One of the major drawbacks to going back to the office is dealing with the dreaded open office plan. If Google popularizes a new office style that discourages the bullpen feel of open offices, it would be a welcome relief.
> when the company asked a diverse group of consultants — including sociologists who study “Generation Z” and how junior high students socialize and learn — to imagine what future workers would want.
Danger Will Robinson Danger!
Why would anyone try and make decisions based on the preference of jr. High students. Making decisions based on youth in the most unstable period of their life when they are incredibly hormonal and still not all that logical seems like a recipe for disaster.
I don't know about you but my jr. High self was an idiot and nothing he said or did was a good idea.
Or is the idea that we don't want to have the next gen adapt to a new way of socializing and interacting in a professional workplace? That too seems like a bad move.
It's not that they only consulted them, it's that they included them. That seems entirely reasonable - these people are going to be entering the workforce. Google wants to be attractive to them, or at the very least prevent being actively unattractive.
Additionally, gen Z is growing up with technology in a way that surpasses even millennials. They may have deep expectations about how technology should work in ways that older people don't.
Sure, but the grandparent alludes to the fact that what they think of as great now can easily change by the time they enter the workforce - and, given that we're talking about engineering jobs that usually require a degree, it will take some time.
Additionally, these people don't have much work experience. A lot of ideas - such as open offices, work from home or skipping documentation - feel fine until you've worked with them and found their drawbacks. It might work for some, but it does not for a lot of others.
I agree. I think as a society, we need to stop fetishizing youth. Not contempt - but tone it down a bit. Kids today have wanton access to internet and technology but aren't any smarter or better at making decisions. One might make an argument that they may be worse. Certainly more prone to group think than generations previous which is good and terrible at the same time.
That could have as much to do with the contemporary social environment as it does with actual decisionmaking. Sex among youth is down overall - even pre-pandemic, iirc.
In 7 years their L3 engineers are going to be those jr. high gen Z kids, and in real estate, your office furniture and space plans need to last at least 10-20 years.
It's funny that there are a lot of stories lately which contain googla and privacy in the same sentence. It is like they realized that they have an image problem and are doing something about it.
If the shuttle buses are to be suspended, but they still expect people to come to work, it is a recipe for disaster. When I still worked there, about 60% of my co-workers took the shuttle from San Francisco. About 90% of those who did, did not own a car. Telling them they have to come to the office or quit is equivalent to firing them. I doubt anybody is going to buy a car AND sit an hour in traffic in the morning and an hour and traffic in the evening, to keep a particular job. Xooglers generally have no trouble finding jobs, just having that on their resume.
Xoogler or not, you still have to go through the leetcode gauntlet, and a bunch of places that would pay you the same are all asking to 'go into the office'. FB, Apple, etc.
the sillicon valley bubble of HN is sometimes hilarious.
the concept of a company providing shuttle bus service instead of just having proper public transport to bussiness parks is very weird when one thinks about it.
Public transit, e.g. commuter rail, works well into a city with a public transit system. It works far less well into a distributed set of suburban/ex-urban industrial parks.
I can get into our small city office with a short drive and a longish train trip. I pretty much have to drive to our suburban office.
It is not Google's job to fix public transit in the Bay area. But given the lack of transit, if they don't provide shuttle service, many of their workers cannot work from the office. So not really a bubble as much as stating the fact.
One wonders about the higher level cognitive abilities of someone dedicating much of their waking, productive hours to the service of making the staff and contractors of a giant ad surveillance company more comfortable and efficient.
It seems so insanely thoughtless to me.
Like, is that really the world you want? Gmail surveillance already took over everyone's email, same for maps and apps and YouTube. Anyone with a clue is trying to roll this worldwide trend backward, not make the Google advertising machine more efficient and effective at ingesting every single last molecule your private data and personal activities.
The article's baity title is not the article. Please let's react to the latter, not the former.
It can be helpful to remember that at big media sites, headlines get written by headline specialists. It's their job to sex up the title, and the rest of our job (the rest of us's job?) not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I've replaced the title with a suitably neutral, representative sentence from the article body. There nearly always is one.
In my experience meeting rooms are always fully booked months in advance by the sort of people who have meetings for a living. Rather than having a constant flow of these people in and out of the pod, leave the meeting room outside the pod.
> Employees can return to their permanent desks on a rotation schedule that assigns people to come into the office on a specific day to ensure that no one is there on the same day as their immediate desk neighbors.
Why does it matter if I'm wearing a mask or sitting next to someone in an "office of the future" where the pandemic has already abated?
As a Googler, I'm pretty disappointed with this plan and I think many colleagues are as well. The office that's being pitched right now has no resemblance whatsoever to the one we left. I just don't see why someone would go through 1+hr commute just to social distance/wear masks, use balloon walls and hotdesk. By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive.
Even the hybrid model isn't ideal, because you still need to be within commuting distance of the office, if it was something like 2 weeks onsite every 2-3 months, it'd be much more doable imo.
For the ones who really miss the office, they should be able to go, but mandatory return-to-office seems far from ideal until mask mandate is over at the very least.
> By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive.
It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.
Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).
Fair enough, I can see why it would be beneficial for a noogler, but everyone struggles initially, no matter how much face to face interaction you have. It took me 6+ months before I felt comfortable enough with the internal tools and I'm still learning lots of new things today, despite being 6+ years at the company.
The other thing is, even if we went to the office, we won't necessarily be able to have the same face-to-face experience until the mask and social distancing mandates are done with imo.
I also felt people disinterested on collaborations, everyone has their own goals, I wouldn't attribute it to your country per say.
I think every company struggles with collaboration in general. People have their "day jobs" so asking them to do something they don't really get "credit" for can be tough.
It's easier in-person because you're harder to ignore than an email is. But it can be hard to get support especially from other groups.
I joined Google in February and I love working remote. Definitely not excited about the prospect of sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day just to wear a mask at work.
I don't work from India, but haven't had much issue with onboarding or access to things.
> who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India
I can empathize with the problems of remote work across national and cultural divides, but please don't toss flamebait like this into HN threads. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.
> (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India)
It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office in the US.
Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents happened often enough to be a sore point.
So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India. They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.
Do you know whether people based out of the Cambridge/Boston site would be considered second-class citizens today?
And if there is a second-class dynamic, would it be in a way that adversely affected the work, directly, or the impact was more about individual treatment?
(For example of affecting the work... when collaboration across sites is needed, for the benefit of the org, would there be difficulty getting it to happen, because some were second-class... such as not being taken as seriously, or working with second-class didn't fit well with promotion strategies, etc.)
while I was there I detested the open plan cube farm horror of their offices (at least the SF ones) they weren't even full cubes, being only half height so constant visual distraction, and they didn't completely surround you so you had people always moving around behind you.
Changing how the open plan is arranged is just pointless, accept that you have made an unpleasant work environment and leave it alone so at least people don't have to track whatever new fad you're on. Hotseating makes it even worse, so I can't see why anyone who respected their employees would consider it.
We were all nostalgic for the half-height cubes of Google SF after it was all converted to no-height non-cubes, just desks on the floor (and they kept making the desks narrower, an inch at a time!).
I've been meme-ing about it, but I don't think leadership cares anymore. Instead, I just told my manager that there's 99% chance I'm leaving over the summer, it's a good excuse to take some time off after this crazy year anyways.
Yeah I'm never returning to the office. VP exception or bust. I'm frankly stunned that the company seems to be completely okay with the attrition they are going to see in September.
the company doesn’t care about employees below a certain level. there’s hundreds of thousands of them and many more clamoring to get in. i still haven’t forgiven them for cancelling promos a year ago
I'm an L6. I know a handful of L7s who are looking at remote options. Attrition won't just be among junior engineers.
Did you get promoted in the fall? Between backfilled raises and manager discretion comp, my experience has been that the cancelled perf ended up working out alright for most people, except those with failed promos who needed to respond to committee feedback.
i left for another company where i got a raise and promotion. the stock has proceeded to 4x at my new company and now i’m making more than my skip manager was at G. but wouldn’t have left if they hadn’t cancelled
Fully agree with return to office in line with mask mandate. I’m not sure if you tried talking to someone over hangouts/zoom/teams while they where a mask. It’s next to impossible to understand what they are saying with it on. If we are looking at hybrid most chances someone will be remote.
Next marketable item is masks with Bluetooth microphones I guess…
I am so glad I found a new fully remote job to skip going back to the office.
I haven't admitted this publically, but I am actually really looking forward to Project Hazel masks [0] which look like a crazy futuristic n-95, but have microphones and clear portions to help with communication.
What a hideous mask. I find it hard enough communicating via mask with strangers on the street. There's an anxious feeling that goes with the proximity and the infractions of social distancing. Now imagine all that while looking like Scorpion from mortal kombat.
As soon as a coronavirus vaccine gets full FDA approval (expected soon for Moderna and Pfizer), companies should require immunization for employees. Then they can stop requiring masks.
Every vaccine that has ever had serious side-effect problems has shown them in the first few months.[1] The FDA requires six months of data for full approval. Those six months have passed.
While that's long been common in some situations (schools, military, healthcare, certain limited international travel), it hasn't been the case generally in the past. Put such a requirement in, with appropriate medical exceptions, and expect to fire a non-trivial portion of your workforce who can't work from home and/or need to physically meet with other employees/customers/partners. Not making a judgment but just observing the reality.
I doubt that high of a percentage is so paranoid or stubborn that they would quit over it. My guess is almost everyone will either get vaccinated or a medical exception, and then just complain about it in the office.
I have concerns with employers requiring a vaccine to allow you to return to work because of the dangerous precedent it can set that employers have some valid need to suddenly start knowing your medical status, and once they get their foot in the door I don't see them quietly giving up that power.
Employers have always had a right to know communicable disease status (when it could be communicated feasibly at work, not for something like HIV/AIDS or other STDs). Vaccination status to such a disease is just a stochastic level above that and has been required in college dorms, etc. already before the pandemic.
Since vaccinated people are told they still need to wear masks, why will this change if the vaccine is formally approved by the FDA? It's the same vaccine.
Those balloon walls seems the worst possible solution. Noisy, obnoxious, slow, fragile and doesn't create any sound privacy from whatever you will be talking about.
Right, the cube farm of "The Matrix" was supposed to be a dystopian horror that only a heartless machine would invent, but two decades later we'd all kill to have a cube.
Is the need for ad-hoc, purely visual (not auditory) privacy even a common scenario? If so, how about some curtains? In the 90s, Twin Peaks taught me that drapes can be made whisper silent, unlike an electric air pump and possibly crinkling cellophane.
My experience over the past 6 years with offices at MS was being doubled up in an office meant for one person, then moving to team rooms where we're at the fire safety limit for number of occupants.
The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet, and it was pretty depressing and alienating.
Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of most buildings don't make that practical.
There's definitely a culture associated with offices. I worked at a place for over a decade that had offices (for some) and the norm was doors open unless there was some reason doors weren't open. So you were free to drop in if the door was open and not so if the door wasn't. And doors were usually open.
If I recall correctly, the unusual cross shaped design of Microsoft's earliest office buildings (1-10, recently demolished) was to maximize the number of offices with windows. It did make them somewhat confusing to navigate though.
My worst work environment was also my own office with a door, in a former HP building with no windows, and I hadn't learned about vitamin D supplements yet.
Of course, the main problem was the thermostat was in the empty office next door so I couldn't close the door without it getting hot.
Nothing about having a private office precludes seeing coworkers. In the heady days of my long-lost youth when I still had an office, I stepped outside of it when I wanted to see my coworkers and went back inside and locked the door when I didn't.
Efficiency is an attribute of doing the work. If you're always interacting then you're never doing the work; neither efficiency nor inefficiency can exist at all.
If there's one thing I've learned in the tech industry it's that no matter how much you think your work is worth, real estate is worth more.
We're not getting private offices any more than we're getting family homes. Both are understandable expectations given our nominal wages, but they are also gross misapprehensions of our place in the pecking order. You may be able to afford all the cars and iPhones and vacations in the world, but that will never hold a candle to land. Land owns you.
What's unclear from that article is what timeframes are being discussed here. It's one thing is they're talking about all these changes through, say, the end of the year. It's something else if it's a long-term new normal which would presumably make working at Google much less attractive than in the past.
I want to see what statistics management are looking at where going into an office is better than the current WFH arraignment. Tech stocks are at all time highs with the current work situation. I'm personally never working full time in an office again. I can only see an office being good for junior engineers.
Real estate prices, probably. I remember google has something like 100B in assets. If it's necessary to make employees suffer to keep the RE prices up, they will.
This kind of requires everyone else to play along, otherwise the winner is the big, real-estate heavy corporations that keep doing their core business without bringing people back on campus, and convert surplus real estate to some other profit making venture (whether they run it themselves, or spin/sell it off.) As first mover advantage would be an issue here, it would be a pretty big gamble for Google to try to signal the rest of the market on this the way you suggest.
Those giant offices are often built in downtown areas next to shopping, eating and renting places that will all go bankrupt if nobody comes to the offices. I can totally see how the top brass at google owns a part of that commerce and that there are contracts with deadlines there, so if they don't bring employees on time, they'll suffer massive personal losses.
I'm confused, are these assets their offices or...real estate investments that they own for some reason? If these assets are just offices, what is the value to Google if those offices are worth more or less as real estate? It's hard to imagine that the market for a giant complex of offices is super liquid?
> "Tech stocks are at all time highs with the current work situation."
The logical conclusion to draw from tech stocks being at all time highs is "the general public being isolated at home forced a huge increase in tech usage and purchases", not "WFH is great for tech companies".
If top tech companies want to keep attracting top talent, they will have to let people choose where they want to work from. That means being open to remote.
Instead of forcing hybrid models - invest in tools and processes that make working from everywhere more productive.
Exactly, a truly innovative company would be working on a way to make WFH as immersive, productive and social as an office rather than trying to make the office function during a pandemic.
Or, you know, have everyone "dial in" from their own computer. That was how a number of teams I work with were pre-pandemic. If anyone's remote, everyone calls in separately. Otherwise the remote experience is inherently going to be worse than the in-person one.
That's been one mildly positive aspect of the pandemic. I'm no longer dialing into calls where there are a bunch of people in a conference room and then there's everyone else.
People wear headsets. There are a lot of office jobs where people spend a lot of the day on the phone anyway talking to external people, people in other offices/remote, etc.
I do think that having them centered in the group makes it easier to be inclusive to remote participants. GVC has been great for years, so I expect the tech to work flawlessly.
But everything else looks horrible. Hard surfaces. Completely vertical seatbacks that only go up to your lower back. Little sound isolation. Teeny tiny spaces to put a laptop. Limited surfaces to put a cup of coffee.
One of the good ideas there is video conferencing screens so large that each remote person has their own, and the heads of the remote people are as big as the heads of the onside people.
not a doc or lawyer, not an antivaxxer, welcoming for new info, ymmv etc..
I have heard that the cov vaccines do not prevent someone from getting it or transmitting it - (maybe?) at least two of the three prominent "vaccines" merely change your dna so that if you get it, the effects of it are not as serious as someone who has not gotten the shot (?)
If that is true - it seems to me that it does not make much difference if you spend time indoors with people that have or have not been vaccinated, as it really just protects them and not you.
the top result seems to "debunk" but the details off the page are tricky imho - the first "common questions" dropdown from the cdc, notes on page: "Although COVID-19 vaccines are effective at keeping you from getting sick, scientists are still learning how well vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to others, even if you do not have symptoms"
"
A growing body of evidence suggests that fully vaccinated people are less likely to have asymptomatic infection and potentially less likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. However, further investigation is ongoing.
"
8th result from healthline ( https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-youre-vaccinated-c... )includes this:
"
While all the approved vaccines offer strong protection against severe COVID-19 and hospitalization, the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines block fewer infections than do the mRNA vaccines.
None of the vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing infections. So even if people don’t get very sick with COVID-19, they may still contract an infection and can potentially transmit the virus to others.
"
So it seems that indeed people that have been fully vaccinated with either the mrna (seems like after 2 doses up to 90% protection?) and the lesser ones to a lesser extent..
both types of "vaccines" do not 100% full stop people from getting it an transmitting it.
This is very different from vaccines as I had previously known like polio or shingles vaccines which 100% prevent them and prevent you from spreading them right?
So I guess my point to the OP would be that sure it's fine to not want to go to an office where everyone has not been vaccinated, but this is not like the polio vaccine - depending on the vaccine given there is a 10% or higher chance that those people can still get it and still transmit it right?
It's fine choice to want people to get vaccinated - I just think some people are using the term to think like eradication.. full protection - like polio vaccines.. but this is not that (right?).
Again, happy to be wrong on all of this. But also want other people to not be confused by terms that at this point I feel are being misused, and sure, perhaps for the greater good - but nonetheless can be abused to create a false, and for some people deadly, sense of security.
Two doses of the polio vaccine are 90+ percent effective. Two doses of the Moderna/Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine are 95+ percent effective against any illness at all and 100 percent effective against severe illness. If the polio vaccine is your goal, it's been surpassed.
thanks for the clarification - I had not known polio was only at 90% - since it has been all but eradicated (?) I had assumed it was 100.
I worry many others assume similar - as going back to an office with all at 80-90% I would do, but I may skip the shared bathrooms if I was really worried about it.
Polio isn’t airborne and is much less transmissible so the vaccine doesn’t need to be as effective to stop the spread. Vaccination programs were also very successful.
I'm sure a lot of companies are thinking about it. The question is how many employees you lose based on what you decide--and what your policies around exemptions are (which you need to have).
Certainly the path of least resistance is to encourage but not require because that way someone who doesn't like that policy can just quit rather than require the company to fire people who don't have the right docs (or submit fake ones).
if unvaccinated people get infected, they are more likely than vaccinated people to have the virus replicate at an accelerating rate before they show any symptoms. This large surge in replication means they will be spreading it and this may pose a danger to me. The vaccines are not %100 effective and I have several factors that would make it dangerous for me to get sick. I won't knowingly hang out with potential spreaders.
A balloon wall? Hahahahaha, is this an episode of Silicon Valley? Forcing people to commute in order to wear masks at their hot desk? Google needs to admit reality that WFH is a reality, rather than trying to lever people into the office.
Reading between the lines of the article, I suspect most of these things will never be put into serious use at google, nor does anyone there expect them to. These are solutions looking for problems. My money is on office work looking much as it did before the pandemic, but a smaller percentage of work hours being spent in offices. It’s hard to imagine anyone preferring to work in the way the article describes compared to either full time in office or full time remote.
most of my peers seem to want to do a mix of both office work aswell as remote work. Mainly because wfh allows for deep focus without distraction, while working from the office is far easier in terms of collaboration.
There also appear to have been consultants looking for work.
Where you find consultants, you find solutions to imagined problems...only a consultant can really tell you what those damnable zoomers are thinking, they are basically Martians. Every company must have a zoomer-friendly office.
Despite all the funny ideas, I am happy to see that people are actively thinking about some radical changes in how a tech company office should look like in future. Some ideas won’t work, but some will stay.
>The company that helped popularize open office plans and lavish employee perks
somehow our BigCo got only open offices with the lavish perks lost in translation.
Anyway, it seems that Google is bringing cubicles (and even offices with the "focused work" pods - implicit recognition that "focused work" (is where other than focused work in programming?) is impacted by the open space office) while avoiding the cu-word and, God-forbid, the o-word.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 263 ms ] threadDanger Will Robinson Danger!
Why would anyone try and make decisions based on the preference of jr. High students. Making decisions based on youth in the most unstable period of their life when they are incredibly hormonal and still not all that logical seems like a recipe for disaster.
I don't know about you but my jr. High self was an idiot and nothing he said or did was a good idea.
Or is the idea that we don't want to have the next gen adapt to a new way of socializing and interacting in a professional workplace? That too seems like a bad move.
Additionally, gen Z is growing up with technology in a way that surpasses even millennials. They may have deep expectations about how technology should work in ways that older people don't.
Additionally, these people don't have much work experience. A lot of ideas - such as open offices, work from home or skipping documentation - feel fine until you've worked with them and found their drawbacks. It might work for some, but it does not for a lot of others.
Citation needed, I guess? Teen pregnancies are way down, for example.
https://www.theverge.com/facebook/2020/5/21/21265699/faceboo...
the concept of a company providing shuttle bus service instead of just having proper public transport to bussiness parks is very weird when one thinks about it.
I can get into our small city office with a short drive and a longish train trip. I pretty much have to drive to our suburban office.
Why should I even go into the office during a pandemic, it just does not make sense.
It seems so insanely thoughtless to me.
Like, is that really the world you want? Gmail surveillance already took over everyone's email, same for maps and apps and YouTube. Anyone with a clue is trying to roll this worldwide trend backward, not make the Google advertising machine more efficient and effective at ingesting every single last molecule your private data and personal activities.
It can be helpful to remember that at big media sites, headlines get written by headline specialists. It's their job to sex up the title, and the rest of our job (the rest of us's job?) not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I've replaced the title with a suitably neutral, representative sentence from the article body. There nearly always is one.
> Employees can return to their permanent desks on a rotation schedule that assigns people to come into the office on a specific day to ensure that no one is there on the same day as their immediate desk neighbors.
Why does it matter if I'm wearing a mask or sitting next to someone in an "office of the future" where the pandemic has already abated?
Even the hybrid model isn't ideal, because you still need to be within commuting distance of the office, if it was something like 2 weeks onsite every 2-3 months, it'd be much more doable imo.
For the ones who really miss the office, they should be able to go, but mandatory return-to-office seems far from ideal until mask mandate is over at the very least.
It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.
Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).
The other thing is, even if we went to the office, we won't necessarily be able to have the same face-to-face experience until the mask and social distancing mandates are done with imo.
I also felt people disinterested on collaborations, everyone has their own goals, I wouldn't attribute it to your country per say.
It's easier in-person because you're harder to ignore than an email is. But it can be hard to get support especially from other groups.
I don't work from India, but haven't had much issue with onboarding or access to things.
Not sure why the racism, care to back that up?
I can empathize with the problems of remote work across national and cultural divides, but please don't toss flamebait like this into HN threads. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office in the US.
Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents happened often enough to be a sore point.
So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India. They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.
And if there is a second-class dynamic, would it be in a way that adversely affected the work, directly, or the impact was more about individual treatment?
(For example of affecting the work... when collaboration across sites is needed, for the benefit of the org, would there be difficulty getting it to happen, because some were second-class... such as not being taken as seriously, or working with second-class didn't fit well with promotion strategies, etc.)
There have been a few defrags, but there is a wide array of impactful projects.
Changing how the open plan is arranged is just pointless, accept that you have made an unpleasant work environment and leave it alone so at least people don't have to track whatever new fad you're on. Hotseating makes it even worse, so I can't see why anyone who respected their employees would consider it.
(I, for one, can't see it, but I reckon it's the fight over the desk in Brazil.)
I have a lot opinions on this and continue to say them internally. I encourage you to say this internally as well.
Did you get promoted in the fall? Between backfilled raises and manager discretion comp, my experience has been that the cancelled perf ended up working out alright for most people, except those with failed promos who needed to respond to committee feedback.
Next marketable item is masks with Bluetooth microphones I guess…
I am so glad I found a new fully remote job to skip going back to the office.
[0]https://www.razer.com/concepts/razer-project-hazel
ps. They have been approved from concept phase, so they are being built as we speak
Every vaccine that has ever had serious side-effect problems has shown them in the first few months.[1] The FDA requires six months of data for full approval. Those six months have passed.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
You don’t want, they tell you to. It’s like this in most companies now.
Seriously, just have some rooms with doors. Even if that's not the majority of the space.
Examples:
https://officesnapshots.com/photos/164814/
https://officesnapshots.com/photos/150191/
There are also existing solutions for temporary privacy that range from moveable/accordion walls to rolling felt / fabric partitions:
https://www.buzzi.space/acoustic-solutions/buzzishield-free
https://www.darran.com/product/screens/room-divider
The inflatable concept in the article definitely seems more concept that practical solution.
Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors.
It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet, and it was pretty depressing and alienating.
Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of most buildings don't make that practical.
Of course, the main problem was the thermostat was in the empty office next door so I couldn't close the door without it getting hot.
The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers.
Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.
But yet that's what most everybody in our field gets.
We're not getting private offices any more than we're getting family homes. Both are understandable expectations given our nominal wages, but they are also gross misapprehensions of our place in the pecking order. You may be able to afford all the cars and iPhones and vacations in the world, but that will never hold a candle to land. Land owns you.
I'm confused, are these assets their offices or...real estate investments that they own for some reason? If these assets are just offices, what is the value to Google if those offices are worth more or less as real estate? It's hard to imagine that the market for a giant complex of offices is super liquid?
The logical conclusion to draw from tech stocks being at all time highs is "the general public being isolated at home forced a huge increase in tech usage and purchases", not "WFH is great for tech companies".
That’s what people said right up until the last time top tech management culture turned away from remote work.
Giving remote participants a proportionate physical presence should help equal the playing field.
I think it hinges on how easy it is to set up the call, so that each face is on a separate screen.
That's been one mildly positive aspect of the pandemic. I'm no longer dialing into calls where there are a bunch of people in a conference room and then there's everyone else.
But everything else looks horrible. Hard surfaces. Completely vertical seatbacks that only go up to your lower back. Little sound isolation. Teeny tiny spaces to put a laptop. Limited surfaces to put a cup of coffee.
Actually they’re looming over them with heads 2x the size like Big Brother.
Big flat screens are so cheap now.
I wouldn't want to spend a good part of the day indoors with people who aren't vaccinated
I have heard that the cov vaccines do not prevent someone from getting it or transmitting it - (maybe?) at least two of the three prominent "vaccines" merely change your dna so that if you get it, the effects of it are not as serious as someone who has not gotten the shot (?)
If that is true - it seems to me that it does not make much difference if you spend time indoors with people that have or have not been vaccinated, as it really just protects them and not you.
I just quick opened something like: https://www.google.com/search?q=mrna+vaccine+does+not+preven...
the top result seems to "debunk" but the details off the page are tricky imho - the first "common questions" dropdown from the cdc, notes on page: "Although COVID-19 vaccines are effective at keeping you from getting sick, scientists are still learning how well vaccines prevent you from spreading the virus that causes COVID-19 to others, even if you do not have symptoms"
am I wrong on this?
mRNA doesn't, and can't possibly, "change your DNA".
Vaccinated people are much less likely to get infected and much less likely to spread infection.
" A growing body of evidence suggests that fully vaccinated people are less likely to have asymptomatic infection and potentially less likely to transmit SARS-CoV-2 to others. However, further investigation is ongoing. "
8th result from healthline ( https://www.healthline.com/health-news/if-youre-vaccinated-c... )includes this: " While all the approved vaccines offer strong protection against severe COVID-19 and hospitalization, the Oxford-AstraZeneca and Johnson & Johnson vaccines block fewer infections than do the mRNA vaccines.
None of the vaccines are 100 percent effective at preventing infections. So even if people don’t get very sick with COVID-19, they may still contract an infection and can potentially transmit the virus to others. "
So it seems that indeed people that have been fully vaccinated with either the mrna (seems like after 2 doses up to 90% protection?) and the lesser ones to a lesser extent..
both types of "vaccines" do not 100% full stop people from getting it an transmitting it.
This is very different from vaccines as I had previously known like polio or shingles vaccines which 100% prevent them and prevent you from spreading them right?
So I guess my point to the OP would be that sure it's fine to not want to go to an office where everyone has not been vaccinated, but this is not like the polio vaccine - depending on the vaccine given there is a 10% or higher chance that those people can still get it and still transmit it right?
It's fine choice to want people to get vaccinated - I just think some people are using the term to think like eradication.. full protection - like polio vaccines.. but this is not that (right?).
Again, happy to be wrong on all of this. But also want other people to not be confused by terms that at this point I feel are being misused, and sure, perhaps for the greater good - but nonetheless can be abused to create a false, and for some people deadly, sense of security.
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd/polio/hcp/effectiveness-dur...
I worry many others assume similar - as going back to an office with all at 80-90% I would do, but I may skip the shared bathrooms if I was really worried about it.
Certainly the path of least resistance is to encourage but not require because that way someone who doesn't like that policy can just quit rather than require the company to fire people who don't have the right docs (or submit fake ones).
Where you find consultants, you find solutions to imagined problems...only a consultant can really tell you what those damnable zoomers are thinking, they are basically Martians. Every company must have a zoomer-friendly office.
somehow our BigCo got only open offices with the lavish perks lost in translation.
Anyway, it seems that Google is bringing cubicles (and even offices with the "focused work" pods - implicit recognition that "focused work" (is where other than focused work in programming?) is impacted by the open space office) while avoiding the cu-word and, God-forbid, the o-word.