Do Cubicle Walls Ever Move

One of the reasons I've heard from management about why they put up cubicles instead of investing in our dignity and privacy by putting up real walls and doors is their temporary nature: if they need to rearrange them, it's easy.

And so it goes: the cubicle walls are supposed to be temporary, but the software requirements are supposed to be fixed in stone. Two years later, the software requirements are completely changed around, and the cubicle walls haven't budged an inch.

In 7 of my 10 years of programming I have worked in 3 different cubicled environments. One time, I actually saw the walls move: the web team rearranged its cubicle walls to create a common work area for PairProgramming. (Note: it's not as easy as it looks.) A couple of weeks later, management moved them to a new building with a better common work area, and restored the cubicle walls to exactly the way they were before.

Now, I may just be naive on the economics of office furniture, so can someone please explain to me the economics of cubicles?

Yes they do move. Often backwards and forwards. We used to do this at a former place - people "working late" would shorten other group's areas by moving the partitions and the desks the other side about. It eventually gets scuppered by the lack of available floor-points to plug things in.

A former (enlightened) workplace did used to re-arrange things from time-to-time, more for the variety than anything else.

--KatieLucas

Real world situation. In one of the offices I subcontract in, they are using cubicles in hallways because if they put up drywall, they would have to upgrade the entire office to meet disability act requirements, i.e., bathrooms would have to be redone and all doorways enlarged. Estimated cost $1.5 - 2.0 Million.

More generally, cubicles can be re-partitioned without calling in the building inspector or getting a permit. In some places (i.e. Beaverton Oregon), the city authorities are notorious for expanding the scope of any building project that they become aware of...

I worked in a small company in which we often enough moved the cubicle walls. Being a small, dynamic company, this made sense. Then I moved to a larger company, in which the cell blocks (see CubiclePrison) were of uniform size and arrangement. These cubicles never moved. It probably would've been cheaper for the company to build real offices with doors than to use cubicles in this instance. (Cubicle walls are expensive.) Side note: I'm now back in a small company in which--I swear this is true--I share a space with one other engineer, and the space is an office with a door and a window. Oh wonderful day!

I had a similar experience. Working at a small company that was doubling its size and office space, they built a programmer pen with hardwall cubicles. 6x8, 5ft high, stark white, with the desktop built-in. It was cheaper for them to use hardwall than movable walls.

Where I work you get to choose the cube configuration when you move to a new location on site (which happens every year or two). Then a bunch of big guys come and set up the cube how you want it. For a cube environment it actually works quite well. I went back to Germany for a year a while ago and shared an office with two other guys. Even though the office was nice and we could open and close the windows I'm not so sure I liked it better although there are advantages. --AndrewQueisser

My current employer has cubicles with 2 floor plans - employee and contractor. The employee one has a work surface that is a big U with the door at the open end. The contractor plan has the door in the corner and desk space from the door to about 3/4 the way around. It is intended for 2 contractors to share, but I had my cube set this way for just me - 2 workspace corners, and I'm not facing away from the door.

My boss expanded the sizes of four cubicles by about two feet in one direction, narrowing the "hallway" between two rows of cubicles. This brought some griping from some people whose cubicles did not grow, but my boss is the kind of guy who doesn't let things like that bother him.

As an occupant of one of the new "mega-cubicles," it didn't bother me one bit. It was a little funny to overhear people ask one another "Why do they get bigger cubicles?" The difference between the haves and have-nots was about twelve square feet of cubicle space, but it caused quite a stir. Those with big cubicles suddenly became the elite, and everyone else wondered how they could rise to that level.

I had my cubicle shrunk once. Due to some inter-department politics (our department was on the corporate shit-list at the time), a block of floor space was subject to "hostile takeover" by another department. This required cubicles in our department to be restructured; many, including myself, found themselves in a smaller cube. In my case, the location didn't move; just one of the walls moved inwards by 3 feet.

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