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Comment by DisruptiveDave | Hacker News Reader

I juuuust got off a catch-up call with an old college buddy who works at one of the big wireless companies. He described what I read about here on HN and in some blog posts: The company completely changed its "culture" in a desperate attempt to "attract millennials" (and be on trend). Moved to an open floor plan where nobody has an assigned desk. You literally cannot leave anything overnight or you get some sort of a citation. His words: "I spend my day with a headset covering one ear and my finger in the other ear, as I'm on calls most of the day." He also noted how they computerized the cafeteria so you don't have/get to interact with food workers anymore. "All my sandwiches have too much mayo now and I can't do anything about it."

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It's called 'hot-desking'. In practice everyone still sits in the same place every day, and sublimizes their territorial marking. Sitting in 'someone else's' spot is seriously frowned upon. This trend happened when the 'open plan' needed a next level of hell.

> This trend happened when the 'open plan' needed a next level of hell.

I seem to remember Dilbert explaining this as a way to ensure employees felt more like company-owned sacks of potatoes than actual humans. Hot-desking really does seem like one of the most dehumanizing office designs I can think of.

I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".

> I know the supposed benefits of open offices, but I'm not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve? Except in call centers I guess, where it's explicitly "to speed up firing people".

In call centers, there's another reason: if the company gets big enough, they may have more employees than desks. Since call centers work on shifts, not everyone is going to be in the office at the same time, and so they just lay down a policy of "nobody has their own desk".

>not even sure what hot-desking claims to achieve

It's mostly for environments in which the company's short on space and a lot of employees don't routinely come into the office. Hot desking eliminates permanently provisioning office space that may be only used for one day in five or ten.

If that's not the problem being solved, I'm not sure what is. Now no one knows where anyone is sitting and teams are at least theoretically all scattered around.

I'm pretty sure this is the correct explanation. We have a site that recently moved to this setup, and I know for a fact that there are roughly 20% fewer seats than employees. That's what they came up with as acceptable after crunching the numbers on absentee rate.

Hot desking (or Hoteling as I've heard it called) makes a lot of sense for the headquarters office of traveling consultants. These folks are usually at the client's location Monday-Thursday and back at their local headquarters on Friday. However, there's a huge amount of variation in terms of travel scheduling so having an assigned desk doesn't make much sense. For example, consider a consultant living in LA who's working on a project in the Chicago suburbs. Most Fridays are spent working from LA (either at the office or at home), but sometimes you'll need to take meetings with Chicago people. Hot desking makes it easy to find a place to work for the day because all the Chicago people that are working from home or are at a remote office aren't taking up desks.

For permanent non-traveling roles, I don't immediately see the advantage though.

What's crazy about this is that this nonsense with open floor plan to "attract Millenials" isn't even happening just in tech. My dad's an engineer working in GM's radio group, and they're pushing hot-desking on his entire building. Before it was common practice for each engineer to have a bench for doing small soldering and things like that at, but now even that kind of stuff is hot-desked in a common "lab" area. From just a few conversations with him, it's clear the drain on productivity has been insane, but nobody seems to care.

Open plan verdict: Too much mayo.

The Simpsons were close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X25rP4rTw3A

The only people who like hoteling/hotdesking are upper management because it means they can rent a smaller office space. For employees, it can be a hassle to coordinate with other coworkers, and not being able to leave stuff at the office can be negative for some (e.g. folks with ergonomic equipment or spare set of workout clothes).

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