标签: cubicle

In a Washington Post article, Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace , the author explained how an ad agency moved her from a private office to an open space environment. She now sits at a table with 11 other writers. Every cough, sniffle, telephone call, and business or casual conversation interrupts a dozen workers. Open offices are hip, cool and modern. People lounge around on beanbag chairs. Bright colors and Warhol wall garnishes abound. The article states: “While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Furthermore, a sense of privacy boosts job performance, while the opposite can cause feelings of helplessness.” Engineering is an intensively creative enterprise. People need undistracted time to think, to focus, to mentally assemble a complex bit of code. The model falls apart after any interruption. In fact, interruptions are the biggest productivity killer for software engineers. Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister documented this well in their seminal Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams . They found it takes, on average, 15 minutes to assemble that mental model. Yet, the average engineer is interrupted every 11 minutes (Mark, Gonzalez, Harris, 2005, "No Task Left Behind?: Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems). Peopleware showed that eliminating these interruptions gives almost a 300% boost in software engineering productivity. Let’s see: a 3X productivity improvement for engineers, some of the most costly workers in an enterprise. Or, we can save a few bucks and crowd everyone together. So what happens? First cubicles pushed workers into prison-like cells. Then inmates were added; two, three, then four to a cube. Now those annoying walls go and everyone is crammed together in one big, unhappy room. That worker’s pungent perfume or the inevitable result of last night’s bean soup fills the room. Chatter is non-stop. You really want to tune out the discussion of Joe’s looming divorce, but it’s human nature to be curious, to listen closely for the juiciest gossip. Does that sound productive?   (In the too-good-to-be-true department, Thesaurus.com lists “cubicle” as a synonym for “cell.”) Facebook is seating 2800 engineers in what is called the world’s largest open space . A single room houses ten acres of bodies, computers, interruptions, discussions, bells ringing, phones tweeting, and, one supposes, constant Facebook updating. Maybe a little work gets done, too. In The Moral Life of Cubicles the author states that in 2000 the average office worker had 250 square feet of space. That was down to 190 five years later. Facebook’s 10 acres works out to 150 square feet per person, assuming there are no WCs, break rooms, or hallways. Extrapolating, there will be zero square feet per person in under 20 years. A 2011 study ( Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment Health ) showed that those sentenced to two-person cubicles have 50% more sick days than those in one-person offices. Open spaces increase that to 62%. The upside is that so many people are out sick that the noise level goes down, I suppose. Robert Propst invented the “action office,” the cubicle’s predecessor. Shortly before he died in 2000, he lashed out at cubes, calling them “monolithic insanity.” Do you work in a cube or open office? What’s your take on it?

A Washington Post article, Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace , tackles how the author’s ad agency moved her from a private office to an open space environment. She now sits at a table with 11 other writers. Every cough, sniffle, telephone call, and business or casual conversation interrupts a dozen workers. Open offices are hip, cool and modern. People lounge around on beanbag chairs. Bright colors and Warhol wall garnishes abound. The article states: “While employees feel like they’re part of a laid-back, innovative enterprise, the environment ultimately damages workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Furthermore, a sense of privacy boosts job performance, while the opposite can cause feelings of helplessness.” Engineering is an intensively creative enterprise. People need undistracted time to think, to focus, to mentally assemble a complex bit of code. The model falls apart after any interruption. In fact, interruptions are the biggest productivity killer for software engineers. Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister documented this well in their seminal Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams . They found it takes, on average, 15 minutes to assemble that mental model. Yet, the average engineer is interrupted every 11 minutes (Mark, Gonzalez, Harris, 2005, "No Task Left Behind?: Examining the Nature of Fragmented Work." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems). Peopleware showed that eliminating these interruptions gives almost a 300% boost in software engineering productivity. Let’s see: a 3X productivity improvement for engineers, some of the most costly workers in an enterprise. Or, we can save a few bucks and crowd everyone together. So what happens? First cubicles pushed workers into prison-like cells. Then inmates were added; two, three, then four to a cube. Now those annoying walls go and everyone is crammed together in one big, unhappy room. That worker’s pungent perfume or the inevitable result of last night’s bean soup fills the room. Chatter is non-stop. You really want to tune out the discussion of Joe’s looming divorce, but it’s human nature to be curious, to listen closely for the juiciest gossip. Does that sound productive?   (In the too-good-to-be-true department, Thesaurus.com lists “cubicle” as a synonym for “cell.”) Facebook is seating 2800 engineers in what is called the world’s largest open space . A single room houses ten acres of bodies, computers, interruptions, discussions, bells ringing, phones tweeting, and, one supposes, constant Facebook updating. Maybe a little work gets done, too. In The Moral Life of Cubicles the author states that in 2000 the average office worker had 250 square feet of space. That was down to 190 five years later. Facebook’s 10 acres works out to 150 square feet per person, assuming there are no WCs, break rooms, or hallways. Extrapolating, there will be zero square feet per person in under 20 years. A 2011 study ( Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment Health ) showed that those sentenced to two-person cubicles have 50% more sick days than those in one-person offices. Open spaces increase that to 62%. The upside is that so many people are out sick that the noise level goes down, I suppose. Robert Propst invented the “action office,” the cubicle’s predecessor. Shortly before he died in 2000, he lashed out at cubes, calling them “monolithic insanity.” Do you work in a cube or open office? What’s your take on it?

For my money the most important work on software productivity in the last 20 years is DeMarco and Lister's Peopleware . For a decade the authors conducted coding wars at a number of different companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems. The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.) the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by nearly a factor of 3. Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least six months. They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read "quiet") offices and phones with "off" switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money. Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 3x! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get essentially 3 of you. Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear showing how ineffective they are. It's bad enough that there's no door and no privacy. Worse is when we're subjected to the phone calls of all of our neighbors. We hear the whispered agony as the poor sod in the cube next door tries to work it out with his spouse. We try to focus on our work... but being human the pathos of the drama grabs our attention till we're straining to hear the latest development. Is this an efficient use of an expensive person's time? Later studies by other researchers found that after an interruption it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of "flow," that Spock-like trance where you're one with the computer. Yet the average developer gets interrupted every 11 minutes. Yet the cube police will rarely listen to data and reason. They've invested in the cubes, and they've made a decision, By God! The cubicles are here to stay! This is a case where we can only wage a defensive action. Educate your boss but resign yourself to failure. In the meantime, take some action to minimize the downside of the environment. Here are a few ideas: * Wear headphones and listen to music to drown out the divorce saga next door. * Turn the phone off. If it has no "off" switch, unplug the damn thing. In desperate situations attack the wire with a pair of wire cutters. Remember that a phone is a bell that anyone in the world can ring to bring you running. Conquer this madness for your most productive hours. * Know your most productive hours. I work best before lunch; that's when I schedule all of my creative work, all of the hard stuff. I leave the afternoons free for low-IQ activities like meetings, phone calls, and paperwork. * Disable the email. It's worse than the phone. Your two hundred closest friends who send the joke of the day are surely a delight, but if you respond to the email reader's "bing" you're little more than one of NASA's monkeys pressing a button to get a banana. * Put a curtain across the opening to simulate a poor man's door. Be sure others understand that when it's closed you are not willing to hear from anyone unless it's an emergency. The ultimate irony of cubicles is that shortly before he died in 2000, Robert Propst railed against cubes, calling them "monolithic insanity." ( Robert Propst invented the Action Office, which was eventually perverted into the cubicle .)

I would bet that the most significant work on software productivity in the last 20 years is Peopleware by DeMarco and Lister. For a decade they conducted coding wars at various companies, pitting teams against each other on a standard set of software problems.   The results showed that, using any measure of performance (speed, defects, etc.) the average of those in the 1st quartile outperformed the average in the 4th quartile by nearly a factor of 3.   Surprisingly, none of the factors you'd expect to matter correlated to the best and worst performers. Even experience mattered little, as long as the programmers had been working for at least six months.   They did find a very strong correlation between the office environment and team performance. Needless interruptions yielded poor performance. The best teams had private (read "quiet") offices and phones with "off" switches. Their study suggests that quiet time saves vast amounts of money.   Think about this. The almost minor tweak of getting some quiet time can, according to their data, multiply your productivity by 3x! That's an astonishing result. For the same salary your boss pays you now, he'd get essentially 3 of you.   Too many of us work in a sea of cubicles, despite the clear showing how ineffective they are. It's bad enough that there's no door and no privacy. Worse is when we're subjected to the phone calls of all of our neighbors.   We hear the whispered agony as the poor sod in the cube next door tries to work it out with his spouse. We try to focus on our work... but being human the pathos of the drama grabs our attention till we're straining to hear the latest development. Is this an efficient use of an expensive person's time?   Later studies by other researchers found that after an interruption it takes 15 minutes to get into a state of "flow," that Spock-like trance where you're one with the computer. Yet the average developer gets interrupted every 11 minutes.   Yet the cube police will rarely listen to data and reason. They've invested in the cubes, and they've made a decision, By God! The cubicles are here to stay!   This is a case where we can only wage a defensive action. Educate your boss but resign yourself to failure. In the meantime, take some action to minimize the downside of the environment. Here are a few ideas:   * Wear headphones and listen to music to drown out the divorce saga next door.   * Turn the phone off. If it has no "off" switch, unplug the damn thing. In desperate situations attack the wire with a pair of wire cutters. Remember that a phone is a bell that anyone in the world can ring to bring you running. Conquer this madness for your most productive hours.   * Know your most productive hours. I work best before lunch; that's when I schedule all of my creative work, all of the hard stuff. I leave the afternoons free for low-IQ activities like meetings, phone calls, and paperwork.   * Disable the email. It's worse than the phone. Your two hundred closest friends who send the joke of the day are surely a delight, but if you respond to the email reader's "bing" you're little more than one of NASA's monkeys pressing a button to get a banana.   * Put a curtain across the opening to simulate a poor man's door. Be sure others understand that when it's closed you are not willing to hear from anyone unless it's an emergency.   The ultimate irony of cubicles is that shortly before he died in 2000, Robert Propst railed against cubes, calling them "monolithic insanity." ( Robert Propst invented the Action Office, which was eventually perverted into the cubicle .)