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The cubicle (or "systems furniture," as no one actually calls it) has to be the most reviled piece of office furniture ever created.  Ostensibly for fitting more office workers into a smaller space without compromising productivity, what the cubicle actually accomplishes is to create a work environment that produces the illusion of productivity, while actually making its occupants unhappy and possibly unproductive as well.

The primary message a cubicle sends is "you are being watched."  Walls that block no sound and wide openings instead of doors mean that you can't have phone conversations (and are forced to listen to everyone else's), and that you must be constantly aware that anyone walking down the hallway can see precisely what you're doing.  The book Workplaces of the Future called them "bright satanic offices."  We've created a panopticon workplace, and seem surprised that people feel like they're in a prison.

It's an open secret that almost no one in IT actually spends every moment of their workday working.  People (especially people with ubiquitous Internet access, which in IT is almost everybody) take impromptu breaks, check news sites, read blogs, look up sports scores, etc.  The openness of the cubicle environment seems to aim to eliminate all that, by making it obvious when people are not productive.

But this underestimates people's desire to get away from work for a moment.  People still do the same things they'd do in a private, enclosed office -- only now they do it with an eye over their shoulder (or stick a convex mirror on their monitor.)  Instant messenger clients include a "boss key" to quickly hide conversations.  How much stress is introduced into the workplace this way?  After all, now instead of just being unproductive, people get to be unproductive and worried as well.

The unfortunate fact is that the apperance of productivity is generally valued a lot more than actual productivity.  Actual productivity is sometimes difficult to measure -- but whether or not someone's surfing the web when the boss walks by is obvious and memorable.  The office workers know this, so they try to maintain the appearance of productivity all the time, regardless of if they're actually productive or not.

The problem here is that the managers designing offices are trying to figure out a way to make people work harder and more consistently.  After this much time in the IT industry, I've come to a different conclusion -- everyone has an individual level of productivity, and only they can change it.  What's more, everyone has an individual working style, and "an 8-hour block with a 30-minute lunch break" is not the preferred style for all (or even most) workers.  Anything done to attempt to force people into greater productivity instead forces them into greater attempts to disguise how their working style differs from the "norm."  And the time and effort used in this disguising doesn't come out of slack -- it comes out of work.  This isn't to say that people's productivity can't be improved -- it most certainly can.  But this has to be done by providing incentives to be more productive, and those incentives only work on people who want to be more productive.

Instead of spending 6 hours working and 2 surfing the web, if you make that employee feel he has to maintain the illusion of productivity all the time, he'll spend 5 hours working, 2 surfing the web, and 1 hiding the fact that he spent 2 surfing the web.  But he's rewarded for the illusion of productivity he creates, in a way he'd likely never be rewarded for actual productivity.

The biggest problem, from a my perspective, is that unproductive time spent at work is wasted.  It's not that people want to spend 2 hours surfing the web -- it's that they want to spend 2 hours doing something other than work, and the requirement of appearing productive means that they can't use that time on something useful.  They'd rather read a novel, or play a video game, or go shopping, or sit down with their families... but none of those activities have a "boss key."  In requiring people to work for a fixed number of hours under observation, we don't get more productivity -- we get the same amount of productivity for the company while destroying the worker's ability to produce for himself.

Indeed, some of my most productive time at one of my jobs was when I was sharing an office with a friend.  Using breaks to talk to someone I actually enjoyed talking to (as opposed to most coworkers -- while I've always liked my coworkers and gotten along well with them, in general I feel no desire to socialize with them about non-work matters) rather than pointlessly surf the web seemed to make the time "count for more" and make me better able to go back to productive work quickly.  And for me, the truly ideal person to talk to during such breaks would be my wife -- hence some of telecommuting's appeal.

People who work outside of the office environment (whether that's from a home office, from Starbucks, or wherever) are freed from having to maintain the illusion.  They can work, and not work, as their own preferences dictate.  Sure, there are some people who would never get anything done working from home -- but they usually know this.  They know that there are too many distractions for them at home and they wouldn't be productive, so if they were choosing a workspace "on their own" they would probably choose to go to some other environment to get work done (one of my friends uses the local library.)  They can work whatever hours they choose, subject only to the relatively lax requirement of being reachable via phone or email during some approximation of business hours.  And if those hours happen to be "30 minutes of each hour for 10 hours"... so be it.

"But, then they're not working an 8-hour day!" is of course the objection.  Here's the thing, though -- I bet that worker isn't working an 8-hour day in his cubicle, either.  Managers need to measure, not the amount of work time, but the amount of output a worker produces.  What does it matter if Mary only works 5 hours if she accomplishes as much as Bob does in 8?  Why should Jim get a raise for working 12-hour days if he only accomplishes what Fred does in 6?

Unfortunately, measuring output is hard.  You can't measure a programmer based on lines of code he writes -- some lines of code are harder to write than others.  You can't measure a tester based on bugs found -- when I was working on stress and performance at a software company, I would sometimes take a week or more to find, isolate, and identify a fix for a single bug (usually some hairy multithreaded race condition), during which time someone testing, say, UI components might identify dozens of bugs.   We'd both be doing a good job, just at different tasks that require different metrics.

This said, I am not delighted to waste an hour or two of my day because a manager can't tell if I do good work or not.  If a manager doesn't know who is and is not productive on his team he is failing to manage, just as a college professor who has to grade based on attendance is failing to teach.  If you can pass the class without showing up, then either the teacher isn't very good or the bureaurcracy put you in a class you never should have been in.  Likewise, if you can not do your job, routinely, without your manager noticing then either your manager isn't very good or your job is unnecessary.

It seems at least some people are noticing (from Fortune magazine):
If working at home is now part of the zeitgeist, one very large employer that seems increasingly tapped in is the U.S. government. Congressman Frank Wolf, a Republican whose Virginia district is home to many federal worker bees, has made telecommuting his pet project. "There is nothing magic in strapping ourselves into a metal box every day only to drive to an office where we sit behind a desk working on a computer," he told a congressional committee.

Wolf sees telecommuting as a way to decrease traffic, reduce air pollution, increase productivity, and frustrate terrorists. In 2004 he launched a campaign to penalize government agencies by docking funds if they fail to support telecommuting. Now the SEC, the State Department, the Department of Justice, and four other big agencies are required to offer every eligible worker the opportunity to telecommute.  [...]

Coming to the office for meetings and in-person collaboration is still important, of course, but as Brand points out, "People are realizing they don't need face-to-face time all the time."

It's a start.  Who'd have thought change would begin in the government?