I don’t know what will have been your company’s criterion, but in companies in which I’ve been part of similar decisions two big criteria were who was considered most likely to report results accurately and best able to recover in case things went real bad.
Doored two-person office with a large window and a glass wall to the corridor. I like it a lot.
my company just announced a plan to completely re-imagine the campus, which means most existing buildings will be torn down and new, modern ones built.
I’m pretty excited. the current facilities are woefully inadequate for what we do in 2016.
“Officles” sounds like a poorly conceived knock-off Popcicle product, or else something a coleorectal surgeon would shove up your ass to remove nodules from your intestional wall.
Reminds me of when I saw Val Kilmer on a film site yelling at some unfortunate young production assistant: “I’m not going to act with a ****ing parrot, it’s not in my ****ing contract, and I’m not going to do it, you ****ing ****!” As much of an asshole as he was there, he kind of had a point.
Stranger
Change “intestinal” to “internal” and you’ve pretty well got it.
Except for the 2 times I was in an open-office mess, I was a cubicle dweller for 26 years. Sometimes I was alone, but I’ve had to share with as many as 3 others, depending upon which stage of “reorganization” was going on. Some had windows, some didn’t.
In my first 3 post-retirement jobs, I had cubicles - one was all of 20 sq ft! I had space for my chair, and everything else was modular and built-in. Thankfully, that was just a 6-month temp gig. Four weeks ago, I started in this job, and for the first time, I’m in a real office with a door and everything! I’m sharing, but next week, the boss is moving into this office, and I’ll be alone in the one next door. It’s a 2-person office, so I guess the next new hire will be moved in there.
Anyway, I’m excited! My own office!! And it only took 62 years! 
I think you’re not supposed to count unpaid age-dependent positions such as “baby” and “student”.
My office as a baby was pretty sweet. Big windows, comfy surroundings and a nice young lady who’d bring me a drink any time I yelled for her.
Being Aspergers, I always hated it when anything was changed. It really threw me off when they replaced the phone, which I thought I knew how to use, with one that had a 150-page operating manual.
After years of working in cube farms, I finally have my own office with a window. I love it.
Privacy is super important to me. I don’t think I could adjust to a workspace that was completely out in the open with no walls whatsoever. It would be a factor in my decision if I was ever offered another job.
I’ve almost always been in a cube farm. The current location has 4-foot high walls and an L-shaped desk. I’ve learned to ignore noise around me, so it’s acceptable. The only thing I love about it is the small coat closet/locket that’s next to my drawers. I have two jackets and a few cardigans in there, along with my winter coat during that season. It’s nice to not have to throw those on the desk or drape them over the chair.
The thing I hate the most about the office environment is the over-bright flourescent lights. I’ve learned to ignore it for the most part, but I don’t know why someone who works on computers all day long needs her desk lit up like she’s doing surgery. But that’s just me. I like bright light as long as it’s natural sunlight.
Ha… I worked at a place a couple years ago, where we moved offices because we needed to expand and upgrade our space. (The company was growing.) We moved from people shoved in cubicles and 4 to an office and spilling over into conference rooms, to a large open-plan space.
At first it was great. The company owner at least had the sense to put sales, who are on the phone all day long, waaaaay at the other end of this enormous space, with the kitchen and conference rooms in between. Their sound couldn’t carry that far; and we still had great airflow, great natural light, and everyone could see out the wall of tall windows. No more depressing, claustrophobic identical grey cubes under fluorescent lighting. It was such a relief from your standard rabbit-warren cubeland corporate office. You actually felt like you could breathe in the space.
Where it all fell down, of course, was the owner’s decision that we could no longer use headphones. The reason for this was listed explicitly, in the brand-spankin-new employee manual, as she wanted us to be able to eavesdrop on each others’ phone calls in case we might “learn something.” No shit. Of course, this was a disaster, because designers need to focus on their work, not listen to one side of someone else’s phone call. (Seriously, were we all supposed to stop working every time someone answered a call?) So we’d get repeatedly distracted by calls that had nothing to do with us, and we ended up at the mercy of one of the supervisors and her taste in music. (Let’s just say she likes the Spice Girls WAY more than I do.)
It could have been a great change, but the owner was a short-sighted idiot. (This was also the company that asked me to convert from freelance to permanent – for a $10K pay cut, no other benefits, and longer hours which I wouldn’t be compensated for since I’d be switching from hourly to salary. And when I pointed out that this wasn’t actually an incentive to change our current arrangement, and attempted to negotiate like grown-ups do, the workload suddenly “slowed down” and they didn’t need me anymore. Hrm… :dubious: )
Oh dear… I just looked them up on Glassdoor, and they have an average 1.3 star rating. I guess that office move really was the beginning of the end.
All my employees work remotely and my office is wherever I happen to be, usually at my desk in my home office which is an entire finished basement.
I work in a place with offices around the perimeter (for the senior executives), and then a combination of “officles” and cubicles in the middle. Previously, I had worked only in actual offices, so I’m not a big fan of this environment since it makes for a less quiet workspace.
However, what I love about this environment is that management has always accommodated me however they could. When I didn’t like sitting near two snarky women who gossiped a lot, I was allowed to move my desk to any space in the entire office suite, to be as far away from them as I wanted.
When the company was hiring a new person, and wanted to stick her in my seat, they let me choose where I moved to. Since the company was in the process of downsizing, we had an entire office suite that was almost completely unoccupied. The last few people working out of that suite left the company or moved offices, and for about half a year, I had an entire office suite all to myself! (Talk about a quiet and private work environment – that was amazing!)
Then the company downsized to the point where they wanted to move an entire project team into the office suite, so they made me move. Since my project team all sat along one hallway, it was obvious which seat would be logical to assign to me, but rather than assign it, I was given my choice of moving to any of the available desks.
Oh, one more story of accommodating: the seat I ended up picking had a missing wall, which made it less private than the others. And the people I worked with figured out a way to move some office cabinets where the wall should have been, to give me more privacy.
And gosh, I didn’t even realize until I wrote out this post how amazing it is that my company has tried so hard to accommodate my desire for privacy and quiet, even within the confines of a cubicle-based system. I feel incredibly grateful.
For nearly 20 years I had a private office with a door I could close. For about the first 10 years I had a window, but we moved into a building with fewer window offices.
In January, we were moved into an open office environment surrounded by surveillance cameras and glass-cage meeting rooms. We have no visual or auditory privacy and little room for stuff.
It looks like something you might see on Star Trek but I’m absolutely miserable. People interact less, they move around less, and it’s awkward to have personal conversations with say doctors or spouses.
My office is a 2013 Ford Explorer, which thankfully is both assigned to me and take-home. It’s larger than much of the rest of the fleet, and I have modified it with useful gear to get the job done.
Companies in my industry go through cycles regarding allowing take home trucks. We have successfully argued that it’s a force multiplier, allowing our smaller staff the ability to compete against larger, better equipped stations.
Inside the station everything is hot swap for photo staff, we’re issued our own laptops and work wherever we find open space. I’m only in house about 1 day a week on average so that’s no big deal.
I do have an office but it’s really just a storage room with a desk and chair. I don’t spend much time there, I’m much more of a field worker.
No complaints.
I’ve had the occasion of having various different types of environments, everything from a desk space that’s not a whole lot wider than I am, shared cubicles, small cubicles, large cubicles, cubicle with a door, an office, working from home, and open concept. I think most of them have some benefits and some drawbacks and it depends on the type of work you do. For example, the open concept is awful for the type of work I do, since it leads to a lot of distraction for writing code and working on projects, but I imagine it could be good for highly collaborative types of work, especially if grouped in teams that work a lot and it can block out noise from other teams. Ditto with shared cubes, I’ve had a couple projects where I worked really closely with one other person and we got along well, so it was easy to just ask a question, but when we were working, we’d just leave each other alone. For me, the best situations I’ve had were a fairly isolated cube (akin to having an office with no door) and an office. In both cases, I could play music through my speakers, people left me alone, but I could easily work with other people when I needed to. But, obviously, for space reasons, that’s not practical.
It seems to me the best compromise I’ve seen is mid-sized cubes with a door. As an example, I had one that was about 6x6, tall enough to see over if I stood up (so maybe 5’ tall) so it blocked a lot of noise and I could close the door to block more and get people to largely leave me alone, but if I needed to collaborate I could just stand up or slide the door open. And these sorts of cubes aren’t any bigger or too much more expensive than other types, so I don’t see why they’re not more common.
And I love working from home, for the type of work I do, I can get WAY more done at home where I don’t get all the distractions and drive-bys and random conversations. The problem is, being in government contracting, they like having butts in seats and have lots of unnecessary meetings, so that’s not a permanent solution… yet. It seems to me that corporations trying to save money, especially on rent, would be finding ways to enable workers that reasonably can to work from home. Why not let workers work from home at least a couple days a week, letting the company save money on rental space and workstations and letting the employee save time and money on commuting, and then just provide some communal working spaces for when they are in the office. Schedule various teams to work from home or in the office on various days to take appropriate use of the space and make sure the people that need to meet are generally in or out at the same time, and chances are companies can cut the space they need by a significant chuck.
I have a few workplaces (I teach voice, and sing professionally for whoever will hire me), but my primary space (25 hours a week) is a very nice studio at the university. I do have a studio mate who uses the room one day a week, but other than that it’s mine. Lovely view of a church, with trees and other greenery. Also a Steinway. I’ve had some pretty wretched teaching spaces over the years (I taught in one of these for years), so I’m happy right now.
This is my view from my workplace on Tuesday evenings (and all week concert weeks). That’s cool, too.
My office setup is terrible. We’re a small consulting firm so we don’t really expect people to work in the office. Basically it’s just a windowless room with “touch-down” spots for about half a dozen workers, a single conference room (with a view of the neighboring building’s wall) and a single office.
My old company was like this.
I think I have it pretty good. I work in a small downtown Seattle satellite office. Its mostly shared offices around a common space. Due to a peculiarity of the layout I’m actually in a bigger office with three people. My desk is against the window and we’re high up in the building, giving me an unobstructed view of Mount Rainier over my monitors.
The mother ship down in California is mostly cubicles. They weren’t terrible, but I prefer the current setup.
It is conceivable that they will turn this into an open space to fit in more people. That wouldn’t make me happy, but probably wouldn’t be a huge deal. A far worse change for me would be moving out of downtown Seattle, messing with my current efficient express bus commute.