This move strikes me as just the worst of both worlds. First, Google tells employees they need to be in the office X days a week -- and depending on team, from what I know from friends at the Kirkland office, this was enforced.
Now, Google is saying, "actually, you still have to come in, but you need to share a desk with a stranger and coordinate with them what days you are going to come in." So goodbye flexibility. If I usually come in Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- but I need to come in on Wednesday this week for a meeting -- I'm now SOL if my desk mate is also in the office.
Pre-pandemic, I was really opposed to hot desks because if you're making me come into the office, at least let me have my own workspace and setup. But in this situation, I feel like hot desks would be a MUCH better situation. Allow people to reserve their desk a week or even two weeks in advance for the days they'll be in the office -- you could even have it set to be auto-renewing for certain days each week -- but at least you'd have flexibility if you were needed to come into the office one day instead of another.
And personally, I would rather have a hot desk than have a consistent desk I have to share with someone else, because that's worse. It's a consistent workspace, but I can't customize it because someone else uses it too. So I can't have my own keyboard (I'm not sharing things I spend my own money on with strangers, sorry), my own monitor configuration, or the stuff I like on my desk. And unlike a hot space, I'm tied to using it only on specific days.
Right before the pandemic, Microsoft started phasing out personal offices (because of real estate taxes, pure and simple) and there was a lot of pushback and upset (totally understandable, going from a personal office to either a group of personal desks or to hot desks is not cool), but since people can still WFH, my understanding is that most people who go into the office X days a week still have a private office at the main campus (not sure about other locations, but I think most of them were more open plan).
At GitHub (where they have announced they are phasing out all offices), we can reserve a desk space before showing up to a location, which is great -- plus, people who go in to the office all the time either have a recurring reservation (and have a more customized work space) or are choose to move around.
Here's a tip to companies: if you want people to come into the office, don't make coming into the office a punishment. I'm not saying that the lavish perks of the 2010s were sustainable or even good (the whole idea was that you would never leave) -- but workspaces are fucking important and sacred. One of the best parts of Microsoft was that until 2020, nearly everyone had their own private office (maybe you shared with one other person). When they started to phase that out for tax reasons, I was annoyed. But seeing what Google is doing is just capricious and seems to go against reason.
If I were told tomorrow I'd have to go into an office two days a week (but only those two days) and sit in a specific location that I was sharing with another person and had no flexibility in that -- oh, and I would be discouraged from booking conference rooms b/c people squat in them) -- I would be beyond livid. And I say that as someone who doesn't think WFH is the holy grail and actually misses being in an office.
I get that these companies signed massive leases on offices that now no one is using. That sucks for everyone. But the solution isn't to treat that as a punitive thing for employees. If no one is using your space, get out of the lease or sublease it to other companies. Or find other incentives to get people back into the office. But this worst of both worlds stuff just isn't it.