The Accidental Arrival of the Cubicle | Hacker News Reader

The Accidental Arrival of the Cubicle

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39 pointsmcos17 comments

Honestly after being in cubicles, and then experiencing an 'open office' where it's just rows of desks crammed up against each other... I don't understand all the complaints about cubicles. I love them now. Open office is a horrible regression.

But do you at least have a desk of your own? I agree that open offices are worse than cubes, but there is even a worse system where even desks are unassigned -- supposedly to encourage interaction across groups.

An anedcote: my boss was PM for building a new building and his claim was that offices with sheetrock and (steel) studs was cheaper than cubes.

We still had cubes. Because you have to have cubes.

And of course the Edifice Complex held - we were sold before everything on the building was done.

private office > cubicles > open office layouts.

Where do VR offices fit in? [1,2]

[1] http://assets-jpcust.jwpsrv.com/thumbs/nqfIhMYO.jpg

[2] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/i-worked-in-a-vr-...

I think it entirely depends on whether workers get out ahead of the curve and embrace them and own the VR environments.

If people stop and consider VR desktops might be a serious improvement over the current open office hell.

You can be relatively impervious to visual and audio distractions not of your own design.

They will probably allow even more work from home as the technology of avatar visuals improve enough that people feel like high bandwidth personal communication between people is possible and comfortable.

The darkside is that VR and AR have very high ability to monitor your moment to moment attention.

They have very high ability to completely control your environment without your input.

If management controls that, it will be an evil thing.

Either a heaven or a hell, depends on workers taking ownership.

I like to stay positive but given how little backbone workers have shown in being herded into open offices, I'm not sure how it will go.

Right now VR environments are still "barf machines". Some people are working on handling the balance problem, but it will be more than just messing with the inner ear.

Instead we might get something like the ball from Lawnmower Man. Heh. Or complete neural bypasses like in Matrix etc.

It's not at all true that they are "barf machines".

For a properly installed "room scale" vive installation almost noone experiences any discomfort.

Badly designed software can absolutely still cause sickness but thats on the owner of the Vive.

The headsets are still too hot and bulky.

They don't have good enough visuals for large amount of text manipulation.

You'd really have to capture facial expressions and body language for that work work well.

Not sure how doable that is with avatars instead of 3d video, and not sure how you'd get the video to not lose anything while editing out the VR goggles.

Some circle of hell no doubt, but I don't remember my Dante well enough to gauge which exactly.

Wow, maybe Nick Negroponte's SDMS can finally go mainstream! [0]

[0] https://www.media.mit.edu/speech/papers/1979/bolt_1979_spati...

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/24/3040959/dataland-mits-70s-...

Yes sir, I never thought I'd miss my cubicle until I got rammed into a folding table in an "open office". I bailed within weeks.

What companies in the Bay Area don't embrace the open office structure today?

Well Google is leading the charge, and everyone wants to be like Google so . . .

I feel lucky that at the LA Google office I only have a dozen people in my glass-walled pen and that I am not out in the general cubicle areas.

Probably places like Genentech and many others. Does anyone know the new Cupertino layout apple will employ in their doughnut building?

Small offices. Usually one per developer but sometimes two.

The article alludes to, but glosses over the fact that the original vision was a reaction to the terrible open office approach.

The article does chronicle the sad perversion into cubicle sterility.

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