The solution is not cubicles, or even closed offices. Just open offices with ~1/3 of the regular density of people per square metre would be good. It also gets you the promised "seamless collaboration" of open offices.
Smaller companies follow these trends because they think it will make them successful. It's like reading the latest article on "Ten morning routines of billionaires", following that, and believing that it will make you rich. It's the other way around.
I've been thinking that reverse engineering skills are much more useful than puzzle solving.
I had such a question at Google. I guessed what was the problem they were trying to solve as it was a classic leetcode question (linking nodes in a tree while traversing it). So while the format is a bit different than typical leetcode solving, I'd say it's still the same type of skills and preparation involved (at least in my case).
Also, the bit about puzzles, leetcode is somewhat of a myth, mostly perpetuated by salty candidates who couldn't pass tech interview loops, for whatever reason. Puzzles were explicitly banned at Meta and Google, when I worked there, and if a question is found on leetcode or a similar site (as they eventually do), they'd get banned too. The idea isn't to make candidates jump through a series of pointless hoops, but to concretely evaluate their coding and reasoning abilities. It's certainly not perfect, but it's a lot more BS proof that just having a chat or take home assignments. Also, needless to say, more senior candidates are expected to successfully grapple with harder problems.
Why?
At any rate, there's a chance the accusation was wrong, and if you make wrong accusations and the other person disputes it, it could lead to unnecessary legal proceedings. (libel, etc.)
PS: not saying the company policy by the GP is necessarily correct, just saying what lawyers and risk adverse bureaucrats might be thinking when they drafted it.
I have never worked in one so I am only imagining here, but I think I would prefer either of the two other options to cubicles.
I have worked in both, and an open plan is vastly noisier and more distracting than a cubicle.
It was a great setup as you’d build nice team dynamics and easily talk, but didn’t need assistive technology like headphones and white noise machines to function.
15 years later, I’m probably skill in regular contact with about 50% of the people I worked with in that environment.
I am interested to see how work habits change and evolve. For me personally mostly working from home and then heading in to something of an open office with conference rooms is ideal because on the in-office day the only reason for me to be there is peer collaboration anyway so I wouldn’t need an office.
For a lot of companies at this point, having dedicated individual work spaces for most employees doesn't make a lot of sense unless they have specific equipment needs and are going to come in most days.
Closed doors are like therapist room - you get to the meaning of topics fast. They allow conflict resolution and discussion.
Open concept are like libraries, everyone is silently trying to to disturb each other working. Full of visual and audible distractions.
WFH remote meeting have the lowest form of communication bandwidth. It's hard to arbitrage interactions with no visual cues, invites multi-tasking during meetings, and encourages disengagement.
So, like, if you Zoom'ed?
Which, unless the meeting is about hanky panky or massage or something, should be just as good for the purposes of technical discussion...
Can your manager just disrupt you and micromanage you in person at all times at home?
Does it even justify their role in the company when noone can see his subordinates all together in the same space?
The principle behind cubicles is to reduce the amount of open space immediately around you, with sound-absorbing material so both the sound you emit, and the sound others emit, travel more upwards than side-ways as the cubicle walls force the sound up, essentially making the environment more silent, if you are situated in a cubicle. If you were to be hanging from the roof above all cubicles, you'd get to hear basically all the sounds coming from the cubicles.
It's a pretty basic solution, something better would be actual private offices where everyone is enclosed fully, then you can make the environment really quiet. But that's also way more expensive and requires more space.
I'm not sure that's the case. Most companies lease their floors space. The offices themselves are built to a standard height or code, so the actual walls needed for internal offices are easy to procure, and manufactured en-masse.
Sure, there's a sunk cost to it, but once you're past start up size, your company is probably wasting more money on many other things (entertainment, lunch, free merch, and so on) than a one-off floor reconfiguration to accommodate offices.
At the other extreme, I worked for Megabank. They had a couple of buildings, with a total floor count of around 70, in the basement they had not hundreds, but thousands of partition walls stacked up and ready for use, so they could reconfigure the offices as needed. But, of course, only for senior management. Everyone else had to work in open plan offices.
A typical 'cubicle' has a wide desk and space to move you chair in and out of, plus a 'corridor' between all the cubicles. Change cubicle walls to office walls and have doors open into the existing corridor, and it's no different in size. Building codes might require some changes but I don't think it will anywhere near as much as 2x.
The literature (Spolsky lists it one of his articles) implies that increased productivity of the existing employees in their own offices more than compensates for the slight decrease in the number of people you can pack into a fixed area.
The difference with start-ups vs non-start-ups, is that in that first 6-12 months, it is typically a small group of people completely focused on getting the business up and running, and writing greenfield code. My point is that the environment, both the physical open plan office, and the 'coding environment' are totally different it's quite dynamic for start ups where it's just getting new code up and running and iterating quickly on ideas, vs. much more 'static' when the company has an existing product and code base.
I think they promote collaboration, but the price oh the price of that can so often be way higher than the value.
A company that cannot afford proper offices is probably not creating much value. Big tech companies can afford offices. They choose to allocate capital differently.
When I ran a consultancy, I spent a lot of rent of making sure my employees had both proper offices where they could think and common areas where they could collaborate. Doing otherwise is foolish.
Looking back, wouldn't it have made more sense to not spend alot on rent and let the employees work at home? Granted, no common areas to collaborate.
Also working from home is not as productive.
I'd like to see your data on that. When covid hit and sent everyone home I was working in the Danish public sector and we saw an increase in productivity. People worked less hours, or at least, they were using their computers for less hours, but they delivered more.
It probably would've lead to reforms if it wasn't because the employee satisfaction didn't do equally well. As you might imagine, covid was hard on middle managers, but it also turned out that quite a lot of employees (public sector might be very different than tech) got very lonely while working from home every day.
There’s your answer, demoralized employees are unproductive.
What can be much more manageable is to have comfortable cubicles for everyone (not the cramped desks with dividers, which is what probably gave cubicles the bad rep), and also have many small and large meeting rooms where people can congregate and collaborate in. This has the benefit of defaulting to semi-private workspaces which can easily scale, and moves the noisy collaborative areas to closed rooms, so that they don't bother anyone else. The smaller rooms could even serve as rotating private offices, if needed, that anyone can book for a limited period of time.
But the open floor office only has practical drawbacks, and definitely has to go. It only got popular because it's really the cheapest option for companies; just place some desks, chairs and monitors in a huge space, and sell it as "collaborative". But if they really want to entice people to come back to the office, they need to invest in better working conditions.
Some companies like Microsoft routinely provided them
Go visit any good law firm or CPA firm.
I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
Do these companies hire thousands of employees a year? I doubt that.
Private offices for everyone just doesn't scale at the same growth rate of tech companies. Where would they realistically fit thousands of new employees per year if everyone had their own office?
> I benefit from my equity holdings in tech companies. They are choosing to give that money to me in valuation instead of building out proper offices.
And you expect the buildings to just magically expand for new employees? I'd rather not take a pay cut, and "settle" for comfortable cubicles. Or better yet, work remotely, and get a raise from the money the company is saving on not having to pay for my office space.
One approach is for an organization to use open offices while they are building out proper offices.
They have significant churn.
That said, when I worked at one, I didn’t have an office. I didn’t even have a dedicated desk.
Wasn't a problem for Microsoft and other companies. But then again, those valued their employees...
I recommend that all those who might compete with me adopt these situations and give up on the difficulties of managing office space.
It was designed by Frank Gehry and built by Gensler for a client that had an open pocket book. You'd be surprised at how much a pane of glass can cost when it's glass that has to go into a Frank Gehry building.
Not saying it's just offices that saw the... Sun-set... but there are things companies that survive do -- and private offices ain't common.
What on Earth is wrong with traditional offices with normal doors? Cubicles always make me think of cattle, they are like open space but you have limited view so someone can stalk you without you noticing that or surprise you etc. Thank goodness we can easily work remotely these days.
I can explain this in three words:
* money * money * money
Open-plan is much cheaper.
I agree. It's like how cells with bars on three sides and a window on the wall side, are so much better than isolation cells closed all over.
Cubicles were great, especially if you got one near a window. You had the outside view; desks were angular in large cubicles so you had ample space for multiple monitors; the barriers provided just enough visual and noise isolation, while you could always prop up and chat with your neighbors; the barriers also served as tackboards, and people decorated their spaces in unique ways. Et cetera.
I still don't want to go back to working in an office, even if I had a personal space with a door, which most companies can't afford, but they should bring back the cubicle. It will probably be renamed and marketed as something else, but kudos to Meta for taking the lead.