The cube farm was hated at the time, but things only ever get worse if you work in an office.
Scott Adams was blasting open concept offices before it was cool to blast them.
All of the sysadmins worked from one room, with a "datacenter" in the room next door. Imagine a single room, with desks lined up around the walls. No cubicles, and barely enough room for a keyboard/mouse/monitor and room for a soda or coffee. Crappy chairs too. Since I was the FNG, I got the desk in the back corner underneath the A/C duct. So I was perpetually frozen.
No one looks at each other since our desks faced the walls. The walls between our room and the "datacenter" had no soundproofing, so whenever I spun up the Sun gear (T2 cpus) the noise was like a helicopter taking off. Even over the A/C blasting down on me, I would hear these servers when I did a reboot.
I think the average salary at the time was around $70K or so, and there were 9 of us crammed into that crappy little room. So roughly $1M in compensation, but they couldn't find a real spot for us to work. Screw that place...
When I entered the workplace in 2003 I was lucky to get a peg for my coat, had to hot-desk during the day - there were 6 people on shift but only 4 computers. You'd go out to fix a printer or something and when you came back to base someone's taken your place
The Dilbert world of the time had cubicles, it was glorious. 3 years later the IT crowd had an entire room with just 2 people in, with their own phones, computers, desks etc.
Now of course I'm in a far more senior position and no longer deal with printers (literally have a high-viz saying "We don't do printers"). If I went into the office I'd still have to hot desk, although only on a per-day basis.
