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Comment by shortsightedsid | Hacker News Reader

> What’s your working environment like? - We’ve recently moved to a more “hip” location. We used to have personal desks, but now we have this “pick whatever spot is avaiable” open area. I dislike it a lot.

Somehow this resonates a lot with me even if though I've never worked on Mainframes or anything like that.

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I, too, strongly prefer having a personal desk. It is completely natural for a human to set up his environment according to their tastes and preferences, and I'm baffled that some office designers do not account for that.

Depressing to see how low we've gotten. It's not that people want an office (with a door) to minimize interruptions, you now need to advocate for your own fucking desk?

That jumped right out at me too. When I started at Microsoft a quarter century ago they did their best to get everyone in an office

Because there's a subset of designers and architects who feel that they are uniquely enlightened and brilliant, and their job is to dictate to poor benighted proles how they should live their lives, rather than serve and empower human beings who have their own dignity and agency.

Witness modernist architecture: "you shall all live and work in soulless concrete boxes, because I the brilliant architect have decreed that ornament is superfluous, and I can shape you into Properly Thinking People by manipulating your environment."

A think everyone prefers to have a personal desk but for hybrid (work from home with office days) it can be wasteful and a few days a month I could put up with a random desk. I see no point in forcing people use a random desk when everyone in the office most of the days.

I wonder if most offices are like us, where we have "flexible seating" but everyone has their spot and sits in the same desk whenever their in and most people respect that. So your chair, monitor position and brightness, desk height, etc... are all as you like it. Makes a mockery of the hot desking concept and we'd all much rather they officially abandoned the idea

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