I'm dealing with a particularly stupid inter-departmental fight over hot desking right now. I'm not in the office enough to "justify a dedicated desk", but I also have lots of sensitive hardware others aren't allowed to touch covering "my" desk. I attempted to compromise with the relevant department by suggesting that we just mark the desk as permanently reserved the way other teams have, but that was rejected because "rules say...", as was API access to reserve it automatically.

The joys of bureaucracy...

Excuses that API will book it automatically and there’s nothing else to do are just that - excuses.

Oh no, it's worse than that. I can't even get API access to book things automatically. I would have to manually log in and do it every day, and there's only so far ahead I could book.

Can't script/screen scrape that process either because the site is behind SSO, so I would truly need API keys to access it automatically.

My expectation is that hot desks will become the norm, as companies will (in time) decrease their office space in line with the % of the workforce who are actually in the office on an "average" day.

Hot desks are about the dumbest thing there is. Then why go to the office at all? So you can sit next to random people on an uncomfortable table/chair for hours?

Here we are now really only going to the office if there's some collaborative work that would benefit from face-to-face. And in that you don't really need your own desk since you're probably going to be spending most of your time in a meeting room anyways.

I think there's some people still going to the office daily and I imagine they basically have their own dedicated desk at this point.

So you can have a meeting in person and/or work on hardware that's on site. That's the only reason to go to the office these days.

They’ll provide the family picture on the desk, to make it more personalized.

At some point companies may even try having some employees offer to work from somewhere other than the office, like a coffee shop or even home if you absolutely had to, to deal with any over-crowding issues that come up from this. You can’t really work in the office if it is over-subscribed. Can’t have people standing around waiting for desks. (Hmmm… or conference rooms for that matter…)

Sure you won’t get the in-office perks, but the company appreciates your understanding.

Starbucks should just open co-working spaces. It's literally just a Starbucks but with monitors, keyboards and mice.

I actually don't know any coworking spaces that provide monitors, much less keyboards and mice, so there's an idea to capitalize on.

It would be cheaper for Starbucks to open a cafe in every office instead. And we've come full circle!

They could call it something work-related, like ... WeWork? :D

Coffee shops are nice but only for short periods of work. It's definitely untenable if everyone starts to stay for more than 3 hours.

Co-working spaces are basically coffee shops that allow you to stay for a lot longer.

I guess you don't have any meetings during the workday. Most coffee shops are just to noisy to have anything close to a meeting. That's at least my experience.

Most meetings I go to are superfluous and can be replaced with a slack thread; I think the noise would encourage fewer (and shorter) meetings. Stack them all up at either the beginning or ending of the day and then go to a coffee shop for a few hours.