There's a lot of crappy office politics that circles around access to daylight. You invariably have a mismatch between Valuable Employees and Valuable deskspace, jockying for position becomes a distraction and having multiple grades of desk just kind of beats the newer employees about the head and shoulders with how little they matter.

It is, in a word, fractious.

The best solution I've seen for this is to keep most of the windows in public spaces. If I go for water or to the bathroom, I should get daylight. Impromptu meeting spaces and lunch spots: daylight.

The thing is, developers say they want daylight at their desk, and then they realize that they can't actually work in natural light (this has gotten better in just the last few years, but I've been watching this happen for 20), and so the people who 'own' the windows end up closing the blinds to work in peace.

The worse this ever got, we had the top floor of a building and so many blinds were closed all day that we might as well have rented space in the basement for half the price/ft²

So now if I am to get any daylight it is at the sole discretion of someone already on an ego trip? No thank you.

Move the desks so that people can see daylight but aren't in daylight. All the windows stay open, your AC bills are a little lower, and the steepness of the pecking order is not quite so brazen.