Pretty sure it won’t be open office. Talked to someone who’s been part of the planning. They were working on the wall height and we won’t see over it. Something positive!
A decade ago when it was my first real job a cube was just a normal part of working; I guess I would be fine if I hadn’t been lucky getting an office. I’m really interested in how some of the others will take it. I mean dang, if you’d been there for 22 years would you be a bit more pissed?
Sidetrack: in the past few months, I’ve discovered that “ERP” is now a fairly commonly-used acronym in the business world. It always makes me grin, because it has a completely different definition in the world of role-playing games and MMOs, where it means (spoilered because it’s potentially NSFW):
Erotic Role-Playing
On one of the MMORPG forums I’m on, there’s a recurring meme in which someone will post an actual ad about business ERP jobs, with “How can I get this job???” 
Pro: Cubicles help with team collaboration. You can yell (or speak loudly) questions and answers to each other. You can overhear something and step in with an offer of help. There was another team on the other side of the cube wall from me and I would frequently get wind of things that would affect my team before we were officially informed.
I had a team member yell at me, shut off his computer, and storm out. My boss, who was in an office not three feet away, was unaware anything had happened until I went in and told her.
Con: Lack of privacy. When I had a team member want to talk to me about something sensitive, we had to grab an empty conference room. I had no office door to shut when I took a personal call and had to leave the building for “privacy.”
Yeah, they’re ugly and I wanted to hate them, but our art dept. was basically a five-armed monster that had to work together and make instant decisions, come up with instantly brilliant concepts (and make instant changes). Just raising your voice (“Janet, how do we show ‘timely responsiveness’ without being cliche?”) would save so much time …
And for me, I got so much psychological energy sucked out of me when I’d have to call a co-worker, get no answer, go knock on their office door, they’d stop what they were doing and take paperwork off a chair because they thought I’d sit down because they felt obligated to ask about my sick dog… all for a seven-word question.
So cubicles and quickie interactions, yay!
By contrast, some jobs require intense individual concentration. I’m a software engineer, and my specialty is troubleshooting. I figure out why software breaks in strange ways. I may be sitting quietly at my desk, staring at a screen (or even with my eyes shut), and be working furiously, holding a complex state machine in my head while trying to see why a couple of pieces of it are colliding every hundredth step. If someone comes up and asks me a question, or pops their head over the cubicle wall to make a joke, or starts yelling into a phone, I may lose the state in my head. It may take an hour or more of effort to get back to where I was. And cubes don’t offer a “Do Not Disturb” mode.
Internal chat software (for sensitive material) and Discord (for other interactions) are great for this kind of question. I use them to collaborate with other (equally grumpy and asocial) programmers all the time.
I’m all for in-person collaboration, especially in creative work. It can be fantastically effective and productive, and I do it when collaborating on writing games and other prose all the time…but that’s what conference rooms are for. (Except that in my last workplace, all the meeting rooms were permanently taken over by people desperately trying to find enough peace and quiet to get their solo work done.)
Open offices are the big new thing (that’s not new at all). They suck beyond comprehension if you have a job where you need to be able to actually concentrate like programming.
Cubes can be OK, but offices are still better.
At my one of my workplaces (with the cubicles), IT tried to get to use some kind of messaging program. Yeah, much more convenient waiting for your co-worker to notice your message an reply than taking three steps over to their cubicle. The really funny part was most of the IT staff (who where in the about 50’ away in the next room) stayed logged off for weeks a t time.
At my last workplace, we had an open office environment and the new guy would shout at manager who was 10 feet away. Thankfully, I left after he was there a few weeks, but everyone in the office was visibly and audibly irritated. This was a room full of accountants.
How about the worst of all worlds: hotelling?
I work for a large IT firm and all our locations are hotelled. Nobody has a permanent desk even if they work there full time. It’s a crapshoot as to whether you can even get a spot near your coworkers when you’re all in the office. If you’re there two days in a row… well, bring everything home with you anyway because you can’t get the same spot 2 days in a row.
Supposedly they have locking drawers in a central spot so you can leave your things overnight - but that means you have to pack everything up at the end of the day.
Don’t get me wrong: I understand the business reason for it. If you’re an organization whose employees usually work offsite (at a client or whatever), then it’s foolish to maintain a lot of underused office space. But for cryin’ out loud, have a provision for people who DO need to be in the office regularly.
Is this actually a thing? I’ve never been to or heard of an office that doesn’t allow headphones or earphones, and especially for the “you’re paid to work not listen to music” reason.
That sounds dreadful. I would probably be looking for another job.
I had an obnoxiously loud co-worker in another department next to my team. When she started going off you could see the mad scramble for our earbuds. My boss had a small speaker in her office to listen to music. I considered it like background noise, and when I was doing a deep dive into a project I grabbed my music. The only con was trying to get someone’s attention, but it was a good excuse to get out of the chair and go knock on their cube.
I absolutely dread the day I have to go back to a cubicle. I lucked out a ton and not only do I have my own office, but it’s rather large and my desk is in the back, which means I can listen to music quietly without headphones. I have large and annoyingly thin ears so headphones hurt after a while and are super uncomfortable…I regret having to go back to them…
It was bad when I had shift work and had to share a workstation with the people working first and second shift. But what you describe would be hell.
Man, I bet colds and flu would spread fast.
I used to work at a place that had a branch with open office. Going to that branch was the worst. I don’t know how people work like that. Anyway, yeah, there is nothing about a cubicle that is better than your own office.
We are moving to that setup in a few months. I work full-time in the office. I have a drawer full of tea and chocolate. I need a workstation with dedicated screens, I’m not going to be hanging out on the couch “collaborating”. (I do work with other people. Ideally, at one of our desks, with lots of screen real estate.)
Yes, I’m considering my options regarding not being here much longer. I understand that some groups have basically just camped out in cubes and said, “screw the hotel system, this is my disk”. If I can get away with that, I’ll probably stay. If I really can’t keep any personal stuff handy-by, I expect I’ll be looking at early retirement.
We do that. When I started I got a backpack - laptop, headset (no phones, everything goes over Skype), keyboard, mouse, adaptor, I threw in my own mousepad and notebook. I can get a locker if I want but they’re on the bottom floor. Permanent staff have lockers in their ‘zone’. Workstations have dual monitors. A lot of people just use their laptop screens. There aren’t even garbage cans.
There are a bunch of ‘huddle rooms’ with a desk and 4 chairs (still no garbage can) for face to face meetings.
I thought I’d hate it but it reallly doesn’t bother me much since I’m in the office two days a week at the most. If office-in-a-backpack means I can work from home, or anywhere, that works for me. Maybe I’d like it less if I had to go in every day.
People tend to sit in the same spots anyway. There’s chatter but I just tune it out. Sometimes I’ll put on my headphones but more often to perk me up.