There are “cube farms” and there are “cube farms”.  I did some consulting in the late 90’s for a company which stabled it’s employees in office cubes like this.

The corporate culture was interesting, the programmers held tight control over “their” code.  So when part of the team was split into a separate division, “their” code became two code bases.  Fast forward a couple of years, and it was a tribal culture where neither group really talked.

And you could see it in their source code.  So a project to convert their code base to a new platform just become more difficult because a) two versions of the code trying to access the same database b) the teams didn’t speak to each other.

Out of that grew my dislike of code forking.  And my strong liking for source code repositories.

The Cube Farm pictured?  It was a cube farm at an Intel office in the USA.  There was much rejoicing when the Intel workers moved into a new building.

Update: The cool Cube Farm photo above?  By Josh Bancroft.  It’s licensed under a Creative Commons license, and you can see more of Josh’s photo’s right here.