
No Laptop, No Phone, No Desk: UBS Reinvents the Work Space - e15ctr0n
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/business/dealbook/ubs-bank-virtual-desktops-london.html
======
bengale
Sounds awful. What better way to make your employees feel like a replaceable
cog than to strip any personality from their work environment.

~~~
maxxxxx
Are the execs that cook this up part of this or do they keep their (window?)
offices?

~~~
tzs
It sounds like there are no window offices. From the article:

> Inside, UBS has significantly reduced the number of individual offices, by
> about 40 percent. None sit against the windows, allowing light throughout
> the building.

------
jimmywanger
Somehow this reminds me of the government office description in "Snow Crash".

"So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the same. You
come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to work. You
could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it
would be noticed. "

~~~
quantumhobbit
In the book this is the same office that timed how long employees spent
reading emails. Too short and you are penalized for skimming, too long and you
are a slacker.

I wouldn't be surprised if offices are doing that now too.

~~~
falcolas
Yahoo tracked their remote worker's activity by their VPN traffic (to access
email). So yes, it is being done.

------
caleblloyd
I love using a different keyboard every day that somebody previously ate
Doritos at. Are they hiring?

~~~
frozenport
[http://www.fritolay.com/careers.htm](http://www.fritolay.com/careers.htm)

------
rwmj
This same idea went notoriously badly for Chiat/Day:
[https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/](https://www.wired.com/1999/02/chiat-3/)

That was over 20 years ago so I guess all lessons have been forgotten and we
have to learn them again.

------
TY
To the point of using thin clients:

One interesting angle to this is arguably better security for the corporation
as there are no USB ports on employee machines.

This prevents employees from making copies of corporate data or bringing
malware on their USB flash drives.

I know that there's software that disables USB ports, but there are always
exceptions or workarounds that are enough to cause an incident.

This also eliminates potential of data loss in case of hard drive
failure/damage or theft of employee's computer as everything is on corporate
servers where enforcement of backups is much easier than on actual computers.

------
seasoup
Not sure how this works... so it's a race into the office so you can sit next
to your team before it all fills up?

------
bhewes
So working at UBS is like a public HS. You get a locker a phone and you float
around to where you need to be.

------
jamisteven
Being an employee at this company I can tell you it has nothing to do with
mitigating risk associated with data loss prevention, and everything to do
with cost of infrastructure. This particular roll out is due to Citrix' A3
being deployed in favor of HP physical desktops, as well as Microsoft Lync
(Now Skype for Business) in place of physical Avaya phones. Its a long term
play for cost cutting with some argument for latency as well, as the A3's when
they work right are super fast.

------
darklajid
I've been in contact with a number of Swiss companies and saw that live
already - the PostFinance in Berne did the same stuff. You have a locker for
your private stuff/jacket and a tiny container with your 'work stuff' that you
just push to a random desk (Not sure if they still do this, last saw this a
year ago or so).

You plugin your laptop in a docking station and start working.

I .. hate the idea and felt uncomfortable the couple days I stayed. This is
definitely not new or UBS specific though.

------
pavlov
Isn't this essentially what the Sun Ray thin client was, 17 years ago:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray)

~~~
cabacon
Yes, absolutely. They did something like this at the Sun Microsystems field
office outside of Chicago while I worked there. You would log into a sunray
with your smartcard and pick up whatever you had left behind in your session,
with no permanent desk assignment.

It was unpopular, to say the least. Your personal belongings went into a
pedestal on wheels that you could take to whichever workspace you wound up at
that day. This was in 2000/2001 or so.

~~~
david-given
These days we call them ChromeBoxes.

And they _can_ be great. My work issue laptop is a Pixel 2 ChromeBook, and I
love it. But that's mine, which I alone use (except when I lend it to
someone), and the grease on the keyboard comes from my fingers.

------
crooked-v
I'm sure the people who use a specific model of keyboard or monitor for
ergonomic or accessibility reasons just love this idea.

~~~
swalberg
My office did this on a vastly smaller scale. The people that do care about
their keyboard either store it in their locker, or in the case of one of my
coworkers, carry it with them (it's the smallest CODE keyboard so it packs up
easily).

That clearly doesn't work for the monitor.

------
syntheticnature
I hope someone is sanitizing those keyboards regularly. It's impressive what
germ-traps shared keyboards are.

(Not originally written as a Douglas Adams reference, but I suppose it sort-of
fits.)

~~~
Grishnakh
This is easy to fix: get rid of the keyboards altogether, and just use on-
screen touch keyboards. Give employees screen wipes to use.

I can't imagine why office workers wouldn't mind typing in lengthy documents
using an on-screen keyboard. /s

------
satysin
It is a shame the article has no pictures of the office setup.

~~~
inanutshellus
Initially I thought this as well but upon reading it's somewhat irrelevant.

Desks are now like parking spots: first come, first served. When you log in,
you get your own VM, not your own PC. So the placement and configuration may
well be innovative in some way, but it would be a separate concept. You lose
the ability to be special at all (prefer a trackball or ergonomic keyboard?
Grossed out by that grey crap on someone else's--wait, your--mouse? Too bad,
sucka!)

Digital nomads... but none of their digitals are nomadic. :)

What I found noteworthy is the lack of laptops. Nobody works from home?

~~~
gist
I am inclined to not look for the zebras here. No photo offered by UBS,
nothing they can get easily from a getty images (a clip photo) so hey it's not
like they are going to use any leverage they have and demand it. "Photo or we
don't run the story". As always this article was floated by someone for PR
purposes. And a UBS employee is quoted. So it's not like they couldn't have
said "ok we will print but send us a photo to make it more interesting". And
the photo is of UBS offices in Zurich to boot. Lazy.

Back in the day when we were featured in a news story I actually took the time
to setup the scene (in advance) for the photographer that was sent over from
the local big city paper. As a result he was able to get a great shot and the
article was syndicated in 20 newspapers across the country. Was well worth the
effort. Even had a ladder for him so he could get the shot from the top
easily.

------
parennoob
Some of the doublespeak in large financial corporations is astonishing.

> UBS executives insist the shift is not all about costs. “I would be wrong to
> sit here and say there isn’t an economic efficiency dimension,” Mr. Owen
> said. “In and of itself, that’s not the reason to do it. It would fail on
> that basis. It has to be of value to our staff and our structure in the way
> we operate. There has to be a value there.”

Translation: It's all about costs and making employees absolutely replacable,
only we're calling it "value addition" or some such nonsense. And what the
fuck is an "economic efficiency dimension"?

------
FrancoDiaz
I like it. If I want to get on a whiteboard with a couple guys and hash things
out, we can get a room with maybe a couple PCs to write some code. Otherwise,
you're at home or somewhere else you find comfortable.

------
GreatPowers
Give it a few years for those disgusting coworkers to dirty up all the chairs,
keyboards, and mice. Maybe add a bunch of fingerprints to the monitors.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Maybe add a bunch of fingerprints to the monitors.

And yet, somehow, the new thing in laptops is touch screens.

:(

------
falcolas
I work at a company where this was implemented at one point. The kicker?
Everyone picked a desk and stuck with it, setting up family pictures, monitor
setups, and so forth. When someone did change desks, it was a major pain to
track them down for in person conversations, and it incurred ill will with the
coworker (and their colleagues) they displaced.

We're back to normal seating arrangements.

------
logfromblammo
This was predicted by Stephenson in _The Diamond Age_.

It sounded perfectly horrible when I read it then as fiction, but reading it
now as reality, I find myself filled with an unpleasant sensation of dread and
loathing that well surpasses my previous response.

~~~
Grishnakh
Every day, I become more and more convinced that I'm living in a dystopian
"mirror" universe like the one on Star Trek where the humans are all evil, and
somewhere out there, there's a "prime" universe where humans are generally
good and things are generally improving.

------
adamnemecek
This setup wouldn't work for "computer people". My OS' tend to be adjusted to
the extent that I have a hard time using the default installations.

------
bsimpson
There are 13% fewer desks than people. Sounds like finding a desk there at
least once a day is about as fun finding an open meeting room other companies.
Plus, you can't find anybody because you don't reliably know their home
location.

~~~
raverbashing
Looks like Musical Chairs really

------
geofft
I find myself moving around the office with my laptop a lot, and I don't
really understand why I have a desk, other than to accumulate junk. I like the
idea.

~~~
pcunite
If you have your own personal laptop, sure.

------
raverbashing
To truly reinvent it what I would want done is email

It might be needed for external information, but companies should start to
think how to get it retired

~~~
sergiosgc
Email, much like spreadsheets, is the second best tool for any task. You can
long for the best tool, if you first define the task. You can't beat email's
flexibility, though, when you don't know the task beforehand.

------
nunez
This is what VDI was meant to accomplish. Secure desktops in the cloud. The
problem is doing it right gets very expensive VERY fast

------
kdamken
God what a nightmare that would be. As if open office spaces weren't bad
enough.

------
edgarvaldes
I would love to see how thin are these "so-called thin desks".

