Dilbert is responsible for changing the face of corporate offices. He created a generation of children who spent years reading the Sunday funnies, all the while wondering if Dad's career could possibly be so inane.

Did he really spend his days being ordered around by a pointy-haired buffoon? Was he really forced to work while cooped up in a cheap fabric box; a cruel parody of a private office; under the sterile flicker of fluorescent tubes? I think with this latest generation, companies knew their incoming graduates were terrified of leaving college only to become trapped in Dilbert's world. To try to attract young people, they attacked the most visible symbol of Dilbert's life: The cubicle.

Google is the most prominent company to do this. In the mid 'aughts, the Google headquarters became a byword for the future of office spaces. Gone would be the days of cube farms. In their place would be open sunlit spaces. These would not only feel freer and less stifling, but there was some influential research indicating that such spaces fostered better relationships among co-workers. The research indicated that friendships are built on chance encounters as people go about their day. An office space which fosters those chance encounters makes it easier to develop friendships at work. It encourages people to collaborate, to share ideas and innovations. Spontaneous conversations are easy to strike up, with the cubicle walls removed.

The Google open-plan office inspired many imitators. But like cargo cultists, the imitators often copied a few surface features of Google's campus, while leaving out something critical. It's easy to forget that cubicles, despite their flaws, were originally an innovation to spare people from something even worse: The bullpen office. And the bullpen office is what you return to if you simply take a cubicle farm, but remove all the cubicle walls (or heaven forbid, take away individual desks and seat people at long tables).

I think the bullpen is perversely appealing to managers. It makes them feel like kings as they survey their subjects arrayed before them. It gives a sense of satisfaction how every head turns to acknowledge them as they walk by. It gives them a sense being tuned in to the life of their group, and it gives them a sense of control. They can see if Jones is getting up unreasonably often for bathroom breaks, if Smith is distracted and just staring at the ceiling, if Williams is browsing Facebook instead of working. Plus, it saves almost 20 percent on real estate costs. It's an all around win!

But working in such an environment is stressful, and has been found again and again to place a penalty on worker productivity. In research famously cited by Steve McConnell (the same research which introduced the world to the 10X engineer), there was a consistent finding: Among the most productive engineers, nearly all of them reported that they had a quiet space to work, while most of the low-productivity engineers complained of frequent distractions. Indeed, the reason Dilbert complained about his cubicle was never that it was too private.

I think there are a couple reasons for this productivity penalty

Distractions

Programmers (and, I think its safe to assume, most knowledge workers) work best by achieving a state of flow. In this state, the rest of the world is tuned out, and we are only concentrated on our code. Flow is productive, satisfying, and delicate. It's easily broken by distractions, and a bullpen office is full of distractions. What's most obvious are the auditory distractions: Loud meetings a few desks over, co-workers taking phone calls, and friendly chatter. I've even encountered one office where people played music that everyone could hear. But I think what's more subtle are the visual distractions: The occasional awkward eye-contact with you co-worker at the opposite desk, the movement of people coming and going throughout the day. There are even olfactory distractions, like the scent of your deskmates's jumbalaya in the trashcan.

The Need to look busy

Bullpen offices create a situation of always being watched. This leads to trouble, because many essential components of creative work look distinctly non-busy. Those moments staring up at the ceiling? Of standing up and pacing around the office, maybe grabbing a cup of coffee? On an assembly-line job, those might just be slacking off. In a creative job, they are necessary to the creative process. A bullpen office encourages people to either disguise these periods of slack, or go without them. Either way contributes to stress, and makes it difficult to engineer creative solutions to problems.

The tight quarters of these spaces can even serve to make collaboration harder. If there are no physical private spaces, people will create cultural ones. I have personally seen them lead to a culture where talking to anyone, without first getting permission via Slack, was a major faux pas. Actually, even reaching out to them by Slack was a faux pas if they were wearing their noise-canceling headphones. I believe that any time you see an office worker wearing noise-canceling headphones, that's a sign that the office space is hurting people's ability to do their jobs. Those headphones are a silent scream for mercy.

Compared to all of this, cubicles are havens of comfort and productivity. I admit I'm pretty introverted, so it's possible bullpens bother me personally a lot more than they would bother some people. I make it my policy to turn down any job in a bullpen office environment. It's such a penalty on my productivity that working in such an environment is only setting myself up to fail. But I've talked to several engineers who have felt the same way, and none who prefer such environments. There is some anecdotal evidence that even the mighty Facebook drives away talent with their huge bullpen office, and needs to offer significantly higher salaries than their competitors to compensate.

Space for Improvement

BUT, for those employers really interested in getting the maximum engineering productivity from their office spaces, you can certainly do better than the cubicle.

Private Offices

One answer is simply having small, private offices for developers. It sounds radical, but there is a pretty decent argument that it more than pays for itself in increased productivity. A few tech organizations, most notably Microsoft, have done this for years with excellent results. I'm sure it's not viable in most organizations, but that's more for political than practical reasons. An office isn't just a productivity aid, its a status symbol. Giving offices to engineers implies in an unspoken way that, in this organization, an engineer is the equal of a manager. I can also see a legitimate concern that private offices could lead to employees working in isolation, and getting cut off from opportunities to exchange ideas with their peers. But that seems like it could be easily and enjoyably addressed with frequent team lunches and happy hours.

Campus Office Plans

If you look carefully at what Google does with their office spaces, they aren't just recreating the bullpen offices from 1950. Each individual's workspace may be a desk in a bullpen, but it doesn't end there. People are discouraged from just staying at their desk all day. Google's policy is to supplement the open office with gratuitous amounts of common space, including kitchens, cafes, private nooks, and outdoor spaces. They say that no area of the building is more that 150 feet from food.

If anything, they seem to be trying to recreate the experience of studying on a college campus. In college, my desk in my apartment which was "my space" was sometimes prone to distractions. But most of the time, I didn't study by just sitting there all day. I took my laptop and books, and moved around. I might spend a couple hours hanging around a coffee shop in the morning, where I felt invigorated by the quiet buzz of conversation around me. I would seek out a private nook in one of the libraries when I really needed to concentrate. In the late afternoon, I might grab a table in the big atrium of the Engineering building, and gather with a few friends for a study group. I might take a long early afternoon lunch break where I would head to the gym, and make up for it by studying for a couple hours in my apartment before bed.

It appears that Google tries to build campuses that recreate as much of this environment as possible.

I think this kind of thing can also be a hard sell to managers. If, deep in their hearts, the reason for switching to an open office was to increase their sense of control (and that precious 20% savings on real estate), the "college campus" office does the opposite. It requires purposeful design, and more square feet of office space per employee. Forget about checking if they look busy; the boss doesn't even know where half his people are at any given moment. But nonetheless, it's probably an easier sell than private offices, and it might be even more effective. It affords privacy when privacy is necessary, but also manages to reap the benefits of easy collaboration, chance encounters, and overheard conversations. There is some evidence that this sort of office plan is gaining ground.

I certainly hope the trend continues. I have gotten to work in an office like this once, and I can personally attest to how pleasant and productive it is. An added benefit is that I often find that a change of scenery is exactly what I need to get the creative juices flowing. If I'm struggling to concentrate in the morning, then getting up, walking around and resettling somewhere else is sometimes just what I need to be productive.

Remote Offices

This is one of today's hot topics, and I plan to revisit it in greater detail in a future post. But take a minute and consider how pleasant that would be. Cutting out the commute adds an entire waking hour back to your day. I'm sure you could put together an office in your home which is more comfortable and private than any office you've had at a company. It has the advantage that it almost totally removes the pressure of needing to look busy, even more so than in a campus office. I think if it's not handled carefully it has potential to isolate remote workers from their peers, but I can also attest from personal experience to how productive it can be.

I think some of these ideas can be easily combined. In particular, the campus office is already set up so people can work from anywhere in the building. All it takes is a VPN to expand that to anywhere with internet access. Indeed, It appears to me that most places with campus offices also have liberal work-from-home policies. I wonder if they feel more at ease allowing people to work from home, since they aren't presenting an office that people want to escape from