Cubicles got so much hate because they were worse than private offices that came before them. Now open floor plans are getting hate because they’re worse than cubicles so rose-colored glasses makes cubicles the nostalgic dream.

I don't think there was ever a time where every office worker had their own office. Only the big boss got their own office and everyone else had desks in a large room. The open floor plan we have now is pretty typical of what they used to look like.

Here's a good example:

https://www.officemuseum.com/1935_Auditor_of_Overcharge_Clai...

More pictures:

https://www.officemuseum.com/photo_gallery_1930s_1940s.htm

There are plenty of places where offices were the norm some years ago. When I worked in Germany the standard was either single Offices or team offices With max 5 people. In the US IBM also had offices when I contracted there. Microsoft always talked about their offices as important. Developers sitting elbow to elbow in a room with dozens of people is a fairly recent development from what I have seen. The need for headsets to get some quiet also seems fairly new.

That's interesting, but I'm unsure how much we can generalize from some photos. For example, I wonder how much "photogenic bias" [0] and survivorship bias exist in such photographic evidence. How many photographers of the time would take a picture of a hallway of private offices? And what editor would keep such photographs for posterity?

[0] There's probably a better term for this...

You're probably looking for "selection bias" in some sense, where the photos exist but they aren't being looked for so they aren't found.

THere are a bunch of places where 2 to 3 pps are in the office. I never accepted a job that didn't involve me having an office like that.

Office pictures from the Great Depression are not very convincing ;-)

I use to hate cubicles, but that was until I discovered open workspaces. For the past ten years, I've been in open workspace hell at 5 different jobs/contracts. I fucking miss the cubicle!

I've been living in cities and I think that is a big factor. Real estate is expensive. But make no mistake, open workspaces are miserable places. Cubicles still suck, but they're a massive step up from open floor plans.

I think it depends on the nature of your job. If you regularly need to interact verbally with colleagues, cubes are kind of a pain.

I forget where I saw this but there was a company that had set up what were basically "team offices" so teams that worked closely together each had their own closed room where they worked, so they could collaborate in their own manner.

Quiet when they needed it, loud when they needed it, and on their own schedule.

That seems like a good middle.

I had a setup like this. The IT Office which was its own room, then had 4 of those L cubicles in it.

If you're reading this and you have this setup - don't take the bait to move to the newly remodeled building - it's a trap!

Having worked in one of these, we found those sorts of "team offices" hurt collaboration and innovation even more than open floor plans. Unless the company is pretty small, the random conversations between people from different teams is often the key to innovation and getting problems solved early. A team room means that to ask a co-worker on another team a simple question or to just see what they are working on becomes a big deal because you are now entering that other team's space and interrupting a dozen people. Unless you really know the other person well, we found people just are hesitant to do it.

In big companies, there usually isn't a problem with communicating within a team - the problems occur when teams aren't communicating with people in other teams. These team rooms ruin any informal inter-team collaboration and communication.

My past office was just like that. 10-20 people per room, but usually less than that because people worked from home. Sometimes more than one team per room, because there where smaller teams. My room had 3 teams but we worked in a similar area, so we could bounce ideas with other team members.

It's not a good middle, it's the best possible way to work.

I had something vaguely similar at an internship. Each team was in a separate room for security reasons (aerospace firm), so the co. was all groups of 6-10 people in little open-plan offices. I thought that was nice and quiet.

Team offices are the best in my view. You actually can collaborate there without bothering other people.

In the small sample size of my jobs, cubicles are getting much shorter.

In my pre 2010 job, the walls of the cube I had were quite tall and gave reasonable privacy. In my 2016 job, they were quite short for "enhanced collaboration". I didn't really feel "safe" in my short cube, for lack of a better word.

the feeling "safe" is a good way to put it, actually.

If you feel "safe" in that manner, it increases your focus, and thus productivity.

The cubes we had at Intel were fantastic - they were super tall.

The cubes we had at Lockheed were great because they were super big.

I've hated every "open office" layout I have ever had.

I especially liked having a shared office though, sitting back-to-back in a single office, with a door - What I liked about it was that my office mate and I both liked to work with the light off, and just let the natural light from the window through (floor to ceiling window)

When you have some sense of self-privacy, and ability to block people out, your productivity is higher.

The reason why the "open office" concept was pushed, is all about cost.

Its cheaper to give people a slot at the trough, as opposed to building them an office or cube.

(Source: Former Designer and implementation builder at some of the largest open-office-concept companies you have all heard of)

>I'm surprised cubicles get so much hate.

cubicles were a step down from individual offices, and was the manifestation of commoditization of the software engineering. The transition from cubicles to open offices was the part of that process going even further. Basically blue collar workers of 196x on a large factory floor.

One would think that we've reached the peak of bad offices ... Well, i think some form of vertically stacked option is coming in the mid-term. In the short-term i think the next thing is the "cloud" style approach where no office desk is assigned permanently and coming into office you'd have to [find and]schedule a desk for yourself. That would allow to cut office space even more.

Some companies are already doing the 'hot desking' thing.

In ~2017 I did a contract with Ericsson, in their offices they had no assigned desks. Some days you'd show up in the morning and find another team had moved into your space, claiming that some other team had taken theirs. In those days we became desk refugees, wandering halls to find/take a space large enough for the team.

Mine has been hot-desking since we moved offices in 2013. There's general areas each department is supposed to stick to, but no enforcement - the groups are constantly encroaching on and intermingling with the neighboring ones.

The next stage, that we reached around 2016/2017, is "we're running out of seats; everyone should work from home one day a week to alleviate the problem". Good when you're at home, but the rest of the week becomes even more chaotic because you can't predict what the available seats will be like day-to-day.

> Well, i think some form of vertically stacked option is coming in the mid-term.

I'm fine with this. I'm surprised that airline seat manufacturers don't make versions for office use -- business class seats are much nicer than any open plan desk I've ever sat at. You are fully surrounded on all sides, your chair can turn into a bed, and inside an office you can probably stack them. Getting a couple of 30" monitors in there that are infinitely adjustable would be a challenge, and cleaning it sounds like a pain in the ass... but I'm sure these issues could be resolved if there is money in doing it.

I think people like open-plan offices because they're easy. You move into the space, have IKEA deliver a bunch of tables, and you're set up. It's cheap and it's easy.

Its called hotdesking and there are definitely some startups selling solutions to organize this

I got to witness it first hand in a fairly large financial organization. It is first come, first served - i.e. early birds get nicer window seats and if you come late there is a chance you actually won't have a desk. If someone was eating at their desk yesterday you may get grimy, smelly keyboard and spots on the screen from them showing something on the monitor with dirty hands.

After a while you get to know that this spot - letter "E" and "Backspace" doesn't work, that spot - mouse right click doesn't work, third spot - second monitor flashes every 10min...

And then there is this constant "I don't belong here" feeling. Sure it is more "efficient" from the space and hardware utilization perspective. For call centers - I don't mind the setup, but good luck to you if you are planning to build software in such environment.

Good lord, does there have to be a startup for everything? Enter office. See empty desk. Sit at desk. Work. Done.

The solutions are more along letting you check in/check out so others can find where you are in a given day.

So it's finger?

> vertically stacked option

Bunk-bed desks.

Coffin hotel offices.

Give me a decent size office over that any day.

I don't think most tech workers have really had a proper office.

The alternative isn’t open plan but an office with window and daylight. Cubicles are a little better than open plan but in the end they are still crap.