The problem of the cubicle is the lack of privacy. Which is why workers always coveted the offices, with their fancy doors that could close.
The solution to the cubicle, which offered little privacy, seems to have been to just remove the tiny bit of privacy they did offer, and call it a “concept.”
Yeah you’ll get the “concept” of work from me tyvm.
It’s also not a coincidence that a cubicle is designed so your back is to the entrance, whereas most offices are set up so that the person sits behind a desk facing the door.
Power games via instincts. Entry in your view: you are in control. Entry in your back: boss is in control.
Work from home is the best, having a office with a door is second, but cube life wasn’t that bad, I had fabric walls I could pin stuff to, a little rear view mirror on my monitor, and my own set of file drawers that I didn’t have to share with anyone.
Back when I was in IT in a office during covid I flipped the desks around so it was facing out and could see people walk past.
I’ve never had a cubicle job, but my autistic brain thinks it’s great, it’s like one step below a dedicated office. I can’t think of any other way to give a bunch of people pseudo-privacy and a consistent space to keep their stuff.
Open workspaces just sound like a way to cheap out on furniture and remove any pretense of privacy.
I’ve had every type of desk situation - completely open with no barriers, small fabric barriers, and full cubicles. I’ve found that if you get along with your coworkers the open concept isn’t too bad. And if you hate your coworkers anything less than a closed off office isn’t going to help. In a cubicle people can still openly talk to you over the walls and people will pop up behind you at random while your working to ask you questions. My current boss does that and she’ll use the softest voice possible to say hello and then just stand there watching me until I notice.
I typically just want my back to a wall, maybe it’s some kind of lingering prey instinct, but even if people can talk over them I like having the wall.
if I must have a cubicle, I have a strong preference for walls I can see over OR walls no one can see over. I’ve had walls about 5ft tall, where my coworkers could stand a head above them but I couldn’t. That was unfair. They’d pop up on any side of my cubicle.
I’ve also had open concept. That was OK. I was doing QA for an agile dev team and it was nice to just turn to them and ask questions. We had small private rooms for phone calls, meditation, and migraines.
Yeah I used to think call center half cubes were bad (I missed the full cube days), then I got switched to an “open concept” office and I’m convinced I did maybe 1 week of full, real work in that office in a total of 5 years. Until lockdowns and suddenly everyone kept working, and even better than before. Obviously no lessons were learned from this.
First job was like this, one cubicle was the size of four of these and one person per corner with 2m space between each desk . Tons of plants all around, cube was next to a window. Temperature was constant, work was easy enough to slack off sometimes weeks at a time.
Privacy wasn’t the best, but no one in my 6 years working there could differentiate between me reading a book on the screen and actually working lol. Its just words on the screen, make it look like work and you can do everything. Boss even called me a model worker at a yearly review when I myself thought I might be pushing it too far. Seems I wasn’t slacking off nearly enough!
Anyway, I know this isn’t indicative of cubicles, but if you’re the right type of person, they can be a good place to work. If you can still find any.
I can’t say that these things were great, but at least they are better than the stupid countertops we have now. I’m so over hearing about how they promote collaboration. They don’t and collaboration is not needed nor desired 100% of the time. That’s the purpose of meetings and meeting rooms.
If they’re so fucking great, make the c-suite sit in them full time. No office, no escape to travel all over the place for no good reason. No drawers for anything. No protection from sound, everyone can see your monitors. Go ahead, COLLABORATE ALL YOU LIKE.
They hinder collaboration. Open plan means if I need to talk to someone real quick I can either disturb everyone around or pull them aside into a meeting room. A cubicle means I just walk to their cube and have a quick chat without fear of disturbing anyone else’s focus
One place I worked was so overcrowded and loud that everybody on my team was wearing headphones all day long, just to preserve their sanity.
The level of noise and the fact everybody wore headphones to overcome it meant that often the best way to chat with the person sitting within a metre of your desk was by text over signal / google messenger, etc.
That’s the purpose of meetings and meeting rooms.
We had meetings and meeting rooms, but we only went there for required meetings.
I think the kinds of things they were trying to make happen were those informal discussions you sometimes get. That was part of the purpose of having pool tables, ping pong, break rooms with snacks, etc. It was a place where people could bump into each-other without an agenda and talk about what they were interested in without sticking to an agenda.
But, they didn’t seem to realize that the physical space was much less than half the requirement. The other half is that people feel happy, safe, energized, confident, relaxed, optimistic, etc. If you’re stressed out all day because your workspace is way too crowded and lacks privacy, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re worried you’re going to be hit in the next round of layoffs, you’re not going to want to do that. If you’re getting stack ranked against your teammates and put in the lower half of the stack, you’re not going to have the confidence to bring up your ideas.
Yeah. Since we’ve got open office, we don’t need meetings anymore, right?
So glad I live in germany where the law mandates that every permanent office workplace needs to have access to sunlight
Me too the open room shit has got to go. Some people need private space to function.
Still can’t beat working from home in my pajamas.
I like to separate my work and living space.
I do not have the luxury of separate spaces.As long as you don’t have a shit commute, its alright. My last job after 5 years of fully remote ordered us to start commuting to an office the company didn’t even own when I joined.
When I joined the office was a 20 min bike ride away, they moved it to multiple hours of bus, ferry and train travel and then acted surprised when I handed my notice in later that week.
New role is 25 min bike ride and only the very last 200m or so of it is shared with cars, the rest is on a really nice bike route.
Same here with my commute.
Bus is about 25min
Bike can be done (depending on how much I follow traffic rules and traffic in general) in 15-20 minutes. (Also the bus is a hell hole during summer. Both in heat and smell)Ahh, those fun little games of how little will I respect traffic and traffic laws today!
During lockdowns I heard this from so many people. I can’t say I get it, because I just associate WFH with my work laptop and work notebook, and if I’ve got those tucked in a backpack well I’m no longer working.
Just a preventative mental health precaution
It also helps me to maintain my social skills so they wont completely deteriorating.
Keep in mind that everyones mind works differently.
I dislike homeoffice strongly. Too much potential distractions.
I like it as an option though. But I can’t imagine myself having to be home 5 days of the week dealing with my tickets alone.And sometimes a bit of company is nice :)
Everyone’s different like you say. I like company too but most of the time it’s distracting/unpleasant.
It was actually so great to be able to say to people during lockdowns “how you’re feeling right now is how I feel every single day of my working life.” Those lockdowns were some of the first times I actually got to enjoy working.
When you work at home you live at work.
You don’t need a separate room, just setup some boxes in a dedicated corner. You could even go out and get a coffee or something if you need a little extra to set yourself in work mode.
Imagine things being so bad we want what our parents thought was crap.
This is your reminder that in the 90s Homer Simpson and Al Bundy were considered absolute bottom of the barrel losers, and they both had stable jobs, owned their own homes, multiple cars, and raised multiple children on a single income.
They were not considered the bottom of the barrel losers. They were considered America’s middle class. Or working class depending on how you wanna say it. With Al being the high school football star who had peaked in high school fucking the cheerleader who ended up getting pregnant and here we are it’s just that story. But that’s not bottom of the barrel loser. That’s just a funny joke on what ends up happening to people that peak in high school. I don’t remember home ever being considered a bottom of the barrel loser. I think it Makes more sense saying he was considered extremely obese when now that’s not considered all that fat. Homer was a small business owner. He had a good job.
The ultra-wealthy hyperclass has been able to shift our focus away from taxing their wealth and make us point our fingers at each other, instead of look up and see the boot from below.
A tale as old as history itself.
They must love identity politics.
This is also a reminder that fictional characters should not be used to gauge metrics of real life.
No, I was there when the beasties were boyd. That was white man loser. Anyone with less was extremely unemployable; hardcore drug addict, very mentally impaired, etc. Used to be, you could just work at Burger King and easily have a couple of shit cars and a shit house after a few years. In the 50s you could get those at the very start of the shit job, and they were new. Then, after a few years you could buy a second property on a river or lake.
Again, white men only though.
I would actually kill for an office job after spending years working retail 10 hours a day no breaks by myself.
It’s true. It’s also true that for our ancestors who toiled in farm fields picking weeds by hand, or risked being mangled by machines in a factory, a cubicle would seem like absolute luxury.
But, comparing ourselves to previous generations of office workers, the only thing that seems similar to what “knowledge workers” have to deal with today are the typing pool / secretarial pool / steno pool from ye olde days:
Brakes are mandated by law
That doesn’t mean you get them. A “Law” without enforcement is just a written suggestion.
Yeah :(
Not in pennsylvania.
Jfc what are we doing
Suffering
I hate open workspaces so much I’ll actually decline a position over it.
It’s not some minor inconvenience. It’s my 2nd home for potentially the rest of my life. Give me my fucking privacy to work. It requires an extra foot of vertical cubicle space and if you can’t provide that you’re not the kind of organization I want to give the rest of my life to.
For me, it doesn’t matter the office plan as long as I’m not working for Private Equity owned retail for less than peanuts.
Yeah, until you get there, the grass is always greener.
I used to fantasize about my walmart stocking job while working at an open-office call center. Whos idea was it to have the person 4 people down from me perfectly audible IN A CALL CENTER
So lately our work has shrunk the cubicles to fit more people and the latest we measured we had a 5’x5’ cube with lower walls, the minimum required size for a individual goat pen.
We’re no longer cattle, we’re goats now but still just a cost account to be slaughtered.
So now we get the worst of both worlds where we’re given less space than a convicted criminal and we get to hear everything like an open layout.
I dunno, 100x better? I mean, maybe like 2.5x better. Let’s not get carried away. This still fucking sucks.
