Extending short cubicle walls

You could put a lamp shade over your head.


Throw in some ear plugs and you're all set!

I'll see your twenty and raise you ten. My current digs have 6 foot partitions, except they are arranged in hexicles. Each cube seats 6. Room for a desk, a corner computer desk and a low open shelf unit. {long rant about the digs deleted}

This came about by it being tried on a few brown nosing ----ups who reported the arrangment to be marvelous, and so it became the new standard.

I don't work in an office so I could be wrong but I think I would prefer the more open environment to cubes. I prefer not being in an office over either option though

WOW! That picture looks exactly like our new office across the street. Even the yellow mustard wall and the angled supports in the background are the same.
Clearly this all comes out of the same catalogue

I've worked in a "bullpen" type of office before: 4 foot cubicles surrounding a common round table. At first it was extremely distracting, especially since some of the people in the room were loud talkers. It's amazing how fast you learn to tune the surrounding noise out, however.

Loud talkers I can deal with. Its the people the hum or whistle without thinking that drive me nuts...

I've set up three office environments in the last six years or so, each with pros and cons.

Empeg - originally totally open plan because we had no money and couldn't afford furniture! Later, cubes of a sort - 5'6" accoustic partitioning and too many people crammed into a small space. The former was perfect for a startup, the latter was really quite unsatisfactory. The partitioning added little real privacy, was a poor acoustic isolator, and detracted from the "group of guys all pulling together" vibe.

DNNA - a massive increase in space all on one level. Meeting and special rooms around the periphery then one large open development floor. No serious partioning, huge desks, a feeling of plenty of space. I didn't spend a lot of time working in that office (in fact I spent more time planning and creating it!) but while I was there I felt it was a partial success. The down side was a stilted atmosphere - everything was so open that rather than being too noisey the place was often deathly silent, a kind of a public library effect. I found it disconcerting at times, but perhaps it got better with more people. The second mistake, I think, was fitting the place out with Herman Miller everything, minutely trimmed and platted miniature trees, bloody expensive lighting and other stuff that made it feel like a classy solicitor's office more than an R&D centre. I got carried away with the sudden availability of money but it was the wrong vibe. One of my more pointy haired moments I have to confess. I know the Sigmatel folks tinkered a bit since I left, with lots more plants and so on and I'm really pleased to read Peter's positive comment as Andrew (the office manager) and I put a lot of effort into making it somewhere nice to work.

Akai Digital - I spent a lot of time reading pretentious workspace essays from over funded New York software bloggers (yes you know who) and pretty much convinced myself that we needed individual offices to a) attract the best staff and b) make eXtreme Programming work properly. As it was I had a hell of a job finding a suitable space, and when we eventually found Logic House (discovered by Mr Schofield after a Wrestlers one day) it didn't really lend itself to eleven separate offices plus the communal rooms. I compromised and instead we have two staff members to an office, each office being fairly large and partitioned down the middle with cupboards and acoustic panels. Because of XP everyone spends a lot of time in each others offices, so in fact it's not uncommon for each space to contain only the two people who are working collaboratively at that time. This seems to work out well in terms of minimising distraction, empowering collaborative working, and still giving everyone some degree of privacy when needed. The walls are all glass with integral blinds so the place feels spacious and open but you can shut yourself away if you need to browse some porn or something. Through architectural and budgetary necessity we seem to have stumbled on something that works really well and as far as I know everyone here is pretty comfortable with the environment. Oh, and no sculpted trees - although I do have several chilli plants growing in the staff room!

Whatever type of space you have I think the #1 most important thing is for staff to be able to customise it to their requirements and tastes. Some guys here have left their office totally stock, and at the other end of the scale there's Toby's space . So to respond to the original post, get those partition extentions up without delay and explain to your CEO how motivational you find them!

Rob

Does anyone else have any ideas?

Not any ideas, really, but just a description of my work environment, which sounds like it should be awful but actually works pretty well.

One room 23 x 46 feet, no partitions of any kind, 10 large desks in three rows, completely open environment.

What makes it work is that rarely are more than four or five desks occupied at once. Right now, I am the only person in the room. Since all of us have to informally interact just about all the time (Example: "Denise -- the copy for Budget Auto Sales has expired, do you want me to extend it?") it is much easier to just call across the room, rather than walk over or email or telephone. It is usually pretty quiet, so "calling across the room" is really just speaking in a conversational voice.

The nature of my work most of the time is intense but repetitive, pattern matching and watching for error dialog boxes (not enough separation between commercials for the same client, for example), requiring great alertness but very little cognitive power, making it an ideal situation to keep my earphones in just about all the time, usually listening to audiobooks.

Maybe it shouldn't work, but it does.

tanstaafl.

I am the only IT guy in the office. Not much collaboration for me to have.

In most of our UK offices we have between 200 and a thousand people per floor, and the current pointy-haired wisdom is that open plan is the way.

Gakkkkk

Luckily, we put together a business case saying this was not suitable for information security staff, so we have our own spaces - still open, but limited to 20 or so folks, maximum.

Which works nicely:-)

I think you should pull a Pixar, go down to Lowe's and pick up a garden shed, set it up in the building as your own "private office", and deck it out with all sorts of goodies that make you feel at home.

Would that I could. They jammed it so full, they almost forgot to leave room for an electrical closet.

As has been pointed out, though, cubicles cost way more than drywall.

Cubicles must also be wired and meet building codes. They just come "prefinished".

When I see the budget that includes the cubicles, I'll let you know for certain.

I always thought the cost savings came into the manner of cramming more people into less space, far less than to do with the actual building costs. Any office the size of a standard cubicle, to me, is a closet.

Ditto.

Pricing of cubicles has always been a mystery to me. We have Herman Miller products at my place, and while this information is several years old, here is how they worked the pricing:

List price for all the pieces and parts to build 1 cube: $20,000 (several years old pricing, probably different now)

Our corporate discount (At that time): 75%

Real price of each cube & parts: $5,000.

I still thought it was expensive. Not sure who would really spend the list price if for some reason they weren't eligible for any discounts...

Randy

I will point out that the people I'm working with design integrated circuits all day long.

Also, that cost isn't totally finished. Specifically, it does not include wiring, electrical, or flooring. It does include some of the wiring and electrical parts, but not the labor. It also includes the equivalent of drywall and paint and paint labor. There's bound to be a labor cost for physically assembling and installing the cubicles. It does include a desk and maybe a lamp and a small cabinet or two. It may or may not include a chair.

I've seen offices made from actual broom closets, complete with electrical mains shutoff on the wall- very cramped.

Stu

Slashdot post about this same issue. Evidently you're not the only one who thinks cubes are a bad idea.

For the record, I agree.

The cost of the cubes can be justified in a number of ways and are one time charges. The ongoing cost of maintenance is usually assessed on a bucks/sqft basis. That charge never ends and has to be justified constantly.

Airlines represent this taken to ridiculous levels. Having squeezed space out of their aircraft so drastically that people just don't like to fly anymore.