[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.