Have an office now, but when I was a newspaper reporter, it was one big room, with a bunch of desks, phones, and typewriters.
Also very crowded, in the sense that when I was going to push my chair back and get up, I warned the guy behind me, and vice versa, because if we both pushed our chairs back at the same time, we’d collide.
I was lucky in that my desk faced a window. Some people faced…other people. That would have been very distracting.
It was hard, at first, to call someone up and do a phone interview with my coworkers chatting, singing along with Thin Lizzy on their Walkmans, throwing wadded-up papers, and clacking away on their Selectrics. Once I became a managing editor I got my own office, and it was a real perq.
Guess I’m the only one who likes open office? Not sure if I saw another person say they liked it yet.
My company doesn’t much believe in cubes. I sit at an L-shaped desk next to other L-shaped desks, near 6 other people including my boss. Our jobs are really easy so “quiet” isn’t needed. The open design lets us socialize and freely ask questions/for help/etc all day. If I was alone doing my job in a cube I’d HATE work a lot more than I do now, I’d be very bored and spend a lot more time slacking off (and I already spend plenty even with my boss 6 feet away).
Also helps I sit directly in front of a huge wall of windows looking outside. And that I like my coworkers and my boss most of the time.
I am sure once my career progresses and I’m past the entry-level corporate position I will change my mind (when I have actual work to do) but for now I dig the social and collaborative atmosphere my job has, at least in my team’s corner of the building.
Boy, I’ll say it does. People come by and talk to my neighbors all day long. 3? 4 cubicles away? Not to worry. I can hear every word of your conversation as I try to work. Clear across the room? No problem! I can hear that too, including that conference call you have on speaker. And if you’re walking along the corridor and see someone you need to talk with 60 feet away, there’s no need to wander over and talk to them – just shout!
But it must be a good thing, for upper management, who all sit in private enclosed offices with doors in a separate part of the building and have to deal with none of this shit, seem to like it.
ETA: No, this isn’t a dig on you. It’s just an opening for a rant.
Well with open plan I’m able to look about me and see actual human beings, smiling or scowling or concentrating. I can turn and say “hey Nicky, have you done that thing yet?” We can throw stress balls at each other. We see each other come and go, and say good morning or good evening, or I can stand up and say “hey I’m going down town at lunchtime - anyone want to come for a walk?” People wandering into the room get greeted by everyone, and we get to exchange pleasantries and information. We can convene spontaneous informal meetings just by turning our chairs. Our brainstorms can be performed while someone’s sitting at their desk doing something really important, but still participating. By informalising the space, we make the informalities during our working day easier more integrated into our work, and therefore they don’t last as long. We don’t have to stop what we’re doing and wander into someone’s cube or convene round a water cooler to take a breather. We therefore work more efficiently. Also, some of the women are great to look at.
For me, the cube farm was a way of packing more people into the space, like with cattle stalls - my experience with open plan is that each person gets a lot more desk space, as well as natural light coming in from the windows, a view that is more than a couple of feet across (and if you’re lucky, with where you’re sitting, you can see the sky). There was an impersonal claustrophobia. I never knew who was there and who wasn’t. We would therefore use the phone or email to communicate with people who were a few feet away. Convening a meeting at the last minute involved a hell of a lot of messing about trying to find people. There was the aforementioned illusion of privacy thing. And then the groundhogging phenomenon which, while amusing at first, I ultimately found quite tragic.
But clearly there are cultural expectations at work, judging from the number of people in this thread who say they’d hate open plan. It’s all I’ve ever known, and I prefer it - but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
**jjimm **said pretty much everything I would, it seems. To me, work isn’t just a place where I show up, do my allotted tasks and go home again to start my real life. I work with other human beings, there’s a social element and the idea of being closed off in a cube is horrible. I agree with the farm animal analogy - in a cube farm (and I don’t think that term is entirely accidental, either) I feel like a battery hen or a milking cow - there to perform a specific function for x hours a day to the benefit of another.
Is it another European/non-European thing, as Nava suggests? What’s more common in non-US, non-European countries?
I can only speak about the places I worked in Hong Kong, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia in the 1990s - all open plan. But I was working in journalism/marketing/property/advertising, so other kinds of office-based companies may run things differently.
With a cube, I can do all that if I like, and also refrain if I choose (and let me tell you, anyone who ever threw a stress ball at me would choke to death on it). Ultimately, it’s an office, not a playground, and I"m there to work, which I personally find it difficult to do with that much distraction.
I’m sure open plan works fine for plenty of people, and probably better for certain industries, but both my personality and my work require quiet and privacy, and I find the idea of having none viscerally upsetting.
I’ve had all the possibilities. Started out with open floor plan. Ten of us to a room with low walls separating our group from other groups of ten. We all sat at drafting tables whether you were an engineer or a draftsman. We’d chat throughout the day about sports or tv or the hot legs you saw in the cafeteria at lunch. We’d shoot rubber bands at each other or over the wall at the other groups. Never thought about cubes because we never saw them. Only one phone in the group that sat on the boss’ desk. If you wanted to make a personal phone call, do it at the pay phone by the elevator. During break time, of course. We had one keyboard and monitor that hooked up to the mainframe and that was for about 40 people.
Then I went to another division that had private cubes with low walls. My own phone- yippee! No computer access at all, but later I got a PC with a monochrome monitor. About the only guy I really had to talk to daily was a low wall away and I could just hand him papers to have him do his thing.
Two divisions later and a new office cube with 8’ walls and a door. Cool, I could shut the door and pick my nose and fart or whatever. The others had 6’ walls but being the boss I had 8’. There was some degree of banter over the walls but for the most part the place is like a morgue. I liked the privacy but in a way miss the old open office with the rubber band fights and day long chatter.
With the retirement of a Major Dickhead whose position went unfilled, I got to move into his office. Full height walls and a door. Unfortunately, we have an open door policy and it’s normally open unless I’m on speakerphone for a conference call or one of my staff wants to close the door and bitch about their coworkers. It’s quite tomblike but I like it that way.
To sum up, open offices are great if you can chat and do your work at the same time. If you need more privacy and concentration, you can’t beat the closed room office. Cubes are a bit in the middle, it’s nice to work without eyes on you, and you can still chat to some extent.
I would hate an open office plan. As it is, I have a great corner cube with windows that open to the north and west. I share cube walls to two people and there are only 4 of us in about 1200 sq feet of space. That helps make it nice and quiet. If I need to talk to someone, I can be heard from my cube, but I generally just get up and talk to them. We all have extra chairs in our cubes for impromptu meetings and sharing of information.
Also, I tend to eat lunch in my cube (I have my own mini-fridge). I much prefer the privacy for that to.
In an open office, it just wouldn’t feel like my space. And it would be much harder to concentrate.
These two posts pretty much summarize everything I hate about open offices & cubes. I’m not at work to socialize. I don’t want to listen to your brainstorming. I don’t want to break my concentration to hear you invite me to go out to lunch or say hi or hear about your vacation. Work is a place where I show up to do my allotted tasks and then I go home to my real life (and that’s perfectly OK with me - work is work, home is home, I don’t need to mix the two.)
I can see how some jobs have much more of a social aspect to them than writing code, but for me - who is writing code all day - I can’t socialize while I work. I concentrate when I work. The best work I get done is when I’m on a roll for 4-6 hours at a time. Even my husband has learned not to come in my office when I’m working.
I just remembered - once a client sent us some promo photos of their business, and one of them was an overhead view of their giant cube farm. All I could think was why they’d want to present that image to the public.
I think we might be getting into personalities - my idea of hell is socializing all day, every day. Like Athena, I go to work to work. My preferred work style is to come out of my cube/office to take a break and interact with human beings, then go back in to get some work done.
Then you would have hated one particular environment that I worked in.
Like I mentioned before, one table comfortable for 6 people, but with 10 or 12 crammed in. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Nerf gun fights were not only common, but practically mandatory. I’d be trying to work, and little Nerf bullets would be hitting either me or my monitor. Most guys there thought it was great, but I guess I was the curmugeon telling them to get the hell off my lawn. And this was not in a spacious room. Things were very tight.
One afternoon the plan came to full fruition. Two guys were having a gun fight and a bullet hit someone’s soda can, which spilled onto his laptop and fried it. He lost a few days work because of that.
Pretty much all newsrooms are open plan - I think that’s pretty traditional. My first full-time job was as a newspaper reporter, and the only editorial person who had an office was the editor himself - the managing editor was out on the floor in a glass-enclosed cube, kind of like a zoo exhibit (and considering the person who had that job at the time, it was … rather appropriate).
I never minded it, but we fortunately were not overcrowded and really the only time we were required to be at our desks was the hour or so before deadline when we had to be instantly available to the editors if they needed us for something. Otherwise, we were pretty much free range. We had portable computers (TRS-80s, anyone?) that would allow us to transmit stories over phone lines. I probably only spent about half my day there, typically. Perhaps if I’d had a job that required me to be chained to my desk all day I would have felt differently about it.
My most hated office space was a tiny cubicle that had its door facing the mail boxes - traffic all day long, and because it was smaller than a standard cubicle, there was no door. This was a problem as part of my job required me to create usernames and passwords for incoming students and the only place my computer fit was with its screen facing the door. I had to jury-rig a curtain I could close over the door when needed. Thankfully I got moved as soon as new office space opened up and that cube was taken down.
I find it ironic that people talk about work being a place where they come in, perform a bunch of tasks, don’t interact with anyone and then complain about being treated like a drone or a farm animal.
That sounds like a place I worked in like ten years ago, Nerf guns and all.
Me too. I wonder if the people who love open office plans leave their doors open all the time at home, like Seinfeld. When I’m coding I don’t even look at my e-mail. There was an article in the Times a while back about how people who think they can multitask great really can’t.
