When will introverts realise that their working conditions are being dictated to them by extroverts? The pandemic-driven remote working is hell for some people, and unfortunately they call the shots.
I donāt mind coming into your office now and again (thereās a special dimension to IRL connections), but the reason I donāt want to work there full time is that itās crap for knowledge work. I outspend you by 10x per head in my home office, and everything there is to my exact specification. The whole field of modern office design should be a discredited pseudoscience; management is addicted to it because of the real estate crisis though.
This is also kind of terrible, because a lot of people use FAANG as their North star for every policy decision.
āWell Google use primary colours in their logo, Brianā
I have been working remotely for decades.
Most people can't work remotely and productively because they are not trained to do so. E.g. You are in your office (inside your home) and your wife, your dog or child enters it demanding you do some kind of non important issue right now, distracting you from your work.You need to be trained to not them let them distract you. The people living in your house need to be trained as well on what to do.
The training for working in the(external) Office started at school, from a time fiber optics telecommunications were unheard for common mortals.
Most people feel alone because they lack the social skills to make friends outside work, or just lack the initiative, knowledge and internal motivation to work without external pressure and supervision.
The companies that will solve this issue at big scale in the future are those that solve it because the they have to in order to survive(against established companies). It will be a startup that faces all the risks involved, not an established company like Google or Facebook.
It will not be companies that could pay millions for people living in ultra expensive places and are already making big bucks doing that. They don't need to change because the system already works for them.
After a year working remotely, I don't think I'd be willing to go back to working fully (or even primarily) in the office.
I could do a day here or there for team-building activities or major meetings, but that's pretty much the extent I'd be willing to do.
Granted, this is based on having a 40-minutes train commute (each way, so 80 minutes/day), but unless I could have a 10 minute walk or bike commute I don't think my opinion would materially change, and that's pretty unlikely where I live due to downtown property/rent prices (Tokyo).
I think this is mostly driven by management's insecurities / needs to see their "subjects" right in front of them and their typical need to "show" their activities in an obvious/noisy way. Typical managers tend to be extroverts and find allies in other extroverts or in people who happen to work in/enjoy the social interaction in office. Unfortunately there is not much representation of introverts in the decision making circle so those people will be once more thrown under the "quality-of-face-to-face-interactions" bus. Engineering-driven, low-politics, not-so-large orgs might do things a bit differently.
> If employees want to work from home beyond Sept. 1, they will need to formally apply for a max of 14 days annually
Somehow this sounds to me like: "Oh, and remember: next Friday... is Hawaiian shirt day. So, you know, if you want to, go ahead and wear a Hawaiian shirt and jeans."
What surprises me about this whole discourse is how quickly the narrative has been rewritten.
Read any article from the likes of HBR from 2019 and it's apparent that much, much research shows that offices, and open offices in particular are toxic for productivity - and that the 'water cooler' collaboration effect has been vastly overstated.
Sometimes in an open office you could go several hours without getting anything done at all because someone had decided to hold an impromptu meeting by your desk. And irony of all ironies - you put your headphones in at a loud enough volume to drown out the noise and then get tapped on the shoulder for 'distracting' people.
Fast forward a year and a half and the 'water cooler' myth seems to be accepted as fact, and none of the business press seems to mention at all the harmful effects of open offices on productivity. It's not like good ideas ever came from those interactions - they tended to produce the half baked ideas, and definitely didn't produce the x-functional alignment it actually takes to get anything done in most orgs.
The switching cost of interruption - or even the fear that you could at any moment be interrupted - is a complete inhibitor to deep work. My only hope is that when people are inevitably forced back into the office, people will be able to be more productive because of 40% fewer people being in them.
I'm a little shocked by this. I thought the big tech companies and Google specifically were leading the charge in "we will allow significant WFH forever going forward", but maybe I wasn't paying enough attention.
Personally, I'm at a small data company, and we're opening a new office for people where WFH is a burden (NYC apartments and all), but is so far voluntary. In fact, I think there are only seats for less than 1/3 of the company. I've been really impressed with how smoothly everyone shifted to all zoom all the time mode, and honestly, my small conference room meetings have been more productive the last year.
And, now that they don't have to be first, Amazon is in:
Amazon updates remote work guidance, plans to āreturn to an office-centric culture as our baselineā
https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-updates-remote-work-gui...
oof.
If the employees of these companies want a remote life after the experience of this past year, they'll leave the company. If the companies are experiencing enough loss they may reconsider their remote stance. I think it's unlikely though. More likely than not some employees will leave and the company will hire new employees that don't want to work remote.
I feel like the "max 14 days per year" put the slam down on 2 days home / 3 days office everyone said would happen.
After spending more than a year remote, full remote is difficult ( not impossible ) . Most of us have settled on 3 days at home, 2 days at work, so we can socialize, make new connections or just simply have lunch.
Going back to in office 100% is a thing of the past unless you are a team that has to be there - making hardware etc.
For ex I cant imagine the Pixel team working 100% remote.
As someone who's worked only remotely for several years, this makes sense. I know many will disagree with this assertion but in my estimation in-person collaboration is far better than online-only.
I think the best balance is at least a couple days per week in the office and the rest remote.
As what would be described as an aspergers person, I find offices full of people playing bizarre political and social games with each other that I don't have any particular interest in and the workplaces themselves to be extremely unproductive. I hate working in offices with people often appointed due to nepotism or just because they are like the person hiring, that I would rather be poor then work in them.
The entire concept of workplaces, how they are run, and what people do is created by the normal person and for the normal person. This is completely irrespective and often counter to what produces the best outcome. It is about the social needs of these people, not the needs of the product.
That's interesting, since my assumption is that Google would be fairly data driven. I'd be curious if Googlers feel like this is because they are really seeing reduced productivity, or if there's a different motivation.
Datapoint: long ago (decades) I worked for a large well known valley software company, for several years. During that time I worked with many colleagues who were somewhere on the same campus, but I never physically met them. Obviously I was around my team mates, manager, and I attended many cross-group in-person physical meetings, but the number of people I interacted with online only was large. This was before video conferencing existed, just email phone and IM.
This focus on returning to work or a hybrid model really seems like a missed chance to pivot the economy in a new direction. It would be great if these companies let employees work remotely full time if they choose. That'll allow people to have more freedom in where and how they live, and also distribute the economy more evenly. Right now, working for big tech companies means having to live in one of a few big city centers, that all share virtually the same cultures (socially and politically) and lifestyles. Haven't people figured out how to make remote work successful in this last year? Anecdotally, it seems like most people are just as productive.
I am an introvert and I am never going back to office. If I won't find work in a forward thinking company I'll do something else, but never in the office. Because of the time gained by not communing, I was finally able to do my hobbies and researching my own business that hopefully I'll make happen next year. Even if they wanted to pay for time spend on commute, no thank you. I realised the time I would be losing is priceless. You won't ever have it. If that means I'll earn less or nothing at all? So what, I'll be happier. Also - we should start demanding that companies will pay for use of our homes as their office. How come paying rent to some rich office owners is fine, but if a worker wants to be paid for use of his or hers home is not?
In my mind this past year of pandemic work from home hasnāt been an accurate depiction of normal (non-pandemic) work from home because of the forced isolation in the hours outside of work. It seems like the pendulum is swinging back too far too fast to in office work.
I like work from home and get to focus more effectively than the open office. Iām pretty deep on the introvert side of the scale and this pandemic has been too isolating for even me. Which is to say I donāt think work from home should be removed because most everyone is socially needy now. Iām looking forward to being with friends again. But I do not want to go back to working in the office. Iām hoping my work has max one required office day for meetings a week, but not more, and hopefully less.
I have a permanently impaired immune system and had a corporate job for five years. There are things that can be done to help make offices less of a health hazard even in the face of something like covid and most people don't cope well with remote work.
It takes a lot of practice to get good at effective emails in place of face to face conversations.
I actually tended to email my immediate boss my questions. With my eyesight issues or whatever, I seemed incapable of figuring out how to show up at her cubicle with good timing like other people routinely did.
When I and two other people on my team were moved to a newly created troubleshooting team but kept the same technical lead, my work life hardly changed. I continued mostly emailing my questions and getting what I needed.
My two coworkers who had been dependent on being able to talk with her face to face were blowing a gasket now that their desks were too far from hers to conveniently slip into her cubicle like they were used to doing.
I can handle remote work. I've spent a lot of time doing things online for a lot of years.
But I'm not surprised that it's been a tough work year for most people and productivity seems to have generally been down. Working remotely takes a different skill set and many people simply don't have it, even people who work at a computer all day.
I enjoy working from home. If reopening offices means going back to the office and having to sit in a mask for eight hours a day, no thank you.
The title and article feel slightly misleading.
It is allowing some offices to have people who want to come back early, come back.
It is sticking by its commitment of allowing WFH until September and looking at hybrid models for after.
Personally, a hybrid model seems ideal to me. I dislike remote full time.
To me, after reading the article, it seems like Google saw all these offices they have and realized all the money would go to waste if people donāt use them.
And then thereās the middle manager aspect.
Google made these offices with the idea to make people feel like the office is āhomeā. Snacks, food, bring your dog, etc all screams āwhy go home when you have everything here?ā
The cynic in me believes that is exactly their aim, to keep people at the office longer and middle manage.
That said, I do believe that a lot of people have a hard time not working in an office. These people should still have the choice, though, and these offices should not feel like home. Because it isnāt.
But this is still something that many companies will take advantage of; it simply costs less to not rent an office. Yes, they should also pay for part of the rent and internet bills for the employee, but it would still cost less than renting a huge building. Especially in Silicon Valley.
As someone whose been in an awfully designed office at a "thrifty" company, I can't imagine how returning to that office would be a gain for me.
I was put in a row of desks literally next to the open kitchen/conversation area. My day had constant distractions and I had no control over how I wanted my work environment to be.
Working from home, I'm incredibly comfortable AND productive. The noise level, lighting, etc are all how I choose them. I dont have this tension around other people getting to decide for me how I want to work.
If you work in a FAANG type of office environment, the above probably doesn't apply to you. Your office is professionally designed and cost many millions of dollars. You are given high quality equipment to make you comfortable. Your office has amenities that make being there easier.
Well, it's a nice move by Google.
It makes sure that people who are aligned with new ways of working have less reasons to work there. It also sends a strong signal the PHBs have taken over.
Thanks for letting me know, so I know not to apply.
I find this interesting that the new economy Google is so set on office work where as Shell (at least in .au) is planning on staff having an office / work from home mix. They have even reduced overall office space so that they don't have enough spaces for all employees to work from some local offices.
It would be interesting for someone to look into the value of the commercial real estate holdings of the big tech companies in any examination of why they are declaring the end of permanent remote work.
I say whatās up to most of the team till about noon, and unless I have meetings I mostly nap a bit. I wake up early and do my work.
Before the pandemic I used to goto work and not do shit. Wake up early on one or two days and do my work.
Itās the same exact routine except now I have to pretend in the office when I could just be napping and doing better work later.
:shrugs:
Iāll find a way around whatever bullshit the suits come up with.
"a maximum of 14 days remote per year"
-- WHAT? They need to apply for that?
For a company that provides so many tools for remote work, they are trying so hard to show that they do not believe in them.
My company is located in a place that's pretty difficult to reach via public transport. It's common knowledge that owning a car is expensive. We are working fully remote since november, and I realized that I just own a car for the sake of getting to work.
Don't get me wrong: I like to drive "somewhere" on the weekend or visit family and friends, but for that, an older car would be fine enough. Heck, I could even persue my dream of a convertible. I just own a decent car to have a reliable way to get to work. Every. Day.
Things might change for me moving forward.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-31/ibm-expec...
IBM expects >80% of their employees to be spending at least 3 days per week in the office post-pandemic. Parents will be allowed to continue to WFH until schools re-open in September. And they're labeling THIS as a "hybrid model".
Is this 1st April joke?
Even though it's clear that to each their own. It's amazing how hard people can make life for themselves. I'm totally for you working at an office if you feel you're more successful and happier that way. But given you are somewhat forced to do something else, try to make it work. Of course there are exceptions and that people may have really dramatic households that make all of the below impossible. But, how many are there, really? I think it's mostly a matter of communicating and setting expectations properly.
a) I'm interrupted at home. Communicate, talk to your kids and rest of the family (works from ages 4 and up, before then you need to agree for a partner/caretaker to handle kids) and let them know there are times they can't interrupt you but the key here is: offer times where they can! You can't expect to be left alone 8 hours a day in a row in this new arrangement.
b) I can't work without pressure. Communicate, talk to your teammates and have a virtual room where you just work, without talking unless there's a question. There's also focusmate.com if you are afraid of your coworkers. Also, create a routine for yourself. Be unafraid of asking for help.
c) I don't have friends or family. Will an office really change that? I know that the friends I made working at an office I still have, and that I've made friends working remotely too. As well as having the friends I made when young.
Finally, many workplaces are not enabling workers to be successful remotely, becuase they don't know how to or they don't want to. You need to encourage async, reduce (not increase!) meetings, and offer more freedom to accommodate for the above.
I guess I am an extreme in that I hate going into work. WFH forever please.
If any Google employees are reading this thread and don't agree with this move, it seems like the kind of issue that the Alphabet Workers Union would be in a perfect position to help push back on. Join up: https://alphabetworkersunion.org/
It should be made optional because WFH every day is boring but working from office everyday is hectic and risky now.
Everyone keeps saying, "There are so many good things about WFH". Ya, good for you. People who make these decisions don't care what's good for you. "But I'm more productive when I'm happy" you say. They don't care how productive you are. They care how profitable you are with is the ratio of how productive you are to how much you cost. If they can hire three miserable people to do what you do at one fifth the cost they'll do it. You being a happy is incidental to what they're doing.
"But they don't have to pay for office space". Sure, but you're totally discounting the amount of power that they gain by having control of your physical body. I get to tell you where to be, when to be there, and what to do. I have cameras and badges to verify you're there. You're also physically close so you're buying a house with a mortgage, putting your kids in school. If I fire you your only choice is something within a 100mi radius. I'm a member of local business groups so there's a good chance I know where you're going and maybe even play golf with the companies CEO. You better not burn any bridges on your way out or I might shake my head and make a face when I mention your name on the back nine.
I guarantee you that some people will be allowed to work from home. Others won't. Right now they're busily working to determine which ones those will be where it's best for them. The outcome will be you'll always get the worst deal. The ones that are fungible and I can cut costs to the bone? Sure work from home. The ones that I need a little more leverage with? You're coming into the office. I'll even buy a foosball table and put some snacks in the kitchen if it makes you feel better.
I don't really give a shit if you go across town. They take my people, I take yours. The point is your ours and we trade you as we see fit. Think I'm being dramatic. Think again https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...
Google use to be a good company to work for.
I'm so glad I left my big tech job.
So:
You must live somewhere with the highest cost of living.
Working on software that intentionally isolates and manipulates people
And now you don't even get to work from your overpriced home.
I'm sure there won't be a retention problem,
Perhaps this will trigger a number of employees to leave for other companies with more flexible policies, or more interestingly, trigger a new wave of start-ups.
That's a weird decision for Google. Bad management.
Price it in. 8h work + 2h commute means minimum 25%+ higher comp to come into the office. We now know it's not necessary for the majority of work.
Managing salaried employees by optimizing their productivity as hourly labourers is essentially abuse.
The secret is to always maintain an opportunity funnel and a pipeline of potential job opportunities that you can convert into interviews or jobs within a few weeks.
Executives likely have data showing that wfh doesn't work. From a cost perspective, most executives would prefer wfh because 1) the talent pool is greater 2) they can save on facility expenses 3) they can dramatically reduce compensation
Over time (1) and (3) could see compensation easily halve as supply of developers becomes more easily globalized
What nobody is saying is that covid is not going away. This is highly irresponsible of Google given they have all the research in the world showing that. They already have the ideal situation set up to mitigate the risk of getting and spreading it. The vaccines aren't and never claimed to be 100% effective against covid, and as new variants have emerged, it's looking more like covid is going to be the next annual flu, except with all of the worst symptoms of covid, which can include death.
Our administration needs to pass legislation to prevent companies from forcing people back into offices. This is rediculous.
How long until Verizon acquires them?
the problem was never remote vs colocated. it was commuting.
offices are fine (though not required). travelling for > 15-20 mins to and from work is what sucks the most.
we need local office hubs. work around your local community for your employer near your home.
The whole "remote work is the new normal" didn't last long.
Instead of being thankful to employees for increasing Google stock price by 50% in the last 12 months, Google now try to repress the staff. Another reason not to use Google services.
Howabout we get this raging pandemic under control first, and then companies can sort out how to get back into offices. There is far too much hubris and suicidal optimism at the idea that in a month everything is safe to share air with others again. Over half of the country is surging in new cases for a potential huge 4th wave, we're starting to see some vaccine breakthrough cases including unexpected hospitalizations and deaths from fully vaccinated folks, and children are still totally unvaccinated for at least the next 6-12 months. We also have only begun to verify mRNA boosters will work and be feasible to adapt to the ever-changing variants. All of these problems are surmountable and I fully expect to see them solved, but not in a couple months.
There's a part of me that wants to stop reading Google headlines and remember them as they were before the Great Decline.
What does "accelerating" mean?
I'm guessing they found that employees aren't as productive when they not obliged to show up to the office every day. Not to mention when they're not provided with a steady stream of free food and coffee.
Fourteen days a year seems pretty limited--weren't Googler's working from home more often than that before the pandemic?
Hope this does not start a trend
Iāll go back to the office when they give me my own four walls and a door.
April fools?
damn i guess all the megacorps decided to announce today
If climate change is real, then commuting is going to die sooner or later.
God no.. remote wirk advocates needed Google
Another article about Amazon doing the same https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26650430
At the beginning of the pandemic did google not announce that employees can work remotely
The typical googler is a 20 or 30-something that has close to zero life interest outside work. I would not expect them to want to stay remote as their social life revolves around Google.
Sadly, from what I have seen most people with a good work life balance want to stay remote while people with few other life interests want absolutely go back to work.
I predict that in a couple years this will be part of the culture of each company. You will chose a company based on your desire to become close friends with your colleagues or live a great life outside the office.
"I spent all this money on offices, better force the minions to sit in them"
My first read I saw "pornodoro", then timer, and thought this comment was going in a whole other direction.
did everyone starting leaving the hell hole known as Mountain View?
Hey guys, why don't you guys stop browsing hacker news and go back to your 200k/year job.
As a person who has first-hand experience working with dedicated Google managers - this is great news. I used to be able to get answers very quickly, but even the simplest issues nowadays can take up to 3 weeks to get resolved. "Everyone is remote, you understand" - is the usual reply. I can any guess how terrible it's for regular businesses that don't have assigned dedicated account managers.
Remote work is terrible for productivity especially if the company was not already remote first. In my employer, we've noticed a 30-40% productivity dip across the board. Not only that, but people are reporting more stress and are working unhealthy hours. Replying to emails at 9pm, etc.
The communication breakdowns are constant. Previously you'd absorb information through osmosis, but the watercooler chat about projects and upcoming initiatives has outright stopped.
If in person meetings are 10 in terms of information bandwidth, video calls are less than 6. They're just terrible. Oh, I accidentally interrupted someone yet again because of lag despite us all having fiber internet. Amazing.
Just in case you were operating under the illusion that tech giants are run by forward thinking executives who are immune to the usual politics and problems of corporate life. Nope, most of their exec layer is a bunch of people who cut their teeth the industry in the 90's, and are operating within a thick fog of local workplace politics. I guarantee that behind this move is an executive who believes that developers need to be physically colocated to be productive, because that's how it worked when he was coming up at WordPerfect or whatever. Backing it is also a group of people who have a lot to gain from it politically.
At my employer we have some pockets of embarrassing leadership like this, but thankfully I haven't seen it in anyone senior enough to make global policy like this. My department is letting go of remote teams and only hiring in a handful of cities around the world, while ramping up office space spending. It's more expensive, less flexible, and less productive... and everyone knows it. But I guess it makes some people feel important, and it's how some others remember developing when they last did it 20 years ago. So it's happening anyway, and many of their best engineers are now on the market.