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.
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.
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.
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.
Open offices usually at least have quieter spots if you get in early enough, in my experience.
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.
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.
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.
So dedicated office space can be expensive.
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.
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...
...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.
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.