I worked in a "hoteling" environment as a consultant for more than a year, so let me tell you what happens when there are no designated desks:

There are designated desks. It turns into high school lunch hour, where everyone has "their seat" and god forbid the ignoramus who trespasses.

Until someone more senior than you comes along and takes your seat. Typically someone from outside the office who just wants to sit next to their "friends". Nothing quite reminds you how junior you are than to have to find another desk.

It's another one of those "wins" for the corporation - why set up guest stations throughout the business when you can just say "there are no assigned desks"? It even re-inforces the "we are a family, not a company" meme.

I had an assigned room and desk in our family home when I was growing up.

Whenever that happens I enjoy taking someone's "seat" if they are late, and watch them twitch but not say anything when they do come in....

I used to insist on designated desks and hated offices with hot swap desks, clean desks policy etc. I had drawers full of crap, my own "special" monitors, kit bags underneath my desk, lots of cans of pepsi max etc and dreaded moving desks. And sometimes I often had managed to get the back-to-the-wall/window far-from-corridor lots-of-privacy desk and did not want to surrender the desks...

But then in the last few years I have always been on projects with 100% pairing so I rarely sit at my "own" desk anyway. And though people's habbits does still lead to defaulting to certain desks, some teams I have helped have started to rotate people's desks on purpose every week so people wouldn't get too attached.

This has lead me to appreciate no designated desks. Though also insisting desk areas belongs to a team and has enough capacity, and even allocating developer desk areas so the desk specs are not missmatched. Outsiders taking up space is still frowned upon. :)

I also have a more lighter office presence. As long as each desks has very decent monitor(s) and a charger, I just move my laptop, my ergonomic keyboard, and maybe the chair if it is good. Takes 1 minute in the morning when pairs change. Also having a good locker near your desk area means I stove my crap in there instead of moving a drawer unit around like a hobo. (Though "drawer jousting" can be fun).

The only issue is where the company has gone cheap on the desks and they are not all height adjustable so people can not opt to stand at them. So people bring in their own monstrous (but good) sit-stand desktop risers by e.g Varidesk, Ergotron, Ergo Desktop, etc which are not that movable.

Hopefully, we are not long away from that being a ubiquitous option in the office.

Likewise for chair adjustments.

I left my last company in large part because there was no designated desks. Even worse, the office was overcrowded and some days I wouldn't be able to find a seat at all. Honestly, to me, it's insulting that a company would not value it's employees enough to provide them with the most basic tools like a desk.

At my current job, they plan to move office and to change the organisation from "open office layout" to what they call "dynamic layout", including no designated desks.

And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of desks by X% (minus a small delta).

People will even have lockers to store personal stuff...

I'm looking forward to see how that will work, have a good laugh and quit.

> And they made some studies stating that an average of X% of the company workforce time is spent in meeting rooms, so they can cut off the number of desks by X% (minus a small delta).

I never understood that logic. These kinds of calculations usually completely ignore the most relevant thing for desks: the (regular) peak number of people that want to use a desk.

At a place I worked for they had 10 people from a company we worked with come in every monday and tuesday. No more desks needed, because "most of the time there are more than enough desks". People just called in sick on monday and tuesday, because there were 20 people in a room that could maybe fit 8-10.

Whenever next someone is going to suggest something like this, I now enthusiastically propose to also cut parking by 50% since the lot is nearly empty 18:00 to 7:00 anyway (adjusted to whatever calculation they are using)

They did this at my last place.

But wait, I have a matlab license and VS installed. So I need to be at my desktop PC or reinstall everything every day. Oh, and to debug some parts of this legacy code, I'll need local admin or it crashes.

No, I don't want to switch to a laptop.

Oh, you can permanently book my desk for me in 6 monthly blocks? Works for me...

Well, they already planned that all of us will have a laptop + a cell phone. (We don't get to choose our hardware so desktop PC is not an option...)

> People will even have lockers to store personal stuff...

It is fun to watch uppity personnel of the SV companies to realize the companies would gladly treat them as the blue collar throw away technicians.

At my current job I was moved to 3 different desks before officially being told I didn't have one. It was fantastic news! I'm not categorized as remote and have little obligation to sit in the office when I can work from home at a much better setup.

No designated desks, or no predesignated desks?

If it's the former, then yeah, I'm bailing, that's tremendously dumb. If it's the latter, then whatever, it's hardly even a selling point.

I read more along the lines of you having the liberty to decide where that personal space is.

If given the choice in an office like that, I am pretty sure I would choose "at home".