> “Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,” the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the same day. “Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment.”
you are not important enough to deserve stability....your schedule is not yours....you are directed by the parents and told where to sit...and stand etc...
This isn't float desks. This is an assigned desk that requires you to share and coordinate office time with a co-worker. This is so much worse than float desks.
Snow Crash does a good job satirizing the problems with float desks.
Though even Snow Crash is a little optimistic; it didn't predict the typical issues with a person's multi-monitor setup of the day not working quite right, or encountering weird hardware incompatibilities between one's docking station of the day and one's laptop.
> The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children.
That's always been Google's move. Get some CS graduates from top schools, ideally right after graduation, and stretch out the campus experience as far as they can into the working world. Prevents them from developing the kind of independent thinking that might lead them to conclude that working at Google is not that great.
A reservation system? I work for a remote optional company and employees can reserve desks ahead of time and/or you can get an assigned seat if you come in daily.
Surely there will be someone who will realize that you can approach this problem by building a matching engine based on Hall's Marriage Theorem[1], and then deploy it onto multiple regions for maximum anti-fragility, get promoted, rally some new hires to launch it as an extension of Google Workplace, get promoted again, abandon the project, and then have the feature die 10 months after public launch wondering why operating it cost so much money.
At least, that would be the Google WayTM of doing it, right?
Wow, I thought they were talking about two people sitting at one desk at the same time. This is insane. "Matching process for agreeing on a basic desk setup and establishing norms?"
BRB, I have something I need to do over at schwab.com. I'll be back shortly.
Don't believe everything you read on CNBC. They tend to exaggerate. A lot. There is no "matching process". People will be paired up, and have to agree upon the norms. The email isn't opinionated about this. Each org will have to figure out a process.
As someone who worked at a place where we had more people needing desks daily than we had desks, sharing with one specific person is probably the worst solution I can think of.
i like the image of the grumpy ayn randian product manager using the conference room as his office, evil-eyeing all who pass by and look longingly at that big glass table, imagining the near-perfection of the muffled office noise barely penetrating the sleek glass enclosure...
Wow Google’s culture has really gone to the dumps. I think this is a direct consequence of hiring too many people and hoping for the best. There’s no way their quality bar is anywhere near what it was 10 years ago.
Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.
I don't understand the negative sentiment with this. Do people expect employers to assign everyone a big desk, which is not completely open office and also have the flexibility to come to the office 1-2 days a week?
I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.
part of it, for me, is that this policy says, 'hey googlers, we order you to _not_ come to the office -- at least, not at the same time or day as your desk friendo, or your desk friendos.'
so when CEO 'x' says, 'everyone back to the office, we need to whisper sweet idea nothings to each other on our way to/from the bathroom, in the office, so that we can $$$$$' -- ceo google just said, "that's obviously untrue, and completely ridiculous, besides".
either that, or ceo google just said that the money we save by creating desk friendos will surpass the alleged value we gain by whispering sweet idea nothings to each other in the hallways, or at our covid- and flu-covered desks.
but one commenter said 'stackable desks' like bunk beds - which makes sense - kind of like that vertical pig farm in china. not sure how productive that will be -- for the desk jockeys, not the pigs -- but worth a try i guess.
Google's South Lake Union campus cost $802 million[1].
Google's parent company, Alphabet, spent $70 billion on stock buybacks[2].
I know I'm drastically oversimplifying the complexities of accounting required for a trillion-dollar empire, but this comes across as more of a punitive measure than a cost-saving measure.
I acknowledge that being able to take the force of money and apply in a direction that results in growth at Google's scale is arguably one of the most difficult problems in business at the moment. But how does downsizing your offices do anything but make the hard times for Googlers a bit more uncomfortable? How does this news attract the talent that could help Google grow?
It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders. The Lindy effect[4] suggests that Google will probably be around for another twenty years. To his credit, Sundar has spent the last 3 years navigating one of the largest companies in the history of mankind through an event that society hadn't seen in 100 years. So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter?
Google was revered in the media for decades as being one of the best places in the world to work at, you can look Xooglers talking as far back as 2008 and see stories of people who went to work there and left disappointed because of the homogeneous mindset and work benefits failing to match the competition[3].
2. Good leaders are visionaries that have the capacity of picturing a better future, realizing what needs to be done, and then delegating and executing those requirements to manifest that vision into reality.
3. Sundar wants to be a good leader.
It would be easy to say that my #2 is correct, but doesn't apply to Sundar as CEO. I've heard his tenure associated with the "MBA-ification" of Google. Solely focusing on maximizing shareholder returns, which in the case of the company sitting on the multi-billion dollar revenue hose, means cutting down on anything that gets in the way of that.
That would indeed allow shareholders to get a great return on their investment for some time, but if you reduce google to a private AI research lab and a digital ads platform, there's nothing left to react (or bring forth) to changes in how people interact with technology. I feel like nothing exemplifies this further than Bard.
Perhaps I am too much of an optimist. But it really feels like he should care.
Right. I want to know how much money this initiative could possibly save, especially in comparison to the scale of their revenue/profitability/spending on other things. It seems like they don't consider the well being of workers and how mistreating them will impact the well being of their company. People thinking along these lines should not be leading these trillion dollar companies.
> It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders.
Which would be completely normal behavior for the CEO of a large publicly traded company and its board, which is the real problem.
Agreed, I have the perfect setup at home, I paid for everything (except laptop) and I pay for all of the electricity, bandwidth, accessories and upgrades, and furniture and upgrades.
Saving the company a lot of money and I'm at my desk way longer!
I never bothered but it's definitely easy at google to expense your internet and I remember hearing about someone successfully expensing some amount of their electricity
whole thing makes no sense, just feels like leadership is flailing. Is RTO just sunk cost fallacy due to these big companies having spent billions on real estate and fancy buildings? There seems to be minimal benefits to mandating it, it shrinks your talent pool, makes employees less efficient due to commute, forces you to pay more in tech hubs, and makes you spend more on office stuff. The only benefit is the completely non-measurable "improved collaboration" metric
If they don't come it and don't resign themselves, then I assume google would fire them in which case they would get severance? Is that how it works? It's only an issue if the people who wfh resign then they would not get severance/unemployment?
In the case of not coming in it’s kind of a gray area right now. Some stipulate failing to come to the office would be a failure to perform and so the employee would be fired without severance but still be able to collect unemployment.
People who resign would be quitting on their own accord and would not be able to receive neither a severance nor unemployment. That’s why resignations are probably Google’s ultimate goal.
I'm not in the PA that will be sharing desks but sit in one of the affected offices. I can see about 100 desks from where I am right now. All of them are assigned to someone, but only 6 presently have someone sitting there. Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%?
Something was bound to happen given all the unused real estate. But it's shitty that those of us who actually use our desks, because we rather like work-home separation, now might end up with a desk time share. Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?
> Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%?
> Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?
Not sure what the rules are at BigCo, but it looks like it would be way simpler to ask office-first people to apply to permanent positions.
Desks? Make those lazy bums sit on the floor. If they want a desk they can bring one from home. No, you can't work from home, obviously, or the Communists win.
Though I think Google's Bay View campus is gorgeous and probably a lovely place to work, I can't imagine it's a particularly efficient use of the space it takes up. I could be wrong though as I've never been inside. I'll give credit to Google for not building another box full of cubicles, but it seems like it was meant to compete with Apple's spaceship in terms of impressive design, rather than somewhere for thousands of employees to get work done. Anyone know how many desks the buildings have and who gets to work there?
It seems like the general sentiment from people assigned to Bay View campus hate it, and the campus is an example of form over function as an actual office for doing work.
> to ensure... desks are kept clean and free from personal items.
This was called "hotdesking", then "hotelling", and it's unclear why I would arrange with a coworker to timeshare a desk when a proper hotdesking arrangement would likely be cheaper and easier.
I'm supposed to be in one of those "hotelling" env's but human beings are so territorial that it effectively failed. In truth managers sabotaged it but employees were happy to go along. Even with WFH dominating now, it's still That's My Desk Not Yours.
I kinda like the hotelling idea because you can mingle with people who work in other domains and mostly avoid that small percentage of really obnoxious folks. I suppose it could get problematic if you're the resident Hot Girl in an office of needy males (sorry if that sounds sexist and I'm sure I would absolutely hate being Hot Guy in an office of needy gals and no I'm not being facetious at all)
It seems like each day there's an article lately about reasons _not_ to work at Google. Sad to see how they went from an enviable place to work to a place to avoid these past years.
(Although internally, things might be better than it looks from the outside of course)
I used to say something similar to this but then I worked at Google. It turns out I care a lot more about working on interesting problems than I do about fat checks.
Google still has interesting problems to work on? I thought they just printed money with adsense and launched projects just so they could cancel them 2 weeks later. /s
Companies like Google have a unique problem. They attract the best engineers, but they still have lots of boring work to be done. So they end up hiring brilliant engineers only to have them work on uninteresting things like financial reports. My company created a whole separate job title which basically equates to "less skilled and lower payed developer" so we can hire more average engineers to do that kind of work without diluting our quality of engineers.
> It turns out I care a lot more about working on interesting problems than I do about fat checks.
It is definitely possible to get a fat check and work on interesting problems at Google. But you need to be really picky with what team you work for (obviously, not so easy ATM).
I'm a Googler who very much cares about having my own desk. I hate WFH because I find it to be miserable, strongly prefer WFO, and this would make WFO miserable too. I'm not gonna be miserable for 8 hours every day for any amount of money.
Not OP, but for me, it's the isolation. I wouldn't quite call it miserable unless I can't go out. I lasted only a few days into WFH for COVID before I went to live with my parents until I was forced back to the office. Just a few weeks ago I was snowed in for a week and I was about to crawl up the walls.
If I were single, I can see how that would make a difference. When I was forced to both work from home and not go to the gym and hang out with friends after work and I was single a decade ago during bad weather, that was miserable.
I'm single and I love WFH and I avoid the office as much as possible, coming less than required. Especially now with the stupid hotdesking. I actually have more time to socialize now <3
Not OP but WFH to me is like living at my workplace. There is no boundary anymore between work and home. This where I work, this is where I live. This gone with WFH. I much rather prefer the physical separation of office and my private home.
In HCOL cities in the USA, it can be tough to get a setup like this.
One may suggest to move cities, but my community is my friends in the city I live in. One may suggest getting new friends in a new city, but that's a tough and long process - friendships can take years to build, especially if I'm isolated and working from home.
I could move further out of the city, but now I'm commuting 1hr+ one-way to see my friends every day. The very commute that WFH was trying to get rid of.
That’s the joy of working remotely. But do you really hang out with your friends everyday? Serious question, I’m older and most of my friends are married with families (as am I). If we see each other, it’s well planned out and on the weekend.
Even when I was single, I had friends all across the Atlanta metro area and we still ended up having to drive an hour to see each other.
But it’s been a long time since I was single, and I will admit in my single days, work and my social life was intermixed so heavily that we would have all (male and female) ended up in HR today.
WFH would have sucked when I was living in Beijing (I'm not sure how my friends have managed for the past 2 years). It is much better in Seattle, even though the space is more expensive here. I've got my own office, so does my wife (for now, our kid wants to sleep in our room anyways).
That’s assuming that one’s issues with WFH can’t be resolved by not having a bunch of other people around.
It’s lost in me why so many nerds don’t understand that not everyone wants to be wrapped up in their fortress of solitude, peeping out of a Zoom window.
I absolutely love being around people when I am not trying to do deep work. Even as far as going to lunch, dinner, etc with coworkers. I work in consulting now, I have to actually pretend to be a people person.
Just about every reason you've seen for preferring WFO over WFH posted online for the three years of the pandemic so far is true for me. No reason to rehash it all here.
My company switched to hot desks and didn't add any restroom capacity even though the peak building population was much higher. It was pretty terrible on days where everyone was there for all hands/townhalls.
> I'd work from a toilet stall for a Google L6 comp band
For maybe a quarter, until your brain adapts. Once you have your needs met, there's diminishing returns. You can still be miserable while getting a fat check.
Google definitely doesn't have a spare toilet for you. I remember a group of coworkers threatening to file a complaint with OSHA because the number of toilets was so limited. (I just used the bathrooms that were part of the building but not managed by Google. They were not "nice" so nobody was ever in there, but it was better than waiting in line to use the facilities.)
I worked in a building on the Mountain View campus where they brought in porta-potties to "solve" the bathroom problem. (They were very nice porta-potties, but still...)
For anyone who's curious, OSHA does require a minimum number of toilets per male or female employee (https://www.osha.gov/restrooms-sanitation), and the law doesn't permit co-ed restrooms unless the stall dividers and doors go from floor to ceiling. Office buildings are generally designed around a 50/50 male/female ratio, and when the ratio gets way off, you can wind up not having enough restrooms for one or the other, despite being well within the total design occupancy limit.
I can’t say the same. I was making $150K in 2020 at 45 years old living in my 4 year old newly built house in the burbs and I completely ignored any chance at working at BigTech if it meant moving.
The only reason I gave a recruiter the time of day at the BigTech company I ended up working at is when she suggested I do a pivot into the cloud consulting department (cloud app dev implementations) and said the position was remote.
But I would go back to my old comp way before I would be willing to ever be in an office again.
I was making “enough” in 2020. Everything else was just gravy.
They do. Kirkland was overcrowded. People were working on the stairwells! At least I had my own desk. Working on an open for plan was bad enough. Having to share your desk wouldn't work for me. I think I would prefer"hot seating" over sharing a desk.
Almost no reason not to let people work remotely
I remember visiting MS (Redmond), in the 1990s (It was at the "Longhorn" launch, if that helps date it).
A friend of mine, worked in one of the nearby buildings, and took me to his office (He was doing documentation, or something for Encarta).
I was struck by the narrow, dark, corridors, and the small, windowless, offices. My friend said that all MS engineers had a private office.
I have since been told that the building I visited was probably an old one, and not representative of most buildings, and I think that MS went open-plan, since.
I have also visited the Facebook (it was still called Facebook, back then) office, in NYC.
The programming floor was a really big, noisy, open-plan office, jammed with desks (standing and sitting), and everyone was talking away. No windows. The floor was surrounded by conference rooms and offices, which had windows.
The Japanese offices of my own company were sort of like that, but with uniform desks, and quiet as a mouse; even with hundreds of people. No individual offices. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had a small desk, in the corner.
Microsoft started to transition to open layout company-wide sometime in the mid-10s.
Depending on the org, some team at Microsoft still had private offices for their devs as late as 2017.
When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better.
I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time".
It would have to be timed so each employee got equal stool time. IIRC standing all day isn't necessarily healthier than sitting all day. You want to alternate.
It’s not like standing statically is good for your health either, and it can be easy to do that when focusing.
I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that for hours at a time was not good.
I‘m not sure standing 4+ hours a day has been established as healthy without exception. Long sitting is bad, sure; but switching things around ad libitum might be better than enforcing standing all the time.
Sounds like the best option for a standing desk is to add one of those walking treadmills then. For me though, whenever I'm using a standing desk I move around a lot; I almost never stand still.
That's not the employer's purview. They can incentivize health but, seriously F right off with that controlling nonsense. They're employees, not your charges or children.
Not that I agree with the practice, but many retail employees (at least in the USA) are required to stand while working, even if the job can easily be done while seated, as is the case for receptionists, fast food and grocery cashiers, and so on. It's definitely within the company's purview, even if the practice is unnecessarily cruel.
I think the only cashiers I see standing in Germany are at IKEA and hardware stores (because they have to stand to scan half the huge parts), and even then I think they have a chair inside their little spot next to the scanner and the conveyor belt. Only the "info booth" people are usually standing.
Yeah. Right. We can add it to the long list of ways that tech bros assert their false sense of transferable expertise onto other people. The average startup…whatever person, has never actually asked an expert if standing desks do much if any good. The truth is way more nuanced.
I liked the fishbowls, but I had a team whose office was just the right size for it - The glass walls kept out the noise well enough, and the view of the rest of the office didn't bother me. I was for a period in the open plan area without an enclosure - That sucked, modulo the Sennheiser headphones we had provided which I blasted music and white noise in.
Damn idk which I'd rather have. Some cube farms are next-level depressing. When I was younger, I think part of what made the prospect of moving out of my hometown more compelling was the fact that a giant mega-insurance company ended up being the main endpoint for CS grads. I got to visit once and it was _not_ pretty. Tightly enclosed cubes with tall aging white walls, one source of sunlight if that. They must of really liked Java.
On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he ate at his desk multiple times a day.
There are so many other options besides a football size open space (hello, facebook) and corpo cubicles. For example, each agile team could perfectly fit in a small room + shared areas. And put a couple extra desks for monads like managers.
Open or not, the important factor is how much free space you have around you. I claim that a crowded cubicle setup will be worse than a spacious open office. Granted, SPACIOUS open offices are really rare - the largest motivator is to crowd as many people in as possible. You know what the icing on the cake is? Open office workspaces are almost always crowded into a building that was made for cubicles or a warehouse or whatever. There's never enough parking, never enough toilets. The asshole business owners always play the "well, we're a growing company so you'll have to live with this for now" card.
When the company I work for was new, we had big desks in a huge office space, so we were spread out. It was awesome! Like you easily had 8ft of desk to yourself and a cabinet and lots of space to breathe.
Yeah, at the job I just left we had much less square meter space per employee in our open office than what egg laying chickens are required to have in Europe by law. We literally have it worse than farm animals in some offices.
I had low-wall cubicles at one job and thought it was great. Could still see the eyes and noses of my coworkers around me, and it was easy making conversation or asking for help.
I worked at a company where a smart manager got low profile cubes for the dev team. We were located in an area that had access to a host of large whiteboards, and large monitors for video conferencing. It was really great. If a dev ran into a problem, it was easy to ask for help. Then you could start working at a whiteboard a few feet from your desk.
Whether you were working something out alone or with some other dev, chances are within a few minutes several other devs were there working the problem out with you. I mean the collaboration was really cool and we blasted through so many bugs and bad code, it was really refreshing.
Likewise, we had a large portion of the floor dedicated to CSR folks. Again, some smart manager got them 7ft. high cubes so the noise the devs were making wouldn't interrupt what they were doing. They even had a few spare CSR cubes for anybody who really wanted to be heads down and working in absolute quiet.
Sam Lowry's office at Information Retrieval[1] was supposed to depict a dystopianly-terrible office setup, but these day's I'd kill for a workspace like that. That's how bad offices are in 2023.
I am sitting at a Google desk and there are 5/6 people not here in the desks in my vicinity. I would prefer fewer desks and to actually get to sit next to people rather than being scattered among a sea of mostly empty desks due to people WFH.
I agree, but I think that the way of achieving that is quite dumb.
Id rather enforce something around. The first 1-2 floors in some specific buildings on every campus will turn into shared spaces instead of forcing everyone out of their desks.
Decisions seem so poorly though recently that the only way I can make sense of many is thinking that they are trying to get people to quit to avoid paying for severances and taking another morale and press hit at announcing layoffs.
Same, but, they shouldn't be taking away the desks of me of my coworker, as we're in using them five days per week. We come to the office because we find that we're much less productive at home in our shared Manhattan apartments.
I agree, I come in 5 days a week and not having a dedicated space would make that experience much worse. I wouldn't rejoin the Cloud PA with this policy in place, and I imagine plenty of people will leave when the tech industry turns around again.
The problem I have with shared desks is that morning people get the best places close to windows and away from traffic and noisy corners, night owls are at a disadvantage. Also quite often shared hardware is in a sad state (keyboards with broken legs, mice with slippery wheels from people working with greasy fingers, etc.)
Yuck. If I just look at my keyboard and mouse, I really do not want that anyone _has_ to use them. I clean them regularly and do not eat at the desk, but still cruft assembles.
I have never seen shared desks with morning and evening split. The article says it will be alternate days, with the same desk. Basically, each desk is now assigned to two people, on alternate days.
Internally Google might be just fine, but optics are equally important in this industry. Before Sundar took over Google never went through bad PR. It's just an observation, not a dig at Google's affairs.
There were a lot of other good things going that masked these. The recent "PR botch ups" are creating more damage. The most famous e.g. is reacting to ChatGPT's hype and rushing to do a demo and then messing it up. It wasn't so much messing up the demo that caught they eye; it was how Google rushed/reacted to do it esp. when Google is considered to be at the forefront of AI. Again, optics. Besides Sundar hasn't come out with anything impressive in the last few years. It's ok to just keep the lights on, but at least don't create bad optics.
How quickly the tide turns in our industry..from massages at your desk to sitting on each other's laps. Hey they could perhaps still continue the massage to each other though.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIf only, there was an easier solution.
The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children. Oh yeah. This is going to work out just fine.
Though even Snow Crash is a little optimistic; it didn't predict the typical issues with a person's multi-monitor setup of the day not working quite right, or encountering weird hardware incompatibilities between one's docking station of the day and one's laptop.
That's always been Google's move. Get some CS graduates from top schools, ideally right after graduation, and stretch out the campus experience as far as they can into the working world. Prevents them from developing the kind of independent thinking that might lead them to conclude that working at Google is not that great.
A reservation system? I work for a remote optional company and employees can reserve desks ahead of time and/or you can get an assigned seat if you come in daily.
At least, that would be the Google WayTM of doing it, right?
1: https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/
BRB, I have something I need to do over at schwab.com. I'll be back shortly.
i like the image of the grumpy ayn randian product manager using the conference room as his office, evil-eyeing all who pass by and look longingly at that big glass table, imagining the near-perfection of the muffled office noise barely penetrating the sleek glass enclosure...
Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.
I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.
so when CEO 'x' says, 'everyone back to the office, we need to whisper sweet idea nothings to each other on our way to/from the bathroom, in the office, so that we can $$$$$' -- ceo google just said, "that's obviously untrue, and completely ridiculous, besides".
either that, or ceo google just said that the money we save by creating desk friendos will surpass the alleged value we gain by whispering sweet idea nothings to each other in the hallways, or at our covid- and flu-covered desks.
but one commenter said 'stackable desks' like bunk beds - which makes sense - kind of like that vertical pig farm in china. not sure how productive that will be -- for the desk jockeys, not the pigs -- but worth a try i guess.
https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-g...
Google's parent company, Alphabet, spent $70 billion on stock buybacks[2].
I know I'm drastically oversimplifying the complexities of accounting required for a trillion-dollar empire, but this comes across as more of a punitive measure than a cost-saving measure.
I acknowledge that being able to take the force of money and apply in a direction that results in growth at Google's scale is arguably one of the most difficult problems in business at the moment. But how does downsizing your offices do anything but make the hard times for Googlers a bit more uncomfortable? How does this news attract the talent that could help Google grow?
It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders. The Lindy effect[4] suggests that Google will probably be around for another twenty years. To his credit, Sundar has spent the last 3 years navigating one of the largest companies in the history of mankind through an event that society hadn't seen in 100 years. So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter?
Google was revered in the media for decades as being one of the best places in the world to work at, you can look Xooglers talking as far back as 2008 and see stories of people who went to work there and left disappointed because of the homogeneous mindset and work benefits failing to match the competition[3].
1: https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-...
2: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billio...
3: https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/
4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Why would he care?
1. The CEO is the leader of the company
2. Good leaders are visionaries that have the capacity of picturing a better future, realizing what needs to be done, and then delegating and executing those requirements to manifest that vision into reality.
3. Sundar wants to be a good leader.
It would be easy to say that my #2 is correct, but doesn't apply to Sundar as CEO. I've heard his tenure associated with the "MBA-ification" of Google. Solely focusing on maximizing shareholder returns, which in the case of the company sitting on the multi-billion dollar revenue hose, means cutting down on anything that gets in the way of that.
That would indeed allow shareholders to get a great return on their investment for some time, but if you reduce google to a private AI research lab and a digital ads platform, there's nothing left to react (or bring forth) to changes in how people interact with technology. I feel like nothing exemplifies this further than Bard.
Perhaps I am too much of an optimist. But it really feels like he should care.
Which would be completely normal behavior for the CEO of a large publicly traded company and its board, which is the real problem.
Saving the company a lot of money and I'm at my desk way longer!
People who resign would be quitting on their own accord and would not be able to receive neither a severance nor unemployment. That’s why resignations are probably Google’s ultimate goal.
Something was bound to happen given all the unused real estate. But it's shitty that those of us who actually use our desks, because we rather like work-home separation, now might end up with a desk time share. Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?
Not sure what the rules are at BigCo, but it looks like it would be way simpler to ask office-first people to apply to permanent positions.
https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...
This was called "hotdesking", then "hotelling", and it's unclear why I would arrange with a coworker to timeshare a desk when a proper hotdesking arrangement would likely be cheaper and easier.
I kinda like the hotelling idea because you can mingle with people who work in other domains and mostly avoid that small percentage of really obnoxious folks. I suppose it could get problematic if you're the resident Hot Girl in an office of needy males (sorry if that sounds sexist and I'm sure I would absolutely hate being Hot Guy in an office of needy gals and no I'm not being facetious at all)
(Although internally, things might be better than it looks from the outside of course)
I doubt any Googlers actually care about this stuff
It is definitely possible to get a fat check and work on interesting problems at Google. But you need to be really picky with what team you work for (obviously, not so easy ATM).
People are different.
One may suggest to move cities, but my community is my friends in the city I live in. One may suggest getting new friends in a new city, but that's a tough and long process - friendships can take years to build, especially if I'm isolated and working from home.
I could move further out of the city, but now I'm commuting 1hr+ one-way to see my friends every day. The very commute that WFH was trying to get rid of.
Even when I was single, I had friends all across the Atlanta metro area and we still ended up having to drive an hour to see each other.
But it’s been a long time since I was single, and I will admit in my single days, work and my social life was intermixed so heavily that we would have all (male and female) ended up in HR today.
It’s lost in me why so many nerds don’t understand that not everyone wants to be wrapped up in their fortress of solitude, peeping out of a Zoom window.
“We are in this together” so to speak.
It’s funny how our brains do so many things for us without us being aware of them.
Now, the more people return, the more hectic and loud it will be which I detest.
For maybe a quarter, until your brain adapts. Once you have your needs met, there's diminishing returns. You can still be miserable while getting a fat check.
For anyone who's curious, OSHA does require a minimum number of toilets per male or female employee (https://www.osha.gov/restrooms-sanitation), and the law doesn't permit co-ed restrooms unless the stall dividers and doors go from floor to ceiling. Office buildings are generally designed around a 50/50 male/female ratio, and when the ratio gets way off, you can wind up not having enough restrooms for one or the other, despite being well within the total design occupancy limit.
The only reason I gave a recruiter the time of day at the BigTech company I ended up working at is when she suggested I do a pivot into the cloud consulting department (cloud app dev implementations) and said the position was remote.
But I would go back to my old comp way before I would be willing to ever be in an office again.
I was making “enough” in 2020. Everything else was just gravy.
I had my house built in 2016 in “the good school system” in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K. It was 3200 square feet 5/3-1/2.
There is a reason I didn’t entertain the recruiter until she suggested a permanently remote role.
This tends to be an indicator of age, rather than wisdom.
When you're young, you value money more than time.
When you're old, you value time more than money.
A friend of mine, worked in one of the nearby buildings, and took me to his office (He was doing documentation, or something for Encarta).
I was struck by the narrow, dark, corridors, and the small, windowless, offices. My friend said that all MS engineers had a private office.
I have since been told that the building I visited was probably an old one, and not representative of most buildings, and I think that MS went open-plan, since.
I have also visited the Facebook (it was still called Facebook, back then) office, in NYC.
The programming floor was a really big, noisy, open-plan office, jammed with desks (standing and sitting), and everyone was talking away. No windows. The floor was surrounded by conference rooms and offices, which had windows.
The Japanese offices of my own company were sort of like that, but with uniform desks, and quiet as a mouse; even with hundreds of people. No individual offices. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had a small desk, in the corner.
I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time".
Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.
I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that for hours at a time was not good.
Swelling in lower limbs doesn’t sound good. From an evolutionary POV I can’t really imagine why our bodies should be optimized for standing still.
They had it better in the movie Brazil. At least they had offices!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
Good to see the tech industry bringing us back to the workplace of the 1800's.
Up next: Child labor!
If only we still had it that good!
On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he ate at his desk multiple times a day.
When the company I work for was new, we had big desks in a huge office space, so we were spread out. It was awesome! Like you easily had 8ft of desk to yourself and a cabinet and lots of space to breathe.
Yeah! See, at least with cubes you know exactly where your "space" ends. Not so with many open plan offices, they can always try to cram more.
I worked at a company where a smart manager got low profile cubes for the dev team. We were located in an area that had access to a host of large whiteboards, and large monitors for video conferencing. It was really great. If a dev ran into a problem, it was easy to ask for help. Then you could start working at a whiteboard a few feet from your desk.
Whether you were working something out alone or with some other dev, chances are within a few minutes several other devs were there working the problem out with you. I mean the collaboration was really cool and we blasted through so many bugs and bad code, it was really refreshing.
Likewise, we had a large portion of the floor dedicated to CSR folks. Again, some smart manager got them 7ft. high cubes so the noise the devs were making wouldn't interrupt what they were doing. They even had a few spare CSR cubes for anybody who really wanted to be heads down and working in absolute quiet.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
Id rather enforce something around. The first 1-2 floors in some specific buildings on every campus will turn into shared spaces instead of forcing everyone out of their desks.
Decisions seem so poorly though recently that the only way I can make sense of many is thinking that they are trying to get people to quit to avoid paying for severances and taking another morale and press hit at announcing layoffs.
Sunday became CEO on August 10, 2015.
Google+ was launched in 2011. (And the "real name" policy was a PR disaster.)
Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (You can hardly find a PR disaster that people in the tech world complain about more.)
Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe had an anti-poaching agreement that finally got settled in 2015, but they were getting bad press before that.
"Right to be forgotten" bad press was in 2014 and before.