Hungarian Desks
Assigning office desks optimally with the Hungarian algorithm and an Airtable form full of everyone's preferences.
How do you hand out desks in an office? Usually by department, but at Chatterbug — and at GitHub before it — people sat wherever they wanted, and with partial remote schedules the desks were shared anyway. Mixed seating is arguably better for a company. It’s just annoying to arrange.
So this turns it into an assignment problem. Everyone fills in an Airtable form ranking the desks they’d like. The tool feeds those rankings into the Hungarian algorithm, which finds the assignment that maximizes total happiness across the whole office rather than just giving the first responders what they asked for.
I wrote up the whole thing, including why the obvious approaches don’t work, in Hungarian Desks.