8 ms·

Recently got a tour from some former coworkers of the new PTC HQ in Boston, open office AND hotel style seating (no assigned location... stuff goes in a cubby a

Recently got a tour from some former coworkers of the new PTC HQ in Boston, open office AND hotel style seating (no assigned location... stuff goes in a cubby at the end of the day). So not only can you hate all the noise and distraction around you, but tomorrow it can be entirely new set of people that piss you off. Also nothing says "you don't matter" like not even giving someone 4x6 feet of space for a desk and chair they can call their own..

beart 8y ago
Our office transitioned to desk hoteling. What it amounted to is a small set of people switching desks semi-regularly. The first month, everyone pulled down all their personal stuff. Six months later, most people never actually changed desks and ended up putting their personal stuff back up, 'claiming' desks as theirs anyway.
- 0xffff2 8y ago
  Didn't "hoteling" start out as "hot desking", where the idea is that there are fewer desks than employees because some percentage of employees are out of the office each day? What the point of not having assigned desks if you still have as many desks as employees?
  - CharlesColeman 8y ago
    > What the point of not having assigned desks if you still have as many desks as employees? This is the point: > https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/ https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/ > As the unofficial story goes, Jay Chiat was skiing down a mountain in Telluride when it dawned on him that the conventional American office structure was antiquated and counterproductive; that revolution was not only inevitable but overdue; and that destiny had selected him, Jay Chiat, as its agent of change. So the boss can see himself as a trend-setting visionary. That link it pretty interesting, since it was clear that "hoteling" was awful 20 years ago in 1999. It's bizarre that I was reading about the how terrible 2019's trends in office space are when I was a kid.
  - beart 8y ago
    In our case, we travel frequently so it isn't completely unjustified. However, in practice, everyone just started working remotely after the change so now there's rows of empty desks.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      For better or worse, when remote working gets normed in a company location or group it tends to naturally expand. A lot of people who are more or less indifferent between working in the office or staying home stop coming in because so many of their co-workers aren't there.
dudul 8y ago
Our office is going through the same transition. Half of the desks are being removed to create "lounge areas", and there are no assigned desks. So now, people who used to be remote once or twice a week, are planning to just not show up at all and stay home. Where they have... you know, a real assigned desk with their stuff.
- pavel_lishin 8y ago
  Honestly, it seems like a net improvement in your situation. At least until management cracks down and makes attendance mandatory.
  - dudul 8y ago
    And that's the thing. On the other side, they have all these initiatives to do catered breakfast/lunch, happy hours, game night, etc. To try to get people into the office. We have a lot of truly remote employees (coast to coast) so attendance will not be mandatory.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Doing this to people who are only remote one day a week seems extreme. But if you're actually remote most of the time, not having an assigned desk is really not a big deal for a lot of people. At least many of us don't really need a lot of stuff that isn't on our laptop in order to be productive.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
Kadin 8y ago
I worked in an office that transitioned to hoteling. It was the last in a series of increasingly-escalating "fuck yous" from the company's ownership to employees. TBH they would have been better off just cutting 20% of their staff if they were looking to cut costs for whatever reason. It's better to have a smaller workforce of happier, productive employees than a larger number of alienated, angry employees all half-assing things while looking for other jobs. I left soon after and never looked back. In retrospect it was a symptom of a bigger problem at the company.
mc32 8y ago
It’s astonishing to me that new staff as well as new managers became such eager consumers and proponents of open offices just because a few big-IPO companies made it _seem_ avant-garde. At no time did they consider the effect on personal space and depersonification of this new “paradigm”. People were hoodwinked into believing this was more social, more cooperative and more egalitarian. No it wasn’t. It was cheaper to seat people and it took freedom away from workers. You now had a multiplicity of eyes upon you. So now even if you don’t have anything productive to do till tomorrow, you have to at least pretend you have something to do now. So instead of thinking about what and how you’ll do things to morrow you waste your time pretending along with everyone else in the corral. I saw this happen at places which say they “care about workers” and offer a good “work-life balance”. It was such horseshit. If you have to propagandize your beliefs you don’t actually believe them.
- devoply 8y ago
  That's the point, open office spaces are essentially the panopticon idea from Jeremy Bentham in that regard. I used to work in a place where the managers would take the corner with two walls and all the workers would be observable.
  - menckenjr 8y ago
    That would be my cue to find something remote and hightail it out of there.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - braindouche 8y ago
    That is literally every open office I've ever worked in. Walls are desirable, windows moreso, and corners are coveted. Remarkably, the highest-ranking workers seem to all occupy those desirable desks. Even more interesting, I've seen company officers bring in bookshelves to create spaces where they cannot be approached from behind (that office space was odd and mostly lacked corners). Egalitarian workspaces are a myth.
theshrike79 8y ago
This _only_ works if you have more people than desks, and the usage patterns are fluctuating. Like you have 10 seats and 20 sales people or consultants, who spend 3/4 of their time on the road or on location. This way you don't need to spend money on seating that's not being used most of the time. For everything else hot seating/hotel seating is utter crap.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Yes. It can make sense for people who aren't in the office much--especially if the alternative is to lease more space that will be half-empty most of the time. Last time I had to move desks, I just gave up having a permanent desk and took everything home. If you're tight on space, it's perfectly reasonable to shift people who aren't in the office most of the time to hoteling but if someone is going to be butt in seat most days, why not give them a permanent space?
  - rocqua 8y ago
    Leasing more space is expensive. The entire point of a hotelling office is to reduce costs. Less space to lease, less desks and chairs to buy, less cabling to run. Office space is expensive.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      That's true. But it's not people sitting in different chairs each day that saves the space. It's increasing the utilization which means you need some critical mass of people who are out of the office on a given day. (Some have also promoted hoteling for other reasons but those reasons are mostly dumb.)
chrisseaton 8y ago
> hotel style seating (no assigned location... stuff goes in a cubby at the end of the day) That sounds like the opposite of a hotel (no rooms, have to vacate overnight.)
- hermanradtke 8y ago
  The practice is called hoteling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoteling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoteling
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    I know it's called hoteling. My point is it's weird that it's called that because not having a room that is yours overnight is the exact opposite of what a hotel does.
- smileysteve 8y ago
  You can bag check when you leave a hotel for the day...
commandlinefan 8y ago
> nothing says "you don't matter" That's what I can't wrap my head around with the debacle that professional software development has become... isn't there supposed to be a _shortage_ of developers? Wouldn't that suggest that they'd be trying to find ways to retain and attract us instead of finding new and creative ways of kicking us in the teeth?
- joker3 8y ago
  There's a shortage of developers in part because of terrible management practices.
  - ryan42 8y ago
    bingo. I can't wait to leave to find my dream job that is outside of IT and Software Development
- grigjd3 8y ago
  So I strongly suspect that for people who will leave over the open office, there already exists better reasons for them to leave.
lozaning 8y ago
One level deeper into the circles of hell is the Zenefits model, same as open office hot desking, but desks are over subscribed to the tune of 30%.
notjustanymike 8y ago
There's no better way to spread company wide disease than hoteling. Unless your cleaners wipe down every desk every night.
- chessturk 8y ago
  As someone who worked in a crap-hole telemarketing firm where we called them "Communal Cubicals", this is one hundred percent a major issue. Company-wide Swine Flu happened.

beart 8y ago

Our office transitioned to desk hoteling. What it amounted to is a small set of people switching desks semi-regularly. The first month, everyone pulled down all their personal stuff. Six months later, most people never actually changed desks and ended up putting their personal stuff back up, 'claiming' desks as theirs anyway.

0xffff2 8y ago
Didn't "hoteling" start out as "hot desking", where the idea is that there are fewer desks than employees because some percentage of employees are out of the office each day? What the point of not having assigned desks if you still have as many desks as employees?
- CharlesColeman 8y ago
  > What the point of not having assigned desks if you still have as many desks as employees? This is the point: > https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/ https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/ > As the unofficial story goes, Jay Chiat was skiing down a mountain in Telluride when it dawned on him that the conventional American office structure was antiquated and counterproductive; that revolution was not only inevitable but overdue; and that destiny had selected him, Jay Chiat, as its agent of change. So the boss can see himself as a trend-setting visionary. That link it pretty interesting, since it was clear that "hoteling" was awful 20 years ago in 1999. It's bizarre that I was reading about the how terrible 2019's trends in office space are when I was a kid.
- beart 8y ago
  In our case, we travel frequently so it isn't completely unjustified. However, in practice, everyone just started working remotely after the change so now there's rows of empty desks.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    For better or worse, when remote working gets normed in a company location or group it tends to naturally expand. A lot of people who are more or less indifferent between working in the office or staying home stop coming in because so many of their co-workers aren't there.

dudul 8y ago

Our office is going through the same transition. Half of the desks are being removed to create "lounge areas", and there are no assigned desks. So now, people who used to be remote once or twice a week, are planning to just not show up at all and stay home. Where they have... you know, a real assigned desk with their stuff.

pavel_lishin 8y ago
Honestly, it seems like a net improvement in your situation. At least until management cracks down and makes attendance mandatory.
- dudul 8y ago
  And that's the thing. On the other side, they have all these initiatives to do catered breakfast/lunch, happy hours, game night, etc. To try to get people into the office. We have a lot of truly remote employees (coast to coast) so attendance will not be mandatory.
ghaff 8y ago
Doing this to people who are only remote one day a week seems extreme. But if you're actually remote most of the time, not having an assigned desk is really not a big deal for a lot of people. At least many of us don't really need a lot of stuff that isn't on our laptop in order to be productive.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Kadin 8y ago

I worked in an office that transitioned to hoteling. It was the last in a series of increasingly-escalating "fuck yous" from the company's ownership to employees. TBH they would have been better off just cutting 20% of their staff if they were looking to cut costs for whatever reason. It's better to have a smaller workforce of happier, productive employees than a larger number of alienated, angry employees all half-assing things while looking for other jobs. I left soon after and never looked back. In retrospect it was a symptom of a bigger problem at the company.

mc32 8y ago

It’s astonishing to me that new staff as well as new managers became such eager consumers and proponents of open offices just because a few big-IPO companies made it _seem_ avant-garde. At no time did they consider the effect on personal space and depersonification of this new “paradigm”. People were hoodwinked into believing this was more social, more cooperative and more egalitarian. No it wasn’t. It was cheaper to seat people and it took freedom away from workers. You now had a multiplicity of eyes upon you. So now even if you don’t have anything productive to do till tomorrow, you have to at least pretend you have something to do now. So instead of thinking about what and how you’ll do things to morrow you waste your time pretending along with everyone else in the corral. I saw this happen at places which say they “care about workers” and offer a good “work-life balance”. It was such horseshit. If you have to propagandize your beliefs you don’t actually believe them.

devoply 8y ago
That's the point, open office spaces are essentially the panopticon idea from Jeremy Bentham in that regard. I used to work in a place where the managers would take the corner with two walls and all the workers would be observable.
- menckenjr 8y ago
  That would be my cue to find something remote and hightail it out of there.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- braindouche 8y ago
  That is literally every open office I've ever worked in. Walls are desirable, windows moreso, and corners are coveted. Remarkably, the highest-ranking workers seem to all occupy those desirable desks. Even more interesting, I've seen company officers bring in bookshelves to create spaces where they cannot be approached from behind (that office space was odd and mostly lacked corners). Egalitarian workspaces are a myth.

theshrike79 8y ago

This _only_ works if you have more people than desks, and the usage patterns are fluctuating. Like you have 10 seats and 20 sales people or consultants, who spend 3/4 of their time on the road or on location. This way you don't need to spend money on seating that's not being used most of the time. For everything else hot seating/hotel seating is utter crap.

ghaff 8y ago
Yes. It can make sense for people who aren't in the office much--especially if the alternative is to lease more space that will be half-empty most of the time. Last time I had to move desks, I just gave up having a permanent desk and took everything home. If you're tight on space, it's perfectly reasonable to shift people who aren't in the office most of the time to hoteling but if someone is going to be butt in seat most days, why not give them a permanent space?
- rocqua 8y ago
  Leasing more space is expensive. The entire point of a hotelling office is to reduce costs. Less space to lease, less desks and chairs to buy, less cabling to run. Office space is expensive.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    That's true. But it's not people sitting in different chairs each day that saves the space. It's increasing the utilization which means you need some critical mass of people who are out of the office on a given day. (Some have also promoted hoteling for other reasons but those reasons are mostly dumb.)

chrisseaton 8y ago

> hotel style seating (no assigned location... stuff goes in a cubby at the end of the day) That sounds like the opposite of a hotel (no rooms, have to vacate overnight.)

hermanradtke 8y ago
The practice is called hoteling. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoteling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoteling
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  I know it's called hoteling. My point is it's weird that it's called that because not having a room that is yours overnight is the exact opposite of what a hotel does.
smileysteve 8y ago
You can bag check when you leave a hotel for the day...

commandlinefan 8y ago

> nothing says "you don't matter" That's what I can't wrap my head around with the debacle that professional software development has become... isn't there supposed to be a _shortage_ of developers? Wouldn't that suggest that they'd be trying to find ways to retain and attract us instead of finding new and creative ways of kicking us in the teeth?

joker3 8y ago
There's a shortage of developers in part because of terrible management practices.
- ryan42 8y ago
  bingo. I can't wait to leave to find my dream job that is outside of IT and Software Development
grigjd3 8y ago
So I strongly suspect that for people who will leave over the open office, there already exists better reasons for them to leave.

lozaning 8y ago

One level deeper into the circles of hell is the Zenefits model, same as open office hot desking, but desks are over subscribed to the tune of 30%.

notjustanymike 8y ago

There's no better way to spread company wide disease than hoteling. Unless your cleaners wipe down every desk every night.

chessturk 8y ago
As someone who worked in a crap-hole telemarketing firm where we called them "Communal Cubicals", this is one hundred percent a major issue. Company-wide Swine Flu happened.