Clickbait title because arstechnica is a garbage publication.
Employees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with another employee. They will not sit at the same desk at the same time.
Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.
> Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.
Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enough desks given that they mandated a return to office.
I despise them. I'm convinced that they became "cool" purely for two reasons:
1.) Bosses loved the feeling of superiority they had by having their own office but everyone else is sitting out in the open where they can easily see them all and bother them at a moment's notice.
2.) Fresh out of college grads would see them and get this feeling of a cool, buzzing, hypersocial hive that made them feel all good inside.
The first time I was introduced to a massive open office space, they tried to play it off as exciting and it just filled me with an utter sense of dread. It caused a massive amount of stress then my brain compartmentalized it all and ran the stress subroutine in the background. Blaring bright lights overhead, endless chatting and movement in your perpipheral view, witn an absolute requirement to wear isolation headphones to get any concentration. Tech can be utterly barbaric.
Yep, I will 100% admit they "look better" but I'm convinced productivity is not the same. I'm all for having "collaborative" spaces but surely the optimal environment is one where employees can get hours of work in without distraction. With an open office, the opportunity for distraction is practically everywhere.
I wouldn't have made it through my last consulting gig without headphones/earbuds and a 45" (114 cm for the more enlightened measurement connoisseurs among us) ultrawide screen to block 95% of my view that I bought and brought in to the office.
Employees: why? Why have them at all? I don't have an "office" I have a small section of table. At home I have an office.
Companies: we invested money in these work spaces and want them to be used
Employees: you mean the shitty open space you moved to in order to save money rather than real "offices"? the ones that make us provably/demonstrably less productive than being at our home offices? If its about money, get rid of them entirely.
Companies: Um, yes. It helps build interaction and community
Employees: No, being shoved together like cattle breeds resentment and irritation and distraction and a feeling of no privacy or ability to think.
Companies: Just come back to the office. It's about buy-in
Employees: You mean the buy-in you refuse to provide for reasonable work spaces?
Yep! I mean honestly, a rather nice "perk" of working with a company could be a private office, almost like an extension of your home... but within reason. They have the building anyways.
Similar to how professors at university usually have such an office.
With how much remote work has taken off and how much companies want to bring at least some people, this is certainly a perk that I would consider.
Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money. Why is it that we pretend like "shareholders" are these mythical beasts that are different than us? I have money in the stock market. You probably do as well. Why does your money suddenly become ok to waste if it's invested in a company?
5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own desk. You don't want them having their productivity hurt by being crammed in like sardines. But in this case, let's be real. Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
Would you pay to keep inventory on the shelves when you could do JiT delivery of parts and keep expenditure on stocks at a minimum? Did not having spare capacity work out for car companies when the logistics chain was disrupted during Covid? I bring this up as an example because you seem to be(and this is entirely my interpretation that could be incorrect) implying that the spare capacity of the space per person is always a negative to be ruthlessly optimized out. I would posit that it has benefits like morale that need to be evaluated as a tradeoff. That's also ignoring the whole point that they demanded the workers return to the office and then didn't invest in making that possible, so now workers are dealing with the worst of both worlds.
>Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
I wouldn't expect germaphobia to be the issue, it's the constant change that prevents employees from getting into a routine. We all already know that software engineers need to get into the zone to be productive, which takes time and becoming comfortable with what they are working on. How easy is that going to be when you have to adapt to a new environment everytime you go to work and reset up your workstation in the manner that works for the engineer?
I absolutely had lower productivity sharing a desk last time I was required to. The chair was always adjusted wrong. May as well just stay home. I'm not OCD but I've been seeing doctors for my back problems since I was 18 so frankly you're an ableist. Enjoy your health while you can.
Ableist because I didn't factor in that adjusting a chair is a horrific injustice? Can we just agree that that is ridiculous and absurd and comically dramatic?
The ADA legally mandates that accommodations be made for people that need them and if you're not in that category you're being ridiculous and if you are this doesn't even apply to you.
Ableist because you assume that either the effort of getting the chair / desk / monitor adjusted correctly is trivial, or the consequences of not adjusting are minimal.
The chair doesn't get adjusted until it has already caused pain. Thanks for your concern.
Actually I'm going to lay into you for this. Do you have any fucking idea what its like to not be able to get an erection? Not to feel your legs, shoulders, or hips for days? To not be able to tell when you have to poop? And all it takes is a fucking $200 chair that they leave the fuck alone to be just fine? I don't need the goddamn ada. All I need is a little trial and error to get my spine aligned right so I can sit for 8 hours without "SUPRISE you cant feel your DICK" and then to have that chair left the fuck alone.
Dude you will be so fucked when you hit 60. You have no idea how much you will hate the world for the lack of consideration it shows you.
This is such a stupid short-term saving for a long-term cost. It's frustrating to me how focused shareholders are on saving a quick buck via stock buy-backs, employee layoffs, leaving real estate agreements. It's a bunch of number misdirection to try and make it look like the company is earning more money when they're just losing a little bit less.
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-7billion-re... <- Google invested $7b in Real Estate 2 years ago. When the next economic boom happens they're going to hire as many people as they can and claim they don't have space for them. And the entire time they're fucking with employee morale because it's not a number they can put on a spreadsheet. But it will have a cost. They just won't see it until it's too late.
I'm quite used to spending part of my paycheck on things like renting my own toilet, my own bathroom, kitchen with my own coffee maker and while it is used for a much larger part of the day my bedroom is only used < 1/3 of the day.
I have no idea why we are doing this!
> Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money.
No man! People actually BUY cars so that they can keep them all to themselves!
It gets more absurd I assure you. The justification for most of them is to drive to work!
I think investors know we are doing this with their money?
You can drive your car anytime you want, and you do. It’s not limited to a designated schedule of 2 days a week and 8 days a month and never on holidays. Same with everything else you said in your dishonest, bad faith comparison. Personal is not business.
I’m a cofounder at my current startup so I guess I think differently about a business paying for things that are needlessly idle for no reason, but you do you. We don’t think paying for office space makes sense at all and don’t. But if we did, no way are we flushing cash down the toilet for overly indulged devs when that cash can go to raises and bonuses for top performers (morale). And if a top performer wants a dedicated, non shared desk, well ok. We will offer them a choice between a salary boost or the desk.
Implying that people have their own assigned space to work in is something "...for overly indulged devs..." is a frankly amazingly hypocritical response from what seems to be an overly entitled business owner.
You walk it back slightly by saying that you offer the choice between the cost savings or the desk to the worker, but somehow I doubt that the worker's are getting the whole cost savings or that you wouldn't start bucketing them as no longer a top performer for making what you view as a sub optimal choice.
I often joke to my migrant coworkers that they don't understand, they think you work in order to live but here in the west we live to work.
Everything is about work. We allow people to have a home and a car... wait for it... so that they can work! If salaries are to small to survive people stop working, if they are to big they also stop working. We've tailored the salary to squeeze out maximum productivity. Where homes and/or food are cheap employees are also cheap and visa versa.
This is no accident!
I applaud that you are not renting office space, your programmers already have a desk and a computer and their salary is such that they can and will replace it. You are going to pay for that. You have to or they will go work some place else where the salaries are more calibrated.
If you will ever do offices you will need a good excuse for it. What that might be we don't know but you will need something in return for sacrificing productivity. As everything is about work that what the proverbial top performer wants is probably related to work too! If they are more productive if you give them their own office you would have to figure out if it is worth it.
It would have to be some office if they are to feel at home there. Or actually, if they are to be more comfortable than at home.
The whole premise is absurd, the product they make (if not interrupted) is 1's and 0's it can easily be shipped all over the world. 2 desks will make it slower and needlessly complex.
Maybe the migrants are right and we are wrong. Maybe the show should be about living not about working. One time a coworker who barely speaks the language was asked if he could do a 7 day work week again. He reluctantly agreed and asked "but when do I live?"
Yeah, the old ways deserve every bit of mockery. The revolution has to happen now or it wont happen at all.
Maybe change happens for a good reason sometimes? Engineers no longer have secretaries, file cabinets, etc. We have all this technology to help us organize things, is an individual office still the right thing?
I get the value of quiet time, I just don't feel like it's lost. Still plenty of places to hide. Maybe I'm an outlier.
I can't think of any place I've worked where I had my own dedicated seat. There's 168 hours in a week that seat could be used and I only need it for 40.
I used to like arstechnica but it's degraded into what I am complaining about. The title of the article implies that people are crammed in desks next to each other by being purposefully vague.
Why tho? They still deliver great on topics in a tone and depth not many do (eg. popular science). I do agree their comment section became comprised of bitter 50+ people.
The problem is that the clickbaity stuff becomes viral.
Which is why the clickbaity stuff exists.
The real issue is that readers like you and me are garbage and reward publications for the garbage they write. The good stuff won’t even get a fraction of the views.
It's not 2010 anymore. Google sucks to work at if you're a talented engineer that actually wants to do impactful things. In fairness I should specify that there are a few teams at Google that do amazing things but the vast majority of the employees are just cogs in a vast machine.
Startups that don’t suck. But if you want a big, safe company…… hmmm, maybe MSFT, Salesforce, Netflix…. Honestly I hate big companies so wish I could recommend better.
Google (at least circa 2014 when I graduated) has slowly taken on the image of a “retirement home” (i.e. where you go to turn your brain off and clock in to get paid) in elite STEM undergrad programs. Oracle had solidified their spot, but at least at Google it used to be easy to find interesting teams if you knew people there to navigate the team matching process. Now it’s decline is in full swing, its sad but seems inevitable for behemoths of human capital.
once you're a publicly traded company for a while, the company will always eventually go down this spiral. completely independent of success, the company will go from a great place to work to a soulless corporate machine, and it is ALWAYS the people who are in charge of the money who cause this. every freaking time it is the love of profit over nearly all else and the fear of wasting money in any way which are responsible for this.
Can you explain more? I would have guessed any great collection of people is bound to slowly unravel for all kinds of reasons. Why would you place so much of the blame on money people?
No connection to Google, but I'd be cautious about ageism in this type of thinking. Been at places before where young guys mostly burn themselves into the ground "working hard" coding all sorts of stuff that really didn't matter, or sacrificing their personal time and life for code. The older guys were considered "unmotivated" because they didn't overwork when they knew it wouldn't matter.
Playing the devil's advocate: How would the older guys know that their work didn't matter?
My personal experience: 2001 I got assigned to an internal project to keep me busy. When planning and getting feedback from the internal stakeholders I realized that they weren't interested in the project. I slacked off, because there was nothing else to do. I got laid off six months later.
I guess I was referring to more optional type work like inventing their own frameworks and abstractions, refactors for code style, major rework of some in-house blob of code that could easily be done with an off the shelf library, etc.
Yes, didnt mean to be ageist. Its a mindset thing- 22 y/os would go to Oracle knowing they could clock in 25 hours a week. I’ve worked with 40+ y/o engineers who still show up fresh everyday and work a standard 40 hours, but were efficient, great teammates and leaders.
What's the audio latency? I've found remote desktop to be a bad experience as a blind developer. At a prior job we used thin clients which had decent audio performance from my desk in the office. Once Covid hit and we had to connect from home audio latency was awful and it took me an act of god to get a corporate provided laptop.
They are more like a super well connected SSH client. I think you could probably get X11 / audio up on it but I’ve never had the need to.
Development on an internal fork of VS code (web page) which sets up all the build tooling for you to use your cloud top as your build eng. Includes ML based completion as well which is nice.
So if you have used VS code I’d imagine the accessibility is similar as audio is rendered locally?
I highly doubt I'll ever get a job at Google but that's good to know. I use VS code as my main IDE and Microsoft has done a lot of work to make it accessible.
You probably didn't work for a company that has a global network that is capable of running Youtube levels of traffic around the planet with the latency requirements of Google Ads.
I used to consult, and got at one point hired to explain to higher management, at a small but important "regulatory" government department, why 256kbps ADSL sucked for rdesktop (which was on a private ATM channel from the incumbent telco, very expensive, and also very bad, it was still ADSL over an ATM backbone, in 2005, supposedly it was more secure ...). Note 256kbps = 32 KB/sec. I'm not sure how much they paid, but the page describing the product at the telco said to call to make an appointment for sales to visit you to get some pricing info. Oh, and the backend connection for this had to be done in duplicate, with endpoints in 2 different countries. I'm pretty sure just the backend connections cost a decent house a month at minimum.
Needless to say, over 32 KB/sec, rdesktop is pretty much unusable. Not that said incumbent telco actually delivered 32 KB/sec, merely because they paid through the nose.
So I wrote a 40 page document, written in 12 days, for a just-barely-not-6-figure-bill. They had an excellent restaurant. Steak for 4 euro, and every week a different theme. Even the spaghetti bolognaise was excellent. Didn't do anything for the rest of 2 months, going in several times with my access badge just for the restaurant (to "discuss followup"). This went very slowly because of the top 3 levels of management, who had to approve everything, 2 were government appointed positions. These people never even came in because their performance and future at the company was only tied to their party's performance in elections, which had absolutely nothing to do with what this department was regulating.
Google can probably provide incredible remote desktops. Small companies can't, due to cost (not of the connection, hardware cost. Remote desktops, to be good, need to be machines running large VMs. That means modern i9s with 64G of ram MINIMUM). I'm not sure what Google uses, but ... Large companies and government can't, due to "best practices" preventing timely upgrades. This happens because they require everything be explained, risk-assessed, verified by external consultants, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
About 3 months ago I went full thin-client using similar internal tools. 90+% of my workflow is using terminals and editors that work brilliantly over an SSH tunnel. For the stuff that can't be done on a remote computer (flashing boards, physical hardware), I have a couple scripts that allow me to do that locally. The whole thing has turned out to be less work than the physical tower under my desk.
Common problems in my experience:
* Build performance is crap every morning as the file cache is purged from RAM overnight and needs to refetched from remote disks
* Build performance is largely determined by how much cpu and RAM others VMs on the server are using concurrently. Sometimes it's really good when it's underutilized, but sometimes it can be pretty bad as you are no longer using more resources than you were allocated
* Trying to interact with it via a GUI (chrome remote desktop for instance) is quite laggy. This doesn't bother me as I am already on the ssh + tmux gravy train.
I really appreciate the consistency of dedicated hardware and really don't want to give it up.
But we're not talking about the same thing here.
I do also work 99% in the terminal, and SSH is perfectly okay.
But my window manager is running locally.
In a thin client/remote desktop setup the WM is running remotely. From my experience, this makes the mouse and keyboard ever so slightly laggy that's it's very annoying.
I'm under the impression that the vast majority of people use their cloudtop over ssh and a remote vscode connection. I only ever use a remote gui for a few minutes every X weeks to do chrome-based auth for an nonstandard workflow.
I worked for a company during Covid where I had to remotely connect to a Windows machine, and from there, connect to a Linux machine.
The only issue I had was keyboard mapping, specially because I was using a macbook. I had to remap a few keys, but even then, a few hotkeys didn’t work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better and I can see many companies will force us all to this in 10 years time.
If you see some building as a large tent, where the people roll a little cabinet with their stuff to some free space that is changing every other day, that already has arrived. I think it's called 'flexible workspace'.
Clearly a signal that search is about to go through a massive change. AI chatbots will compete with Google search and take market share. The company is boarding up the windows
Google has been getting steadily stingier with personal space for a long time. My last job there was at Crittenden, and the desks were next to each other with no dividers whatsoever. That was the worst of my twelve or so locations, by far. But this really takes the prize.
Personal story: in the 1980's I had about a half hour interview with Eric Schmidt, at Sun (yes, that Eric Schmidt). The one thing I remember is, he said that if you looked at the cost for private offices vs. cubicles, they were about the same, and that must be the case because the market will equilibrate. This was at a time when private offices still existed.
I don't think Google's Real Estate division got the message.
By the quality of the work. Whatever you save on one end you will have to pay on another end. Or the less competitive thing will go out of market completely. At least if you assume a rational market with fully rational actors.
This makes sense though. If people aren’t coming in 5 days a week, why should they have dedicated spaces for 5 days?
We have a hoteling system which works pretty well. You get lockers you can place things you don’t want to carry each time in (KB/Mouse/Pen stand/cables/etc for me) and before I come to the office I reserve a desk and plug in my laptop into the docking station and I have my whole setup ready (well in my case I also need to plug in my Keyboard and mouse, but for most people thars all they need).
I preferred my dedicated space with all my stuff, but when no one’s coming in 5 days a week the lack of a dedicated space makes complete sense.
Agree. It goes against my grain to seem in support of anything FANG companies do, but this is just a logical extension of the WFH trend. One of the reasons it will stay is that it enables corps to save on office space, and Google is simply ahead of the curve: the businesses that realize this cost saving effect first will have an advantage. Most employees will likely see the small discomfort as a fair price to pay for being able to work from home many/most days. (Not counting the vocal minority that seem to love commuting, office work, mingling and watercooler chatting).
LOL. I worked for SGI in the late 1990s and was hired as a contractor in the marketing department. I recall having to share desk space on Rengstorff Ave in Mountain View —-which is, of course , where Google HQ is currently located.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 75.6 ms ] threadEmployees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with another employee. They will not sit at the same desk at the same time.
Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.
Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enough desks given that they mandated a return to office.
1.) Bosses loved the feeling of superiority they had by having their own office but everyone else is sitting out in the open where they can easily see them all and bother them at a moment's notice.
2.) Fresh out of college grads would see them and get this feeling of a cool, buzzing, hypersocial hive that made them feel all good inside.
Companies: please come back to the office
Employees: why? Why have them at all? I don't have an "office" I have a small section of table. At home I have an office.
Companies: we invested money in these work spaces and want them to be used
Employees: you mean the shitty open space you moved to in order to save money rather than real "offices"? the ones that make us provably/demonstrably less productive than being at our home offices? If its about money, get rid of them entirely.
Companies: Um, yes. It helps build interaction and community
Employees: No, being shoved together like cattle breeds resentment and irritation and distraction and a feeling of no privacy or ability to think.
Companies: Just come back to the office. It's about buy-in
Employees: You mean the buy-in you refuse to provide for reasonable work spaces?
Similar to how professors at university usually have such an office.
With how much remote work has taken off and how much companies want to bring at least some people, this is certainly a perk that I would consider.
5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own desk. You don't want them having their productivity hurt by being crammed in like sardines. But in this case, let's be real. Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
>Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.
I wouldn't expect germaphobia to be the issue, it's the constant change that prevents employees from getting into a routine. We all already know that software engineers need to get into the zone to be productive, which takes time and becoming comfortable with what they are working on. How easy is that going to be when you have to adapt to a new environment everytime you go to work and reset up your workstation in the manner that works for the engineer?
The ADA legally mandates that accommodations be made for people that need them and if you're not in that category you're being ridiculous and if you are this doesn't even apply to you.
You are being ableist right now.
Actually I'm going to lay into you for this. Do you have any fucking idea what its like to not be able to get an erection? Not to feel your legs, shoulders, or hips for days? To not be able to tell when you have to poop? And all it takes is a fucking $200 chair that they leave the fuck alone to be just fine? I don't need the goddamn ada. All I need is a little trial and error to get my spine aligned right so I can sit for 8 hours without "SUPRISE you cant feel your DICK" and then to have that chair left the fuck alone.
Dude you will be so fucked when you hit 60. You have no idea how much you will hate the world for the lack of consideration it shows you.
maybe, at the end of the day, the cleaning crew does a deep clean of the surfaces etc..
I'm quite used to spending part of my paycheck on things like renting my own toilet, my own bathroom, kitchen with my own coffee maker and while it is used for a much larger part of the day my bedroom is only used < 1/3 of the day.
I have no idea why we are doing this!
> Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money.
No man! People actually BUY cars so that they can keep them all to themselves!
It gets more absurd I assure you. The justification for most of them is to drive to work!
I think investors know we are doing this with their money?
I’m a cofounder at my current startup so I guess I think differently about a business paying for things that are needlessly idle for no reason, but you do you. We don’t think paying for office space makes sense at all and don’t. But if we did, no way are we flushing cash down the toilet for overly indulged devs when that cash can go to raises and bonuses for top performers (morale). And if a top performer wants a dedicated, non shared desk, well ok. We will offer them a choice between a salary boost or the desk.
You walk it back slightly by saying that you offer the choice between the cost savings or the desk to the worker, but somehow I doubt that the worker's are getting the whole cost savings or that you wouldn't start bucketing them as no longer a top performer for making what you view as a sub optimal choice.
Everything is about work. We allow people to have a home and a car... wait for it... so that they can work! If salaries are to small to survive people stop working, if they are to big they also stop working. We've tailored the salary to squeeze out maximum productivity. Where homes and/or food are cheap employees are also cheap and visa versa.
This is no accident!
I applaud that you are not renting office space, your programmers already have a desk and a computer and their salary is such that they can and will replace it. You are going to pay for that. You have to or they will go work some place else where the salaries are more calibrated.
If you will ever do offices you will need a good excuse for it. What that might be we don't know but you will need something in return for sacrificing productivity. As everything is about work that what the proverbial top performer wants is probably related to work too! If they are more productive if you give them their own office you would have to figure out if it is worth it.
It would have to be some office if they are to feel at home there. Or actually, if they are to be more comfortable than at home.
The whole premise is absurd, the product they make (if not interrupted) is 1's and 0's it can easily be shipped all over the world. 2 desks will make it slower and needlessly complex.
Maybe the migrants are right and we are wrong. Maybe the show should be about living not about working. One time a coworker who barely speaks the language was asked if he could do a 7 day work week again. He reluctantly agreed and asked "but when do I live?"
Yeah, the old ways deserve every bit of mockery. The revolution has to happen now or it wont happen at all.
I get the value of quiet time, I just don't feel like it's lost. Still plenty of places to hide. Maybe I'm an outlier.
hmm... disagree. strongly. have you seen the quality of some publications? surely the line between garbage and not-garbage is lower than this.
unless you are someone who considers something extremely political to be the only good publication or something; I hope not
I used to like arstechnica but it's degraded into what I am complaining about. The title of the article implies that people are crammed in desks next to each other by being purposefully vague.
maybe the headline put a different picture in your mind than what the article said, but the headline seems ok to me.
if you wrote the headline for that article, what would it say?
100% this.
I think they were good about 10 years ago. Now they are just garbage
The problem is that the clickbaity stuff becomes viral.
Which is why the clickbaity stuff exists.
The real issue is that readers like you and me are garbage and reward publications for the garbage they write. The good stuff won’t even get a fraction of the views.
This article sums it up:
https://medium.com/@pravse/the-maze-is-in-the-mouse-980c57cf...
Startups that don’t suck. But if you want a big, safe company…… hmmm, maybe MSFT, Salesforce, Netflix…. Honestly I hate big companies so wish I could recommend better.
My personal experience: 2001 I got assigned to an internal project to keep me busy. When planning and getting feedback from the internal stakeholders I realized that they weren't interested in the project. I slacked off, because there was nothing else to do. I got laid off six months later.
This is the end.
All thin client/remote desktop solutions that I have used are laggy enough to piss off a programmer, while fast enough to fool a manager.
It's the perfect killing blow to productivity and morale.
Run a mbp as your carry around, and then everything else runs on an overbuilt server vm with a direct connection to shared storage.
I’m able to sync to head + rebuild 100k+ files in < 5 mins
Development on an internal fork of VS code (web page) which sets up all the build tooling for you to use your cloud top as your build eng. Includes ML based completion as well which is nice.
So if you have used VS code I’d imagine the accessibility is similar as audio is rendered locally?
I used to consult, and got at one point hired to explain to higher management, at a small but important "regulatory" government department, why 256kbps ADSL sucked for rdesktop (which was on a private ATM channel from the incumbent telco, very expensive, and also very bad, it was still ADSL over an ATM backbone, in 2005, supposedly it was more secure ...). Note 256kbps = 32 KB/sec. I'm not sure how much they paid, but the page describing the product at the telco said to call to make an appointment for sales to visit you to get some pricing info. Oh, and the backend connection for this had to be done in duplicate, with endpoints in 2 different countries. I'm pretty sure just the backend connections cost a decent house a month at minimum.
Needless to say, over 32 KB/sec, rdesktop is pretty much unusable. Not that said incumbent telco actually delivered 32 KB/sec, merely because they paid through the nose.
So I wrote a 40 page document, written in 12 days, for a just-barely-not-6-figure-bill. They had an excellent restaurant. Steak for 4 euro, and every week a different theme. Even the spaghetti bolognaise was excellent. Didn't do anything for the rest of 2 months, going in several times with my access badge just for the restaurant (to "discuss followup"). This went very slowly because of the top 3 levels of management, who had to approve everything, 2 were government appointed positions. These people never even came in because their performance and future at the company was only tied to their party's performance in elections, which had absolutely nothing to do with what this department was regulating.
Google can probably provide incredible remote desktops. Small companies can't, due to cost (not of the connection, hardware cost. Remote desktops, to be good, need to be machines running large VMs. That means modern i9s with 64G of ram MINIMUM). I'm not sure what Google uses, but ... Large companies and government can't, due to "best practices" preventing timely upgrades. This happens because they require everything be explained, risk-assessed, verified by external consultants, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
I really appreciate the consistency of dedicated hardware and really don't want to give it up.
But my window manager is running locally.
In a thin client/remote desktop setup the WM is running remotely. From my experience, this makes the mouse and keyboard ever so slightly laggy that's it's very annoying.
I worked for a company during Covid where I had to remotely connect to a Windows machine, and from there, connect to a Linux machine.
The only issue I had was keyboard mapping, specially because I was using a macbook. I had to remap a few keys, but even then, a few hotkeys didn’t work.
It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better and I can see many companies will force us all to this in 10 years time.
Personal story: in the 1980's I had about a half hour interview with Eric Schmidt, at Sun (yes, that Eric Schmidt). The one thing I remember is, he said that if you looked at the cost for private offices vs. cubicles, they were about the same, and that must be the case because the market will equilibrate. This was at a time when private offices still existed.
I don't think Google's Real Estate division got the message.
... How? That is, through what mechanism?
We have a hoteling system which works pretty well. You get lockers you can place things you don’t want to carry each time in (KB/Mouse/Pen stand/cables/etc for me) and before I come to the office I reserve a desk and plug in my laptop into the docking station and I have my whole setup ready (well in my case I also need to plug in my Keyboard and mouse, but for most people thars all they need).
I preferred my dedicated space with all my stuff, but when no one’s coming in 5 days a week the lack of a dedicated space makes complete sense.