No assigned desks with a badly implemented "flat structure" is a special kind of hell. You're a nobody with nowhere to go. No title, no fixed desk, no fixed chair, no identity. Developer #13 sitting at desk #21.

One of my previous employers had an open-plan office, and after a management change introduced mandatory hotdesking. You had to move desks every day -- management checked every morning and wrote people up if they sat at the same desk for two consecutive days.

Then they introduced a mandatory uniform and a complete ban on personal items -- all the Wallace and Gromit coffee mugs, the photos of family disappeared overnight.

It's the most sterile, depersonalising, demotivating work environment I've ever encountered.

Incidentally, BPS covered this in another article... "Why it’s important that employers let staff personalise their workspaces" -- https://digest.bps.org.uk/2015/03/27/why-its-important-that-... . It's well worth a read.

Did you work in a Terry Gilliam movie? Was this in the USA? It sounds dystopic.

UK actually. A FTSE-listed company.

I've mentioned some of the other stuff they did in my other comments so I won't dig it up here. I left at the end of last year and at that point I was doing the job of four engineers (who'd all left).

These days, I sleep through the night (first time in about five years), I've massively cut down my coffee intake (from four cups of espresso-strength to a couple of lattes), and I'm working on my own projects in the evenings again. I still have about a stone in weight (put on through comfort-eating) to burn off, but I'm working on that.

Our negotiating position as engineers is way too good to put up with shit like this. I have savings precisely so that I can walk off the job the instant hot desking is announced.

Now that i'm finally moving up the engineering ranks, i'm starting to stockpile money too. As soon as i get through these cert exams over the next month, it's game on.

Give me my desk!! my keyboard!! my monitors!!

This ensures that you know you're nothing more than a lineworker in a digital factory.

Open offices are the first half of that, and open desks are the other half.

Who does it benefit? The company in cost per person of space. Any other metric applied shows gross inadequacies of open offices.

Yeah, they market it as "even the CEO doesn't have his own office!" Oh, cool, he works from home or is travelling the whole time and doesn't need one.

Maybe i'm just being a baby, but a work desk doesn't feel complete without at least a picture of my dog at it, haha.

Hm, I would definitely miss second and third monitors and docking station for my laptop..

Not having assigned seats is frankly just bizarre, and doesn’t seem to have any relation at all to open office. Individual closed offices with no assigned seats would be just as bizarre.

I'm not saying you're able to do this at your current workplace, but if I was stuck in this type of situation, I would heavily advocate for the ability to work from home at least 1-2 days a week.

Having worked in an open office like environment before, it was the only way I was able to get a lot of stuff done.

These types of open offices are a deathknell for productivity and great for people who use work as their only social outlet.

Hmm... there should be digital photo frames, and a stapler with LEDs inside. When you “check in” to your station, your phone activated, your family photos go on the photo frames, and the stapler lights up in your preferred color.