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Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your o

Why stop at having an office merely "open"? Hot desking is the new thing - it's nothing to do with cost saving, it's all about "flexibility". Except that your organisation might also have a policy against working from home. There's no implicit message that you are simply a replaceable functional unit, not at all. You might even find there's no desk left when you arrive at work - who doesn't love the suspense of arriving for an oversold airplane? Now you can have that at work every single day! Truly modern offices have hot desks AND are wired for teleconferencing - right in the open areas! That's right, if "open" is good for communication then a 60" screen on the wall with video cameras pointing at you is even better! You can share in the dull roar of collaboration with people on other continents ALL DAY! In the average open space you can fit at least two, maybe three such screens. When you have them installed, get the tradesmen to come during office hours. It costs way more if they come after hours and your employees should get the chance to see drills, saws and nailguns operated by professionals, they may learn something. We all know there's nothing that stimulates productivity like the sound of productivity, right? So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of hot food - all these things will make employees feel right at home. Using only the most modern materials in the office - lots of glass and steel - will ensure the entire workforce shares the joy. You don't want to be damping the precious sound waves with carpet or plasterboard. I wish I was joking.

mrweasel 12y ago
I got a bit stressed out just by reading that.
matwood 12y ago
Hot desking is the new thing I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge. It was interesting to see and a little frightening. Right off the bat the noise level would have turned me off. I asked how hard it was to hire and he said interviews are held in the room with him or another senior person pair coding with the candidate.
- ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
  There is no middle ground between my desktop settings and the crazy cat lady.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- eloisant 12y ago
  At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the machine acted funny, it would wipe the hard disk and reinstall both OS' from a network image. The whole process was completely automatic and was done in 20 minutes. So it was real hot desking, and it worked great. You sat at any computer, it became your computer. Way before Google started to talk about stateless computers and their chromebook.
  - matwood 12y ago
    That's not what this was. I was specifically told that over time their settings would all merge together.
    - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
      Due to RSI I have my mouse set to the lowest possible sensitivity, I'd like to see my settings merge with his
  - npsimons 12y ago
    That sounds remarkably like my school; New Mexico Tech perchance? I was a UC, then SysProg at the TCC for a while.
    - cookiecaper 12y ago
Touche 12y ago
This reminds me of the hip news organization on House of Cards where everyone is sitting around on stair steps and such. I wonder how productive such an environment is for anyone, and whether the decision to design an office in such a way is solely for the sake of image.
- cookiecaper 12y ago
  Considering it's not a real office, yes, it's purely for image. It's meant to communicate "Slugline is so creative and forward-thinking that they don't even need non-beanbag furnishings!", and contrast against the Post's button-down, cubicle hell style. The sad part is that some people see things like that in TV shows and try to duplicate them in the real world, without realizing that devices that work to communicate something on television don't necessarily actually work for doing the thing that the TV people are supposedly doing.
  - fish2000 12y ago
    Funny that – I often imagine that a nicely productive compromise would be a scheme like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation. That particular plan is far from perfect – they have often used the lack of isolation (e.g. people peeping on neighbors through ceiling-level windows) as a plot device – but I still like the actual looks of it, based on actual experience with the open-plan-induced drudgery discussed in the article.
    - liveoneggs 12y ago
      small (permanent) war rooms for workgroups and private offices for management/shared offices for drones (2-3/office) is a great setup, imho. I worked at a place that did big war rooms per project and had tons of empty "home" cubes where you went for an hour or two per day to do non-primary work. I think a fixed-time system in the groups would be best.
    - spb 12y ago
Thriptic 12y ago
Our laboratory actually employed hot desking for a bit, albeit out of necessity. We had a limited amount of desks (in an open office configuration no less) available, and they were distributed by seniority. All the graduate students, undergrads, and some post-docs were forced to share a small, hot room with long benches for doing computational work. There was also inadequate space in this room, so people would have to go elsewhere to do work at times. The results were literally disastrous. Tension built up among the people sharing the room, and also between people with and without desks. People stopped coming into work or would leave early etc. It was bad enough to warrant our purchase of another room to solely devote to personal cubicle space for these hot desking individuals, which also isn't perfect but it's better.
RyanMcGreal 12y ago
"The dull roar of collaboration" is my favourite expression of the day.
caw 12y ago
One job I had went to hot desking for a campus of over 1000 people. The oversubscription ratio was 1.25 people to 1 station, with the assumption that every 5th person would be not in a desk for some reason (travel, vacation, sick, in meetings -- they actually measured this by taking headcounts). The idea is that if you were going to leave your desk for more than some specified amount of time you'd pack everything up.
- notahacker 12y ago
  My friend hot-desks in an oversubscribed office which solves the oversubscription problem with a work-from-home-day rota. The punchline: he's a quant for one of the world's biggest banks.
  - Florin_Andrei 12y ago
    They've optimized the living daylights out of the whole thing. Well, I'm sure the savings free up money for other, more valuable purposes.
Udo 12y ago
I think my ideal office space would have both - little separate rooms for one person or, depending on preference and necessity, a small group. And then there'd be large and quirky open areas where people could go and sit down with their laptops randomly. Because I have experienced both extremes (including my own startup) and they're not ideal. Having your own office is nice, but sometimes you want to ad-hoc with a small group of other people, or maybe you just want a quick change of scenery, maybe go to a place where there is some background activity. You shouldn't have to go find a Starbucks for that. For me, these laptop-only environments don't work very well either, because at some point I want to have my desktop with a decent multi-screen setup. Lastly, there should always be the option of working from home when appropriate. So, if I ever start a company again, I'd try to just keep all these options available and let people find the right balance that works for them individually.
woah 12y ago
You sound like an angry person.
YTowOnt9 12y ago
> So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen > open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the > sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy > PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of > hot food - all these things will make employees feel > right at home. This is an accurate description of lunchtime at the digital shitshow where I work. An open plan kitchen really is the handiwork of the idiot. Sometimes I'm glad the toilets were prebuilt when we moved in, or else I fear we'd have open plan shitting as well.
- t_pascal 12y ago
  When I was in prison, we had open plan shitting. It was very morale-boosting synergy.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    Wait, you made your release date and didn't tell me?! I've missed the party!
    - t_pascal 12y ago
      I used to be in prison. I still am, but I used to be as well.

mrweasel 12y ago

I got a bit stressed out just by reading that.

matwood 12y ago

Hot desking is the new thing I visited a place that was a giant room of ~100 people working. No one had their own computer, instead you just sat down and whatever computer was there and started working. The guy running this insanity said they re-image all the machines all time taking settings from one of the machines that has been in use. His theory was that over time everyones preferences would merge. It was interesting to see and a little frightening. Right off the bat the noise level would have turned me off. I asked how hard it was to hire and he said interviews are held in the room with him or another senior person pair coding with the candidate.

ChikkaChiChi 12y ago
There is no middle ground between my desktop settings and the crazy cat lady.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
eloisant 12y ago
At my university, 15 years ago, we had network profiles. So you would log to any machine in the university, your home directory would be your own. That worked with dual boot Windows and Linux, so you'd get the same files on either platform. The machines were pretty much stateless. When you booted a machine you could choose between Windows, Linux, or reset the whole machine. The third one was what you did when the machine acted funny, it would wipe the hard disk and reinstall both OS' from a network image. The whole process was completely automatic and was done in 20 minutes. So it was real hot desking, and it worked great. You sat at any computer, it became your computer. Way before Google started to talk about stateless computers and their chromebook.
- matwood 12y ago
  That's not what this was. I was specifically told that over time their settings would all merge together.
  - GotAnyMegadeth 12y ago
    Due to RSI I have my mouse set to the lowest possible sensitivity, I'd like to see my settings merge with his
- npsimons 12y ago
  That sounds remarkably like my school; New Mexico Tech perchance? I was a UC, then SysProg at the TCC for a while.
  - cookiecaper 12y ago

Touche 12y ago

This reminds me of the hip news organization on House of Cards where everyone is sitting around on stair steps and such. I wonder how productive such an environment is for anyone, and whether the decision to design an office in such a way is solely for the sake of image.

cookiecaper 12y ago
Considering it's not a real office, yes, it's purely for image. It's meant to communicate "Slugline is so creative and forward-thinking that they don't even need non-beanbag furnishings!", and contrast against the Post's button-down, cubicle hell style. The sad part is that some people see things like that in TV shows and try to duplicate them in the real world, without realizing that devices that work to communicate something on television don't necessarily actually work for doing the thing that the TV people are supposedly doing.
- fish2000 12y ago
  Funny that – I often imagine that a nicely productive compromise would be a scheme like the SCDP office on “Mad Men“: mostly private offices, but with a pseudo-open “Creative Lounge“ that facilitates collaboration but retains basic human stuff like doors, for some sense of sonic isolation. That particular plan is far from perfect – they have often used the lack of isolation (e.g. people peeping on neighbors through ceiling-level windows) as a plot device – but I still like the actual looks of it, based on actual experience with the open-plan-induced drudgery discussed in the article.
  - liveoneggs 12y ago
    small (permanent) war rooms for workgroups and private offices for management/shared offices for drones (2-3/office) is a great setup, imho. I worked at a place that did big war rooms per project and had tons of empty "home" cubes where you went for an hour or two per day to do non-primary work. I think a fixed-time system in the groups would be best.
  - spb 12y ago

Thriptic 12y ago

Our laboratory actually employed hot desking for a bit, albeit out of necessity. We had a limited amount of desks (in an open office configuration no less) available, and they were distributed by seniority. All the graduate students, undergrads, and some post-docs were forced to share a small, hot room with long benches for doing computational work. There was also inadequate space in this room, so people would have to go elsewhere to do work at times. The results were literally disastrous. Tension built up among the people sharing the room, and also between people with and without desks. People stopped coming into work or would leave early etc. It was bad enough to warrant our purchase of another room to solely devote to personal cubicle space for these hot desking individuals, which also isn't perfect but it's better.

RyanMcGreal 12y ago

"The dull roar of collaboration" is my favourite expression of the day.

caw 12y ago

One job I had went to hot desking for a campus of over 1000 people. The oversubscription ratio was 1.25 people to 1 station, with the assumption that every 5th person would be not in a desk for some reason (travel, vacation, sick, in meetings -- they actually measured this by taking headcounts). The idea is that if you were going to leave your desk for more than some specified amount of time you'd pack everything up.

notahacker 12y ago
My friend hot-desks in an oversubscribed office which solves the oversubscription problem with a work-from-home-day rota. The punchline: he's a quant for one of the world's biggest banks.
- Florin_Andrei 12y ago
  They've optimized the living daylights out of the whole thing. Well, I'm sure the savings free up money for other, more valuable purposes.

Udo 12y ago

I think my ideal office space would have both - little separate rooms for one person or, depending on preference and necessity, a small group. And then there'd be large and quirky open areas where people could go and sit down with their laptops randomly. Because I have experienced both extremes (including my own startup) and they're not ideal. Having your own office is nice, but sometimes you want to ad-hoc with a small group of other people, or maybe you just want a quick change of scenery, maybe go to a place where there is some background activity. You shouldn't have to go find a Starbucks for that. For me, these laptop-only environments don't work very well either, because at some point I want to have my desktop with a decent multi-screen setup. Lastly, there should always be the option of working from home when appropriate. So, if I ever start a company again, I'd try to just keep all these options available and let people find the right balance that works for them individually.

woah 12y ago

You sound like an angry person.

YTowOnt9 12y ago

> So when you plan your next office, leave the kitchen > open too - the scrape of chairs on the tiles, the > sound of the dishwasher being unloaded, the happy > PING of the microwave - not to mention the aromas of > hot food - all these things will make employees feel > right at home. This is an accurate description of lunchtime at the digital shitshow where I work. An open plan kitchen really is the handiwork of the idiot. Sometimes I'm glad the toilets were prebuilt when we moved in, or else I fear we'd have open plan shitting as well.

t_pascal 12y ago
When I was in prison, we had open plan shitting. It was very morale-boosting synergy.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  Wait, you made your release date and didn't tell me?! I've missed the party!
  - t_pascal 12y ago
    I used to be in prison. I still am, but I used to be as well.