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They're getting rid of real estate yet force people to work from the office at least n days a week. Why not embrace remote and get rid of even more real estate.

Company I work for did this. Our CFO said he never wants to deal with real estate again. I will follow this man to the depths of hell and back.

No you won’t. You’ll be behind your keyboard on a beach while he goes to hell and back.

Speaking from experience: You can work your ass off from a beach. If anything, I'm more likely to do so

(virtually)

Video call into the depths of hell

What happens when he does something you don't like? Perhaps everyone back in the office? Or camera on all day while you work?

Then you quit? I don't understand this question.

> I will follow this man to the depths of hell and back.

I suspect the real reason for this is to make job hopping harder, and improve the employer bargaining position.

Real estate is just a slog. It takes years to build new office space. Lease opportunities come up on weird schedules and tend to be long-term too. They're likely offloading the space they started acquiring pre-COVID, or in the first year of (when the industry was hiring like crazy), because they're not optimistic about being able to fill it any time soon.

They could probably spread things out instead, but real estate is stupidly expensive, and Google was never known for spacious accommodations (maybe except for some remote offices). I can't imagine they have any motivation to spend more if their approach worked fine for more over a decade.

I don't love it, but how many applicants walked away because of cramped open spaces? How many top performers quit for that reason? We just put up with it.

"Return to office, what's left of it"

You thought it was bad before, now we're going to cram you into an even smaller open floor plan.

It'll enable collaboration

Being forced to sit on co-workers lap while desk-sharing (and chair-sharing) will enable even closer collaboration

It isn't exactly "innovative". I expected google to be on the cutting edge. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wUOUmeulNs

About 6 months ago my manager, who happens to prefer RTO told me how if I only visit office sometime, I should not expect to have a desk. I was amused, but I did not ask if that means I can just stay home then.

Clearly management class figured out a fun little plan. Announce RTO so that people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount ( lower cost ), introduce hybrid ( so that you can claim you are flexible in posting even if you offer 1 remote day out of 5 and save real estate at the same time ), sell non-performing real estate ( lower cost ) and cramming employees into rotating cubicles ( efficiency ).

What does it all translate to? Bonuses.

I am not exactly a revolutionary type, but its now or never if you are on a particular side of the fence. Whatever window is there to establish a normal, it is closing now.

> people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount

Self-select usually mean the brightest and most capable select another job though.

That is the weirdest part of this whole shift for me. Remote positions now get tons of applications and can afford to select best possible candidates, while 'old guard' is left with 'not best' candidates. Granted, some positions do not need a rocket scientist, but one would think a company would want someone, who is capable enough to have options.

And yet, HRs across the US spectrum seem to be sending the same memo. I am mildly annoyed by this, because I had a mini-conversation today and the tone from an executive was: business won't let this ( WFH ) stand.

Maybe it is not about best possible candidate. Maybe they are ok with less capable people for whatever reason.

Cliché that the best people are among the remote workers.

Are they, though? Coding well doesn’t make a good programmer. Interaction does, and influence in the office does.

I think remote workers just hate office politics, like everyone else, but that makes them non-contributing to company growth.

I think it is a valid question and I will attempt to respond in good faith.

I do not personally think that there is no value to politics. Sadly, we have to navigate those waters somehow.

But, if people who self-select out say they do not want to deal with it and instead contribute to company growth one line at a time, why would you not allow them to specialize in that?

Or are they just an easy target practice for politically astute?

FWIW, I am probably not a great remote worker. Still, good enough to get the job done. What more does an employer want from me? They are good enough to me that I can extent some loyalty and goodwill, but why would a company want me to also participate and contribute to its craziness politically?

<< Cliché that the best people are among the remote workers.

Well, it is that way now because fully remote work is in demand if you look at sheer application numbers for those roles. Companies have their picks for those. Anecdotally, my company, where my manager is RTO-oriented, but does not seem to want to rock the boat too much, begrudgingly seems to have accepted that for the position he listed ( niche in niche kinda deal ), he won't get a guy to just move from another state just to sit in a chair one day a week ( and depend on corporate whims ) so he had to accept that reality.

Mebbe its a cliche, but, not unlike stereotype, there is a reason it exists.

> why would you not allow them to specialize in that?

Because it requires pre-hashed work. It requires someone else to do the politics for them. But we may be unclear on the definition of office politics.

In this situation, the politics is simply drawing on a whiteboard an architecture with or without Kubernetes, taking note of who cringes and who is unhappy, and extracting the technical reasonings which a very real and legitimate for the future of our app. “I’ll be hella expensive”, “Will be awesome because every dev wants Kubernetes exposure” “Will be a hell because no-one know K8s”, all those concerns are not “playing office politics” but “finding and addressing the technical hurdles”.

Once we know we want K8s, sure, any remoter worker can do it, but this is not the difficult part in that process. It’s like the chain factory was already set up, and here’s your seat.

In a chain factory, the genius is not in the chain worker, but in the engineers who split the work.

Remote people can participate in office politics, but the fact that during 3-days-remote-per-week, office politics only happen on the remaining 2 days, it shows it’s much more smooth in face-to-face.

Perhaps with Apple’s VR…

I think that's what was implied by "it's now or never".

Your company forces anti-remote policies? If you're worth anything, just leave.

I love this approach.

Our org had a different plan. They put the entire office (region based) on organized teams and sent out an email. You get team points based on: - visits to the office - meals in the office - attendance at after hours events - etc. etc.

SMDH. I can see the article headline now "Innovative gamification in the office"

I am bullish on apple’s vr headsets. That is all you’ll have room for. No desks!

A "concentration floor plan"?

"Return to ofc"

So do the people at Google who handle real estate rentals talk to the people who ordered everyone to come back to the office?

The observation is that offices are underused, so both space reduction and a presence increase improve this statistic.

It's not like you can only do one thing, then keep the rest of your operations still.

CA is being abandoned. I'm thinking I should leave and not be left behind.

A 2BR 1000 sqft house in the Bay Area still costs $1.5M (and rising), so there's a lot of "abandoning" still to be done.

It’s really sad if that happens.

I love this state. I feel so at home here. I have traveled and lived all around the US. I didn’t feel that anywhere else but here in CA. Anywhere in this state, I feel at home. The diversity of people, geographies, and weather. So amazing.

I moved to Colorado a decade ago. I love it here.

Sure. Tell that to the valley real estate prices.

I come into the office 3-4 days a week, sometimes 5. We're technically hot-desking but I put all of my personal items on a desk. "MY desk" is always open for me now b/c it's uncomfortable for strangers to sit on a desk with someone else's family photos and tchotchkes. Bonus, all of my colleagues know exactly where to find me because I am in the same desk every time and I never have to readjust my chair/monitor etc.

Return to office you say?

Clearly now is the time in the Bay Area to start converting empty offices into apartments and condos

can anyone speak to:

a) how dense was google office space in the before times?

b) what their remaining portfolio of office space is?

Google floor plans were ridiculously dense. I don’t have hard numbers on my fingertips but I recall that the sf business press systematically underestimated the number of employees in San Francisco based on industry average floor space per employee that was far too high. They constantly moved us from one floor to another always with smaller desks.

As for question B, Moffett Place alone was 1.9 million square feet, so shedding 1.4 million square feet is not that big of a deal. It’s about what the press reported them acquiring in 2019.

I was in what amazon called double high density once. one guy had to duck under anoterh guys desk to get to his. so basically against fire code. the better way i've seen it there was where you will not quite bump into the person behind you if you push back. I was only in that once. usually I had an extra foot. I'm in low density right now it's good. Amazon never gave us smaller desks, they were always door desks. That would have gotten us more dense tho.

that's got nothing on what my animation co-workers dealt with in movies where they were just far enough not to bump elbows on the perimiter of a sound stage / mocap area. Worse they had a 2nd row of other coders above you on grating. They didn't let women on the upper deck due to look ups.

Don't you have fire departments in USA?

In Italy they can be called, or just randomly do an inspection and they can just say "this entire building is closed until you adhere to regulations".

I work in sweden now and this doesn't seem to be a thing either. Lots of things that in italy would get you shut down happen here. For example doors requiring 2 hands to be opened from the inside. In Italy they have to be hands free doors.

they do, thats why I said fire code.

Here they show up, say fix this shit. and come back and check a week or 2 later.

They came by and we moved around the same time.... the inspections are generally scheduled.

It was only that crazy for about 3 weeks. longer and they would have probbably had a different fix.

> the inspections are generally scheduled.

Found your problem right there.

It's usually short notice from what I know but yes... but also you gotta have the person with the keys around to let people in. They still find tons of stuff. They also freak out about dumb stuff like a sheet of paper taped to the window.

An entire door? Luxury!

I honestly can not tell if this is real or if everyone in this thread is laying too thick...

I never had a desk at google that was anywhere near as big as half a door.

Couldn't it be a "sign" that (at least) 100% back to office is off the table?

It may also be a sign of further layoffs.

A lot of people prefer being laid off than forced back to the office.

So maybe 1000-2000 staff worth of space? A lot, but maybe not alot for G.

Supposedly the Bay View building is 1.1 million square feet and 4000 employees.

500-1000 square feet per employee sounds way too high.

I think these measurements typically include all parts of a building, even space not usable as workspace: stairs, elevators, mechanical rooms, walls, kitchen, etc.

I was thinking Google would cram in the employees, but need another 100% on top of that for the fancy spaces with weird chairs, baristas, food courts, etc.

Well there is that harem city for Sergei Brin.

??? B-

They want people to RTO ??? But they're deleting the office? "Never let them know your next move!"

How does this fit with return to office?

my guess is that they planed to grow previously, and built/leased bunch of offices, but growth didn't happen, and they cut many jobs, so now they shrink office space.

Honestly depending on the time scales you look at, this could be seen as "growing office space less quickly". They just built a massive campus in ATL and have two more coming up in MTV and CHI.

They will be canceling them much like London regardless of how far along they are.

RTO may not mean return to the Bay Area ?

Considering the high CoL people have already moved other places and this is a reflection of that ?

Teams are more distributed now. Seattle and LA footprint will grow, bay area will shrink.

Will high level technical/product roles ever settle in SEA/LAX?

This is the profile. Mountain View was becoming an executive Versailles and the rest of the offices for the peons.

^_^ know any recruiters

Or ~93.000m²

Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket".

Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office.

What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective? You're literally a tech company, you make all kinds of collaborative technology.

I'm selling my Google stock. They've gone full IBM and are legacy tech.

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (instead of Gerrit or a Gerrit-clone), multirepos or monorepos without Bazel, anything else than gRPC...).

And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?

Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me.

When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on.

So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”

I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.

So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.

On the flip side, Xooglers are expected to do that. That's mostly the reason they are hired for. If they ever suggested just hosting a static page with 0.01 QPS on an existing API server, they'd be deemed as failed Googlers.

Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.

We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.

1. Terraform is absolutely useful for both startups and enterprises. IaC makes everyone's (Platform, App, Ops, Security) lives easier from an accounting, governance, and reproducibility standpoint.

2. Terraform isn't a Google product. It's by Hashicorp

I know Terraform isn't by Google. I'm saying that's what Xooglers are expected to know since this new meta of IaC buzzword has been present in Google for close to a decade. It's nothing new.

Also, do you really need it when you're a startup running 3 EC2 clusters with "potentially tons of customers"? No.

I have experienced a similar situation at a startup. I was an early employee with many years of experience, and we were shipping functionality without any major issues. After an investment round, we hired several new developers.

The new developers managed to convince the leadership that we needed "better" processes, and other technologies. The result of this was rewriting the system into more micro services than developers in different languages and multiple frameworks. The new processes ensured that teams didn't talk together because each team should be independent and effectively blocked any input. The startup failed hard and barely survived even after major cuts

You’re probably better off without that nonsense.

Except that nonsense is 90% of startups these days. Most of the people who get funded are well connected fools or charlatans. I’m shocked at how poorly money is invested.

If the CEO thought process used in a megacorp was appropriate for a four engineer startup, then he is a fucking idiot and you are better off out of that impending cluster fuck.

Often those who’ve only worked at small companies don’t grock how much organizational bloat is needed to run a large enterprise. Alignment cannot be done in a 50k employee company by having everyone hash it out over beers.

Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.

> grock

“Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting.

Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.

Not OP but I use the word Grok a bunch without having read Heinlein.

I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.

The failure begins at around 150 employees, from what I've seen in startups I joined when smaller and grew to that point.

> 26 year old CEO

In 95%+ cases that’s a pretty terrible idea

Sounds like you dodged a bullet.

Dodging the bullet is not getting hired by a shitty company. Getting fired, even if it's by the same shitty company, is taking the bullet.

That's why they say having "Google" on your resume sets you up forever (˃̣̣̥‿˂̣̣̥)

The worker wasn’t the problem, the boss’s imposed hierarchy of command was

You might have had 20 years of experience building products that don't need to scale for millions of concurrent users, if you consider all "purely internal architectural changes" to be lower priority than the customer facing work just because it's purely internal. And the Google guy might have tried to spend time scaling a product that will have five concurrent users, because "this is Google" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI). It's all about perspective, and CEO thought the other perspective was more valuable.

He mentioned there was a lot of customer facing issues to tackle, it was a startup, and their team had 4 devs. Scale shouldn’t be an issue until you know you’ll scale. Who cares if you use Kafka and Kubernetes. You sacrifice so much man power to do things thinking you’ll have a million users, but then fail like 90% of all other startups. I’ve never once heard of a startup failing because they had trouble scaling their architecture — just their business. We know he lost his job because the CEO valued the perspective of the ex googler, but the ex googler had 5 years on systems that were already large, massive man power, and budgets that dwarf startups. You’ll make any new CEO salivate showing road maps that will handle 1,000,000 concurrent users, but “handle” and road maps to “get to” are different.

> Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.

GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.

I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.

Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.

Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".

[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...

> that includes things like Github for code reviews

I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.

I’ve just reviewed ‘spr’, ‘git-spr’ and ‘git-grok’ which supposedly make it easier to submit a stack of prs for review. They all kinda work, I didn’t like any though. GitHub really makes it more difficult than it should be.

I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.

You think Gerrit is any better? The way I've seen Gerrit used essentially erases the commit history with an amend, and its configured so only one person can work on a branch at a time, locking out vertical, parallel work. Maybe that's just been my experience however.

Not a Googler, but the point about gerrit vs gitlab is totally valid.

The tools you use are culture-defining.

From 2012, to 2016, to 2020, google bled an incredible amount of key talent

I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it

Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO

My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc

This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time

Google management has always been incompetent. It's just that now that economic conditions have forced them to make more drastic decisions that their incompetence is even more obvious.

Eric Schmidt seemed very competent, given how much of the famed old Google culture was built during his tenure. I was at Google during the Larry Page era and contrasting him with Schmidt was not favorable.

All the early Eng VPs were also great

Actually I think Schmidt was quite good. Sadly he's the only CEO the company has ever had.

And Schmidt was forced on them.

Yeah, I'd never heard of investors threatening to take their money back, either before or since. I've never had such a clause in any financing docs I've signed.

G+ wasn't a bad product, but it's hard for me to conceive of a worse rollout plan.

Google+ is still the best social network that the world has seen.

But, yes, from what I understand they could hardly have botched it more if they tried.

I'm thinking of details like using the opportunity to latch onto Facebooks "Real Name policy", and using the same name as their deeply unpopular single sign-on solution + killing their existing social network at the same time.

There was no reason for the average user to switch from Facebook. Arguably, it was worse than Facebook due to poor UI: I could never make my wife understand the value of circles, it was simply not the way she thinks about her contacts.

No ads was nice

>What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company?

Google went public is what happened. You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter.

I’m sometimes cynical about publicly-traded companies, but Google seemed more forward-thinking in its pre-Alphabet era, and Apple seemed to be very forward thinking from 1997-2011 when Steve Jobs was running the company. Being a publicly-traded company doesn’t automatically mean resorting to bean counting and other bad forms of management.

You're absolutely right that being public doesn't automatically making bad choices--but it does eventually mean making poor choices. As long as you have a strong CEO, they can weather the storm of shareholder requests, but once you get to third or fourth generation leaders it typically becomes a race to the bottom. See: Every company in every industry.

Can you explain what things shareholders generally request?

As far as I know the only duty a company has towards shareholders is "protect them" (aka: don't mess up and make money). As long as the company eventually does that there is no issue. Even if it takes 8 quarters to become profitable (or 10+ years, see Amazon).

There are probably ways in which shareholders can get together and request something (in court?), but that almost never happens? Maybe I'm wrong. If so, would love to see examples.

Look at the history of activist investors like Carl Icahn. They will happily start a proxy war to oust management to wring the last cent out of a company, or file a minority shareholder lawsuit alleging all kinds of malfeasance to tank the stock to be able to buy up a controlling interest. The 80s M&A boom had all kinds of crazy things, and it makes recent history look somewhat mild by comparison.

These days the vast majority of executive comp is in stock - imagine if bad optics could force you to take a 60% pay cut, you'd be pretty conservative with your choices.

Investors in Google (or Meta) don't have voting rights. You simply can't do any of that stuff. All you can do is not invest, which means the price doesn't go up, but that hasn't been happening.

They do have the right to sell the stock.

If too many of them do, the stock goes down, and essentially everyone at the company (especially the executives) take a pay cut. The executives aren't even just thinking about their own pay. The entire company's ability to attract and retain talent depends on the stock price going up.

See my other "sibling" comment. As an owner/shareholder you have duties owed to you by Google.

If a too good offer comes by, for instance, for one to buy Google:

the offer has to be disclosed; and regardless if the founders like it or not -- or what the voting majority says, there is a price where the remaining shareholders can force Google to be sold.

Well just to be complete there are enumerated duties to shareholders (the fiduciary ones):

1. Duty of Care

2. Duty of Loyalty

3. Duty of Disclosure

4. Duty of Confidentiality

5. Duty of Prudence

6. Duty of Good Faith

You can start looking at this rabbit hole here (and it is a rabbit hole): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty

P.S. Just a (fly-by)comment; not advice of any short or kind -- either investment or legal. P.S.2 Oh it does happen that share/stake holders seek enforcement for breach of fiduciary duties. I would say it is quite common.

Their duty is to keep revenue or profitability up and to the right. Every quarter that they don’t do this, analysts will grill the management team about what happened and what will change. The company is forced into a cycle, quarter by quarter, of underestimating earnings, outperforming estimates, and pleasing investors.

Or they could grow a spine and declare they’re not playing that short sighted game.

they could, and occasionally a few CEOs do this. It is not the norm, though.

I think you need someone with a steadfast personality like Jobs in order for it to work. Otherwise the CEO just ends up drifting in the wind trying to appease shareholders

I'm sort of amazed how often I see this dumb take on HN.

just because it's a US tech-world cultural norm for companies to mostly be run in fucking stupid short term ways, it doesn't mean it's actually required. especially in the case of Google, where 1) Eric, Larry and Sergey have stiched up the entire board's voting power, 2) doesn't need to raise cash via bonds or stock at all and 3) it's a magic money tree, so investors will accept being told to fuck off and let the CEO run the company however they think it'll work best.

Google also IPOed in 2004...are you seriously suggesting that it hasn't been a

> forward thinking and innovative company

for ... 19 years? that's a pretty bold take.

I'm sort of amazed how many times this exact reply was added to my comment. Did you read any of them? Of course it's not required. It's just what happens.

Things weren’t like this for a long time after it was already public. I used to work there more than 5 years after ipo and their office environment (especially in zurich) was really good

You're right, and I addressed this in another reply, but keeping a good company culture requires a very special leadership team, and it can't and won't last forever.

* Eventually ownership will disperse from the core group of initial owners to investors in general

* As a larger ownership moves towards investors, decisions are made that sacrifice the special sauce in order to increase returns.

* Appeasing general investors leads towards enshittification.

Sometimes a strong leader (Jobs, Cook) can keep the investor class as bay for a period. Sometimes leadership can be consolidated for long periods of time to delay the process (Walton, Zuck), but it feels inevitable after IPO.

They just did mass layoffs in Zürich too from what I hear. Many will be out of a job at the end of this month at that office.

Reality isn’t fractal. People leaving for a variety of motives, expansion of some offices, closing others… chip away at the edge of known truth.

Entropy forces new relative perspective. Humans need to do better about accepting figurative and literal death and chill. There quite literally is nowhere else to go except insane from repeating ourselves.

A rewrite of philosophical priority is a necessity for anyone under 50 and the species. That has to be taken sincerely and seriously because, well they kind of outnumber the ossified pensioner, and if they’re staring down forced obligation to choke on fire smoke for 60 years or dump gramps overboard, no one around to see it happen will be around long enough to insure it’s a footnote in any discussion of history.

Self proclaimed STEM minded secular people seem just fine ignoring evidence that does not fit the civic life narrative they’ve been spoon fed like it’s immutable truth. Seems to have latched itself onto whatever quirk of biology religion accidentally exploited; like a nihilism cause it’s all gods plan kind of woo.

“Hey look at me, mom! My life goal is making computers do what they were intentionally designed to do!”

That can be automated; any acceptable experience is a finite set of constraints. DOOM is pretty DOOMy. Same for Halo. Email clients. But hey we have figurative career ambitions, man; Google Fellow! Boom goes the dynamite.

Smaller models first; let’s make an AI to replace the CEO by assigning project management to vetted candidates via publicly audited randomizer. Term limits for geniuses who always seem to end up enjoying their own farts.

“I’m sorry general manager of capital intense AI infrastructure, you are tonight’s… weakest link! dropped into literal shark tank”

It’s been a long day. Sorry not sorry for the more unhinged off gassing.

>You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter

Ironically, Google doesn't care about their shareholders and quarters like other tech companies. They don't provide a guidance, their earnings calls have little substance, and their disclosure is atrocious.

They don't have to do that, though - founders still retain control so could ignore shareholders.

It's sad: Google has (had?) all the ingredients needed to make an absolutely amazing tech company, but instead they've been consistently shooting themselves in the foot for at least a half-decade. They've had oodles of money, brilliant developers, majority stock ownership by the founders (to avoid being completely beholden to shareholders and their short-term interests), lots of goodwill and a great image at the beginning, and they're just squandering it all with terrible leadership.

Not quite - just because the founders have majority control doesn't mean that the BS financial duty "laws" don't apply to the company executives. They have a duty to all the shareholders, not just the controlling ones.

There is no duty to maximize profits though, that is a myth.

IDK I'm confused about that. I think we can agree that it's at the very least a myth that holds a lot of sway among many investors and executives.

https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...

  The leading statement of the law's view on corporate social responsibility goes back to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co, a 1919 decision that held that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." That case — in which Henry Ford was challenged by shareholders when he tried to reduce car prices at their expense — also established that "it is not within the lawful powers of a board of directors to shape and conduct the affairs of a corporation for the merely incidental benefit of shareholders and for the primary purpose of benefiting others."

  Despite contrary claims by some academics and Occupy Wall Street-type partisans, this remains the law today. A 2010 decision, for example, eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark, held that corporate directors are bound by "fiduciary duties and standards" which include "acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders."

They have no legal duty to do so, but why do people buy stock if not to produce a return?

Producing a return doesn’t imply maximizing that return. Short-term profit maximization may actually be detrimental to long-term success. People also buy stocks because they believe in what the company does in terms of meaningfulness, and that meaningfulness tends to decline when trying to maximize profits.

You don't have to base everything around what will make the most profit this quarter. Bezos certainly didn't feel compelled to in the early days of being public.

Yes. I love working for a company with no shareholders. We actually get time to look at the problem.

Their business revolves around ads. I don’t know where that’s going, but I’m not betting the house on it.

Their AI strategy has been a joke as far as I can tell. That’s not helping.

Their “regular” services are ok, but nothing I would pay for.

They are downsizing and dropping staff left and right. This might be a good signal: they are being realistic and riding this one out, but I’m not getting good vibes.

As a googler I understand. Leadership is capricious and petty, chasing trends and seems to be flailing. They have nothing left to offer stockholders than cost-saving measures.

Tbh I love the project I work on and I’m still learning tons. But I wish we could have more confidence in our leadership instead of hoping to be insulated from whatever their whims are this month.

I agree with your first statement. When in-person, it isn't good to have a hot desk. You need to reset your space each morning. You can't have anything personalised at the desk. You have new neighbours who you probably couldn't be bothered talking to because they'll be moved tomorrow.

But I disagree that in-person is the worst way of working. I think some people are more productive in areas that are well-defined. But if teamwork, group problem solving or large amounts of communication is required (such as onboarding a junior), then there is no comparison: In-person has far more communication points than remote. Working in a team remotely requires you to schedule every communication point. This is frustrating when most information that gets passed between people is by osmosis / overhearing.

There's nothing about hot-desking in the article. What's your source on that?

A long time ago when I worked there, I didn't like working in the office sometimes, but sitting out on the balcony with a laptop wasn't so bad. Can't do that on a sub :-)

As covered publicly, Cloud is hot desking but only requiring a couple days a week in the office to make it work. Other parts of Google are not hot desking. Most are hybrid, 3 days a week in the office. Honestly hot desking 2 days does not seem like a big deal to me.

> on top of the worst way of working which is in-office.

It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact

It _is_ objectively true that WFH is better for the environment. But oh well, so far wildfires are contained to just wildfire season, so not a big deal :))))))

WFH may be better for the environment but that is a different thing than "the best way of working".

I've been remote for 14 years, I love it, but I've worked with plenty of people who didn't and went back to an office.

Define "best" I suppose - best for corporate efficiency or best for human thriving? But yeah fair can't argue that it relates to efficiency.

The entire concept of capitalist "work" is in opposition to human thriving

> I've been remote for 14 years, I love it, but I've worked with plenty of people who didn't and went back to an office.

I've seen this level of reasonability probably less than 10 times when the remote vs. office debate breaks out. It's a real shame that sites like HN behave identically to twitter and reddit wrt actual conversation and debate about working environments.

Yeah, people forget about the energy and pollution costs of forcing everyone to commute. Even if you drive an EV, there’s still pollution from tires.

Given that we’ve proven that remote work is viable even without next gen AR VR devices, a lot of corporate PR supporting the environment feels very empty when we learn their stance on remote work

If you move the goalposts or are vague enough, anything can be true. Working from home is worse for the environment than abolishing capitalism, which is the driving force behind global warming.

See? Conversation is useless if we ignore context or intent.

…I don’t think that’s what “moving the goalposts” means? What were the goalposts?

I was just observing that WFH is better for the environment than WFO, which I would again say is just an objective fact. Obviously peoples priorities differ, and I guess some people don’t see climate change as real so would fight me on it being a fact, but I feel completely certain about that assertion.

Re: capitalism, I mean, yeah… isn’t that also true? Much much more subjective but capitalism sure seems to be doing a number on the planet. Again what we want to do with that fact is up to priorities but… well tbh I’m confused about what you’re cross about!

It’s not like the USSR cared about the environment even the tiniest bit..

Under capitalism at least you get free speech and therefore some public pressure to impose various regulations.

Capitalism has nothing to do with freedom of speech. See: capitalist countries without freedom of speech.

Free market competition is impossible without some degree of free speech, so it depends on how you define ‘capitalism’

> But oh well, so far wildfires are contained to just wildfire season, so not a big deal

We just added a month and a half to wildfire season, just to keep that true!

Hotdesk is the biggest bullshit ever. Can you imagine arriving at your office having to think, will I be able to seat next to team? Having to do conference call because no meeting room available just for the poor guy who cannot be there by 8? Best part, people consider their desks as they own it, I have seen people moving stuff just because some dared to seat there before they arrive with management approval.

Did you note the portion of the comment I specifically quoted? Because nowhere does it discuss hot desks.

This is not what Google is doing.

Working in an office is better than working from home in my experience, but hot-desking is a stupid idea.

You might want to hold on for a few more Qs because short term solutions like this do increase stocks.

ugh, you're so right about this hot-desking nonsense.

But it's not even just Google. I haven't been back to my company's office because they insist on not assigning a desk. Every time I wanna go in I have find a random desk to sit in.

Is google actually hot desking or is that a extrapolation on them cutting office space.

TBF it's "two people share a desk on alternate days", and as the other commenter said, only in limited areas for now. How anyone thought that was a good idea, I have no idea.

If I am doing "2 days in office, 3 remote" for my employees, why would I want to pay twice as much so desks can sit vacant more than half the time?

Because the desk-sharing vibes are, as the kids wisely say, cursed. No personalization of decorations or monitors, can't work flexibly, etc. etc. etc.

working at twitch... few of our desks had custom desks, just nice dual monitors or one ultrawide at every desk. now decorations/personalization i'll give you, we had those in spades... we don't currently have the density to hot desk but most people used default keyboards, or we had lockers to store your keyboard overnight to hotel when we though we were doing that.

so why is the lack of monitor personalization cursed, 90% of my coworkers seem great with those options and Iv'e seen a ton with just a laptop and to black monitors or one in use.

yeah lack of decorations, I got you... it's a we-work at that point.

I guess it mostly comes down to feelings. Maybe this metaphor can illustrate my feelings: living out of AirBnBs wouldn’t mean you would miss any specific amenities, but I would feel much less happy without the ability to relax in a place that feels “mine”. It’s something about routine and weaving a comforting self-narrative, I think.

It sends a powerful message that this isn't "your space". But if employees won't even come in most of the time, why should they get "their space"?

I agree, hotdesking when you're in the office most of the time is horrible. But if you want to primarily WFH, I don't understand why you also think you should get nice office space at a second location. When you go to another location for work (e.g. a client if you are a consultant), you don't have a nice personalized desk.

Which also makes one wonder why the 2 days in office are even needed.

alternate team groups I guess?

actual hotdesking in some platform areas (for example, Google Cloud). I don't know how universal that is.

Not exactly. For engineers, at least (not sure about other roles), the Google Cloud desk options are:

1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal.

2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want.

3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway.

4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner.

5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...)

To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking.

And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller?

You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.

But yeah, they care about productivity.

Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.

I worked at a Microsoft derrived game studio in 2010... the offices were glorious... but the devs literally only talked to each other once a week or at lunch. But they were doing things like implementing entire siggraph, which are 'near real time' aka 1-5 seconds per frame, papers into actual real time (sub .1 millis per frame) implemetations. theyd spend a week wiring bindings between c and glsl, and 3 months getting it down to 20ms so we could see the effect. it was really odd since I needed to interact a LOT with otheres comparatively. I got bored as fuck coming from an agile pair programming company. It was good for that deep level of coding. it was not for the type of stuff I do at my current job.

Pair programming with all pairs trying to ignore or talk louder than all others is miserable. Open offices decrease face to face interactions empirically.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

wow great writeup... thanks for that.

I wonder how 2 will work. it'll be interesting. I have too much shit at the office for that, but I also have a lot of unoffical work stuff at my desk, like the tools to fix the monitors (hex wrenches screwdrivers), and the whiskey stash.

3 - I do see a ton of non-eng doing this. I see a lot more eng also just chilling in 'flex spaces' like phone boths, lounges, etc... the stuff that never got used when everyone had desks and now is even tho my office isn't over full. our little mini-single desk rooms I call our intern offices as they seem to just work in there.

is the 2 days a week just the RTO minimum?

4 - this is me but also 1 is kinda me.. I'm in a lot but I travel a lot, and I have very specialized setup that I do use.

5 - I can get this, my whole management chain is remote... I'm senior enough. I'm actually well above average on in office attendance, and just below the rto requirements esp if you account for me working from office for a month in the last 2 months while bein in other cities. or last 3 weeks because there were "synergies" for folks for me to meet.

The true answer for me is I get to pick and choose between days when I need to get stuff done coding, by clearing my calendar, and slamming out code at home... or at the office. Or by forcing a lot of in person meetings and getting 8 months of design convs done in 4 hours. I got a solid 1.5 hour convo done while waiting for traffic to die down on thursday that I had been trying for 2 years to do on remote.

but I had this flexibility in the before times and I'm pretty senior.

The thing I do think sucks is that I suspect everyone is single car riding into the office so traffic in seattle is actually WORSE than pre-pandemic. Traffic sucks till 9:30 am now.

The only true benefit of the march of time is that there's so many "enhanced" cars now that I can just HOV way to the front of the line then cut off a tesla or obviously expensive mercedes in the exit lane at the last second and know they'll stop :)

basically I'm a bad one to ask and I'm making it work well for me.

Average cost of a desk is like 10k/yr. That’s very little compared to an employee’s compensation, it only has to make them like 5% more productive to be worth it.

> Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket".

Wouldn't some sort of LRU scheme work better as some sort of PAGE-ing algorithm? Maybe RANK the employees to group by locality.

Google must become the new IBM. As business gets bigger, they have to relentlessly control costs, else they'll end up out-flanked by nimble upstarts.

It's the circle of business life.

Google seems to have taken their eye off the ball when it comes to providing accurate search results.

Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days.

Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?

1st page of most search results is inundated with irrelevant ads. Pitiful. And yes, a small minority know about and actively use uBlock Origin. But that doesn’t mean the core functionality and purpose of Google search isn’t tainted. The rotting and decay has already manifested itself in ugly ways.

Have you considered that maybe your priors are just wrong?

I don't know a single person who prefers in-office work who thinks that remote is more effective, but I know many who have the opposite opinion but prefer the flexibility.

Maybe there isn't a realistic way to make remote as productive. I'm honest enough to say that the social pressure that people bemoan makes me significantly more productive. I wish it didn't, but it absolutely does. The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think.

Managers and leaders have acknowledged this and finally we're moving towards getting work done again.

> The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think.

If you know a person does not like being interrupted don't be selfish and write a message. Why does your productivity matter more than mine?

In my experience working with people who didn't like to help people or people who helped people whenever they felt like it, they became managers or already were managers (because of course you can be super productive when you only help people when you feel like it) and then had revolts of people they managed when everyone got sick of having to waste hours because the other person didn't want to give a few minutes. People showing up late, missed deadlines, and just a general not caring about the company after so much disrespect. If you don't care about the company and just your career, you can continue to be hated and selfish, but it will come back to you if you ever start a company or want to advance past that level.

I was a naive intern at my first paid software gig, so I towed the line, but I watched as a startup went from hiring some very smart people to the engineers realizing they could come in at 11 hungover and leave at 4 because they were all smart, management was treating them like crap and they couldn't just fire everyone. There were other issues, but power tripping over personal productivity and not giving engineers time for help or questions about the business was a huge issue at that job.

This is not a promotion of the anti-WFH control busy body managers, but just know if your coworkers are asking you questions so they can do their job you should be mentoring them so they need to ask less questions. If you're the type to answer a slack message hours later, people are slowly growing to hate you and will eventually sabotage you.

I love helping people, but don’t fucking tap me on the shoulder if I am concentrating on something. Don’t touch anyone at work. If even you stand around looking needy, and I can tell I will suffer a full loss of concentration, at least let me wrap up my current thought and do something to mark what I was thinking about and then ask if I can help, that would be better.

Because 10 minutes of your time might save hours of someone else’s. Why is your productivity more important than your entire teams?

I feel like people don’t treat achieving business goals as part of their job in dev. I’ve never had people treat this as a problem across other job roles.

Constant interruptions are the biggest enemy of top performers. Everyone should have the right to at least a few hours of freedom for interruption except in the case of genuine emergency. There is a problem in the organization if people cannot work for a few hours on their own without asking for help or if there is too much unwritten organizational knowledge so that people can't help themselves.

Of course people should make themselves available and not be jerks but I strongly believe that a culture that encourages unrestricted interruptions will achieve worse business outcomes in the long run.

If ten minutes of my time is worth hours of yours and you are coming to me, I must know what I'm doing and you ought to respect my concentration. You will still get your help, but respectful of my schedule. Tell me how urgently you need an answer, and I will triage it. If there is an incident, that is different.

I do believe that there is room for better tools in this area, and I'm working on it. Tools that help users solve their problems collaboratively without imposing undue burden on their coworkers.

Agree with your points. That said, I think people work from home because they value their personal happiness more than helping Google make more money. They probably see that Google isn't doing much to help anyone except Google, particularly Google's executive team and shareholders. If leaders want workers to be more productive, they should improve culture and motivation, forcing workers to put social pressure on each other is a short term boost, but folks will move to greener pastures eventually.

This all falls apart when the people you are working with are geographically distributed anyway, which happens to be the case quite often in companies of this size.

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Compare average programmer's salary Chicago vs. Mountain View...

A big company like a FAANG will shift the local market when they open an office.

There are plenty of competent people all over the world that can’t move easily for whatever reason - usually family.

Yeah, it's a more generous explanation that they want to tap into the Chicago area talent pool. It's possibly true, a new office like this was no doubt planned years ago.

Last time I checked, Chicago was not in the Bay Area.

It'll be interesting to see which companies rotate people through & how. Most orgs are trying to get people in on the same days, to synergize & that shit. Will that be the path forward? Who will rotate shifts more?

Shout out to a TSMC interview where M.C. was saying TSMC is just better because instead of running 1 shift a day of trying shit, they ran the fab always & got 3x the shifts a day.

Same story, but different timebase. Utilization. How can we do great for space, & utilize it well? We are so far away from that level of smart management. Such idiotic returnalism. Space wasn't good before. If we want to return, how do we de-suck it? Admittedly better utilization feels like an anti goal for de-suck, so extra hard mode: how do we make good utilization a win win win?