On the meeting room thing: I worked in an office a number of years ago where the name of the person who booked the meeting (and its time/duration) was shown on a small touch screen by the door.
To start the meeting, that person (or their proxy) had to swipe the screen with their badge. If the swipe had not been completed after 10mins, the room would become free and accept anyone's swipe to start that meeting. Their name would then be displayed for the same duration as the original.
The kicker was that after the 10mins (and if no swipe), the system would send an email to ALL EMPLOYEES saying "Room XYZ, booked by [name of culprit], is now free".
To this day I still fondly think of the genius of the person who got that system approved!
While I love working from coffee shops, one thing I really get grumpy about is people taking meetings out loud. If you're taking a meeting from a quiet corner while not disturbing others, it's fine. What drives me up the wall is people sitting at a large community table or sitting in the vicinity of many others and speaking loudly. It's elementary common sense to not do that. Mercifully, it doesn't happen too many times. (I'm located in Belgium; so the real-estate is usually small in coffee shops.)
haha, many years ago when I worked in a large office the three meeting rooms where constantly busy so my team would grab a laptop and pop down the road to the pub for our meetings.
Because most people are trying to uphold some baseline of professionalism and aren't actively seeking to make the lives of the people around them harder?
Hotdesking can be so utterly impersonal it makes a mockery of RTO.
The point of RTO is that you are surrounded by colleagues in your team so that you can spontaneously collaborate. It sounds like its just a meat market and everyone is jammed together regardless of team or affiliation.
hotdesking only really works for a small number of situations, and even then, it needs careful planning and thought.
You need permanent lockers so that you have somewhere to stash your shit.
the equipment needs to be all the same class(to avoid "I want this one") and _higher_ quality than non-hotdesk.
Hot-desking is awful. I was going to say it's the worst of both worlds, but it's actually even worse than that. You're not around your teammates, you can't "move in" to your desk, and you have to commute. Honestly, what is the point? Either give me my own desk or let me WFH.
The company I work does hot-desking, but it is implicitly also divided into groupings. All the people in each team sit in the same part of the office each day and hotdesk within that group of desks. There are maybe 1 time in 50 that I show up and there are no desks free in my teams part of the office.
One other potential advantage with hot-desking is that you can have different zones with different rules. Working on a project where you need to talk with your colleague a lot during the day, sit in the 'talking' zone. Need to be left alone in silence for 8 hours straight, move to the 'quite' zone.
My company uses a very simple system. Each team gets assigned an area that only they can book. For example a team of 15 people get a cluster of 10 desks. That solves it.
A company I know forced all employees to attend a seminar about ergonomics at work. It included a visit from the presenter who would come to everyone's desk and adjust everything (chair height, reclining resistance, screen angle, light, etc). This company is now migrating everyone to hotdesking.
What I'd love to ask the CEO: was it all a circus back then, or do you not care about your employees' health now?
CEO response: It is your personal responsibility to adjust your seating and workspace arrangements to your personal needs. Please do take the time (i.e. come in early) to make sure your work environment is suitably ergonomic.
No mention of how this was sold at the time or how much time is invested in fixing everything every morning, or how that will work for employees with disabilities that make it difficult/impossible to adjust their workspace by themselves.
(Somewhat ITish company in Germany, 250 employees) - I had to fight hard to get the company to buy seven 4K monitors (total of 2800€) and now those seats are always booked lol. At least my colleagues are a bit more productive I guess... the other desks have 1080p monitors and look terrible when connected with a Mac.
What kind of company is that? The cost of a 4k display (and 400 Euro is pretty much bottom of the barrel when it comes to good displays) is a fraction of the yearly salary of an employee, lasts many years, and a good screen can help reducing eyesight problems. It always surprises me that companies apply austerity to weird things, like providing a setup that keeps employees healthy, while probably throwing a lot of money at irrelevant stuff.
Hotdesking for knowledge workers is basically so bad it's punitive. The same kind of disregard for your physical and mental comfort as Amazon warehouse workers, just with a higher salary attached.
In meta's case its: "lots of people left who joined remote, perhaps its because everything is tribal knowledge based? lets evolve the culture to make it more frien.... YOLO RTO PEOPLE"
Were I used to work they did all the things you suggested and it worked well. Every desk had a good setup, nice chair, massive screen etc. There were plenty of lockers and other storage if you needed to leave things in the office.
Some of us had laid claim to a desk if we were always in, but most people tended to be in only a few days a month. Different teams tended to cluster in particular parts of the office when they were in. There were plenty of desks so there were no arguments.
Hotdesking, hybrid working, remote working and fixed desk in-office setups can all work, but they require people to actually think about how space and systems are designed, and to put enough resources in place.
Unfortunately, most companies just don't put the thought in to the details, or the resources in to make them work properly, so they become terrible work environments and then they complain that no one wants to come to the office.
I have very little sympathy for companies that can't make hybrid work because they just put the minimum effort in, and then complain that it's all the employees fault.
A previous company managed to do hotdesking very well. The key was they started small and rolled it out as they learnt. By the time they moved building and went full hotdesking, they'd ironed out the problems and made it workable.
The only point of RTO is to make the C-suite and managers happy to be back in control, since the only thing that gets them going is the thought of their underlings being miserable.
These sociopaths don't care if it's awful for everyone involved as long as they get to see their minions at their desks, knowing that they're the reason dozens/hundreds of people are having their lives wasted on thumb twirling in some depressing office.
>"It seems impossible to get one desk for a long enough period," one employee said. The person noted one day having to go between hot desks at Menlo Park on different floors to get through a work day in which they'd been required to come in for meetings.
So even when teams are co-located (which isn't a given), they aren't necessarily working face to face. This kind of flies in the face of the premise that RTO is needed for "collaboration". There's definitely another reason for RTO and it's not one the bosses are willing to state on the record.
They can probably work anywhere, but need to be in the office for face-to-face meetings.
Although, I'm not sure why the person would be losing their desk between meetings unless Meta had a policy for people to take their belongings with them if their going to be away from their desk for an extended period of time.
The most likely option is that the booking system allows you to book a desk for less than a full day, so late bookers might be forced into fragmented bookings.
> "We have not yet figured out hybrid work," Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, wrote on Threads. "Assigned desks mean lots of empty chairs. Hotel desks mean lots of unfamiliar faces. Pods are good for privacy but take up a ton of space. We have a lot to figure out."
Yeah, maybe work all that out before you demand everyone come back to the office? Just a thought ...
Surely the company has enough money to figure all this stuff out. The way things are described, it feels like the company is being incredibly disrespectful to its employees.
It also seems a bit strange for the company to have an overarching goal around building a "metaverse", but not to try to figure out how they themselves might use those tools for their own work. No appetite for their own dogfood?
I am a huge fand of learning by doing. This is a great way of dealing with problems you cannot anticipate. But it is just bad planning, if you are not dealing in advance with the problems you can anticipate. Like not having enough desks in the first place.
Iteration can be good to more effectively optimize metrics, but what are they optimizing for here? Is there any particular metric that is currently down and should be up, other than butts-in-seats?
A unionisation of tech workers is long overdue, we can't expect fair working conditions consistently by leaving the single randomer citizen to fight alone against multi billion companies and various interests
Why is it ironic? What does you comment aim to achieve? It's a statement of a fact, are you implying that should we aim for shittier conditions for tech workers? Really sometimes I wish people would activate braincells before writing
I don't consider 'tech workers', working class. We're higher paid, our jobs do not destroy our bodies, in my mind it's a purely middle class career. I agree with your actual point though, we are pampered.
Working class as in "people who work"? Since tech workers are comfortably in the middle class when it comes to income level.
Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.
I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.
I think one of the reasons there's not much unionization in tech is that the market balances itself. When your skills are in such high demand, the market has no borders and investors queue to fund startups, working conditions naturally goes up.
But it goes both ways. When a given company decides to cut costs or change some working policy you can't blame them, especially when they still pay way above the local median and provide astonishing perks. Also you don't need unionization to have your conditions written in your contract.
Certain professions deserve better working conditions, I don't think SWE is one of them,
I will never understand this. I prefer working from the office and being around my colleagues. It’s more comfortable than home, and the commute is an added bonus for me (short enough that doesn’t bother me, but provides a barrier for “I’m done with work for the day”).
That being said I would never force my colleagues to go back to the office if they don’t want to. Their circumstances are different than mine.
So what’s the problem with “you want to come to the office? Come. You want to work from home? Don’t”
It’s cheaper from the company (no providing food for everyone, the office doesn’t have to accommodate everyone, etc) and better for all employees, who can do exactly whatever they want.
> Until OKd, office work is required, even when teams are elsewhere.
This is the one I find baffling about RTO. I know plenty of people who have been dragged into offices where they have no team members. So they are just on Zoom at a desk in the office rather than at home.
I know of one guy where the company set up a local office for him and another person (who is not on his team), so they could be the two people in their office in their city.
I did it for the last few days of my prior job. Was dragged into the office when all my co-workers were at least 3.5 hours away.
Even if all the supposed benefits of in person are accepted at face value, none of that allows for them.
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To start the meeting, that person (or their proxy) had to swipe the screen with their badge. If the swipe had not been completed after 10mins, the room would become free and accept anyone's swipe to start that meeting. Their name would then be displayed for the same duration as the original.
The kicker was that after the 10mins (and if no swipe), the system would send an email to ALL EMPLOYEES saying "Room XYZ, booked by [name of culprit], is now free".
To this day I still fondly think of the genius of the person who got that system approved!
"Dear All, there will be a 5 minute silence to commemorate the untimely passing of [name of culprit] over the weekend"
The point of RTO is that you are surrounded by colleagues in your team so that you can spontaneously collaborate. It sounds like its just a meat market and everyone is jammed together regardless of team or affiliation.
hotdesking only really works for a small number of situations, and even then, it needs careful planning and thought.
You need permanent lockers so that you have somewhere to stash your shit.
the equipment needs to be all the same class(to avoid "I want this one") and _higher_ quality than non-hotdesk.
Repairs need to be proactive.
One other potential advantage with hot-desking is that you can have different zones with different rules. Working on a project where you need to talk with your colleague a lot during the day, sit in the 'talking' zone. Need to be left alone in silence for 8 hours straight, move to the 'quite' zone.
What I'd love to ask the CEO: was it all a circus back then, or do you not care about your employees' health now?
No mention of how this was sold at the time or how much time is invested in fixing everything every morning, or how that will work for employees with disabilities that make it difficult/impossible to adjust their workspace by themselves.
Sincerely, the management.
Some of us had laid claim to a desk if we were always in, but most people tended to be in only a few days a month. Different teams tended to cluster in particular parts of the office when they were in. There were plenty of desks so there were no arguments.
Hotdesking, hybrid working, remote working and fixed desk in-office setups can all work, but they require people to actually think about how space and systems are designed, and to put enough resources in place.
Unfortunately, most companies just don't put the thought in to the details, or the resources in to make them work properly, so they become terrible work environments and then they complain that no one wants to come to the office.
I have very little sympathy for companies that can't make hybrid work because they just put the minimum effort in, and then complain that it's all the employees fault.
And a good booking system to assign people to desks "in their regions"
But I guess the managers that "are worried about collaboration" didn't think of that
These sociopaths don't care if it's awful for everyone involved as long as they get to see their minions at their desks, knowing that they're the reason dozens/hundreds of people are having their lives wasted on thumb twirling in some depressing office.
So even when teams are co-located (which isn't a given), they aren't necessarily working face to face. This kind of flies in the face of the premise that RTO is needed for "collaboration". There's definitely another reason for RTO and it's not one the bosses are willing to state on the record.
They can probably work anywhere, but need to be in the office for face-to-face meetings.
Although, I'm not sure why the person would be losing their desk between meetings unless Meta had a policy for people to take their belongings with them if their going to be away from their desk for an extended period of time.
Yeah, maybe work all that out before you demand everyone come back to the office? Just a thought ...
Surely the company has enough money to figure all this stuff out. The way things are described, it feels like the company is being incredibly disrespectful to its employees.
While some level of forethought and planning is essential, sometimes you just have to learn by doing.
Ironic, considering that tech workers have by far the best working conditions of the working class.
Anyway, for most people, compensation and income level are really good, which is why unionization isn't as much a thing for tech workers. This is also because there's a lot of disparity, with some earning $35K / year and others $350K / year for basically the same job; unionization and successful agreements would mean the $35K / year would go up, but the $350K / year would go down by a lot and wouldn't want to cooperate. And that's just salary, then there's stocks, stock options, bonuses, perks, etc to consider.
I'm not saying tech workers shouldn't unionize, all I'm saying is that the incentives are low. Because if you don't want to work under the conditons that e.g. Meta offers, you can vote with your feet and work somewhere else, pretty much anywhere and anything you want.
Deleted Comment
That being said I would never force my colleagues to go back to the office if they don’t want to. Their circumstances are different than mine. So what’s the problem with “you want to come to the office? Come. You want to work from home? Don’t”
It’s cheaper from the company (no providing food for everyone, the office doesn’t have to accommodate everyone, etc) and better for all employees, who can do exactly whatever they want.
This is the one I find baffling about RTO. I know plenty of people who have been dragged into offices where they have no team members. So they are just on Zoom at a desk in the office rather than at home.
I know of one guy where the company set up a local office for him and another person (who is not on his team), so they could be the two people in their office in their city.
I did it for the last few days of my prior job. Was dragged into the office when all my co-workers were at least 3.5 hours away.
Even if all the supposed benefits of in person are accepted at face value, none of that allows for them.