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Incredible shrinking cubicles – the madness continues

HP is not alone

A can of worms appears to be inexorably opening following our story earlier today HP downsizes workspace.

Five years ago, Philips Consumer Electronics' engineering staff in Knoxville, Tennessee, used to have palatial cubes measuring about 10 feet by 12 feet. Today they've shrunk to 8 by 10, but will shortly become a cosy 8 by 8.

"So you think it's hard on HP to deal with an 8x8 cube?" spits a Philips engineer. "The primary engineering activity at Philips Knoxville is projection televisions and hotel / motel televisions. Usually the sets purchased for development for hotel / motel are 27 or 32 inch, while for PTV development they are 55 or 64 inch 16x9 HDTVs.

"Have you ever tried squeezing a 64 inch 16x9 projection TV into a cubicle? Or even tried fitting a normal 32 inch TV onto your desk with two computers and an emulator?"

"When they forced everyone into the 8x10 cubes a couple of years ago, they set up these common lab areas so we would have a place to work on the sets since they wouldn't fit in the offices.

"End result? Everyone has erected their own crappy partition walls within the big open labs, moved their PCs in there and never even go in their offices anymore. I suspect some of them don't even remember where their 'official' offices are."

So in another fine example of corporate cost cutting, we have a company spending thousands on brand new, smaller, cubicles that won't be used so they can pack in more people who won't be using them either. ®

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HP downsizes workspace

Examples of corporate foot shooting are always more than welcome. You know where we are.

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