommodate offices, but that was too hard to pull off with larger companies.
I remember some old offices buildings at MS where they tried to give everyone a little baby office, and it was actually pretty depressing and weird.
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A lot of offices didn’t, and some still don’t, consider the design of the floor plan. You’d end up with beige cubes filling most of the floor, with no little chill spots to break out and collaborate.
IMHO, a good floor plan has some areas for people to hide and focus, some comfortable areas to collaborate outside of a conference room, and some areas to recharge.
Yeah, seeing an entire room filled with cubes is very ugly and stifling, but as an introvert I’d want at least one place where I can just work out of sight as it reduces my stress levels significantly.
It’s because corporations being corporations and took the concept of workspace partitions to its limits for the sake of efficiency. Look at early concepts of workspace partitions and it doesn’t look like anything that’s the office hellscape we saw in the late 90’s and early 2000s. It went from good design with big partitioned off sections to crammed cubicles in a soulless environment.
Same thing happened with the modern open office plan where everyone got crammed into a flex desk bull pen instead of the proper open office design where everyone has a big private desk where you sit several feet away from each other.
Just look at this clip where Conan visits the Intel HQ in 2007, it’s a soulless maze of cubicles https://youtu.be/gXReifFHXbY
Sure you got privacy but it’s just depressing to spend so much time in an environment like that.
Also here is a video of how the partitioned workspace aka the action office turned into the cubicles we all hate https://youtu.be/7Tt4n8SaxEY
You’d think they’d love it if everyone worked from home, then. Don’t have to pay for office space at all if your employees are already paying for their offices.
There is a lot about working where they just don’t trust employees and want to watch them.
They can try to make metrics to varying degrees of success, but ultimately they live in fear of those metrics being gamed.
A lot of corporate environments are forcing hoteling spaces on their staffs so now you don’t even get your cube you have to share it with other randos you work with, can’t decorate it, and have to share keyboards and mice!
Holy shit I would take this over an open floor plan any day. I dream of having my own quasi-isolated space.
Yeah honestly cubes were hell, but still nothing compared to an open office. Especially a well lit ““vibrant”” one.
Good for socialising. Absolute shit for actually working.
For 8 years I tried. Finally I got my chance when a global pandemic ravaged my planet. Now they’re trying to put me back in.
Same. We don’t have the room in my office for everyone to be there all at once so I’m hoping we go hybrid instead. My wife’s office is the same. They have 7 rooms for 35 people in her team so unless they stack em shoulder to shoulder, there’s no way. Meanwhile, everyone in leadership has their own office. Ain’t that some shit?
As for me, my job involves a lot of salary discussions. Now, I don’t mind speaking openly about salaries. My personal belief is that salary discussions should be open and public. Not everyone thinks the way I do. And I know that if I’m placed in an open cubicle in a hallway, people to whom I report will not want to talk to me as often. I don’t mind either way. I like these people. But if leadership in my organization wants to do that to me, that’s probably what’s going to happen. It’s the nature of my job. I help write budgets and then do entry for nearly $60,000,000 of annual spending, including salaries for about a thousand positions. Nearly half of the entire organization falls under my purview. From division directors making $160k a year all the way down to part time housekeepers making 13 bucks an hour. So if they want me in a cubicle, that’s fine. I’ve done lots of time in cubicles. It doesn’t bother me much. But that could be a consequence of doing that to me.
I have an interview coming up for a job that pays twice as much and looks to be about as much work as I do now. I hope I get it. I think that my departure from this place will cause a hell of a fire. Maybe if I’d have got that promotion I’d been hinting at for some time, I wouldn’t have updated my resume. But here we are. I am no longer gruntled.
I have an interview coming up for a job that pays twice as much and looks to be about as much work as I do now. I hope I get it. I think that my departure from this place will cause a hell of a fire. Maybe if I’d have got that promotion I’d been hinting at for some time, I wouldn’t have updated my resume. But here we are. I am no longer gruntled.
Good luck!
And yep, I know exactly what you mean. A while ago I asked for 50k and remote, and boss jerked me around for months on it - moving goalposts, etc. When lo and behold, as soon as I put in my resignation they immediately offered me what I wanted, but of course by then I already had a much better offer in hand.
Whereas, as you know, if we’d been properly valued in the first place, we probably wouldn’t have been looking for a different jobs in the first place.
I feel like that’s one of the reasons for back to the office bullshit - being in an office makes it harder to interview for jobs.
Follow the white rabbit
Nailed it. I was going to say scary because it looks like Morpheus is about to call you. But yes. This.
“Thomas Anderson?”
“Yeah, that’s me…”
We’re here to fix your monitor
Well, hey, I appreciate that. I’ll get out of your way. Thank you!
Yeah, that’s not happening. Here, let me jabber about things you have no interest in, while you try to remain professional and polite yet still try to diagnose and resolve the issue. Kill me…
This is the story of a man named Stanley.
Stanley worked for a company in a big building where he was employee number 427
Hello IT… Have you tried turning it off and on again?
Ah, ah, I almost forgot…I’m also going to need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too. We, uhhh, lost some people this week and we sorta need to play catch-up. Mmmmmkay? Thaaaaaanks.
I was told, I could listen to the radio, at a reasonable volume.
Please let me leave
Nobody questions what is in the Stanley until you start slurring your morning huddle.
As someone who always worked in an open office, I wish…
