[sharkweek]

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor.

Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to get more desks in their company's current footprint. That obviously got entirely axed March 2020 (over a year of work down the drain), and it's been her job the last year to figure out WFH and what post-COVID-19 workspace looks like.

The executives are wanting people back in the office. They've seen enough they don't like about full WFH that they do want people back in the building at some point when it's safe. But they also don't want everyone in the building at the same time anymore. Basically, they want to operate the building at pre-pandemic capacity of 50% or so, rotating who is in and who isn't.

With that comes some unique space challenges, including but not limited to how does having a desk work if only 50% of people are in the office on a given day. They haven't chosen a final solution yet as there are A LOT of moving pieces, but it has been interesting to watch.

[alextheparrot]

This really is the worst of both worlds for the employees. Employees are still bound to a physical location, but you also have to maintain a home office and heterogenous communications stack [0]. Also, coordinating who is in the office when is a nightmare and can often lead to oversubscribed days.

The only utility I can see is if you need to run for appointments that are easier to do when working from home, but this is less about remote work and more about flexible working hours.

[0] Having worked in a team with distributed offices, a fairly large company like your partner's can definitely solve this.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure it's quite worst of both worlds. One of my company's local offices would be a 90ish minute commute. That's doable for a day a week but not really sustainable a lot more frequently than that. (I used to have another job with a similar commute; it was rough on a regular basis even if I didn't go in many days.)

You can definitely increase the radius of where you can live but you're right that you can't go live in a mountain town.

[slavapestov]

Living in an outer suburb of the city where your office is located is still a lot less compelling than being able to live where you want though.

[ghaff]

I'm not sure I'd live somewhere different to be honest. I'm far enough out of the city that I'm essentially in a rural area. I like being close enough to a major city that I can go in for theater and things like that in normal times (and access to a major airport).

Certainly I could live wherever in the country I wanted to--though western US starts to become more difficult because of timezone differences to Europe--but no interest in moving at this point.

[nine_k]

If you travel to a different place once in 1-2 weeks, you have your main location with everything optimized for comfortable work, and your travel setup which allows you to work tolerably when outside. Two 28" displays and an ergonomic keyboard vs a 14" laptop, a rack full of synths and a large keyboard vs a DAW and a tiny keyboard, a full workbench with dozen power tools vs a contractor chest, etc.

When you have to spend an equal amount of time in two workplaces, you have to invest equally in each. Either you (or your company) spend twice as much on a nice setup in two places, or, more probability, you have two half as nice setups in two places.

Also, if your workplace is routinely used by someone else half of the time, you both waste time and energy on putting things right, adjusting screens, chairs, desks, etc. You either learn to do it in a reproducibly perfect way, or make do with what you've managed today.

Some permanence has certain advantages.

[dbcurtis]

Meh. I started my current job during pandemic. Some weeks I am in 100%, others zero. I have a desk in the ghost town, but spend a lot of time in the lab for hands-on stuff. I would be perfectly happy with a “desk hotelling” situation on a permanent basis. The plant is someplace I visit when I need to hook up probes.

[alextheparrot]

I don't think hoteling is intrinsically bad, just when it is paired with the sort of space constraints the original poster described. If you only have space for 50% of the staff, it is going to be a bad time whenever an important meeting comes up where more than 50% of the staff want to be in person.

[pnutjam]

True, I am not interested in coming in to the office more then once a quarter.

[benhurmarcel]

Right, my company plans to let us work from home a maximum of 3 days a week in the future, but they're cutting our office space by at least 30%. So we wouldn't have a designated desk anymore, just a bunch of similar desks on a first-come-first-serve basis every day.

My main issue with this is that you can't set up your desk how you like it anymore. You can't set the desk height, you get a chair that's differently broken every day, often a different sized screen, you can't ensure to seat nearby the people you need to collaborate with, you can't put up some decoration or printed cheatsheets…

[dont__panic]

And in my experience, you also have to get used to different "neighbors" with different annoying habits every time you come into the office.

May god have mercy on you if your company lets sales and product who are constantly chatting on calls (often at high volume) into your desk area when you're trying to focus on programming or design...

[twh270]

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

[scarmig]

Despite all the individual cases of people claiming WFH makes them more productive, in the aggregate employees are not. In the particular data I've seen, new employees and more junior employees suffer significantly, even while more senior engineers hold steady or improve, perhaps because their responsibilities shift to more easily quantifiable metrics than knowledge sharing, mentoring, and onboarding.

[pnutjam]

Protip, the people doing more work would have been doing everyone else's work in the office. They are the ones that get stuff done and often get no attention for it, because doing everyone else's work is hard to quantify.

[yourapostasy]

In my more agile clients during the pandemic, I've seen a sharp shift to tracking time spent on those soft metrics, and acknowledging the space they take up on time per day. This led to explicit C-level support for more meeting discipline, and explicit No-Meeting-Day block-outs on calendars with the sole exception of production outages and specific meetings for specific projects with direct oversight from management 2 layers down from C-level. These clients' leadership have been very pleased with the overall productivity gain during the pandemic. The visibility into what people are working on and accomplishing, what planning captures, what planning does not capture (and importantly, who is responsible for most of the unplanned work so more planning assistance can be directed towards their areas of oversight) has pleasantly increased. A key tactic that has helped is explicitly setting aside entire planning weeks throughout the year, and making a conscious decision to trade off go-go-gains-all-the-time for more predictable delivery results so the business can plan around the deliveries.

[sharkweek]

It'd be hard to do so without getting a little too specific but I will add two pieces of context:

1) The company has a small technical corner, but is mostly a non-technical org.

2) The average age of the company is quite a bit older than one more focused on technology might stereotypically be and, at the risk of sounding ageist, has proven to be far less interested in engaging with modern technologies that would make WFH smooth/productive.

[minhaz23]

Walmartlabs?

[irrational]

Prior to the pandemic my company was moving to a model where nobody had a fixed desk. You had a backpack and a laptop and plugged is wherever you could find a free place. You were not supposed to stay at the same desk for longer than 3 hours. There was actually a team in each building walking around and enforcing it.

Post-pandemic they have said that is being scrapped since there is too much chance of infecting people from shared work areas. So back to you have a fixed desk. Only, despite adding 2 million more square feet of office space to campus last year, there really isn’t enough room for everyone.

I pity the people who are having to figure this out.

[dukeyukey]

So I get the idea of hotdesking, even if I think it's bad. But moving every 3 hours? Why tf do they think that's a good idea? Office workers aren't migratory animals that must move on when the good grasses have been depleted.

[irrational]

Because some desks are better than others (the ones on the fourth floor by the windows overlooking the lake come to mind). Also, they don't want people setting up shop and claiming one desk as their own. If I show up early and sit at the same desk all day long everyday, after awhile everyone will just see that as my desk.

[macNchz]

> With that comes some unique space challenges, including but not limited to how does having a desk work if only 50% of people are in the office on a given day.

I've heard of companies hot-desking like this so they can have fewer desks than total employees, splitting each desk between people whose schedules are "out of phase" with each other. It sounds basically intolerable.

I'm somewhat less sensitive to many common office complaints than a lot of sw engineers I've worked with, but if this were something my employer announced I'd be on my way out immediately.

[michaelt]

It'd certainly be alienating not to have a desk if you were in the office every day.

But if you're doing two days a week in the office, all your meetings will move into those days so they can happen in person, so you'll miss having your own desk less.

[dont__panic]

Sounds frustrating to coordinate meetings between different teams.

[throw14082020]

Executives want people back. Executives are often the ones that don't stay in the office, or have a far different office experience (power dynamics, extra physical resources). People don't want to be back. More jobs will be more flexible. The best people can find jobs they like. Over time, executives who don't adapt will be stuck a certain type of employee.

[andrekandre]

> Basically, they want to operate the building at pre-pandemic capacity of 50% or so, rotating who is in and who isn't.

i dont know if rotation or full wfh forever is a good idea, but i must say that pandemic or not, offices (at least the open kind) at anything above 50% capacity are horrible places to work... the noise, distractions and reduced oxygen levels are brain-killing...

[walshemj]

Thankfully the days of ramming people into ever smaller footprints seems to be reversing