PLEASE make it STOP! (life in cubeland)

[Anonymous]

Open concept offices are the absolute worst. I do not understand how people are expected to get anything done in that kind of an environment. Without fail, every single person under me at my last company who got promoted from cube hell to having their own office increased their productivity significantly once they had their own space. Now I work at a different company with an open concept office and I telework just to avoid it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Open concept offices are the absolute worst. I do not understand how people are expected to get anything done in that kind of an environment. Without fail, every single person under me at my last company who got promoted from cube hell to having their own office increased their productivity significantly once they had their own space. Now I work at a different company with an open concept office and I telework just to avoid it.

OP here -- this is happening here, too. The only offices are in the CEO suite. Everyone else (including senior VPs) does not have an office. So I am increasing my telework days.

(But am in the office today.)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I make 200K a year in cube land and abought 20 dollar headphone. Not giving a fuck!

You make $200k and you don't have your own office?

That's pretty common, especially in IT.

I have worked in software company where even the CEO has a cube. Very common!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I make 200K a year in cube land and abought 20 dollar headphone. Not giving a fuck!

You make $200k and you don't have your own office?

That's pretty common, especially in IT.

I have worked in software company where even the CEO has a cube. Very common!

Very common in finance too, trading desks aren't even cubes... You have guys making $1m+ with no real privacy

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I make 200K a year in cube land and abought 20 dollar headphone. Not giving a fuck!

You make $200k and you don't have your own office?

That's pretty common, especially in IT.

I have worked in software company where even the CEO has a cube. Very common!

I have worked in government consulting where the product owner shared a big desk with everybody. Agile development fad.

[Anonymous]

Noise cancelling headphones is a must. My co-worker talks on the phone all day telling the same god damn story over and over. It would drive me crazy. The headphones have saved me from losing my mind and breaking their phone.

[Anonymous]

I love it because the trade off in my company is that PT telecommuting is encouraged. Coming in 3 days a week to cubeland so I can have two commute free days a week is totally worth it. Also, we have a lot of conference rooms etc. we can duck into for privacy when we are doing a call or whatever, so I don't find it that annoying.

[Anonymous]

I would kill myself. I am so distractible.

[Anonymous]

I can not understand why they do that. I would have thought the revenue loss due to the loss of productivity would be much more expensive than some walls.

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

11:28 here again. The open office movement is causing more people to work from home. The downside of that, the company started doing check in using the tracker in company cell phones. Two people are getting fired for being away from their home offices (one was in Vegas for the weekend, the other in Florida for Spring Break). Freaked me out a bit about the ability to keep tabs.

[Anonymous]

Open offices and work from home are big money savers for companies. I work for an federal contractor that does a lot of IT work, so we have to assume they are watching us more closely than ever.

I'm old, so I went with the big headphones. One downside is that I sometimes get careless with the farting.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love it because the trade off in my company is that PT telecommuting is encouraged. Coming in 3 days a week to cubeland so I can have two commute free days a week is totally worth it. Also, we have a lot of conference rooms etc. we can duck into for privacy when we are doing a call or whatever, so I don't find it that annoying.

I telecommute 4 days a week and have my own office for when I'm in. And I'm not even that high up in the company!

[Anonymous]

Cubes suck especially when you sit near people whose job it is to talk on the phone...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:11:28 here again. The open office movement is causing more people to work from home. The downside of that, the company started doing check in using the tracker in company cell phones. Two people are getting fired for being away from their home offices (one was in Vegas for the weekend, the other in Florida for Spring Break). Freaked me out a bit about the ability to keep tabs.

Um, shouldn't freak you out if you are doing your work!

I hear these horror stories and I think they must apply to really awful companies who lack any management capabilities. I'm fairly senior at my organization, but hardly a high level exec - but am expected to present on calls, produce work that meets deadlines etc. If I slacked off, they would be able to tell using those metrics, not by tracking my location via computer.

Just weird.

Anyway, I WFH twice a week and have an open concept office and I love it. I left a company where I had an awesome office. It wasn't that great, EXCEPT when I was pumping, but after two kids we aren't having anymore so not a concern. But I've heard this company has a really nice private space for pumping on each floor so no worries anyway.

My company found productivity went up and costs went down (they are a large company and have been able to close down some locations because of telecommuting) so no going back. If the trade off is that the company monitors my computer while I work from home, so be it. It's not that different than working in an office - if you use a company computer - they can see how productive you are when your boss goes out of town, isn't in etc. If your company wants to monitor you, they can is the bottom line.