Billosaur's Journal: Pet Peeve #3: The Cubicle

If you work in IT, Marketing, Sales, just about any industry today, you work in a cubicle. I won't go into my usual harangue about them, because they are now ubiquitous and not liable to be replaced anytime soon. They allow employers to pack larger numbers of workers into smaller areas, and thereby save a little money on office space. And if you believe the economists, productivity has gone up, though I hardly believe that has anything to do with the fact that we sit only three feet from our co-workers.

What gets me is how the profusion of cubicles has caused the blending of what used to be very disparate parts of companies to be melded together. For example, I, a web developer/engineer, am seated next to a large conference room which is heavily trafficked. My floor holds not only my development group, but the server folks, Intranet folks, sales people, media people, and higher ups. I am surrounded by a sea of non-technical people. And that's not necessarily bad, except that the non-tech folks aren't the most curteous lot sometimes.

As I said, I sit not five feet from a conference room -- at least three times a week I'm subjected to the hoopla surrounding some conference call, where people file in, punch their numbers into the phone, and sit yelling into the phone thinking that the people on the other end can't hear them. Invariably, they leave the door open for a period of minutes, allowing the cacophony to drown me, making coding impossible. Sometimes after a meeting they hold little confabs not two feet from me.

And then the main entrance to the floor is not 20 feet away, and invariably the receptionist is not there and someone forgets their security badge and just has to get in, which leads to repeated tapping on the glass with whatever will make the most noise. We also have media types here, and sometimes they shoot bits of footage in the reception area or the hallway. It gets like Grand Central Station around here (which is ironic given my proximity to Grand Central Station).

The non-tech folks don't have the courtesy to realize that we tech folks have work to do, work which is somewhat important to them, for without our maintaining the website and tracking metrics, they're jobs might up and disappear. I know it can't be perfect, but just once I wish they'd see me sitting here typing away and show me a little common courtesy.

The price of real estate.

[skoaldipper]

I feel your pain. Truly I do. When I was developing software for Insurance companies some fifteen years ago, I was stuck in a four way partitioned cube. And, of course, my cube just so happened to be 7 feet away from the bathrooms. You want to know what distraction is? I had my back turned to the door to give people some semblance of privacy. Well, it didn't matter. Normally a minute or so after I heard a door latch close, I'd catch a good whiff of their breakfast or lunch. Plus, the breakroom was an

Better cubes than...

[Red Flayer]

Open floor plans with desks. I consulted for a company where over 20 employees sat in a large room at desks without partitions... a real nightmare for gettign work done.

Interestingly, the inventor of the cubicle partition has expressed regret that he ever invented them.

With link this time :)

[Red Flayer]

Cubicle inventor expresses regret [cnn.com].

Now that I think about it, this might have even been an article featured on slashdot.