Is there such a thing called Cubicle Etiquette? To answer this question we need to understand those two words.

The Cubicle System, As I heard it from many fellow developers, is “the most stupid design a workplace could ever have“. Despite the fact that it was designed for what is called “White Collar” professions, I could only distinguish it from the Production Line system we commonly find in factories by its cleanness. If you are surprised I’ll explain.

The factory environment as we know is noisy, something you expect to be different in a software company. Wrong! software development is noisy too, especially if you have marketing and sales people sharing the site of R&D. Developers are forced to listen the weather current conditions every time a call is made to a customer, not to mention weekend plans and last trip to the Caribbeans the business development people have made. I would even say that the noise you hear in a factory might even be better, at least it sounds like one of the emerging music genres as it is generated from machines that are working in sync. Hands-free phones are more common that you expect, even managers who have their own private offices tend to use them only for telling an employee the bad news of a layoff while all other work or vacation plans related discussions are made across the cubicles soft walls.

Workers in neither environments enjoy any privacy; and I’m not talking only about rubbing their noses without being counted for. Although in a factory everyone is too busy to notice what anyone else is doing, unless it is a break, where it is break for everybody. While in software development, flexibility created conflict between those who are walking around having a break and others who are trying to gain some focus.

The size of a cubicle, or what we can call the “workspace allocated to you“, is about the same. It is in fact a little bigger in many factories especially the ones designed for standing workers. Software development assumed the sitting position and anything above or around you is free for public use.

Shared living space has a known problem of managing the temperature, I even have this problem at home. However, an always moving person with physical activity has a superior ability to adjust his body to the environment, that is probably why Jack in the Titanic died when he fell asleep and Rose stayed alive although we know that water is normally warmer than the air. In the cubicle system, the main mental challenge is to find the thermostat that controls your area, and then when you find it the puzzle is even more mysterious: “how does it work?” You find only one thermostat positioned somewhere in the ceiling and affects the heating system of a whole section of 25×25 meters, an area that fits 8 people in a generous company or even more. With the time, residents of such area have developed their own system of weather control; a set of T-shirts, light jackets, and wool shirts each for certain time of the day.

These problems of the cubicle system created the need for a cubicle etiquette; a set of rules to counter the temptations to be noisy or invading…etc.

My first exposure to the French word “Etiquette” was when I was a child. In particular the different greeting etiquettes I needed to follow. When we visited family A we had to say “Bon Jour” because that is what they consider a proper greeting, if we visited family B we needed to say “Marhaba” [Arabic for Greetings] because the first might look like an insult to them and visiting family C needed the use of “Assalamu Alaikom” [Arabic for Peace on You All]. Why couldn’t we just say “hi” and get down to business right away?

Apparently the etiquette is a part of the rules societies have naturally developed to regulate the individuals behaviors. Irony is in the individuals need for both freedom and socializing at the same time, and the balance is in the saying “one’s freedom ends where the freedom of others begins“, in other words: “Your freedom ends where my cubicle begins“.

That balance is very hard to achieve with the cubicle system. The reasons I guess because it was designed for the opposite purposes; it was designed to emphazise team interaction not to serve isolation, for managers to show their visiting investors where their money is spent and also let developers know investors are still interested, and to simply look and operate like a production line because any other system is hard to understand. No privacy by design, noisy by design and crazy by design.

So until someone “powerful” brings back the private offices system with windows to the daylight, own thermostats and doors, you’re going to have to use your common sense to achieve “THE BALANCE“.