I've worked in a ~6'-height cube farm more dense and plain than any of these photos, but actually more pleasant than most of these look, and better than most open-plan offices I've seen.
With cubes, most of the engineers didn't need headphones nor medication to focus, unlike open-plan. And there was a lot of stopping in others' cube doorways for quick meetings, and temporarily wheeling chairs into the hall.
The cube partitions were finished in a coarse weave of gray cloth, and there were copious T-shaped pins, which people weren't shy about using to hang project artifacts, decorations, and amusements on the insides and outsides of their cubes.
No motivational posters, and I don't recall any soul-sucking corporate art.
A clearing had some small round tables that people sometimes used for meetings. And for "Friday at 4" socializing, the tables were pushed out of the way, and someone brought in big galvanized tubs of ice and beverages.
WFH (with occasional in-person) is best overall, but cube farms can be better than they're made out to be.
When I was IT at Galyan's corporate, they used an old supermarket as an office building. There wasn't even cubicle walls. My "office" had taped lines on the floor to delineate my "boundaries".
It was loud and distracting... one of the only jobs I ever quit without another job to go because I hated it so much.
I remain of the firm opinion that the only reason people think 6' cube farms are even acceptable is because they're being compared to the hell of fully-open-plan offices.
Every office worker should have the ability to close a door to preserve their privacy and productivity, even if it's on a space no larger than the cube would be.
(It is not at all improbable that my vehemence in this matter is related to my mild-to-moderate ADHD, which made my stint in a 6' cube farm extremely frustrating due to the constant distractions.)
Cubicles were invented in the 1960s to provide a superior and more private alternative to open plan (bullpen) offices of the 1950s [1].
The silly part of all this is the people arguing for open plan offices in the present/recent past as a “superior” and more humanizing and collaborative environment when cubicles were literally invented as a more humane option.
Depends heavily on context. I spent my whole trading career not more then 4 feet from the person to my left, right and front and not more than 7 feet from the guy behind me and it was awesome because we were a highly real time commodities trading team amd needed to hear everything everyone was saying. It has been less good doing it stuff in the later part of my career, as real time communication is nearly irrelevant.
Yep, private offices can be incredibly productive. I recall some serious flow state at times when I had a private office, which I could never really sustain for long in cubes or open-plan (at least not during normal working hours; I'd often work late and on weekends to get flow).
If you want to watch a film similar to these themes, check out Playtime from 1967 by Jacques Tati. Something I watched recently.
Playtime works wonderfully as a cinematic satire of contemporary society and our roles.
The film's office scenes are particularly striking because they visualize the dehumanizing aspects of modern office design that cubicle farms would later become notorious for - the uniformity, the loss of privacy despite physical separation, and the way architecture can make people behave more like components in a machine than individuals.
The thing about Playtime is the constant onslaught of appropriate explorations on the theme of an increasingly technical life.
By the time the end of Playtime rolls by, what you get is an examination of what it is like to be human and hopefully you feel a sense of joy in being a part of the human race.
What I got by the end was the unyielding anxiety and nervousness caused by the (dehumanizing, as you mention) modern society. It's a masterful movie in evoking those emotions. I watched it several times, so this is a positive endorsement.
Ahh, all of these offices look so cool! I love the "success" sign that has fallen down. I love the powered-off machine labeled "do not turn this machine off".
“ Judge and Tunbjörk were depicting the same kinds of spaces, but Tunbjörk’s work proved the more perceptive. Part of what separates them are their respective theories for why the office had become hostile. In “Office Space,” Judge suggests that the problem is managerial; in a pivotal scene, Ron Livingston’s character complains that he has eight different bosses. This was hardly a new complaint, however: people had been making fun of middle managers for decades. Tunbjörk’s photos in “Office,” by contrast, point to a more contemporary culprit: technology.”
Uh, as if Office Space doesn’t have the iconic “PC LOAD LETTER? What the… does that mean?”
My nerd side objected to the artistic license there. The computer programmer character should know it's instructions to the user (necessarily terse on a very small character display), to load more blank US Letter size paper into the Paper Cartridge.
What a programmer would more likely be complaining about with a corporate workgroup page printer is someone spooling a huge job that DoSes it, piles of other people's printouts that they never picked up, toner out (and it's not in a sealed cartridge, so you're risking staining your clothes and hands as well as the carpet), paper jams (including paper that must be ripped out, and job reconstructed, after backlog of others' jobs), failing pickup rollers, some software they have to use that sometimes overloads the renderer RAM, the smell of ozone from heavy printing with no openable windows, etc.
Latterly I increasingly worked remotely. But once, for various reasons, it got to the point of VCs with people I had never met and was never going to meet in person, engagement pretty much fell off a cliff.
Because people eager to please will post mirrors/copies and YC's very pragmatic in-house legal team has (likely) decided that those people bear the legal responsibility of doing that, or at least that YC's exposure is limited under certain circumstances.
That would likely mean that they will give out the poster's email/IP given just a credible threat of a lawsuit.
So maybe don't post these if you live in a country where copyright is actively enforced.
Newspapers/magazines generally don't go after copyright infringements on an article level, I think, but who knows what might happen in the current economic downturn.
I think it's (likely) unethical of YC to routinely and obviously allow these links, for the reasons outlined above. Not because I care for the publishers, but because of the potential harm YC exposes its users to by normalizing this.
https://archive.ph/u3qjy
I've worked in a ~6'-height cube farm more dense and plain than any of these photos, but actually more pleasant than most of these look, and better than most open-plan offices I've seen.
With cubes, most of the engineers didn't need headphones nor medication to focus, unlike open-plan. And there was a lot of stopping in others' cube doorways for quick meetings, and temporarily wheeling chairs into the hall.
The cube partitions were finished in a coarse weave of gray cloth, and there were copious T-shaped pins, which people weren't shy about using to hang project artifacts, decorations, and amusements on the insides and outsides of their cubes.
No motivational posters, and I don't recall any soul-sucking corporate art.
A clearing had some small round tables that people sometimes used for meetings. And for "Friday at 4" socializing, the tables were pushed out of the way, and someone brought in big galvanized tubs of ice and beverages.
WFH (with occasional in-person) is best overall, but cube farms can be better than they're made out to be.
When I was IT at Galyan's corporate, they used an old supermarket as an office building. There wasn't even cubicle walls. My "office" had taped lines on the floor to delineate my "boundaries".
It was loud and distracting... one of the only jobs I ever quit without another job to go because I hated it so much.
I agree cubicles are highly underrated to what came after.
I've leased a small office in a coworking space to alleviate the workfromhomeitis.
Its nice enough but wow... the people having to work at tables in an open room, mini fake living room, and open kitchen.
It's social but totally unsuitable for concentration.
The book here actually encited a bit of nostalgia in me and I bought a copy.
I can actually show people what life was like for us since I don't really have my own pictures of office life of the era.
I remain of the firm opinion that the only reason people think 6' cube farms are even acceptable is because they're being compared to the hell of fully-open-plan offices.
Every office worker should have the ability to close a door to preserve their privacy and productivity, even if it's on a space no larger than the cube would be.
(It is not at all improbable that my vehemence in this matter is related to my mild-to-moderate ADHD, which made my stint in a 6' cube farm extremely frustrating due to the constant distractions.)
Cubicles were invented in the 1960s to provide a superior and more private alternative to open plan (bullpen) offices of the 1950s [1].
The silly part of all this is the people arguing for open plan offices in the present/recent past as a “superior” and more humanizing and collaborative environment when cubicles were literally invented as a more humane option.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/a-brief-history-of-how-the-c...
Depends heavily on context. I spent my whole trading career not more then 4 feet from the person to my left, right and front and not more than 7 feet from the guy behind me and it was awesome because we were a highly real time commodities trading team amd needed to hear everything everyone was saying. It has been less good doing it stuff in the later part of my career, as real time communication is nearly irrelevant.
just remember, cubicles were a step down from private offices.
Yep, private offices can be incredibly productive. I recall some serious flow state at times when I had a private office, which I could never really sustain for long in cubes or open-plan (at least not during normal working hours; I'd often work late and on weekends to get flow).
If you want to watch a film similar to these themes, check out Playtime from 1967 by Jacques Tati. Something I watched recently.
Playtime works wonderfully as a cinematic satire of contemporary society and our roles.
The film's office scenes are particularly striking because they visualize the dehumanizing aspects of modern office design that cubicle farms would later become notorious for - the uniformity, the loss of privacy despite physical separation, and the way architecture can make people behave more like components in a machine than individuals.
The thing about Playtime is the constant onslaught of appropriate explorations on the theme of an increasingly technical life.
By the time the end of Playtime rolls by, what you get is an examination of what it is like to be human and hopefully you feel a sense of joy in being a part of the human race.
What I got by the end was the unyielding anxiety and nervousness caused by the (dehumanizing, as you mention) modern society. It's a masterful movie in evoking those emotions. I watched it several times, so this is a positive endorsement.
Ahh, all of these offices look so cool! I love the "success" sign that has fallen down. I love the powered-off machine labeled "do not turn this machine off".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg
“ Judge and Tunbjörk were depicting the same kinds of spaces, but Tunbjörk’s work proved the more perceptive. Part of what separates them are their respective theories for why the office had become hostile. In “Office Space,” Judge suggests that the problem is managerial; in a pivotal scene, Ron Livingston’s character complains that he has eight different bosses. This was hardly a new complaint, however: people had been making fun of middle managers for decades. Tunbjörk’s photos in “Office,” by contrast, point to a more contemporary culprit: technology.”
Uh, as if Office Space doesn’t have the iconic “PC LOAD LETTER? What the… does that mean?”
My nerd side objected to the artistic license there. The computer programmer character should know it's instructions to the user (necessarily terse on a very small character display), to load more blank US Letter size paper into the Paper Cartridge.
What a programmer would more likely be complaining about with a corporate workgroup page printer is someone spooling a huge job that DoSes it, piles of other people's printouts that they never picked up, toner out (and it's not in a sealed cartridge, so you're risking staining your clothes and hands as well as the carpet), paper jams (including paper that must be ripped out, and job reconstructed, after backlog of others' jobs), failing pickup rollers, some software they have to use that sometimes overloads the renderer RAM, the smell of ozone from heavy printing with no openable windows, etc.
Well, I’ve been a nerd and programmer for many decades and just now found out PC stands for Paper Cartridge. Thank you.
Latterly I increasingly worked remotely. But once, for various reasons, it got to the point of VCs with people I had never met and was never going to meet in person, engagement pretty much fell off a cliff.
Why are paywalled articles allowed on HN?
Because people eager to please will post mirrors/copies and YC's very pragmatic in-house legal team has (likely) decided that those people bear the legal responsibility of doing that, or at least that YC's exposure is limited under certain circumstances.
That would likely mean that they will give out the poster's email/IP given just a credible threat of a lawsuit.
So maybe don't post these if you live in a country where copyright is actively enforced.
Newspapers/magazines generally don't go after copyright infringements on an article level, I think, but who knows what might happen in the current economic downturn.
I think it's (likely) unethical of YC to routinely and obviously allow these links, for the reasons outlined above. Not because I care for the publishers, but because of the potential harm YC exposes its users to by normalizing this.
Sorry to everyone for relegating this post to page 2 by posting this comment.
This page is intentionally left blank.
(a) Why wouldn’t they be? (2) Someone usually posts an archive.ph workaround within minutes after posting.
which has already been posted, and doesn't work, as is the custom
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41927518
I don't find remote work alienating at all. Even when I'm in the office most of my meetings are over VC with other sites anyway.
So... no thanks! Would rather work in comfort, silence, and near my dog.
Your dog probably is more fun to talk to than your co workers!
I work in exchange for currency I can then trade for goods and services. Employment serves no other purpose.
I don't work to make friends. I have a variety of other options for socializing.
while I 100% agree with you, it seems this article is about the rise of working “online” in general with email etc around the turn of the Millenium
I'm not sure what the least baity title for this article could be. Have made a third attempt now
Remote working is like veganism or crossfit, people have to come to announce them doing it at every possible possibility.
The progress we've made thanks to WFH is immense and will be clear to the future generations only in hindsight, just like 5-day work week.