Cubicle, oh cubicle, how I miss thee ...

[MRG]

To add to it, some genious decided everyone has laptops so monitors were "redundant", so they took away everyone's monitors as the desks were so small, the monitors took up 1/2 the work space. Of course management couldn't figure out why all the engineers freaked out trying to work on their dinky 13 inch laptop screen vs. the huge multiple screens one is used to when debugging code.

Oh you made me laugh.

Back in the late 80s Megacorp build a nice new building, visable from the HR building. I was supporting all of our clients CICS systems and when they crashed it was a very big deal! They paid millions annually for those to be available.

This day several had crashed including our largest clients. The blinds in the new building could not be completely closed for aesthetic reasons. However the sun beat in the window and I couldn't see my green screen to read the 10,000 page dump.

I put newspapers up to block the sun, shortly after, someone from HR called and demanded that I remove the papers. OK, sure but I can't see to do my job. After a while I get bugged for a status by a client facing person.

I explained I couldn't solve their problems until after dark, so maybe tomorrow I might know what's going on. OMG, the CIO was at my desk 10 minutes later. I smiled and asked him to stand behind me and block the sun for a while!

There was a building engineer sent over to make the blinds close completely a little later.

 

[ChicagoGal]

Now we all sit in 7 x 7 foot stalls, with low partitions, ending any semblance of privacy. The place looks like an Ikea showroom. And the distractions of overheard conversations, people walking by, and the sense that the guy behind you is looking at your monitor, is the pits. Not enough room for my gear, so we use a communal lab area, much less convenient. I'm the most senior engineer in the company but my work space is now the same as a call center employee's.

THE GOOD NEWS: Next week is my last. At age 61 I'm out of there as of January 2. Given the above, it's just in time! Adios!!

Congrats on the retirement! And I hear ya on the cube situation. Had an office with a door in our old building. Then we moved to a new facility and the brain trust here at w*rk came up with the "Right to Light" explanation. The few offices (for very senior managers) are on the interior of the building, so all of the cubicle farm can see windows and have access to natural light. I'm in one of the "deluxe" cubes (all of 6'x8'), but most are standardized at 6'x6'. And I hear that the newest renovation going on in another facility has them doing away with cubicles and assigned seating altogether. Every spot at a table will be first come, first served every day. At least I finally negotiated to w*rk from home two days a week!

 

[NW-Bound]

Until recently my workplace at a large company was a sea of cubicles. But they were pretty nice; 10 x 10 feet with privacy (tall walls) and autonomy; I filled mine with my photos (big hobby). And the overall layout was good in terms of team collaboration ... but we all had our own sacred domains. I'm an electronics hardware engineer, so my cube was also my lab, with microscope, soldering station, network analyzer, oscilloscopes, power supplies, components, wires ... which equals "home" for me...

I now have a bedroom upstairs for my electronics hobby. I brought up an industrial-quality electronic bench, and still have the 2nd one in the garage. Would be nice to bring it up too, but the BR is not large enough. I have a lot of stuff from the failed business that I co-owned.

There are 5 rooms upstairs that are not occupied since we became empty nesters. I don't see turning them all into a lab though.

 

[NW-Bound]

... Of course management couldn't figure out why all the engineers freaked out trying to work on their dinky 13 inch laptop screen vs. the huge multiple screens one is used to when debugging code.

In another thread, I talked about having idiots for upper management at megacorp who had never done anything in their life. They simply do not know how people write code and build stuff.

My son-in-law worked at home on firmware for a megacorp. He has 4 large 22" monitors mounted on the wall. It is possible to do that in a cubicle, although I have not seen it. Usually, a 2-monitor setup is a max they give a worker, even though monitors are cheap now.

 

[NW-Bound]

I have done contract work at a kilocorp. All engineers, even new hires, have rooms with hardwalls. It was the common etiquette to leave the door open so people walking by know you were not dozing off at your desk. Productivity was higher than at megacorps with just cubicles as I was not distracted by noises. There was also less talk around the cooler. That company got it right.

 

[aja8888]

Hey Jeff, congrats on the retirement!

Reading all of the above makes me feel left out of the experiences as I never had to office in an open "cube" environment. Some of these stories make it sound like punishment on a mass scale!

I always had a small office or a field office to work out of. In my management days, I had a private office. When I ran my own company, I had whatever I wanted, which was usually a private office. At times, I did work out of my truck, but that's field work.

 

[Carpediem]

Back in the late 80s Megacorp build a nice new building, visable from the HR building. I was supporting all of our clients CICS systems and when they crashed it was a very big deal! They paid millions annually for those to be available.

This day several had crashed including our largest clients. The blinds in the new building could not be completely closed for aesthetic reasons. However the sun beat in the window and I couldn't see my green screen to read the 10,000 page dump.

CICS and reading dumps....ahhhhh, that brings back memories! I recall at one employer we actually had to read dumps using a micro fiche reader.

 

[poorcarver]

I was an engineering contractor at a very well known firm in the food processing engineering market. Or they were. While I was there, they got a boy wonder president of the division who, in order to save money, moved the offices down the street. The engineering design area was dramatically smaller, everyone had to significantly reduce their storage. So all the design engineering history of 40 years of plant design hit the dumpsters. They saved a boat load of money on space and proceeded to start losing bids as they were re-creating the wheel every single time instead of pulling out and marking up an existing design. Firm is out of business.

 

[JP.mpls]

poorcarver,
I work in an engineering dept. at a midcorp company. They moved us to a nice new remodeled building, with lots of windows and new furniture. It is very nice.


We also got a nice new lab area to work in.


This is what happened:
The head of engineering wanted to use the building to impress customers. He would lead many show and tell visits through the building. He didn't like the look of a usable lab, and demanded that we purge everything we had on the storage shelves, so it looked nice. Our manager is a "yes man", and just ordered us to throw it all out. They purged all of our legacy stuff, and we have no lab storage. It is a similar disaster to what you experienced. We are missing everything, we have to buy everything new to get something done, and we just can't help people with anything associated with our legacy designs.


They also have big tables in the office area that were designs for quiet private meetings, specifically for meeting with visiting sales people. They started moving the project meetings out to these tables, so they were more visible, and it looked like we were a hip and cool company. The meetings keep growing in size. They are silly and worthless, basically just a show, and these meeting disrupt everyone else trying to work in that area.


Just a bunch of silly corporate BS. My BS bucket is filled up if you can't tell.


Take care,


JP

 

[ExFlyBoy5]

Anyone else do after-hours remodeling of their cubes?

You mean something like this?

 

[48Fire]

THE GOOD NEWS: Next week is my last. At age 61 I'm out of there as of January 2. Given the above, it's just in time! Adios!!

Congratulations! And thanks for reminding me of one of the reasons for my ER.

I came across some interesting corporate metrics at one point, which measured revenue $ per square foot. This was applied at an employee level. Shortly after that, they began downsizing, which included people and buildings. Also factored in were the types of buildings. A warehouse is cheaper than an executive building with windows.

Soon, Engineering, which used to have our own building with deep thinkers and spacious labs, was now cube to cube with administrators and technicians. It was difficult to concentrate and my productivity and quality dropped. At 7:45 every morning, the woman across the divider would spend several minutes lecturing her 3 boys, and preparing them to go off to school. And her voice was rather loud and ear-piercing. Yes, I knew all their names, ages, and other details.

 

[ABQ2015]

Congratulations to the OP on the timing of their retirement!

I had a walled office for a few years but most of my career was in an 8x8 cubicle with high partitions. The last few years a new building was being planned with smaller cubicles and low partitions - but lots of walled conference rooms. Management kept trying to sell this as being an improvement. Luckily there were many delays due to lack of funds so when I recently retired the building was still in the final design stage. Most of my co-workers are in their 50's and several plan to retire immediately before they have to move to the new building.

 

[Ronstar]

Anyone else do after-hours remodeling of their cubes?

We always knew where the spare cube parts were. I ended up with a wider front wall overlooking a walkway and window, which allowed me to put the desk on that wall. It made the doorway pretty tight. I told people it was my motivation not to gain any more weight.

The real reason was I didn't have to sit with my back, and monitor, facing the doorway.

I suspect the whole open concept is just a misguided effort to look like a silicon valley "collaborative" workplace, even though it's really nothing like that. Glad I got out before that fad reached us!

Around late 1970's we moved to a new office, and my after hours assignment was to build cubicle walls out of pegboard and 2x4's. After a few nights, I got a visit from the carpenter's union boss telling me to cease doing carpentry work. I told my boss, and kept the doors locked for the few nights that I had left building the cubes.

 

[GalaxyBoy]

I forgot about the "Charrette Areas" that were added to my last office. We had absolutely no partitions anywhere in the room, but the genius boss decided we still needed areas to collaborate. So there was a conference table with 60" flat screen monitor all of 5 feet behind my chair. The one or two times I complained to the participants that they were being so loud I couldn't hear the client on the phone, I was told in no uncertain terms they had reserved that area for their meeting and I could basically go **** myself.

 

[easysurfer]

First position I had didn't have cubicles. Felt a bit like a typing pool. Cubicles at least offered some privacy and absorbed some of the random conversation.

 

[aja8888]

I'll bet no one remembers days before the cubicle wall was invented:

 

[nuisance]

When we moved into a new building with an open floorplan, I was responsible for occasional server maintenance and provisioning. I had some supplies related to that, and they didn't fit on my newly assigned desk, so I dumped them on the desk next to mine. That lasted until I left. I never tried too hard to keep that extra desk clean and organized.

 

[unclemick]

Until recently my workplace at a large company was a sea of cubicles. But they were pretty nice; 10 x 10 feet with privacy (tall walls) and autonomy; I filled mine with my photos (big hobby). And the overall layout was good in terms of team collaboration ... but we all had our own sacred domains. I'm an electronics hardware engineer, so my cube was also my lab, with microscope, soldering station, network analyzer, oscilloscopes, power supplies, components, wires ... which equals "home" for me.

Then some very senior manager got the open floor plan bug. Now we all sit in 7 x 7 foot stalls, with low partitions, ending any semblance of privacy. The place looks like an Ikea showroom. And the distractions of overheard conversations, people walking by, and the sense that the guy behind you is looking at your monitor, is the pits. Not enough room for my gear, so we use a communal lab area, much less convenient. I'm the most senior engineer in the company but my work space is now the same as a call center employee's.

THE GOOD NEWS: Next week is my last. At age 61 I'm out of there as of January 2. Given the above, it's just in time! Adios!!

Interesting. Circa 1966 - exact opposite. Aerospace major aircraft company. Sea of desks or drafting tables. Up to several ?hundred? per work area. At quitting time each desktop had to be completely clean with our telephone in our desk chair. As the decades went on the cubicles showed up more and more in the 1980's I had to make the mental adjustment in the opposite direction to avoid feeling isolated.

However I usually had a personal area 'in the lab' which I cluttered to my heart's content.

heh heh heh -

P.S. Style drift also - suits and ties/spiffy white lab coats - to casual Fridays - to the casual dress you see now in tech and elsewhere.

 

[Calico]

I'll bet no one remembers days before the cubicle wall was invented:

View attachment 27428

View attachment 27429

I remember. This looks exactly like my first j*b out of high school.

The hairstyles and clothing are older, but the furniture arrangement is exactly the same. I'm having flashbacks. {shudder}

 

[MRG]

My first office job in a sawmill. First I was part of the main office, that was ok. Later, due to the mud brought in from the yards I was exiled to a trailer with the logging company. It's okay too, I'm not in there often, mainly to pay for logs brought in by individual loggers.

I come in one day to write a draft for logs and there's a guy sitting at my desk. It's winter and he has torn a chainsaw apart on my desk. It was full of oil and sawdust, that's all over my stuff, in drawers and inventory files. He's actually torn the engine apart, I'm moving the piston to get to my drafts. [emoji111]

A few years later I'm an entry-level programmer at Megacorp and nobody ahead of me wants an open office. I'm sitting in a private office with a great view of the downtown KC airport. Nobody's bringing in chainsaws either.

 

[adrift]

During my post-university career as a programmer I went from a shared office, to a private office, to working remotely part time out of a home office. The single exception to this was a year I spent working in Japan. There, we had cubicles with walls that were about 4 feet tall. The cubicles were in a big room with perhaps 60 people.

There was usually quite a lot of noise with people talking to each other. I quickly got use to that. Occasionally, there was a conversation in English (a visitor, a couple of other gaijin, etc.). That always threw me. The general noise and Japanese conversations were not a problem. But, English conversations I always found distracting.

A month or so before I started working there, I went for a week of meetings peripherally related to what I was going to be working on. I was assigned a cubicle and I left some handouts from the meeting in a filing cabinet in the cubicle. Several months after starting work there, a security search was done and it turned out the handouts were deemed to be company confidential information. For that, I had to attend a series of disciplinary meetings about corporate security.

At the first meeting, there were perhaps 30 people. The tone of the meeting was that we had brought dishonor on the company. I was the only non-Japanese offender. But, because of me, they had to conduct the meeting in English. For both the presenter and most of the audience, this was problematic. After about 20 minutes and a bit of bowing, I was asked if I had learned enough and it was OK for me to leave. I had and I did.

 

[FreeBear]

I started my career in semi-private offices. I had a roommate, but also a locking door. This lasted only a few years.

In the 2000's we moved to cubes with 4 ft clear walls, but they were massive in size, perhaps 9x12 ft. Most of us youngsters preferred the open layout for collaborative purposes. It worked well for us only because of the very low seating density. The cubes were large, with very wide aisles. This cut down on the noise greatly, but you could still hear enough of others' conversations to determine if something relevant was being discussed.

Best of all, the guy in a nearby cube became my informal tech mentor and we collaborated on some amazing projects, which were the highlights of my professional career. Also, several intractable technical problems were solved when guys just stopped by a cube to shoot the bull, but ended up kicking some good ideas loose.

Some truly good memories, but it didn't last. Of course it wouldn't. They re-organized the department, and spatially exiled me from my great mentor. We never did another project together. The department was offshoring, and I FIRE'd a few years later. I spent the last 2 years hiding in my cube with my headphones on, trying to avoid BS meetings while doing busy w*rk well below my skill and pay level.

Now, I think I've re-created my own office space in the basement, complete with tons of my toys clustered around my aging workstation class computer with 30 inch monitor. So perhaps engineers don't really retire, we just start w*rking on only projects we enjoy and only w*rk with folks we like! Should have done this years ago...

Thanks all for trip down memory lane. It's much more fun now that it's over...

 

[Shanky]

Mid Career my office had its own bathroom, my company car was fueled and washed for me in the basement of the building. My domestic travel was corporate jet and international was business class. That industry went bankrupt. The end of my career was with a large silicon valley outfit with no assigned office space, Travel was coach. and in executive conferences we were booked two to a hotel room. Every nickel was pinched. And I felt like a contract employee even though I was a well compensated executive. It is amazing how different Fortune 50 sized companies can be surrounding perqs like offices and travel.

 

[FreeBear]

Mid Career my office had its own bathroom, my company car was fueled and washed for me in the basement of the building. My domestic travel was corporate jet and international was business class. That industry went bankrupt. The end of my career was with a large silicon valley outfit with no assigned office space, Travel was coach. and in executive conferences we were booked two to a hotel room. Every nickel was pinched. And I felt like a contract employee even though I was a well compensated executive. It is amazing how different Fortune 50 sized companies can be surrounding perqs like offices and travel.

Wow! Two bodies per hotel ROOM, not suite??

Yuck! Haven't done that for w*rk since grad school...

 

[socca]

Then some very senior manager got the open floor plan bug. Now we all sit in 7 x 7 foot stalls, with low partitions, ending any semblance of privacy.

Does productivity really improve when you plop a lone gorgeous female engineer into an open floor plan with 19 male engineers? Call me skeptical.

This thread reminds me of one of the advantages to being self-employed: being able to create your own office space. I converted the master bedroom in my house into an office; I use one of the smaller rooms as a bedroom. This gives me an executive washroom - ooh la la. If I had a wife, she would probably strongly object to my priorities regarding the utilization of space in the house, which is one of the advantages to being single.