No Laptop, No Phone, No Desk: UBS Reinvents the Work Space | Hacker News Reader

No Laptop, No Phone, No Desk: UBS Reinvents the Work Space

nytimes.com

22 pointse15ctr0n58 comments

Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

Are the execs that cook this up part of this or do they keep their (window?) offices?

Unlikely. Typically these rules are for the little people.

It sounds like there are no window offices. From the article:

> Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout the building.

They may actually be doing the employees a favour, since it's a false sense of security to think otherwise.

Given that this is UBS, I think this is, more than any other factor, a way for the company to prevent any way of employees establishing any kind of paper trail.

They seem to be getting caught up in scandal after scandal every time some news about something shady going on in the financial industry, the first thing I look for in the article is the letters 'UBS'.

Maybe I'm being too negative/tin-foil-hat here.

No paper trail? I'm pretty certain they already use email and digital documents. Allowing them to hotdesk (as this is essentially what it is) is hardly a way to prevent employees establishing a paper trail.

Digital documents can have established retention periods and mandated purges.

Indeed, I worked for a financial company that had a 90-day default purge on all e-mails and chat. You could drag some e-mails to a retention folder ( limited in overall size ) but as far as I recall that only protected them for another finite span of time.

Anything that needed a longer persistence had to be typed-up into a document and stored in Sharepoint, which was more manageable in terms of legal discovery than individual e-mails.

Saatchi (edit: might have been Chiat Day as mentioned downthread) tried this back in the '90s, and I think gave it up as a bad idea pretty quickly thereafter. I know some studios that still do hotdesking and reconfigurable workpods, but as far as I'm concerned it's a morale-killer.

Somehow this reminds me of the government office description in "Snow Crash".

"So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. "

In the book this is the same office that timed how long employees spent reading emails. Too short and you are penalized for skimming, too long and you are a slacker.

I wouldn't be surprised if offices are doing that now too.

Yahoo tracked their remote worker's activity by their VPN traffic (to access email). So yes, it is being done.

It takes a lot of effort for humans to pick a seat at random, though. School desks fit this description exactly -- they have no features and there is no reason to sit in one over another. The natural result is a fixed seating arrangement. The only way the Fed offices in Snow Crash wouldn't also end up with entrenched seating arrangements is if employees were subject to penalties for favoring a particular seat. You can't "notice" that one of your employees is behaving exactly the same as every other employee.

Have you read the book?

The whole point of the chapter is that if you want to work for the feds, you don't want to get noticed. Ever. Later in that chapter she mentions how you're just supposed to sit in the first unoccupied desk closest to the door. That also serves as a visual indication of when you got in to your coworkers.

No, I haven't read the book. How did this situation arise? A penalty for being noticed can't apply to using a fixed desk, because in a state of nature 100% of employees use fixed desks, making the trait impossible to "notice". The first guy to sit at someone else's desk would be noticed. You'd need to implement a penalty for favoring a desk. This makes up most of my prior comment, but you haven't responded to it at all.

> That also serves as a visual indication of when you got in to your coworkers.

This sounds like an excellent way to be noticed. If you don't want to be noticed, you need your actions to carry less information, not more.

> because in a state of nature 100% of employees use fixed desks.

I didn't bother replying to that part of your comment, because it was obvious that we were talking about two different things. There is nothing "natural" about the office seating arrangement. The management wanted to reduce the employees to interchangeable cogs. You don't have personal desks, and any attempt to favor one, to make it "your" desk was quickly noticed and frowned upon.

> If you don't want to be noticed, you need your actions to carry less information, not more.

If everybody else acted the same way as you did, the way that management favored, your actions carry absolutely no information at all except for the fact that you follow management's dictates. If everybody just grabbed the closest desk to the door that was unoccupied, nobody is giving up any information that they didn't already have to give up by following management.

> If everybody else acted the same way as you did, the way that management favored, your actions carry absolutely no information at all except for the fact that you follow management's dictates.

You just specified that the accepted method of sitting reveals who arrived when. Sitting at random wouldn't do that.

And would also cause you to lose your job. It was mandated or you were highly pressured to sit in the first empty desk closest to the door.

That´s assuming of course that you want to keep the job. If you don´t, do whatever you like. They even had time guidelines on how long it should take you to read memos.

And I think you missed my sentence that you weren´t already giving up information that was required by management´s dictates.

It's a work of speculative fiction, so detailed analysis from outside of its own world context is doomed.

It's a great story though. The first chapter is a work of transformative art. I recommend it highly.

After you (the general you) read it, there will be time for debating forehead tattoos as criminal justice, personal nuclear devices, and the role of mafioso in fast food. :)

Just writing this comment has made me want to read it again.

I love using a different keyboard every day that somebody previously ate Doritos at. Are they hiring?

http://www.fritolay.com/careers.htm

Yes, but the entire HR department is out sick, so good luck getting a hold of anyone.

You bring up a great point... but I am thinking germs.

Back in the day during the SARS outbreak, a few investment banker types either came down with SARS or were caught up in the quarantine measures. The HK health authorities came in closed entire office seating sections (possibly even floors but I'm fuzzy on the details).

Imagine how the quarantining measures would work in an environment where people sat wherever. "Oh today, I sit north side 7th floor, but tomorrow south side 8th, but 2 days prior I was on 6."

Such chaos could easily prompt a building wide closure instead of an easily identifiable seating section.

This same idea went notoriously badly for Chiat/Day: https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/

That was over 20 years ago so I guess all lessons have been forgotten and we have to learn them again.

To the point of using thin clients:

One interesting angle to this is arguably better security for the corporation as there are no USB ports on employee machines.

This prevents employees from making copies of corporate data or bringing malware on their USB flash drives.

I know that there's software that disables USB ports, but there are always exceptions or workarounds that are enough to cause an incident.

This also eliminates potential of data loss in case of hard drive failure/damage or theft of employee's computer as everything is on corporate servers where enforcement of backups is much easier than on actual computers.

Not sure how this works... so it's a race into the office so you can sit next to your team before it all fills up?

So working at UBS is like a public HS. You get a locker a phone and you float around to where you need to be.

Being an employee at this company I can tell you it has nothing to do with mitigating risk associated with data loss prevention, and everything to do with cost of infrastructure. This particular roll out is due to Citrix' A3 being deployed in favor of HP physical desktops, as well as Microsoft Lync (Now Skype for Business) in place of physical Avaya phones. Its a long term play for cost cutting with some argument for latency as well, as the A3's when they work right are super fast.

I've been in contact with a number of Swiss companies and saw that live already - the PostFinance in Berne did the same stuff. You have a locker for your private stuff/jacket and a tiny container with your 'work stuff' that you just push to a random desk (Not sure if they still do this, last saw this a year ago or so).

You plugin your laptop in a docking station and start working.

I .. hate the idea and felt uncomfortable the couple days I stayed. This is definitely not new or UBS specific though.

Isn't this essentially what the Sun Ray thin client was, 17 years ago:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

Yes, absolutely. They did something like this at the Sun Microsystems field office outside of Chicago while I worked there. You would log into a sunray with your smartcard and pick up whatever you had left behind in your session, with no permanent desk assignment.

It was unpopular, to say the least. Your personal belongings went into a pedestal on wheels that you could take to whichever workspace you wound up at that day. This was in 2000/2001 or so.

These days we call them ChromeBoxes.

And they can be great. My work issue laptop is a Pixel 2 ChromeBook, and I love it. But that's mine, which I alone use (except when I lend it to someone), and the grease on the keyboard comes from my fingers.

I'm sure the people who use a specific model of keyboard or monitor for ergonomic or accessibility reasons just love this idea.

My office did this on a vastly smaller scale. The people that do care about their keyboard either store it in their locker, or in the case of one of my coworkers, carry it with them (it's the smallest CODE keyboard so it packs up easily).

That clearly doesn't work for the monitor.

I hope someone is sanitizing those keyboards regularly. It's impressive what germ-traps shared keyboards are.

(Not originally written as a Douglas Adams reference, but I suppose it sort-of fits.)

This is easy to fix: get rid of the keyboards altogether, and just use on-screen touch keyboards. Give employees screen wipes to use.

I can't imagine why office workers wouldn't mind typing in lengthy documents using an on-screen keyboard. /s

It is a shame the article has no pictures of the office setup.

Initially I thought this as well but upon reading it's somewhat irrelevant.

Desks are now like parking spots: first come, first served. When you log in, you get your own VM, not your own PC. So the placement and configuration may well be innovative in some way, but it would be a separate concept. You lose the ability to be special at all (prefer a trackball or ergonomic keyboard? Grossed out by that grey crap on someone else's--wait, your--mouse? Too bad, sucka!)

Digital nomads... but none of their digitals are nomadic. :)

What I found noteworthy is the lack of laptops. Nobody works from home?

I am inclined to not look for the zebras here. No photo offered by UBS, nothing they can get easily from a getty images (a clip photo) so hey it's not like they are going to use any leverage they have and demand it. "Photo or we don't run the story". As always this article was floated by someone for PR purposes. And a UBS employee is quoted. So it's not like they couldn't have said "ok we will print but send us a photo to make it more interesting". And the photo is of UBS offices in Zurich to boot. Lazy.

Back in the day when we were featured in a news story I actually took the time to setup the scene (in advance) for the photographer that was sent over from the local big city paper. As a result he was able to get a great shot and the article was syndicated in 20 newspapers across the country. Was well worth the effort. Even had a ladder for him so he could get the shot from the top easily.

Yeah it is just a VDI setup. I just wondered what the overall look and feel was. Is it little clusters of desks or a giant open plan nightmare?

Some of the doublespeak in large financial corporations is astonishing.

> UBS executives insist the shift is not all about costs. “I would be wrong to sit here and say there isn’t an economic efficiency dimension,” Mr. Owen said. “In and of itself, that’s not the reason to do it. It would fail on that basis. It has to be of value to our staff and our structure in the way we operate. There has to be a value there.”

Translation: It's all about costs and making employees absolutely replacable, only we're calling it "value addition" or some such nonsense. And what the fuck is an "economic efficiency dimension"?

I like it. If I want to get on a whiteboard with a couple guys and hash things out, we can get a room with maybe a couple PCs to write some code. Otherwise, you're at home or somewhere else you find comfortable.

Give it a few years for those disgusting coworkers to dirty up all the chairs, keyboards, and mice. Maybe add a bunch of fingerprints to the monitors.

> Maybe add a bunch of fingerprints to the monitors.

And yet, somehow, the new thing in laptops is touch screens.

I work at a company where this was implemented at one point. The kicker? Everyone picked a desk and stuck with it, setting up family pictures, monitor setups, and so forth. When someone did change desks, it was a major pain to track them down for in person conversations, and it incurred ill will with the coworker (and their colleagues) they displaced.

We're back to normal seating arrangements.

This was predicted by Stephenson in The Diamond Age.

It sounded perfectly horrible when I read it then as fiction, but reading it now as reality, I find myself filled with an unpleasant sensation of dread and loathing that well surpasses my previous response.

Every day, I become more and more convinced that I'm living in a dystopian "mirror" universe like the one on Star Trek where the humans are all evil, and somewhere out there, there's a "prime" universe where humans are generally good and things are generally improving.

This setup wouldn't work for "computer people". My OS' tend to be adjusted to the extent that I have a hard time using the default installations.

There are 13% fewer desks than people. Sounds like finding a desk there at least once a day is about as fun finding an open meeting room other companies. Plus, you can't find anybody because you don't reliably know their home location.

Looks like Musical Chairs really

I find myself moving around the office with my laptop a lot, and I don't really understand why I have a desk, other than to accumulate junk. I like the idea.

If you have your own personal laptop, sure.

To truly reinvent it what I would want done is email

It might be needed for external information, but companies should start to think how to get it retired

Email, much like spreadsheets, is the second best tool for any task. You can long for the best tool, if you first define the task. You can't beat email's flexibility, though, when you don't know the task beforehand.

This is what VDI was meant to accomplish. Secure desktops in the cloud. The problem is doing it right gets very expensive VERY fast

God what a nightmare that would be. As if open office spaces weren't bad enough.

I would love to see how thin are these "so-called thin desks".

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