I'm guessing they found that employees aren't as productive when they not obliged to show up to the office every day. Not to mention when they're not provided with a steady stream of free food and coffee.
Fourteen days a year seems pretty limited--weren't Googler's working from home more often than that before the pandemic?
That's quite speculative, considering how open offices are terrible for productivity but the companies still require it. Most likely it's just management bias.
Isn't your post about Google offices being terrible for productivity exactly the same amount of speculative? And likely just your personal bias towards your preferences?
Found that my productivity - and that of the team I'm on -has gone through the roof since WFH. I'm on a fairly small team though (2-3 devs). I suspect that productivity changes are different in larger, more corporate settings where it is less conspicuous when a worker abuses the circumstances.
Same, my team has gone way through the roof in productivity, delivering more than ever. At some point we actually ran out of stories to do even with more work and had to come up with more.
As a note, over than half the team already WFH'd at least 1 day a week in normal conditions, and there was sufficient team trust that everyone would do the right thing, nobody minded if you ran out for errands or lunch unannounced - people would quickly check if any meetings were scheduled usually before running out, items were completed ahead of schedule. I've been doing a 30m-1h nap in the middle of the day and that's helped a lot too.
I've also managed to not catch a cold or flu for the first time ever.
My previous daily commute was min 1-2hrs each way in completely stopped traffic on a standing room only bus/train with multiple transfers and involved waking up even earlier than that to not be refused entry to an overfilled bus.
I've seen a teammate or two be playing actual games (ranked apex legends in this case) during meetings but honestly, they were still responding, answered questions, and that meeting could have been a slack thread but some other teams are not nearly as competent at reading README.md.
That's interesting, since my assumption is that Google would be fairly data driven. I'd be curious if Googlers feel like this is because they are really seeing reduced productivity, or if there's a different motivation.
I think you'll be looking for a while if your standards for an employer is that you have arbitrary access to the data they use to make decisions. There are a handful of radically transparent employers out there but it is the vanishing exception, not the rule.
Well the trouble is if you tell everyone that you are data-driven, and do so in most cases, then people are definitely going to ask about what data you used to make a decision.
If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.
As someone who has done it for over a decade, in software, it's totally doable providing your org has all the infrastructure and has a culture that successful business requires treating their employees like humans who need to socialize, communicate, and slack off a bit like they would in a physical office. Usually online work turns into a push to maximizing efficiency and minimizing time you'd normally be "wasting" at an office. People then hate it, informal socialization doesn't happen, and hidden business processes that live in those informal social interactions that keep things moving don't happen.
They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.
Yeah, it's very easy to pick and gain metrics to support whatever view point you want to espouse. We see this in politics all the time, sometimes even multiple politicians using the same data set to push wildly different proposals. Why would Google be any different?
Kinda seems odd too because the only metric that you would think matters (stock price) would have heavy consideration (~90% growth since March 2020).
Yep, and then employees have a harder time challenging it - because how is an employee without the power of HR, facilities etc. going to gather the almighty data?
managing a small product engineering team. I have to say WFH has a considerable impact on productivity. Coding is actually fine, but the problems are:
1. Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
2. Personal relationships are difficult to grow, especially for newbies. Usually those things got grown via coffee chats, launch meets, ad-hoc talks, but those are all gone. You know, a lot of cases, whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot. I don't have a word to describe it precisely, maybe "lower team coherency".
3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Those are things may not be easily tracked from data, but really harmful in the long run. I cannot imagine how to manage effectively after another year of WFH.
>...whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot...
I was kind of hoping the remote work experience would help folks make that sort of inside baseball less important. There are real equity concerns to consider, but practically speaking, you end up with narrower and less open decision-making processes in general.
It's definitely a complicated subject, but maybe some folks are partly missing some privilege that they need to learn to let go.
It goes both ways though. Up until now the nice chat zone was limited to people on the same floor. With WFH we got people in other countries joigning the chats on equal footing.
The info density difference also seem to be compensated by everyone being more open and comfortable (not packed in noisy office for the day)
There's definitely less random chats, it's more formal and less intense, but also broader and the hurdle is lower.
I think for companies above some size it's not better or worse, just different.
The problem is that the person in the office in another city, or perhaps even on another floor of your building, probably doesn't get to have that nice chat, ever, due to the lower likelihood of running into each other.
Why should my requests get better prioritization just because I happen to work on the same floor as a person in a key position?
This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people.
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
I think this is very subjective. When I carpooled to an office my personal life lost commute time and arriving early or leaving late to coordinate with rides or buses. Gained an extra 8h a week when I went remote.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Everyone in my team does literally just that on Slack. If I can say something, I can type something. If I can close my laptop in the office, I can close my laptop at home just the same. Or close Slack. Or just sign out of the company's workspace.
I genuinely wish more people held this attitude. Is it really worth 10% (or even 20%) productivity gains if the price is that your employees have to waste 1-2 hours a day sitting behind the wheel of a car?
To the executives and bean counters, yes, it obviously is. But from the overall perspective of society and mental health, hell no, it is absolutely horrifying to put people through that.
Working remote is a skill. Like other work-related skills, it takes effort and attention to develop it. It's likely most people haven't made that effort in the last year, since the situation was seen to be temporary.
I've worked full remote for almost a decade now. It was hard at first, until I realized there were solutions to the problems I encountered and it would take conscious effort on my part to get it done.
It's definitely possible for remote developers to achieve at least as much productivity as in person devs. But it's also understandable if people/companies don't want to make that effort.
>Disclaimer: Googler
>... Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
It just seems honest and pragmatic to me. There are nice collaboration tools, but there will always be a gap vs face-to-face. I think you just have to make other areas of remote work offset the lost value of that unfixable gap.
For (1), I’ve found the opposite. The ICs end up having smaller meetings, and producing more coherent designs.
Then, they’re forced to write their designs down, people read them, and there is a larger meeting to discuss (which usually is only needed for big course corrections).
This depends. The problems we've been working on as a team are really too big to work out on a whiteboard. I think for my team, WFH is just fine. I'm nearing the end of one of the most complicated software projects I've ever worked on and don't feel like any of our issues were related to WFH.
Over the last year I've actually started to connect with my team. We have weekly video chats and spend hours socializing. As an older engineer with bad hearing, video chats are far better than crowding around a big table in a cavernous, modern office.
My only complaint is the environment I have to work in. Silicon Valley real estate is sub-par and high priced. I've been looking for a new apartment with a spare bedroom for months but the only units available are far away or run-down. If I knew I could WFH forever, I'd have left already. Here I am, waiting, because I have no idea when I'll be required to go back to work.
Heh.. I can sympathize. I find voice chat with a decent head set makes it SOO much easier to hear/understand people. And it basically eliminates multiple people speaking at once - the 'muddle' that turned into used to drive me crazy.
1. All you need to do a remote whiteboard is a microphone and a mouse. This is a great opportunity to create new softwares that actually help collaboration and improve the design process rather than being stuck forever with a pen and a paper.
2. What you call "personal relationship" is, at the end of the day, employee relationship and politic to be promoted. You are in a long term position of power on your employee, which allows you to impose your point of view. Stop pretending to be benevolent. Most new hires do what you tell them to do, it doesn't change with work from home.
3. I think that's just because you are not a good manager (sorry), or your own managers are bad. If you actually cared, you would respect people time and have clear rules that show it. You can send a "have a good afternoon" at 6PM, no one would find that awkward
1. This is your strongest point. I've missed the whiteboard a bit. But you just need to find other ways to sketch out your ideas. Even a google doc, which is pretty primitive as these kinds of things go, it pretty easy to use instead.
2. Personal relationships require investment and deliberate choice. Schedule some open mic time. Keep a zoom room open where teammates can interact but with the expectation that they needn't be 100% engaged. This is a substitute for talking over the cube walls or the random break room interactions. Also spend time in non-work conversations via slack or talk a bit about non-work stuff before or after normal meetings. You'd do this in the office as you walked to or from a meeting room. It isn't as easy to just accidentally build these social relationships. Working remote you need to build the habits that support them.
3. Keep your work space and your personal space separate. Set some time boundaries. Encourage your team to put a cap on their daily work. Remind them. You have to learn set and stick to healthy boundaries. Too much time on the job leads to productivity drop in the long run. Keep your team productive and happy by helping them be aware of the issue. As a manager, watch out for perverse incentives driving overwork.
There are zillion little moments of ad hoc communication that happen face to face. Now that their absence has helped you discover that they are valuable, ask yourself when they occurred and how they worked to your advantage. Once you have some idea what you're missing, then you can start to engineer a replacement. As a leader, it's important that you model these behaviors for your team.
I've found that 3-4 people doing the initial design for something is usually too many. One person on their own or two people so they can bounce ideas off each other seems to be ideal. After the first rough sketch of the design is ready (it shouldn't have too many details), it should be presented to a larger audience so they can take feedback and course-correct if needed.
The personal relationship stuff is tricky, and I think junior folks, and especially fresh grads, got hit pretty hard here. On the flip side, I joined a new team around the time we all went remote last year (with several people I'd never met or heard of before), and it turned out just fine. I wouldn't say I'm buddies with all the new people, but I think we all feel comfortable with and respect each other. I joined in more of a technical leadership role, though, so I can totally get that someone who has to also deal with receiving mentorship could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost.
The work-life balance thing I find very puzzling. Many people (especially in the bay area) have gotten 1-2 hours per day of commute time back from utter waste (though I guess you folks at Google have the buses). Sure, things get blurred when you work at a desk in your bedroom, or at your kitchen table. But this is something that you as a manager need to be on top of by setting an example for the team. Keep reasonable hours, and disconnect outside those hours. Don't hold your team members to deadlines that require them to work excessive hours. When you sign off at 5 or 6pm with your "gotta go, chat tomorrow", make it clear that you expect the rest of the team to sign off pretty soon as well.
Having said that, I do know people in my org that work too much. But they're the kind of people who weren't great at balance back when we were in offices, either.
> Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
What's stopping someone from just... grabbing a whiteboard? They ain't expensive. Yeah, maybe not everyone can write to it, but everyone should be able to read from it. Designate someone as the writer and you're good to go.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
What about "Sorry, just broke for $MEAL, let's put it on the calendar for tomorrow"?
When we were in the office it was rare to speak with anyone who wasn't on your floor, whereas now it's no harder to work with someone in Stockholm or Berlin than it is in London.
Doing Zoom calls before was always a massive pain as we have an open office (like almost everyone nowadays) and there weren't enough private spaces.
> 3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
You can only blame yourself for that. When I'm done working for the day, I log out, lock my screen and walk out of the room. And if the time to go happens in the middle of a chat, then so be it. My boss can tell me he's gotta go, and I can tell him I've gotta go, and that's exactly what we do. There is no blurring of work and life because I don't blur them.
I don’t think it’s possible to be completely data driven about a company-wide cultural change that you can’t a/b test. A year or so after they make the decision, though, I’m sure they’ll have data on whether they have a spike in losing employees to competitors like Facebook that are more remote-friendly.
(Googler, opinions are my own) I don't think Google has really justified why the return to the office is necessary for all employees, beyond saying that it's a key part of the culture.
Obviously the office is a part of the culture, and most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. But to me, that doesn't explain why you can't offer a remote option for the employees who want it.
A charitable explanation might be what we've heard from execs: we don't want to rush to go remote, we'd like to dip our toes in and slowly explore broader options. Thus the hybrid 3/2 model. A less charitable explanation might be that Google has spent a lot of money on real estate. Or simply that leadership is out of touch and can't relate to the reasons why employees might want to be remote. I imagine it's a mix of both types of explanations.
Or even simpler: execs own super expensive real estate in the tech hubs and the only thing that supports the prices is the hoards of employees that have to live in the area.
This is the true answer. A lot of people have moved into far away (cheaper) bedroom communities to save money.
Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.
All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.
I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
Google has some of the best offices in the world. They’ve built up these offices as a clear differentiator from their talent competitors. It’s lead to many companies offering free lunch and other perks tied to their physical space.
Giving it up would mean changing the culture and the value prop of working there. I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t want to do that.
Yeah, I do agree. It's odd that FB are doing so differently from them, though. When I worked in a FAANG, they had lots of issues with senior level engineer retention. Generally loads of people left when they wanted to start a family.
I guess FB must have seen the same thing, hence full remote for senior engineers. It's odd that Google haven't experienced this issue.
Sadly that culture changed long ago. Even prior to covid a lot of companies were downscaling their perks as they offshored jobs to Asia, thanks to our previous administration.
Can you give specific instances of this happening? I feel like offshoring tech jobs has been the bogeyman that has never delivered in our industry for a really long time.
Xoogler here, left pre-pandemic. Google has always been very data-driven. It just seeks data that support management's ideas of how they want to run the company. Despite ample evidence showing that cramped, loud working spaces both decrease productivity and increase sick days for coworkers (because flu and the common cold, and other reasons), management went for densification to meet growth targets and cut real estate outlays. Google workspaces would have been the absolute perfect super spreader spaces for COVID. TBH I feel a bit of schadenfreude for their deliberate choice to create that environment, and this article saddens me to see that Google hasn't learned much.
I, for one, hated the densification and tight working environments, but I didn't have the "data" to make a hill of beans difference.
Googler, but opinions are my own. A lot of employees like me would like to go back to the office, but would also like to have a few days at home for personal reasons (exercise time, kids school events, etc), fewer hours of exhausting commuting, and even just to have lunch at the restaurants in my own neighborhood. This would reduce the exhaustion one can feel at the end of a 5 day office week and leave you feeling fresher next time you come in to the office.
The 3-in-office/2-at-home week referenced would work well in this regard.
As someone who's worked only remotely for several years, this makes sense. I know many will disagree with this assertion but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.
I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
Personally, I'm over 20 years WFH now and love it. The last 5 years have been working with people on other continents, and I actually had the choice of time zones to work (I usually work nights for this, as I'm a night owl and it lets me sleep during day time when Arizona summers get hot). I haven't had any of the issues people seem to encounter. I don't work to socialize, so I don't miss lunches and such. For programming or devops stuff, you can definately do 100% remote. I understand people have different tastes, so I find it funny how polarized people get about it. In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
> In-office to WFH is a spectrum - just pick the spot your comfortable on it.
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
Luckily, I think the autonomy part is on the rise...At least for tech workers. I basically no longer entertain positions that aren't 90+% WFH (so companies do quarterly or yearly get togethers, which aren't so bad), and there seems to be more of them all the time. In an industry where working with 'offshore' dev. groups is fairly routine, it seems especially silly to require 'local' resources to come on-site.
I have worked with 50% remote people for decades. There are all sorts of ways this can be productive. The most obvious, which may or may not appeal to the majority of HN’s demographic, is people with families.
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
If you're only coming in a few days a week, you don't need to live as close to the office. Like the difference between a 30 minute commute twice a day five days a week versus a 90 minute commute twice a day once a week.
It's certainly better than nothing. I agree that different people like WFH for different reasons. For my job, anything that lets me move farther from the Bay Area would be better. 1 day WFH per week doesn't let me do that, but maybe 3 days WFH per week would. My current commute is 4 hours, so maybe Id be willing to do an 8 hour commute if it was only twice a week. A week per month would be even better: I could move out of $tate and just fly to the South Bay once a month.
It still allows employees to work uninterrupted while managing their own time on the other days, and allows the company to save roughly half the office space (unless everyone comes in at the same days). It also spares you a lot of commute.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
+1. I was surprised by myself when deciding between competing offers recently. Even after enduring a year of isolation, and beginning my search with the express goal of joining a team on-site, I chose the fully remote position. I found the on-site guys tended to be old-school (not meant as a compliment). Also, in such turbulent and uncertain times, I realized that mobility is a major benefit. If my city turns even more Mad Max this summer (the jobs aren't coming back, people are pissed...), it will be a relief to be able to "bug out" with zero ceremony.
It's easier, I agree, but I would not say its better. Collaborating online requires documentation, its more effort, but the artifacts you produce can be a lot more useful for everyone involved.
The problem is that everyone (in the team) needs to be in the office the exact same two days. That’s difficult to synchronize, some people may want to be at the office on Fridays, while other may prefer Mondays or Wednesdays or...
I solve hard problems for a living. This doesn't even register.
My post-vaccine plan is to have a "mulmen day" where I set the expectation with my teammates and stakeholders that I am in the office and a "float" day where I come in to align with someone else's day who I need to work with face-to-face for whatever reason. If everyone works this way then we can meet most scheduling needs. If we expand this to two float days a week then it is trivial.
There's no reason for the whole team to be colocated on the same day on a regular basis. Those kind of team-wide meetings never benefit from whiteboarding or any other in-person process. In fact the limitations of remote work make that kind of collaboration better because you have to actually prepare your thoughts and material.
Even pre-covid getting calendar time required a week of notice. Office hours were once-a-week and required at least 24 hours notice. Personally my office hours are on Wednesday. If someone books a session I come in, if not I don't. Nothing changes.
In Covid times I have had the most productive period of my career while my team grew by 50%. I have no problem getting coworker time ad-hoc, even remote. Communication is not difficult. We got better at using tooling to write documents and draw diagrams. We don't use whiteboard analogies.
I honestly see no downside to the remote work and a long list of personal, professional and environmental benefits.
Currently in a 2 days WFH scenario atm where everyone just picks whatever random days they want. I'm not a fan. There's almost no consistency even though people set which days they are at home. Hard to describe, but it's mentally impossible to keep track of when starting a meeting if everyone is in the meeting who is supposed to be because I can't keep track of everyone's days, so I don't know if they're just not on the call yet, or forgot about the call and need to ping them, or are in the office but grabbing a coffee before coming to the meeting etc.
If it's all the same days that'd be great but doesn't seem like it's work for everyone. I know certain days/times where I can't have meetings at home because the space is otherwise occupied and I need to keep quiet etc.
I'm sure that's confusing, but it occurs to me that it'd be a lot less confusing if you just assumed that anyone who is late needs a ping, even if they haven't actually forgotten. Even if they're only late by 1 second. Just ping them. If they're grabbing a coffee, they're still late. Non-emergency reasons are not an excuse to hold everyone else up.
I see that behaviour starting to emerge, but you're right. I think this should just become the M.O.
Maybe also by waiting to start the meeting we're enabling it all too?
I find it all too much to keep track of, so perhaps simplifying it to "meeting starts at X, be there or be square" is all that's needed and behaviour will adjust accordingly?
Food for thought.
I've seen some comments that WFH and it's variations (full remote vs partial) are a skill like anything else and need to be developed. I'm not strictly speaking a fan of it all really, but that's just me, and I think the "more productive vs less productive" debate is actually a ruse and that the real argument we're all getting into is "this makes me feel better vs this makes me feel worse" which you simply can't logic your way out of, so I get that it truly does suit some people.
I think I just need to take the mindset that it's a skill I need to develop a little further and some of my gripes with it will ease or melt away.
Seems like, at least in my neck of the woods, 2 days WFH is becoming a standard benefit touted by companies to attract candidates now.
> but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.
Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.
I feel like ideally, in say a 3/2 scenario, most people would be in the office on the same days. But I wonder how that would be accomplished. Everyone's reasons for wanting to stay home certain days might be different.
It seems foolish to rush things as cases are once again back on the rise, which means deaths will likely be rising in about 2 weeks. And why are cases on the rise? Because people are, once again, pretending we are getting back to normal and going back to their old germ transmission daily life. How many times do we need to go through this Grand Opening / Grand Closing cycle before we learn?
(Fully) Vaccinated people spending time together seems safe enough though, so the choice to work in office is probably fine (whereas requiring it is premature).
I'm guessing they are looking forward to the point at which "everyone that wants a vaccine can get one", at which point safely opening an office building should be doable.
After spending more than a year remote, full remote is difficult ( not impossible ) . Most of us have settled on 3 days at home, 2 days at work, so we can socialize, make new connections or just simply have lunch.
Going back to in office 100% is a thing of the past unless you are a team that has to be there - making hardware etc.
For ex I cant imagine the Pixel team working 100% remote.
I see that it is sarcastic in form, but it doesn't address the meaning of the initial comment, which was about sitting down for a meal and chatting, not about food.
I'm a senior manager and also a hardcore introvert. In my many years of office work I would actively avoid having lunch around anyone from the office as much as possible. Lunch is my only alone time when I'm crammed in an office all day.
Super introvert as well, I like my solo time in the office, but some times to make new connections, learn about a new part of the business these small distractions are a good break from the regular.
I am an introvert and absolutely hate group behaviors and nonsensical smalltalk around lunch time.
However I have no issue being a manager and talking to people on 1:1s or with a clean agenda and subject to discuss.
Work is hard. Dealing with people is tiring, but I am also skilled at it and it is tremendously fulfilling to help people grow and achieve their personal goals. Some days I really really don't want to have my 1:1s, but that is okay. Being an introvert doesn't mean that I hate interacting with people. It just means that it is somewhat tiring.
I completely agree. I have to talk to these people all day, now I'm supposed to talk to them while I eat? Never mind the fact it isn't socially acceptable to actually talk while eating.
I just want to walk, read something interesting and eat.
Lunch time is a me time for me as well. People no longer ask me if I go with them. Many times when I found colleagues eating in the same restaurant, I would just say hello and still eat on my own at a different table. When I have too much social contact my mind goes into overdrive and I cannot focus on anything, so I need time alone to "decompress". At some workplaces it was difficult for people to understand that unfortunately.
I also basically never had a lunch with anyone. Only when everyone travels somewhere as a team building event, but then I do not talk during lunch. Not even as kid with my family, I would always read a book during lunch rather than talking
Curious, do the members of your team have activities, hobbies, and relationships they are involved with outside of work? From what I have seen the folks itching to get back to the office are the ones that don't have many outlets outside of work.
On the other hand, for many of us who do have significant non work passions (rock climbing for me) as well as social circles around these activities appreciate remote work because it allows us to structure our lives in a way where such activities coexist with work more easily.
The interesting thing is that for work centered people, remote work has reduced social connections, while for more interdisciplinary folks it can do the opposite.
I have personally worked 100% remote for 7 years now, but before that I lived and worked in San Fransisco. I never attended a Friday night work happy hour because every Friday night I would be in the car driving 4 hours to go climbing in Yosemite.
Now, I can work remotely from a town with great outdoor access and spend my Friday nights hanging around with local friends instead instead of in the car.
Remote work has allowed me to have a more balanced life filled with more things I want to do and less I don't. Have the years of video meetings made my professional career less productive? Perhaps, but I have still worked on plenty of cool projects with plenty of great folks along the way. Some of them have even become close friends. And even if it has suffered, its been worth it!
Remote work is great for companies that have a work life balance. But remote work is a bummer at places that expect more than a 40-hour work week. At those places social activity happened over lunch or dinner. Then suddenly we were all locked down with no pre-existing social circle to fall back on.
We all have hobbies, relationships etc and there is no doubt all those things have improved so much. Not having our long Texas commutes has been great. People with kids love the extra time esp for those that are college bound. I am loving the time with my family and other hobby projects.
To give you some background, we are an IT shop for an Energy co. so there is a big chunk of our people who have to be at work, physically just because of the nature of the work. As others have alluded, we weren't set up with remote in mind.
I would love to hear how being 100% you've built a network, bonds etc with your colleagues. We have a bunch of new people who dont have the rapport with us or finding it difficult to connect ( a few lunches or coffees, or hang out in the common area could help build )
I should also mentioned the 3 off / 2 in office is something of a peace offering to the non IT part of the business. Most of us know we can be fully remote.
I think small teams, one on one collaboration, and interesting projects are key.
It’s hard to get to know folks when sitting on a big zoom call, but I find working one on one works well for developing a bond.
Once you spend many hours over many months working closely with someone, a bond develops and there is plenty of opportunity to get to know them along the way.
In fact, you can do this just over slack - spend enough time hanging in a chat and people’s personalities are bound to come out.
To be fair, you may be less likely to make a very close friend with a remote employee. But a friendly, productive working relationship is certainly easy to develop, and that’s all that’s necessary for most teams to function well.
This strategy probably wouldn’t work with big teams where folks float in and out, or for roles where you have to meet new people all the time.
You are making some interesting assumptions about non-work interests. I don’t mind working in the office 3-4 days/week, and have plenty of Non-work interests: restaurants, photography, dancing, live music, hanging out with friends. I live, work, and play in the city. I can pursue my social activities within minutes of leaving work.
This sounds like a problem with the location of that particular office, not with the discussuion of in-place work/work from home. I live a nice bike trip from work and I cannot stand working at home anymore. And I'm an extreme introvert: I don't yearn for social contact, it's just that my office is very comfortable.
It sounds more like your friends lived somewhere different than where you lived. You were traveling to see your friends and now you don't have to travel because you live closer to them. Remote work can be good for that scenario but you could've also just fully embraced your true destiny to become a dirtbag.
Remote work basically doesn't change anything for the activities I'd like to do. Mine are centered around major cities, require large amounts of tools and space, or have to be done during the day. Remote isn't a huge factor except for the space being expensive in major cities part. If I have a day-time activity I want to do, remote work does jack shit for that. If I want to go skiing 7-times a week then I'm SOL because work hours are work hours and they overlap with the hours that resorts are open. Until the work you do becomes async by nature - not just remote - a lot of alternative lifestyles are not available. I'm sure the same is true for you as well with climbing. You can get lights and go during the night but I'm sure you'd prefer to climb during the day if you had a choice.
> From what I have seen the folks itching to get back to the office are the ones that don't have many outlets outside of work.
Not just that, many of those normal outlets have been heavily restricted or even not allowed for the past year. I expect if that wasn't the case, people wouldn't put so much of their unhappiness on the work part of being at home all the time.
Not something I have direct experience of, but don't most engineers, designers working on hardware projects spend a similar amount of time working at a computer with a screen, keyboard and mouse as software people do? I assume that the vast majority of them are not in a fab/laboratory/solder station on a weekly basis.
It’s pretty common to have local hardware that you’re talking to, e.g. flashing firmware, programming FPGAs, testing fixes on early stage devices.
There’s various ways to create tunnels for remote services to talk to local devices, but it adds latency and complexity to an already complex workflow.
My friend works as an assembler for a company that does small scale electronic devices and anyone who wanted was given by the company all equipment necessary to complete assemblies at home. He had to sacrifice a part of his living room, but he has all the tools at home soldering stations, microscope, oven etc. company send him parts weekly and collect finished products weekly as well. He seem happy with that, but of course his wife doesn't like that they no longer have a living room, but on the other hand they have more time for themselves.
I find this interesting that the new economy Google is so set on office work where as Shell (at least in .au) is planning on staff having an office / work from home mix. They have even reduced overall office space so that they don't have enough spaces for all employees to work from some local offices.
Remote work is terrible for productivity especially if the company was not already remote first. In my employer, we've noticed a 30-40% productivity dip across the board. Not only that, but people are reporting more stress and are working unhealthy hours. Replying to emails at 9pm, etc.
The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.
If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
Are you sure the elevated stress and lowered productivity are due to remote work, and not other environmental factors (i.e., a global pandemic, lockdown, etc.)?
You should never assume businesses, corporations, and people are rational actors. Corporations make irrational decisions all the time, often to their demise. Why do we think Google is exempt?
Oddly at the place I was with we saw literally the exact same metrics but inverse: productivity increase by mid-30%. Everyone hated the office so that makes sense.
My philosophy on it is that management is key. If butts-in-seats gives management the illusion of productivity then they will likely find out they are dead wrong. You can practically objectively measure productivity with remote work. Collaboration is more challenging and therefore surfaces many efficiencies you can make in your process.
In the last 21 years, I've worked 2 years in an office, for Google. Those were by far the least productive I've ever felt. I resorted to getting into the office at 5:30 am to have some quiet time before the obnoxious group next to us in the office arrived and started joking around and flying RC helicopters in the building.
I'm another one with 20 years WFH... Its amazing how much controversy it engenders. I think a good part of it, might be having consciously made the decision vs. having to 'fall into' it during the pandemic.
Interviewing for my last job, I asked if I could bring in a pinball machine, and they said they just moved from a shared office where they had to steal the ping-pong balls from the other occupants so they could work.
I didn't bring in the machine, but it was a nice work environment.
I worked at a place with a historic, beautiful, downtown office. It was great ... for a while. Then they expanded but the location could not. My enjoyment dropped rapidly once we were five to a desk. The question of remote work came up and upper management was heavily invested in on site ICs. And this around the time they promoted some semi-remote folks to be our managers. It was weird. Possibly some trust issues from past contractors.
EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.
The worst time I had was when I got to manage a team of 5 at a remote location. All 5 guys were sitting together. There was only one conference room equipped with videoconference gear. I tried maintaining at least one meeting a week but it had to be booked a lot in advance and I was frequently preempted by higher management because this was the only one room. Usually at the last moment (and I had once been evicted in the middle of the meeting).
There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.
Google has signed like 16 year leases in some offices and has invested hundreds of millions of dollars into them already. For the playa vista office alone at least.
it's true though. They are a publicly traded company with over 100B in office assets. If they can't get people back into the offices, they would not be able to justify they cost of keeping said property and would have to sell it to appease investors. Please use a brain cell next time.
Yikes, please don't damage HN by responding that way, no matter how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are. This is how we get downward spirals into hell. Think of it this way: you may not owe the comment you disagree with any better, but you owe this community much better if you're participating in it.
It would be interesting for someone to look into the value of the commercial real estate holdings of the big tech companies in any examination of why they are declaring the end of permanent remote work.
My understanding is that's not the case, that the 14 day limit (which I haven't heard about, actually) is for only WFH full time over an extended period.
The article is poorly researched and is not explaining the 14 day thing correctly. I'm sure that the actual email will be leaked at some point but since it is listed as internal only, just know that it isn't what is described in the article.
This focus on returning to work or a hybrid model really seems like a missed chance to pivot the economy in a new direction. It would be great if these companies let employees work remotely full time if they choose. That'll allow people to have more freedom in where and how they live, and also distribute the economy more evenly. Right now, working for big tech companies means having to live in one of a few big city centers, that all share virtually the same cultures (socially and politically) and lifestyles. Haven't people figured out how to make remote work successful in this last year? Anecdotally, it seems like most people are just as productive.
This also proves that the climate change initiative is a wash. They can't take co2 emissions seriously and at the same time demand 100k employees to spend 1 hour a day driving to offices. That's like what, 100 millions gallons of gas per year, or 1 gigaton of co2, burned needlessly, only to improve some corporate metrics.
In most places, buses are not substantially better emissions-wise than private cars. Typical deployments have them travelling empty or nearly empty most of the day which negates the savings of packed rush hour trips. Trains are much better of course but only exist for a few routes. Both are substantially worse than working from home.
Yes and this is exactly the problem with buses! You and everyone else rides the bus on the core routes at the peak times, but the buses run for long hours and the routes cover more areas than the core, so the average utilisation is very low and pollution per passenger-km very high - although the average passenger experiences crowded buses.
Deciding to switch a solo peak hour journey from a SUV to bus might help a little, but the bus will still be driving empty outside the peak times & routes. Working from home takes a passenger out of the peak times entirely, and with a reduction in peak time travel then demand-responsive transport becomes more attractive than huge buses blindly following rigid routes, and eventually maybe we can dream that sustainable transport like walking and cycling might be deserve a safe place on the street.
Heck, it's not even good enough for 1 day at home per week. It's basically only useful for cases where you need to stay home because of a sick kid or someone is coming over for house repair/maintenance.
Not if you choose to not opt in. If you choose to not opt-in you will still take those days but you will be unable to work from home around whatever emergency or appointment you have.
The article is ambiguous about that. One interpretation is "max 14 days of remote work per year where you can't be in the office 3 days a week" (which is separately mentioned later in the article).
The article is wrong. The 14 day limit applies only to working from a different country than the one your job is based in. Partial WFH is very much still on the table for the foreseeable future as far as we know.
The typical googler is a 20 or 30-something that has close to zero life interest outside work. I would not expect them to want to stay remote as their social life revolves around Google.
Sadly, from what I have seen most people with a good work life balance want to stay remote while people with few other life interests want absolutely go back to work.
I predict that in a couple years this will be part of the culture of each company. You will chose a company based on your desire to become close friends with your colleagues or live a great life outside the office.
Granted I didn't ask if that was standard interview prep for them prior to interviewing, so this is partly my own biases filtering through, but I didn't get the sense that the seasoned 30-40 yold engineers were on leetcode for 6 months to pass interviews. I'm not saying none of them do that, but I found the Google interview process pretty standard fare for any place that has a similar quality bar.
I remember my interviews with Google & Facebook as a new grad & they felt far more grueling than as a senior engineer (that & 10 years ago they were still asking those brain teasers like find the voltage between two points of an infinite lattice circuit).
At this stage in my career, I've found the interview questions are all about how to design large pieces of software with the coding aspect being a smaller piece of the pie to make sure I'm not BS'ing.
Some people leetcode for ages to get lucky in interviews. But loads of people just interviewed and are highly skilled and qualified. I think I did a week of prep ahead of my interviews.
Some people also get lucky. Luck is a huge factor in FAANG interviews. I've seen people who are definitely no more intelligent or better at LC type problems than average Joe just get lucky with their interview loops - while others who have won competitions just get the inverse luck and don't get an offer.
On the other hand, some younger workers might see remote work as their best opportunity to ever afford a home. Older workers have had better chances to buy in the Bay Area, as they presumably had more time to accumulate wealth and could buy when prices are lower. Younger workers will need to save for a long time, even at FAANG salaries.
My whole team is basically dads in our 30s. Most of my broader colleagues have fully realized lives outside of work. Your stereotype doesn’t ring true to me.
It's not true. The article is not correctly describing the policy. I don't know if the journalist just didn't get the entire email from their source or if they put this out too fast but what is written in the article isn't correct.
Someone above referenced 14 days in a row, working from home. In other words, they don’t want you to rent an apartment in Bali for a month while not on vacation.
> If employees want to work from home beyond Sept. 1, they will need to formally apply for a max of 14 days annually
Somehow this sounds to me like:
"Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."
I'm gonna need every Dev who hasn't seen that movie to go ahead and watch it this Saturday. Oh, and if I could go ahead and get them to re-watch it on Sunday too, that'd be great.
This statement as quoted is false. I'm guessing it is a misinterpretation of the policy that employees may work remotely from a different country for up to 14 days per year without approval. The announcement that came out yesterday stated that this policy has been reinstated. It does not apply to domestic WFH.
That sounds like a legal thing. I'd guess some countries will require payroll tax withholding, company registration, etc for longer stays, also possibly depending on whether google has offices there, if you are a dual citizen, or whatever else, so they need to consider them case-by-case.
I have a permanently impaired immune system and had a corporate job for five years. There are things that can be done to help make offices less of a health hazard even in the face of something like covid and most people don't cope well with remote work.
It takes a lot of practice to get good at effective emails in place of face to face conversations.
I actually tended to email my immediate boss my questions. With my eyesight issues or whatever, I seemed incapable of figuring out how to show up at her cubicle with good timing like other people routinely did.
When I and two other people on my team were moved to a newly created troubleshooting team but kept the same technical lead, my work life hardly changed. I continued mostly emailing my questions and getting what I needed.
My two coworkers who had been dependent on being able to talk with her face to face were blowing a gasket now that their desks were too far from hers to conveniently slip into her cubicle like they were used to doing.
I can handle remote work. I've spent a lot of time doing things online for a lot of years.
But I'm not surprised that it's been a tough work year for most people and productivity seems to have generally been down. Working remotely takes a different skill set and many people simply don't have it, even people who work at a computer all day.
We shall see, but it feels like just a tug in the direction of in-office after 13 months (for the big west coast companies) of things going the other way. I don't think anyone was ever expecting huge FAAMG companies to start selling off their office buildings. I'm mostly interested to see if the guidance loosens for hiring remote employees as well as how much push their is from the top to have managers push their employees to work 5 days a week in the office.
Personally, I'm still expecting to see a much higher percentage of time spent working from home at this time next year compared to the beginning of 2020.
"with manager approval" is just a decoy. won't work out. if your whole team is in the office it's much harder for you to be remote. it must be set as company policy otherwise just a handful will do it and likely suffer for it as their teams won't take all the measures to make it work well and they'll be at a promotion disadvantage compared to people that get face time.
and "with manager approval" remote isn't really new. there were already people working remotely before the pandemic.
Indeed. Large companies like FAANG have invested heavily in their offices, I can kind of see why they don't want to throw that investment away. Hence why they want people back in those plush offices.
Datapoint: long ago (decades) I worked for a large well known valley software company, for several years. During that time I worked with many colleagues who were somewhere on the same campus, but I never physically met them. Obviously I was around my team mates, manager, and I attended many cross-group in-person physical meetings, but the number of people I interacted with online only was large. This was before video conferencing existed, just email phone and IM.
After a year working remotely, I don't think I'd be willing to go back to working fully (or even primarily) in the office.
I could do a day here or there for team-building activities or major meetings, but that's pretty much the extent I'd be willing to do.
Granted, this is based on having a 40-minutes train commute (each way, so 80 minutes/day), but unless I could have a 10 minute walk or bike commute I don't think my opinion would materially change, and that's pretty unlikely where I live due to downtown property/rent prices (Tokyo).
I wonder how many people's opinions will change after a longer time. I wrote the exact same type of posts five years ago when I started my first fully remote job. After two years or so I had to look for an office because the isolation is just murderous and it takes a long amount of time to actually start showing its teeth.
I can highly recommend renting a co-working space once that's a viable option wherever you are in the world. These can be surprisingly inexpensive and often come with internet, electricity, etc. included.
Gives both the "short commute" benefit of work-from-home, as well as the "maintaining a clear separation between home and work" benefit of on-location-work.
And for me personally (as an introvert), it was fantastic to have people around that I could talk to socially, but who weren't directly involved in my work and who weren't going to make demands of me. Totally removed the feelings of isolation, and formed a bunch of new friendships that didn't rest on obligations to my employer.
The fact that we work on the same thing gives me more reasons to talk. I can't ask random people at a co-working space to help me debug an issue or to brainstorm a solution. They aren't familiar with my project the way co-workers would be. They also are not NDAed to look at what I'm working on
I don't understand. I work remotely and regularly debug issues and brainstorm solutions with my teammates. Their physical proximity is not relevant. Clearly I am missing something.
You're missing that the point of being around people for some of us is to "interact" with them. I can easily interact with co-workers. I can not easily interact with strangers at a co-working space.
Also I work on console games. I can't hand the person on the chat the controller and say "how does this feel?"
It's nice to work on a problem with someone and then go to lunch and shoot the shit afterwards. Or just hanging out drinking some coffee. The key is you have to have some coworkers you like though, which I'll allow that not everybody has.
For me, I've worked in full remote and full in office jobs. I favor a mix personally. Maybe 2-3 days in office and the rest remote.
I recognize that situations and preferences can change, yes. But it would have to be a pretty significant change for me to outweigh 80 minutes on a crowded Tokyo subway, particularly in summer.
FWIW, before the pandemic started, I was not enthusiastic at all about WFH, for various reasons but mostly because I live in a small one room apartment (quite usual here in the inner city in Tokyo). Now, after addressing basic issues to improve the ergonomics of my home office, most of the downsides are gone, and those that remain are outweighed by the prospect of commuting again. Of course, this could easily change if I moved closer to the office (or switched jobs to be physically closer), but considering rent close to the typical business hubs here, that's unattractive financially.
As for isolation: personally, I do a lot of pair programming (whether in the office or remotely), so I don't actually feel isolated at all. If would describe myself as mildly introvert, so YMMV, but I feel like I need to disconnect from people after a day of remote work no more or less than after a regular day at the office.
I have a ~ 10 minutes walk commute to work and event I share your opinion, I wouldn't want to go back to the office either
I used to work remotely for a different continent + 9 hours diff timezone and that was as painful as it can get: different hours for meetings, not knowing anything about my coworkers was really exhausting
But with the ability to go back to the office only when I need to and focus on my work much better at home, I don't think I'd ever want to go back anytime soon
Yep. When I look for my next job, remote working will be at the top of my list of priorities. I am not willing to work primarily at an office. Covid has been great in forcing companies to figure out working for home infrastructure, though, so I don't foresee this being a problem.
I've worked directly across the street from where I live on a couple of occasions, and even that prevents you from being able to travel to another location to work (remotely), just for the sake of enjoying some other location.
Makes me realize that butts-in-seats vs. commute distance are equally valid, but somewhat separate considerations.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 421 ms ] threadFourteen days a year seems pretty limited--weren't Googler's working from home more often than that before the pandemic?
Same, my team has gone way through the roof in productivity, delivering more than ever. At some point we actually ran out of stories to do even with more work and had to come up with more.
As a note, over than half the team already WFH'd at least 1 day a week in normal conditions, and there was sufficient team trust that everyone would do the right thing, nobody minded if you ran out for errands or lunch unannounced - people would quickly check if any meetings were scheduled usually before running out, items were completed ahead of schedule. I've been doing a 30m-1h nap in the middle of the day and that's helped a lot too.
I've also managed to not catch a cold or flu for the first time ever.
My previous daily commute was min 1-2hrs each way in completely stopped traffic on a standing room only bus/train with multiple transfers and involved waking up even earlier than that to not be refused entry to an overfilled bus.
I've seen a teammate or two be playing actual games (ranked apex legends in this case) during meetings but honestly, they were still responding, answered questions, and that meeting could have been a slack thread but some other teams are not nearly as competent at reading README.md.
That was Google. No longer.
Xoogler (2012-2019)
I don’t work their anymore
If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.
They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.
Kinda seems odd too because the only metric that you would think matters (stock price) would have heavy consideration (~90% growth since March 2020).
managing a small product engineering team. I have to say WFH has a considerable impact on productivity. Coding is actually fine, but the problems are:
1. Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
2. Personal relationships are difficult to grow, especially for newbies. Usually those things got grown via coffee chats, launch meets, ad-hoc talks, but those are all gone. You know, a lot of cases, whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot. I don't have a word to describe it precisely, maybe "lower team coherency".
3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Those are things may not be easily tracked from data, but really harmful in the long run. I cannot imagine how to manage effectively after another year of WFH.
I was kind of hoping the remote work experience would help folks make that sort of inside baseball less important. There are real equity concerns to consider, but practically speaking, you end up with narrower and less open decision-making processes in general.
It's definitely a complicated subject, but maybe some folks are partly missing some privilege that they need to learn to let go.
There are always things cannot be easily rationalized via formal processes.
The info density difference also seem to be compensated by everyone being more open and comfortable (not packed in noisy office for the day)
There's definitely less random chats, it's more formal and less intense, but also broader and the hurdle is lower.
I think for companies above some size it's not better or worse, just different.
Why should my requests get better prioritization just because I happen to work on the same floor as a person in a key position?
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
I think this is very subjective. When I carpooled to an office my personal life lost commute time and arriving early or leaving late to coordinate with rides or buses. Gained an extra 8h a week when I went remote.
Everyone in my team does literally just that on Slack. If I can say something, I can type something. If I can close my laptop in the office, I can close my laptop at home just the same. Or close Slack. Or just sign out of the company's workspace.
To the executives and bean counters, yes, it obviously is. But from the overall perspective of society and mental health, hell no, it is absolutely horrifying to put people through that.
I've worked full remote for almost a decade now. It was hard at first, until I realized there were solutions to the problems I encountered and it would take conscious effort on my part to get it done.
It's definitely possible for remote developers to achieve at least as much productivity as in person devs. But it's also understandable if people/companies don't want to make that effort.
That’s a heck of a sales pitch for Jamboard.
Then, they’re forced to write their designs down, people read them, and there is a larger meeting to discuss (which usually is only needed for big course corrections).
Over the last year I've actually started to connect with my team. We have weekly video chats and spend hours socializing. As an older engineer with bad hearing, video chats are far better than crowding around a big table in a cavernous, modern office.
My only complaint is the environment I have to work in. Silicon Valley real estate is sub-par and high priced. I've been looking for a new apartment with a spare bedroom for months but the only units available are far away or run-down. If I knew I could WFH forever, I'd have left already. Here I am, waiting, because I have no idea when I'll be required to go back to work.
Heh.. I can sympathize. I find voice chat with a decent head set makes it SOO much easier to hear/understand people. And it basically eliminates multiple people speaking at once - the 'muddle' that turned into used to drive me crazy.
1. All you need to do a remote whiteboard is a microphone and a mouse. This is a great opportunity to create new softwares that actually help collaboration and improve the design process rather than being stuck forever with a pen and a paper.
2. What you call "personal relationship" is, at the end of the day, employee relationship and politic to be promoted. You are in a long term position of power on your employee, which allows you to impose your point of view. Stop pretending to be benevolent. Most new hires do what you tell them to do, it doesn't change with work from home.
3. I think that's just because you are not a good manager (sorry), or your own managers are bad. If you actually cared, you would respect people time and have clear rules that show it. You can send a "have a good afternoon" at 6PM, no one would find that awkward
1. This is your strongest point. I've missed the whiteboard a bit. But you just need to find other ways to sketch out your ideas. Even a google doc, which is pretty primitive as these kinds of things go, it pretty easy to use instead.
2. Personal relationships require investment and deliberate choice. Schedule some open mic time. Keep a zoom room open where teammates can interact but with the expectation that they needn't be 100% engaged. This is a substitute for talking over the cube walls or the random break room interactions. Also spend time in non-work conversations via slack or talk a bit about non-work stuff before or after normal meetings. You'd do this in the office as you walked to or from a meeting room. It isn't as easy to just accidentally build these social relationships. Working remote you need to build the habits that support them.
3. Keep your work space and your personal space separate. Set some time boundaries. Encourage your team to put a cap on their daily work. Remind them. You have to learn set and stick to healthy boundaries. Too much time on the job leads to productivity drop in the long run. Keep your team productive and happy by helping them be aware of the issue. As a manager, watch out for perverse incentives driving overwork.
There are zillion little moments of ad hoc communication that happen face to face. Now that their absence has helped you discover that they are valuable, ask yourself when they occurred and how they worked to your advantage. Once you have some idea what you're missing, then you can start to engineer a replacement. As a leader, it's important that you model these behaviors for your team.
The personal relationship stuff is tricky, and I think junior folks, and especially fresh grads, got hit pretty hard here. On the flip side, I joined a new team around the time we all went remote last year (with several people I'd never met or heard of before), and it turned out just fine. I wouldn't say I'm buddies with all the new people, but I think we all feel comfortable with and respect each other. I joined in more of a technical leadership role, though, so I can totally get that someone who has to also deal with receiving mentorship could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost.
The work-life balance thing I find very puzzling. Many people (especially in the bay area) have gotten 1-2 hours per day of commute time back from utter waste (though I guess you folks at Google have the buses). Sure, things get blurred when you work at a desk in your bedroom, or at your kitchen table. But this is something that you as a manager need to be on top of by setting an example for the team. Keep reasonable hours, and disconnect outside those hours. Don't hold your team members to deadlines that require them to work excessive hours. When you sign off at 5 or 6pm with your "gotta go, chat tomorrow", make it clear that you expect the rest of the team to sign off pretty soon as well.
Having said that, I do know people in my org that work too much. But they're the kind of people who weren't great at balance back when we were in offices, either.
What's stopping someone from just... grabbing a whiteboard? They ain't expensive. Yeah, maybe not everyone can write to it, but everyone should be able to read from it. Designate someone as the writer and you're good to go.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
What about "Sorry, just broke for $MEAL, let's put it on the calendar for tomorrow"?
When we were in the office it was rare to speak with anyone who wasn't on your floor, whereas now it's no harder to work with someone in Stockholm or Berlin than it is in London.
Doing Zoom calls before was always a massive pain as we have an open office (like almost everyone nowadays) and there weren't enough private spaces.
You can only blame yourself for that. When I'm done working for the day, I log out, lock my screen and walk out of the room. And if the time to go happens in the middle of a chat, then so be it. My boss can tell me he's gotta go, and I can tell him I've gotta go, and that's exactly what we do. There is no blurring of work and life because I don't blur them.
Obviously the office is a part of the culture, and most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. But to me, that doesn't explain why you can't offer a remote option for the employees who want it.
A charitable explanation might be what we've heard from execs: we don't want to rush to go remote, we'd like to dip our toes in and slowly explore broader options. Thus the hybrid 3/2 model. A less charitable explanation might be that Google has spent a lot of money on real estate. Or simply that leadership is out of touch and can't relate to the reasons why employees might want to be remote. I imagine it's a mix of both types of explanations.
Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.
All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.
I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
That's exactly how I feel.
Giving it up would mean changing the culture and the value prop of working there. I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t want to do that.
I guess FB must have seen the same thing, hence full remote for senior engineers. It's odd that Google haven't experienced this issue.
I, for one, hated the densification and tight working environments, but I didn't have the "data" to make a hill of beans difference.
The 3-in-office/2-at-home week referenced would work well in this regard.
I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
I've been 'remote' for... 12 years now, but do travel to offices sometimes, and do enjoy being able to do some face to face time with folks, even sometimes for multiple days or weeks at a stretch. The core matter is who decides when I need to be in an office. If it's me or mostly me, it's great. If it's solely at the discretion of others, that's where problems often are (regardless of whether it's full time or not).
Yep. It's the autonomy part that is the problem in nearly all cases. Choosing your own spot on that spectrum is the key part. And your spot may have to change over time, based on other parts of your life. Being forced to spot X is where all the contention comes in, it seems.
I did miss occasional lunches, dinners, break room chats with folks, but now run a coworking spot in town. I have most of the socialization aspects I missed, without them being tied to work (no office politics with these folks, just... socialization).
If you’re 50% WFH, you can structure your parental life around the remote days. It’s not that you work less on those days, but the time you would otherwise spend commuting is time you can spend on weekday family things.
Another scenario I’ve seen is people who want a "remote home.” Fed up with the prices for living in a major metropolitan area, or perhaps because they prefer a smaller town and/or living in a rural area, they buy a place with double their usual commute.
That can be brutal, but if you only do that a couple of days of the week, and can structure your F2F work on those days, the total number of hours commuting isn’t so bad.
Sure, it doesn't allow other things like working from a beach somewhere in Spain. But it's a compromise that keeps many benefits from both solutions.
On your days at home, you can be just as productive as a day in the office without spending a full eight hours locked in your home office space.
My post-vaccine plan is to have a "mulmen day" where I set the expectation with my teammates and stakeholders that I am in the office and a "float" day where I come in to align with someone else's day who I need to work with face-to-face for whatever reason. If everyone works this way then we can meet most scheduling needs. If we expand this to two float days a week then it is trivial.
There's no reason for the whole team to be colocated on the same day on a regular basis. Those kind of team-wide meetings never benefit from whiteboarding or any other in-person process. In fact the limitations of remote work make that kind of collaboration better because you have to actually prepare your thoughts and material.
Even pre-covid getting calendar time required a week of notice. Office hours were once-a-week and required at least 24 hours notice. Personally my office hours are on Wednesday. If someone books a session I come in, if not I don't. Nothing changes.
In Covid times I have had the most productive period of my career while my team grew by 50%. I have no problem getting coworker time ad-hoc, even remote. Communication is not difficult. We got better at using tooling to write documents and draw diagrams. We don't use whiteboard analogies.
I honestly see no downside to the remote work and a long list of personal, professional and environmental benefits.
If it's all the same days that'd be great but doesn't seem like it's work for everyone. I know certain days/times where I can't have meetings at home because the space is otherwise occupied and I need to keep quiet etc.
Maybe also by waiting to start the meeting we're enabling it all too?
I find it all too much to keep track of, so perhaps simplifying it to "meeting starts at X, be there or be square" is all that's needed and behaviour will adjust accordingly?
Food for thought.
I've seen some comments that WFH and it's variations (full remote vs partial) are a skill like anything else and need to be developed. I'm not strictly speaking a fan of it all really, but that's just me, and I think the "more productive vs less productive" debate is actually a ruse and that the real argument we're all getting into is "this makes me feel better vs this makes me feel worse" which you simply can't logic your way out of, so I get that it truly does suit some people.
I think I just need to take the mindset that it's a skill I need to develop a little further and some of my gripes with it will ease or melt away.
Seems like, at least in my neck of the woods, 2 days WFH is becoming a standard benefit touted by companies to attract candidates now.
Being able to talk to others in person and quickly is certainly useful, but its a double edged sword as that quite often results in your stream of thoughts being disrupted and focus gone in a flash. This is one of the reasons I love WFH as a developer. I can get right into my zone and focus on solving problems or being creative without someone walking up to my desk to ask if I read the email they sent me.
When everyone is fully remote, you should always reach them quickly by dropping a chat, but when they are offline they tend to be stuck in meetings
Presumably the increasing availability of vaccines factors into it, lots of new information between Nov 1. and the last few weeks.
(Fully) Vaccinated people spending time together seems safe enough though, so the choice to work in office is probably fine (whereas requiring it is premature).
Going back to in office 100% is a thing of the past unless you are a team that has to be there - making hardware etc.
For ex I cant imagine the Pixel team working 100% remote.
I thought I had to be in an office for this as well then discovered this entire room in my apartment full of mostly unassembled food.
Extroverts gain energy from social interactions. Introverts lose energy. The inverse for time alone.
I’m introverted.
But can be quite social, and even enjoy it. However I absolutely have to have down time after to recharge from it.
honestly im not sure how you can do well as a manager without some tolerance for that kind of thing
Work is hard. Dealing with people is tiring, but I am also skilled at it and it is tremendously fulfilling to help people grow and achieve their personal goals. Some days I really really don't want to have my 1:1s, but that is okay. Being an introvert doesn't mean that I hate interacting with people. It just means that it is somewhat tiring.
I just want to walk, read something interesting and eat.
On the other hand, for many of us who do have significant non work passions (rock climbing for me) as well as social circles around these activities appreciate remote work because it allows us to structure our lives in a way where such activities coexist with work more easily.
The interesting thing is that for work centered people, remote work has reduced social connections, while for more interdisciplinary folks it can do the opposite.
I have personally worked 100% remote for 7 years now, but before that I lived and worked in San Fransisco. I never attended a Friday night work happy hour because every Friday night I would be in the car driving 4 hours to go climbing in Yosemite.
Now, I can work remotely from a town with great outdoor access and spend my Friday nights hanging around with local friends instead instead of in the car.
Remote work has allowed me to have a more balanced life filled with more things I want to do and less I don't. Have the years of video meetings made my professional career less productive? Perhaps, but I have still worked on plenty of cool projects with plenty of great folks along the way. Some of them have even become close friends. And even if it has suffered, its been worth it!
To give you some background, we are an IT shop for an Energy co. so there is a big chunk of our people who have to be at work, physically just because of the nature of the work. As others have alluded, we weren't set up with remote in mind.
I would love to hear how being 100% you've built a network, bonds etc with your colleagues. We have a bunch of new people who dont have the rapport with us or finding it difficult to connect ( a few lunches or coffees, or hang out in the common area could help build )
I should also mentioned the 3 off / 2 in office is something of a peace offering to the non IT part of the business. Most of us know we can be fully remote.
It’s hard to get to know folks when sitting on a big zoom call, but I find working one on one works well for developing a bond.
Once you spend many hours over many months working closely with someone, a bond develops and there is plenty of opportunity to get to know them along the way.
In fact, you can do this just over slack - spend enough time hanging in a chat and people’s personalities are bound to come out.
To be fair, you may be less likely to make a very close friend with a remote employee. But a friendly, productive working relationship is certainly easy to develop, and that’s all that’s necessary for most teams to function well.
This strategy probably wouldn’t work with big teams where folks float in and out, or for roles where you have to meet new people all the time.
Now imagine if your office moved to a tiny, faraway town with no food, nightlife, or dancing. Does remote work seem more appealing?
Remote work basically doesn't change anything for the activities I'd like to do. Mine are centered around major cities, require large amounts of tools and space, or have to be done during the day. Remote isn't a huge factor except for the space being expensive in major cities part. If I have a day-time activity I want to do, remote work does jack shit for that. If I want to go skiing 7-times a week then I'm SOL because work hours are work hours and they overlap with the hours that resorts are open. Until the work you do becomes async by nature - not just remote - a lot of alternative lifestyles are not available. I'm sure the same is true for you as well with climbing. You can get lights and go during the night but I'm sure you'd prefer to climb during the day if you had a choice.
Start work at 6:00 and head out at 15:00. Hardly doable when in office, but if you work remotely close to lifts.. ;)
I agree with you remarks on asymc works. but it's going to take new ways to look at how we work
Not just that, many of those normal outlets have been heavily restricted or even not allowed for the past year. I expect if that wasn't the case, people wouldn't put so much of their unhappiness on the work part of being at home all the time.
There’s various ways to create tunnels for remote services to talk to local devices, but it adds latency and complexity to an already complex workflow.
The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.
If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
We have many offices in offices in different timezones, and remote-only helped cross office collaboration.
Also, the company is open floor plan, which is well-known to be productivity minimizing.
On top of that, we’re pathologically meeting-heavy (“Don’t write it down or send an email. Schedule a meeting instead.” is part of new-hire training.)
If I weren’t under NDA, and I had business school contacts, I’d try to write this up as a case study.
https://www.pwc.com/us/en/library/covid-19/us-remote-work-su...
I will grant you that multi-person video meetings are subpar. Which is a blessing, because now we have smaller meetings.
My philosophy on it is that management is key. If butts-in-seats gives management the illusion of productivity then they will likely find out they are dead wrong. You can practically objectively measure productivity with remote work. Collaboration is more challenging and therefore surfaces many efficiencies you can make in your process.
I didn't bring in the machine, but it was a nice work environment.
EDIT: Forgot to mention they did specifically call out the expense of the location and parking privileges as a reason to disallow remote work.
There was no budget for me to visit them at the office so all in all I saw them in person twice. Not twice a month or even twice a year. Twice. Total.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It is allowing some offices to have people who want to come back early, come back.
It is sticking by its commitment of allowing WFH until September and looking at hybrid models for after.
Personally, a hybrid model seems ideal to me. I dislike remote full time.
That’s the real news for me. After the pandemic is over Google will go back to a full-onsite team.
> for a maximum of 14 days remote per year
I don’t know how to make ‘14 days in a row’ out of that :)
Deciding to switch a solo peak hour journey from a SUV to bus might help a little, but the bus will still be driving empty outside the peak times & routes. Working from home takes a passenger out of the peak times entirely, and with a reduction in peak time travel then demand-responsive transport becomes more attractive than huge buses blindly following rigid routes, and eventually maybe we can dream that sustainable transport like walking and cycling might be deserve a safe place on the street.
It's a trick.
Sadly, from what I have seen most people with a good work life balance want to stay remote while people with few other life interests want absolutely go back to work.
I predict that in a couple years this will be part of the culture of each company. You will chose a company based on your desire to become close friends with your colleagues or live a great life outside the office.
I remember my interviews with Google & Facebook as a new grad & they felt far more grueling than as a senior engineer (that & 10 years ago they were still asking those brain teasers like find the voltage between two points of an infinite lattice circuit).
At this stage in my career, I've found the interview questions are all about how to design large pieces of software with the coding aspect being a smaller piece of the pie to make sure I'm not BS'ing.
For example, maybe you got in before you had a kid? Also, you don't necessarily need to study that much to pass the interview.
It's a numbers game overall.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/patriciagbarnes/2019/07/20/deja...
-- WHAT? They need to apply for that?
Somehow this sounds to me like: "Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."
The weird thing is I watched it before going to college and now I am working for several years it still feels super-relevant to the modern workplace.
Source: I am an employee
It takes a lot of practice to get good at effective emails in place of face to face conversations.
I actually tended to email my immediate boss my questions. With my eyesight issues or whatever, I seemed incapable of figuring out how to show up at her cubicle with good timing like other people routinely did.
When I and two other people on my team were moved to a newly created troubleshooting team but kept the same technical lead, my work life hardly changed. I continued mostly emailing my questions and getting what I needed.
My two coworkers who had been dependent on being able to talk with her face to face were blowing a gasket now that their desks were too far from hers to conveniently slip into her cubicle like they were used to doing.
I can handle remote work. I've spent a lot of time doing things online for a lot of years.
But I'm not surprised that it's been a tough work year for most people and productivity seems to have generally been down. Working remotely takes a different skill set and many people simply don't have it, even people who work at a computer all day.
Amazon updates remote work guidance, plans to ‘return to an office-centric culture as our baseline’
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-updates-remote-work-gui...
oof.
Personally, I'm still expecting to see a much higher percentage of time spent working from home at this time next year compared to the beginning of 2020.
> ...we are giving employees the opportunity to elect a Work Mode—whether they’d prefer to work mostly at home or in the office...
https://newsroom.spotify.com/2021-02-12/distributed-first-is...
They also have a 17-year lease on space in 4 World Trade Center.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-54482245
and "with manager approval" remote isn't really new. there were already people working remotely before the pandemic.
Sunk cost fallacies etc
Disclaimer: I work there.
I could do a day here or there for team-building activities or major meetings, but that's pretty much the extent I'd be willing to do.
Granted, this is based on having a 40-minutes train commute (each way, so 80 minutes/day), but unless I could have a 10 minute walk or bike commute I don't think my opinion would materially change, and that's pretty unlikely where I live due to downtown property/rent prices (Tokyo).
Gives both the "short commute" benefit of work-from-home, as well as the "maintaining a clear separation between home and work" benefit of on-location-work.
And for me personally (as an introvert), it was fantastic to have people around that I could talk to socially, but who weren't directly involved in my work and who weren't going to make demands of me. Totally removed the feelings of isolation, and formed a bunch of new friendships that didn't rest on obligations to my employer.
Although now that I'm working for a company with 15min commute, that became less of an issue.
The fact that we work on the same thing gives me more reasons to talk. I can't ask random people at a co-working space to help me debug an issue or to brainstorm a solution. They aren't familiar with my project the way co-workers would be. They also are not NDAed to look at what I'm working on
Also I work on console games. I can't hand the person on the chat the controller and say "how does this feel?"
For me, I've worked in full remote and full in office jobs. I favor a mix personally. Maybe 2-3 days in office and the rest remote.
i wonder if people who feel this way aren't getting socializing done outside of work, and is using work as a form of socialization?
FWIW, before the pandemic started, I was not enthusiastic at all about WFH, for various reasons but mostly because I live in a small one room apartment (quite usual here in the inner city in Tokyo). Now, after addressing basic issues to improve the ergonomics of my home office, most of the downsides are gone, and those that remain are outweighed by the prospect of commuting again. Of course, this could easily change if I moved closer to the office (or switched jobs to be physically closer), but considering rent close to the typical business hubs here, that's unattractive financially.
As for isolation: personally, I do a lot of pair programming (whether in the office or remotely), so I don't actually feel isolated at all. If would describe myself as mildly introvert, so YMMV, but I feel like I need to disconnect from people after a day of remote work no more or less than after a regular day at the office.
I used to work remotely for a different continent + 9 hours diff timezone and that was as painful as it can get: different hours for meetings, not knowing anything about my coworkers was really exhausting
But with the ability to go back to the office only when I need to and focus on my work much better at home, I don't think I'd ever want to go back anytime soon
Makes me realize that butts-in-seats vs. commute distance are equally valid, but somewhat separate considerations.