As a resident in many cube farms for many years of my career, I have a fondness for stories involving this topic.  This article – Why Silicon Valley Firms Are Rethinking the Cubicle – provides probably more insight than the average person cares to know about this topic.

But this caught my attention:

Intel Corp. is often credited, or blamed, for popularizing the office cubicle. Now it is joining some prominent Silicon Valley peers in reconsidering the concept.

I didn’t know that, but later in the article you find this statistic:

Sun Microsystems Inc. is particularly aggressive about flexible work styles; the computer maker estimated that about 55% of its employees work from home or a remote office as many as two days a week. To accommodate these workers when they are in the office, Sun offers drop-in desks and places terminals in offices, cafeterias and other common spaces.

Now that definitely is a trend I foresee taking off over the next 10 years.  We already have customers that have these areas and they allow us to use them when we are onsite for a day of interviews.  This convenience is much appreciated since the PDA phone can get old when you are trying to read attachments and write out long emails.

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It’s me.  Well, I didn’t make the list, but I think I could have won it (Lee will confirm it).  But this article in CareerJournal.com reports that SnagAJob.com went with their own list and came up with these answers:

According to the 7,000 people who responded to the poll last month, the “slacker” and the “kiss-up” tied for the most annoying person to work with. Each type was selected as most annoying by 32.6% of those who responded to the one-question survey.

…

Third on the list of annoying co-workers was the “gossip hound,” which 18.4% said was the most annoying co-worker. The “loud talker” was deemed most annoying by 11.8% of participants and the “hypochondriac” was ranked worst by 4.6%.

Me, I’d have to agree with the slacker vote.

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We’ve run into some “unique” problems in handling offers with sales candidate.  Strong salespeople all share one significant ability – qualifying.  This ability, when used in the negotiation process, leads to a desire for real clarity when it comes to an offer.

We lost a strong candidate last week due to a lack of informational clarity within our customer’s offer.  There are many variables to this specific situation, but one thing that came out was that the offer was too vague.  The critical piece of information that was poorly defined was the expectations for the position.  No quota, no targets and no defined levels.

This is a new sales position within an expanding company so it is difficult to pin down exact numbers.  Yet, the refusal of the President to articulate the expectations sent a red flag to the candidate.

Don’t underestimate the significance of a position’s sales expectations.  The strongest sales candidates plug that information into the commission plan to sort out what they will make within the plan.  Most salespeople have a target number they hope to earn and will work the plan backwards to sort out how many sales they have to close to earn that target money.

Our customer, despite our pleas, did not want to explain this critical information and it cost him a strong candidate.

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