I am a millennial (born in '88) and I would LOVE to have a cubicle. My first job was at Cisco in San Jose, California which had cubicles. I was fortunate enough to be introduced to the corporate environment with cubicles.
I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business.
Having cubicles also prevented useless chatter.
Then I left that company and my productivity and mental peace has never been the same. Not even near.
Your post reminded me of how my own perception has changed.
I remember when I graduated college I interviewed and got a job and went to work at this company that in hindsight, had these awesome large high end cubicles, with wooden U shaped desks and tall partitions. Yet, I remember walking to my cubicle and feeling a pang of sadness. I could see this huge cubicle farm and I was being guided to my own "little" cubicle to go and sit in. Felt like a hamster in a cage - a small cog in a huge machine. Which I guess I was. All the managers had offices along the outsides of the farm, facing the windows.
But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
If space is at such a premium, the solution is to encourage more remote work. At this point, the industry, with its years of experience in outsourcing, offshoring and working with distributed teams has proven that remote work is an excellent and efficient model. At the very least, it should be far more mainstream than it is.
>But now that my expectations have been lowered further... I'd take that cubicle setup over an open plan office any day.
Scott Adams nailed it in his book from 15 years ago:
>After your boss has taken away your door, your walls, and your storage areas, there aren't many options left for the next revolution in office design. One of the following things is likely to go next: the floor; the ceiling; your happiness. I think the floor will stay, but only because your company would have to dig a huge hole all the way to the other side of the earth to get rid of it. As you can imagine, a huge hole through the earth would represent a serious threat to office productivity.
One company I was at switched to "hot desking" after carefully monitoring the usage rate of desks throughout the building.
Come time to do the switch, and unless you are at the office by 7.30-8.00 it's musical chairs and people end up working in the kitchenettes.
Turns out they did their desk usage survey during the holiday season. So of course there was tons of spare desks at the time.
Also ignoring the fact that developers are going to be in the office every day - they budgeted on everybody being like sales people and out of the office half their time.
This sounds like a job for remote work, but I'm guessing this was the sort of shop that expected you to be in the office 4 out of 5 or more days per week.
Insufficient parking makes me feel like it's a scam done knowingly. If there's not enough stalls in the lot, it encourages you to go earlier so you'll find a stall available, which leads to a feedback loop of the entire workforce needing to show up earlier and earlier (and of course, with the expectation that they'll work when they get to their desk, and still stay til 5).
I think people's experiences and what they consider cubicles vary widely. When I started, I had a true cubicle with a standing 'U' shaped desk around the cube perimeter, which could've housed two employees. The cubicles had tall walls (7ft) so there was some actual privacy. those were Cubicle Nirvana, but for density reasons have seen two iterations of smaller, and smaller cubes. 'drive-by' type meetings were easy to accommodate without disrupting others.
Currently, our cubicles are a honey-comb type arrangement. (think pods of three cubicles on one side, two on the other) There is no privacy, and rows behind you leave 18" of space to the employee behind you. Gone are the tall walls for working while standing. Edges of the cubicles do not stand proud of the desks, so it's not much to work with.
We've seemingly taken the worst of both worlds when it comes to cubicle AND open office concepts. I wouldn't even know what to call it, other than awful.
Ironically, we have collectively forgotten why cubicles were invented, and why office workers originally hailed them as wonderful things: they ended the open office workspaces that were dominant at the time.
There's also the floor size to consider, cubicles or team sized cubicles where everyone has windows or at least some natural light are very different from cubicles in a massive (wide/long) dilbertesque building with only artificial light in the center. In my neck of the woods these large buildings in industrial/technology parks are becoming a thing of the past and a lot of newer offices buildings are very thin which makes cubicles much more appealing.
Millennial here, Working in IT (Support and Development). I work for a company that had existed for over 50 years, they gave me a dedicated office, The productivity increase is incredible, I'm reluctant to ever change jobs because I'd lose my office and become thrown into the pile of people in the center of an office (Hell).
My experience has been the opposite, and I've been in cubes, remote, my own office, and open-offices.
Cubicles are the soul-sucking solitude that give a false sense of privacy. You're still just as interruptable except isolated from everyone else. If you see your coworkers as a problem then maybe this is nice but I never felt that way, preferring open office space to cubicles.
I loved my cubicle. Like you said: just enough privacy to get things done. People would come by only if absolutely necessary otherwise they would mind their own business.
Having cubicles also prevented useless chatter.
Then I left that company and my productivity and mental peace has never been the same. Not even near.