Posted 5:00 PM by Floyd

Today I went to the i2 Technologies office in Mountain View, where I used to work until I was laid off at the end of August. When I started my job I worked for Aspect Development, a sharp, fast-growing software company. In March 2000 we merged with i2. i2 had a lot of good people, but it grew too fast and never addressed its underlying structural problems. The result was a company that has the most incompetent infrastructure (facilities, finance, HR, payroll) that I have ever seen.

Here is an example: In August i2 about two-thirds of the Mountain View office were let go. The result was a mostly empty building that i2 could not possibly sublet because the Bay Area commercial real estate market has gone bust. So you would think that the remaining employees would be allowed to score some nice office space. But I found that all workers had been relocated into a corner of the building, and some of the managers who had had offices were now in cubes! An office is a nice perk for an engineer, but a manager needs a place to discuss issues privately with his subordinates.

Why were these managers in cubes? Because i2 decided that vacating their floor space would be a tax writeoff. That would be a smart thing to do -- except that i2 has no profits to be taxed!

You might think that clustering the employees together makes them feel better than having them scattered through a mostly empty building. The opposite is true. A completely full cube space is not normal, because there is always the odd cube here and there used for a test machine or a visiting worker. Also some proportion of a workplace will be absent for meetings, lunch, or personal reasons. So as long as you see occupants here and there, you will perceive a cube space as occupied. But a small cluster of people surrounded by empty space looks eerie and lonesome.

About six years ago I worked for a startup in San Jose. Most startups occupy small, crowed offices. This startup leased space from Stratacom because an angel investor was an officer of that company. There were ten of us in a completely empty space. We were surrounded by probaby 100 empty cubes; there was not a Stratacom employee in line of sight, though you could walk around a corner or down a hall and come in contact with other people. I have never had a more disorienting work environment.