I recently visited an office that would have been my version of Hell if I actually had to work there every day. It was in a basement, so no windows anywhere. The managers had cubes with short walls, the kind where you can prairie dog up and talk to everyone in the room at once if you wanted to.
The developers didn’t even have cubes. They were 8 to a small room, in desk areas that were more like library carrels similar to the picture here. Basically no privacy at all, and so close together that when I pulled up a chair to work with one developer, I kept having to be careful not to accidentally bump the person working in the next carrel. In contrast, my home office is half again as large as the space they had 8 people crammed into in that office.
I honestly don’t think I could work in an environment like that all the time. It was OK to be there for a day or two (I was consulting) but all the time? I’d gnaw my arm off. I need windows, I need privacy, I need to be able to close a door and work in silence if I’m working on something that requires concentration.
Most people I mention this to look at me like I’ve grown three heads. Seems like a lot of people have no cares at all where they work - as long as they have the basics to do their job, they’re fine. I’m just not wired that way. Am I the only one?
Well, some of the things you mention vary by culture (in Spain most people find cubes oppressive: give us individual offices or open-plan), but IME a bad office can seriously screw things up.
One of the companies where I worked keeps most of its CSRs in a large underground room. Teams working in that room have space allocated to the team, but desks aren’t individually allocated; CSRs are not provided headphones (which are also difficult for an individual person to acquire, this would be a rant in its own right) and usually have to use a computer at the same time, so they often work with the pickup rather than the handset. Our team was there as well. The room has enough capacity for about 300 people; the desks are about school-desk sized; the chairs aren’t more uncomfortable because then they would stop being chairs. We’d be working there, writing documents in a foreign language, programming, designing a super-complex database, and the 150 or so CSRs would be yelling into their phones, each of them trying to speak louder than her neighbor. When you call those same CSRs (yeah, I’m a customer of that company too) you can tell you’ve reached that room all right… you can hear several voices through the phones.
That room’s nickname is known throughout the company (and it’s one of the biggest companies in Spain), the lousy working conditions are unbelievable. I’ve been in factory production areas and car shops which were nowhere near as noisy.
I got moved a couple of years ago to an office that’s less than half the size of my old one, but as I have said often to the Powers That Be, I am extraordinarily grateful to have a door and a window, so the loss of storage and in-office meeting space is worth the trade-off. I have never worked in a cube farm, and I don’t think it would like it very much. I have worked in a windowless office. I did not find it all that onerous. But the privacy that a door affords is really important to me!
I think I can work anywhere relatively quiet. I find some noises much more tolerable than others. Hissing and clanging radiators are fine. Whistling idiots, pen clickers, etc, intolerable. I do want temperature control, good light and fresh air.
When my son the architect was in school, we visited the University of Cincinnati’s new arts building. My inside the box thinking about walls that are vertical, meet at right angles, horizontal floors was out of place. It sunk in to me that engineers can do good work in ugly boxes, but artists will struggle.
We’re semi-open plan now. We have square 4 desk bays with each desk facing into a corner of the square. There is a row of 5 bays. I’m on the outside of the end of the row so I have no immediate neighbours. The partitions between bays are about 4 feet of solid partition with another foot of glass above that. Everyone can see a window.
This is not too bad of a layout but I’d prefer individual cubes with better sound absorption.
I’ve visited some of our customers (big banks in the City of London and the UK’s biggest retailer) and the conditions are hellish. Rows of desks crammed as close together as possible and no partitions between you and the person sitting opposite.
The two worst places I ever worked:
the first was in a small suite of rooms in an older section of a building a few blocks away from “prime” real estate. I was in a roomful of other developers, we all had tables against the wall, and the central part of the room contained a table with a printer. We were not networked; all our computers were connected to that printer via cables - which we had to step over as we came and went. I don’t recall whether we all had phones (this was pre cell phone).
We came and went through an alleyway (as doing so saved a block or more walk), stepping over dead rats and used condoms and other drug parapernalia (safe enough during the day but we did NOT leave the building alone when we worked late).
The second (and far worse) was when we worked in a sub-basement. We had movable cubicle walls. We used to scavenge office furniture from the hallway, as surplus stuff was often stored there prior to being sold / discarded. The space was oddly-shaped and there was one spot where we had to turn sideways to get past the edge of the cubicle wall. The space itself was otherwise standard cubicle-farm adequate but we walked down an unfinished concrete-floored hallway, past a door on the other side that said “Floor contaminated by PCBs, wear protective shoe coverings”. There was construction going on in a room down the hall which kicked up so much dust that by the end of every work-week, my asthma was flaring big time. I put in a standalone HEPA filter in my cubicle (set on a scavenged table); the new cubicle wall was one color below the HELPA outflow and a much darker color (with a very obvious demarcation point) above it. I touched the demarcation line once and my fingers came off covered with greasy black stuff. At least the asthma got better when the construction stopped.
I was pregnant while we worked there and have often wondered whether it contributed to Dweezil’s autism.
I currently work in small cubes, but we’re near customer support (and the fucking televisions that cannot be turned off) so it’s very noisy. Noise cancelling headphones and music is not enough to drown out the woman behind me who is on the phone all day.
We’re about to be moved to an office where the cubes are hip-high and even smaller than the ones we’re in now. I’m looking for a new job because I hate being in the low-walled cubes. Like many engineers, I’m an introvert and putting me in an environment where I feel like I’m in a crowd makes me uncomfortable.
It matters. I work in a call center and I wish our cube walls were a couple feet higher. They’re a little less than 5 feet tall, and everyone can see everyone else when they stand up (although I’m grateful that they cover us up while sitting). There’s also a lot of people who alternate between sitting and standing to take calls (our desks are very height-adjustable), and the people who stand up tend to make the place much louder. Our cube walls are also carpeted, but they still let through a lot of sound. There’s a HUGE difference when taking calls at our peak busy time vs. later in the evening. It also doesn’t help that the row of new hires sits directly behind me, and they never fucking shut up during the between-call downtime. It’s bothersome because the more-senior employees all around them (like me) are doing paper-entry of claims during downtime, whereas they sit in auto-in all night. And when there are no calls, there’s nothing for them to do. I find it really hard to concentrate when a bunch of 19-year-olds are squawking about pop culture 10 feet away.
But noise aside, I think my primary problem with the cube farm concept is people sneaking up from behind and looking at my computer screen. I would love to have an office, if only so I could turn my computer to face the door and see anyone before they see me. I hate when people look over my shoulder!
<whew> glad I’m not alone in my desire for some basic human dignity in my workplace! For me, I think the minimum ante is a door, a window, and a desk that allows me to sit in a position where my back doesn’t face the door.
What really sucks is that during the interview process it’s pretty uncommon to get a tour of where you’re going to be working if you get the job. I had this fantasy of interviewing for a job at the place I describe in the OP, getting it, coming in on the first day and having them give me one of those carrels. Unless I was desperate for the job, I honestly think I’d just turn to the boss and say “No way. If this is it, I quit.”
Of course, in that place, even the boss had a low-walled cubicle. Add in that everyone I spoke to who worked there had an hour+ commute, and once they were in the office for the day due it was very hard to leave (long involved story here, but due to some weird situations leaving the office and coming back was a minimum of a a 15 minute trip each way, making it hard to bop out at lunch or anything like that), it was just horrendous. I know I’ve got it good, working from home, but sometimes it takes an experience like this to realize just how good I have it. If I’m unhappy with my office, I just change it. If I don’t like the hours I work, I can change them, too. Want to take a break at lunch? No problem. And no hour-long commute, ever.
I’ve worked in just about all of the above-mentioned scenarios. Some were indeed hellish. The worst was in a room full of people such that whenever anyone walked by me, they bumped me. And a lot of people walked by me. I got bumped about once every two minutes for about three months.
For eight years I shared an office with someone who was pretty quiet and kept to herself, and we had a window. I’ve spent the last year downstairs in my own office. It’s big, I have a big important looking desk, and a door that closes, but no windows. I like it but I should really put some stuff on the walls, maybe get a plant or mini zen garden.
Funny, I was never asked what color I wanted it painted. But the girls across the hall were asked. They wanted pink, but instead got Pepto Bismol. They claim to like it.
The cube-farm aspect of my workplace was no problem until this new department… appeared in it. And now it’s all the time with the blow by blows of every fucking moment of the world’s shittiest TV shows, plus smelly food. Arrrrgh! It was fine until then - of course I’d PREFER a door, yeah, but it wasn’t awful.
What I just don’t get are people who don’t personalize their spaces at all, especially if they have separate offices. I wouldn’t be able to stand an office with nothing on the walls but paint and one generic piece of framed corporate art.
To me the “standard” office environment is a cubicle farm (usually 1/2 or 3/4 height), in an office park with windows, typically with views of the parking lot or other buildings in the office park.
Of course, since I’ve mostly worked in Manhattan over the past decade where commercial real estate space is at a premium, that’s actually pretty nice.
At the startup where I work now (it’s technically grown beyond “startup” but whatever, our office still sucks donkey dick), I was was able to move to the “corner office” since our SVP of Marketing quit. By “corner” I mean wedged into the corner between the outer wall and the conference room and by “office” I mean the same shitty Ikea tables everyone in the office works off of.
Best office had to be when I worked for a consulting firm in the World Financial Center across from the World Trade Center. We didn’t have permenent spots though. You sign into a “hotelling” workstation ranging from a glass enclosure big enough for a small desk to small private offices to “team rooms” that fit about 6 people.
My boss once went to a meeting where the client just happened to share office space with a competitor. We now refer to that company as a gold farm, because it was a bunch of Asian programmers cramped together sharing desks while the owner’s desk was turned to face them.
I’m going to be moving back to a 4 programmers to a room concept soon, but I don’t mind that so much, as long as no one can see anyone else’s monitor. The big problem will be getting rid of all this crap I’ve accumulated in my office!
Nope, you’re not the only one, and I would not look at you as if you’ve grown any cranial appendages at all. I spend more time (awake) at work than I do anywhere else. Why WOULDN’T I want that time to not suck? (Too hot/cold/noisy/stinky etc.)
I rather liked working in a big open space with tons of light and big desks versus a tiny private office with a door and no window.
I will say that temperature matters. I had a long internship in a place with 3 menopausal women. The place was set at 62 degrees and I wore (business casual) wool sweaters and thick corduroy pants to work every day. God help me if I parked more than a block away and it was already 80 degrees outside before I made it to the door :smack:.
I had a boss whose office was carved out of the middle of a large space that somehow had competing air vents or something but effectively his office was always in the high 50’s. He’d wear button downs and sweaters but I nearly died waiting for him in that hell hole for 10 minutes one day.
Absolutely. But what I get most often is too hot instead of too cold. And this seems to be the worst time of year for it, apparently. The environmental controls are in someone else’s office, so I have little control over it. I had to buy a kind of expensive fan last year.
A lot. I get depressed when I have to spend time in schools or office buildings. Sterile hallways, ill-lit low-ceiling-ed rooms and cubicles are what hell must be like. I chose my current job primarily for the enviroment - it’s very roomy, the layout is comfortable, it’s well-decorated and has better lighting than similar establishments. I used to like shopping there for that reason and I enjoy working here.
Uncomfortable temperatures, bad smells (from people, food or other things), annoying noises, (like other people’s music), cigarette smoke being blown on me (it’s happened), and working in close quarters, especially when sitting down/having people always over your shoulder, are also very hard for me to deal with. I had an office job for 2 years, never again.