I read an interesting post, The Happiness Project: This Wednesday: a quiz–is your workspace driving you crazy?, about what makes a comfortable workspace. (She got the list from a book called A Pattern Language: Towns, Building Construction.) With just one or two exceptions, my office meets most of the criteria on her list. However, our engineers all sit in an open environment to help foster collaboration. I think most of these are not true for them. In particular, these are not true of anyone sitting in an open, shared or cubicle environment, quoted from The Happiness Project: This Wednesday: a quiz–is your workspace driving you crazy?:

• there’s a wall behind you (so no one can sneak up behind you).
• there’s a wall to one side (too much openness makes you feel exposed).
• your workspace is 50-75% enclosed by walls or windows (so you have a feeling of openness).
• you are aware of at least 2 other people, but not more than 8 people, around you (less than 2, you feel isolated and ignored; more than 8, you feel like a cog in a machine).
• no one is sitting directly opposite you and facing you.
• you can see at least 2 other people, but not more than 4.

I sat in a cubicle for 10 years at HP. (Everyone has a cubicle at HP – or everyone used to.) I was worried about it when I took the job, but when I got there I discovered that I didn't mind it at all. When I was writing code and everyone in the cubicles around me was writing code, it worked great. It was relatively quiet and there was always somebody near by to bounce an idea off of. Later, when I moved into management, I found the cubicle environment more distracting for many of the reasons above. I could hear lots of other people's conversations (in particular, I will always remember the woman next to me who would start voice mails and stop and redo them at least three times each!) on topics not related to mine and I was easily interrupted all the time. There was no standard way to signal "I'm on an a call right now that's going to take a while, come back in 30 minutes." – not like a closed office door signals that you don't want to be interrupted. (I also evaluated my home office. If you count the dogs and the baby, I'm doing pretty good here too.)