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Comment by auxym | Hacker News Reader

Slightly different situation. I want to work in office full time due to kid daycare logistics, but there appears to be some chance that our office will be changing to 100% hotdesking for everyone, presumably to save costs while most people WFH most of the time.

That does not work for me. I work with hardware. I constantly have robot bits or DAQ/RT systems on my desk. I'm not hauling that stuff home every day.

I have already told my employer in no uncertain terms that I plan to quit if they impose hot desking.

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I'm in your situation too. I'm not making a big fuss though, I just go to the office every day and always take the same desk. I leave the desk clean at the end of the day, but I just put the things in the drawer under the desk, where people are kind enough to leave my stuff alone. If one day I find someone at my desk, I'll just go to a different desk (it happened only once).

It's like, managers don't realise a sizable amount of us are just looking for the least shit working conditions. They do the simple sums of how much they'll immediately save by essentially asset stripping the office and not the more complicated calculation of what's lost long term when people leave because of the stressful working conditions

And I call that one deprioritizing your people over petty office expenses. Might be just me, but I feel like the higher you go up the corp chain the more this line of thinking gets more and more common.

I don't understand the "kid daycare logistics". Does your work provide daycare access? Is there a specific location near your work? I'm trying to understand why not switch the daycare closer to your home to avoid this whole office situation.

Why would you haul the equipment home every day? Given the policy they want, there are plenty of simplistic solutions. Ask for a filing cabinet on wheels, store your stuff there and roll your gear somewhere that is known for employee storage of cabinets when they're doing hotdesking.

Ask for closet storage due to the cost of the equipment.

I'm a little surprised they can't make an exception on a case-by-case basis for people coming into the office every day and with specific hardware needs. Have they told you they can't make an exception?

Exceptions are difficult in a corporate world. Everything is reduced to k€.

My previous job was for a major corporation and our entire department was an exception. They got rid of our office building several years ago and despite a corporate mandate that everyone must work in an office, they let our entire department work from home indefinitely (still was when I put in my two weeks last month, still no plan to relocate us or get new office space for us).

I'm sure it might be difficult or rare, but if you make your case enough hopefully there's some process in place that allows the exception to occur. Especially if it's just a case of your boss putting a sign on a desk that says "This desk is reserved for X".

No exception for a lab? Our network engineering team has a lab (it’s an office) where they keep a bunch hardware and this and that. It’s pretty much one persons office.

Yes, that’s a very good idea. Tell your manager you’ll need a lab(even if just an empty space) for you to continue working if hot desking is introduced.

Might be just my anecdotal data, but a lot of these things come down to does your manager have a way to present whatever you're asking as a decent expense to his superiors. And not so much wanting to make your (work) life worse.

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