Can I, on behalf of misanthropes everywhere, demand the return of the cubicle?
’Twas perfect. The walls were not high enough to block faces. The cubicle was still a brilliant illusion of personal space. Neighbours were two arm lengths away. A picture of the family, a pile of ketchup sachets, was all it took to feel rooted. As anybody who hit a questionable bed in a questionable business hotel overseas after a 16-hour flight can attest, it takes little for a primate to call a spot home. It just has to keep the world out, a clear separation between ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’.
But all good things must die, for the next thing is yearning to be born.
A generation ago the big challenge was “IT business alignment”. The two were distinct. Information flowed top down from business to tech, imperfectly. The MBA was revered. The leader archetype was the Serious Global Executive. The SGE owned not the product but the topline. The SGE had to look like a SGE: a touch of the imperious, some regalia. Think blue suits, cabins.
The creator savant wasn’t yet lore. The leverage of Web software that allows ten geniuses to reach millions didn’t exist. SGEs ruled the world.
After 2008 things changed. The code was the product. The 2011 a16z “software is eating the world” article announced the triumph of what began earlier with the Google IPO and the Agile Manifesto. A new aesthetic was called for — a visual marker separating the new thing from the old. Epochs too need borders.
The central tenet was ‘openness’. No executive cabins. Rows of desks. Playpens. Sleeping pods. Whiteboards. Direct orders disguised as suggestions. CTOs not CIOs. PMs not BAs. Devs not programmers.
The new thing became all that the SGE-CIO complex was not. Cubicles were raged into the open plan, swords into ploughshares. Email was archaic. Collaboration. Asana, Yammer. Social CRM. One dreary winter morning in Delhi, in 2015, it dawned that I had seven ways to speak to my colleague — sync, async, group, and one-on-one. I didn’t have much to say beyond:
“Bro, the deadline?”
The model can be ultimately traced to the dot com startup. Post the 2001 bust, basic shells sans walls was the best the survivors could afford. And, people who walked on fire together in their 20s favoured proximity.
The open plan became a totem of all that was not boring. An insurance firm with modest tech aspirations could borrow the form, even when it had no use of the function.
The Plan in 2023 when few commute everyday is a note to my younger self, one that believed in a rational world. Change is brought about by new victors, who import wholesale aspects of what they consider the norm. An universal idea, like openness, is rationalisation. There’s little that is rational. Everybody’s drawing from a shape-shifting cloud of signifiers of what’s trendy, what confers status, and of course what’s cheap on a per FTE basis.
CS majors, you won. The SGE-CIO complex is dead. Can we have our cubicles back?
