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Comment by nxc18 | Hacker News Reader

Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities.

Basically the concept was instead of engineers having an assigned office or desk, the office would have a large field of unassigned desks and generic equipment. Every day you would come in, reserve a desk, take any belongings from a locker, and set up shop. At the end of the day, you would tear down, lock up, and leave.

It is beautifully efficient from a top-down perspective, but it turns out employees like the consistency of a known work location each day. Its also nice to be able to put up a picture of family, from what I gather. I suspect the cost of personnel replacement dwarfs the saving of n% reduction in desk need.

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> Several of the engineers I worked with a few years ago left Intel (for the company I work at) after they switched to hotdesking to save money on facilities.

Throwaway account as I work there, but I'd like to make some minor corrections to this: I don't think most of Intel ever switched to hotdesking. It was a trial program. In my building it was on one or two floors. I can't speak for all the locations, but most of the other buildings at our site did not have this at all. Unfortunately I was on that floor and hotdesked for 2 years.

I'm pretty sure none of the process/fab folks were hotdesked (I used to work in that area and stayed in touch with those folks). Nor did any of the circuit designers/architecture folks get hotdesked. After a few years, the trial was over and everyone reverted back to having their own permanent desk.

It's incredibly unlikely that this is a reason for Intel's decline.

It's a symptom of the sickness.

Using cubicles a symptom of a sickness would mean that Google and FB are sicker. Intel has better workstations.

I have a Lenovo P920 at Google. Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold 6154 CPU @ 3.00GHz for 72 virtual cores. And if I want more cores in the cloud, that's also an option. What does yours look like?

From the context, I think the point was about the whole "work"station, not just the computer. It sounds like intel has cubicles, while google has smaller desks with no dividers.

I was careless with my wording. By workstation, I was emphasizing the station portion.

As an example, my current cube at Intel has walls all around (albeit short, but some buildings have walls taller than most people), 2 file storage cabinets with a fair number of drawers, a decent sized desk (enough for 2 people, not that we'd do that). Correspondingly, the cube is enough for 2 people. Also, I have a whiteboard.

That’s not the normal work station at google. Only the chome, Linux, and maybe android team gets it since they need more cpu and memory to compile their projects.

Oh, I just have to move A LOT of protobufs.

Ok?

Also, this is very ungoogly on your part. Flaunting some superficial thing like this is dumb. I’m hope you aren’t leak other more important pieces of info just to win internet arguments.

The worst part of hot-desking in my experience is you always seem to end up next to some guy from marketing who is on their phone all day, and as a result you get absolutely no thinking time.

Same problem comes up with open offices. Some ass from another department constantly talking on the phone 9 to 5. I developed a Pavlovian twitch every time his phone rang.

"Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking. Just a moment!"

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=oFwkL1WgD_0

> Some ass from another department constantly talking on the phone 9 to 5.

Dude, that guy's job probably relied on him being on the phone all day - he's just doing it. It's not his fault that you can hear him, it's your office manager/designer.

Some of us really do have to spend a huge chunk of our day talking to other people on the phone, zoom, etc. There's n other way to get our jobs done, and if they don't give us private office space to do it in, then we have to do it in the open space they do give us.

The counter-anecdote is my first job out of college where a VP would conduct personal calls in the open space office... loudly and emotionally.

Open offices usually at least have quieter spots if you get in early enough, in my experience.

This sounds like hell. Was there a reason it wasn’t split by department - eg sales, accounting, engineering etc?

That's the point of hot-desking, there's a single big room and you pick a free desk.

Got to wonder - why are you there at all? How is this one particle better from working at home? Clearly you're not there because of the environment (proximity to folks on your team etc)

I'm not there, I work from home.

That’s the ultimate sign of disrespect for workers as human beings. Cubes and open office are bad enough but hotdesking is the next step.

I would be miserable in such an environment. I need my keyboard and screens in a certain layout. Books need to be in a certain place. If that was taken away from me I don’t think I could live with that.

> Cubes and open office are bad enough but hotdesking is the next step.

It's not that simple. I worked with hotdesking at Intel. Those workstations, although still small, were bigger than the (assigned) ones I saw at Google and Facebook when I interviewed there, and Intel's one offered more privacy. Visiting those companies for an interview was depressing - finding out your crappy cube at Intel was still better than the ones at FAANG. Surreal.

There are a lot of negative comments in this thread relating to hot desking. The perspective is interesting. From my own experience at first I felt the same, but soon after add noise cancellation headphones (almost everyone has), less cords eg Bluetooth, usb-c monitors, and ability to shift adhoc into smaller teams and groups when required I find it becomes such a winner. A lot of people seem setup or mark a desk as theirs, with books or custom Sun Station or whatever, and most people seem to respect this and get others needs. Hot desking obviously works differently for different types of work and or personalities.

Trying to save money that way always makes me shake my head. Seriously what does 100 sqft of office space cost? $200/month? Maybe $300 when you include common space? So $3600/year. Or 3% of your engineers salary? Doesn't take a very big hit in productivity to erase any savings many times over.

The savings in office cost are measurable, the lost productivity is not.

The savings in office cost are measurable, the lost productivity is not.

It is, but not within the timeframe that someone will get their bonus/promotion for the cost savings and move on. Same scam as outsourcing.

In the Bay Area, it’s more like $60-120/sqft/yr, and that’s triple net. Add in 50-100% because you need walkways and such between offices, bathrooms, security, mail room, IT, and other common areas. Then add more for building operating expenses, property taxes, building insurance, and common area maintenance. Yes, in commercial leases the tenant pays the property taxes, because the leases are for multiple years.

So dedicated office space can be expensive.

If you take the top end, shmancy digs near the VC teat you're still looking at only 10% of your engineers salary. Meanwhile in West Berkeley we signed a lease for $22 sqft/year. I share a 20X30 room with another engineer. Everyone else has a 10X10 office with a door. And we don't have rivers of VC money.

Sometimes I think the way big corps do offices is a legacy of mass production factory stuff. If you have an assembly line making toasters, yeah you need everyone in the same big building on a fixed schedule. But any business where people can work from home it likely means you could in thoery let individual groups decide where they want an office. Give a group of 12 engineers a stipend of $4000/mo to rent office space, see what happens.

It is beautifully efficient from a top-down perspective, but it turns out employees like the consistency of a known work location each day

I worked somewhere once that tried this open-plan hot-desking nonsense. The HR dept kept their nice private office with fixed desks however. They said it was because they had to deal with confidentiality. Whereas us dumb engineers developing the IP of the firm presumably didn’t...

At the end of the day, you would tear down, lock up, and leave.

...so you would never be able to have a computer on for more than the length of your workday? That sounds insane --- I could never get any real work done that way, because so much time would be spent on "restoring state" to the way it was at the end of the previous day. I wouldn't call that efficient at all.

Efficiency is your problem, not that of the office designer. If they can show that they've squeezed 20% more people into the same number of square feet, they're golden.

Laptops can be suspended rather than shut down, so maybe they're counting on that as the solution.

Sun solved that 20+ years ago with their Sun Ray technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

These days you could do it with persistent VDI.

oh, wow: that's how we had it at Sun in Chicagoland in 2000...it was novel and ok, but also felt unusual.

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