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No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for

No, but my work life was amazing. There are important things to address at Google, like not having enough sitting toilets for men (there's 3 times as much for women even though there are much less women in the office where I was working) that an union may help with, but that's different from the product PR.

mosselman 6y ago
Forcing men to poop standing up is probably some productivity hack.
purple-again 6y ago
My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front. What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of. Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support). That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.
- extropy 6y ago
  I will bait too, as someone who has stood in line for male toilets in a Google office. In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet. The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch. Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  > Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on the floor at all. One solution would be to just build more sitting toilets instead of the standing ones, as those ones weren't used as much. But on 1 floor there were 2 bathrooms for women and 2 for men, so yes, repurposing some would have helped.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    Did you miss this part? "If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue" To make this into a gender issue, you have to argue google can't afford toilets
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      Of course it’s a growth issue, Google can’t easily afford the prime real estate with the current housing prices. Load balancing is just a temporary measure that can be done. Google tear down meeting rooms to have more space for cranking more people in the same office. Luckily I was working there in the good old days mostly.
      - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
        Are you seriously arguing that one of the largest and most profitable megacorps in the world can't afford enough toilets, so we'ce gotta take a toilet away from female employees? Profits aside, we do not consider stopping cramming people in an office, or hiring in a more agfordable location? What happened to common sence and self respect? This the literally shittiest, most submissive argument I've come across. If it weren't a civilised forum, i would've colled it bootlicking
YinglingLight 6y ago
There are important things to address at Google, being in bed with the CCP and facilitating human trafficking for starters.
Wonnk13 6y ago
I've seen these comments on internal email threads, but this is the first time seeing one out in the wild. Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.
- necheffa 6y ago
  I mean, when you have to go, you have to go. If you have to travel to an entirely different floor to find an open shitter, that makes for a poor experience.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Going 1 floor is fine...going through 7 floors, visiting every bathroom sucks. Anyways COVID solved the issue I guess.
    - saalweachter 6y ago
      I keep a list of things that would make me quit, and "shitting my pants in a stairwell looking for an open bathroom stall" is on that list. I went through the floor map one day counting desks & toilets, verifying we were above OSHA minimums.
- tomcam 6y ago
  Still blows my mind there are people who don’t understand how some folks are older, have conditions like IBS or are disabled, and that that number can be way, way more than 100’. It can even be a multiple building thing on a bad day.
  - zeku 6y ago
    Right? I had a CS professor who had to pee every hour. After 4+ years in the same building with him you notice.
- unicornmama 6y ago
  I used to work at the Google San Francisco office, back when there was just one SFO office. IIRC the office was 5-7 floors with one “bathroom” per floor. I remember having walked up and down the entire building to search for a toilet, eventually giving up to go use the one at Starbucks. Certainly not employee mistreatment all things relative. But it made me stop and think how much Google values engineer time, and how I feel in terms of productivity.
the-rc 6y ago
Most of the time, believe it or not, details like toilets are outside Google's control, let alone unions'. I heard so many stories when I was in the NY office, like facilities not being allowed to do anything about the big gaps along the stall doors in the tenth floor bathrooms until they bought the building for $2B and everything was torn down. Or the two years it took to get approval to place the stupid logos on the outside. They weren't even lighted, which would have definitely added extra years. Every month it was a different person's turn at the city to reject the application, often for something that had been okay the previous time. There's hell, and then there's the NYC DOB. The bathroom situation stank (pun not intended), but frankly there are other hills to die on.

mosselman 6y ago

Forcing men to poop standing up is probably some productivity hack.

purple-again 6y ago

My first inclination was just to move on but you didn’t post on a throwaway so I will take the bait. Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? My experience in every corner of life in America to date has been separated bathrooms by sex and the men’s restroom containing far fewer sitting toilets. We all know this is because women sit for both natural duties and men, generally in the US at least, only sit for one. This is so basic I assume it’s not what you are talking about but please correct me if not so we can engage on that front. What I assume you mean is Google is 90% male and 10% female (no idea what it really is) and yet the bathrooms are 50% male and 50% female. You specifically mention sitting toilets which is what I am having trouble understanding the relevance of. Are men regularly forced to stand in line instead of being able to walk right in and go? If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue. You could propose turning some female restrooms into male but generally restrooms are placed far enough apart from one another that there would have to be 0 females in the area serviced by those restrooms for that to work. The presence of even one would require facilities assigned to females or mixed gender restrooms (a different argument I fully support). That leaves your only other option as I see it for the female restrooms to be smaller than the male restrooms which is just ridiculous. No one would build the building with that hopefully temporary imbalance in mind and you can’t just repurpose half a bathroom as long as the sexes are being separated.

extropy 6y ago
I will bait too, as someone who has stood in line for male toilets in a Google office. In the office I was in there where generally 1 sitting and 2 standing seats per male toilet. The standing one are quick in / quick out and almost always free. But good luck finding vacant sitting spot after lunch. Edit: female restrooms generally had 3 sitting spots, so same size.
xiphias2 6y ago
> Why do you think the toilet issue you described is a problem that needs to be fixed? Because this way Google was effectively paying me loads of money to just go through 7 floors of bathrooms to find an empty one when I needed to use it. It's a waste of corporate resources to use a human resource's time like this. At the end the solution for me was just using the disabled toilet, as we didn't have disabled people on the floor at all. One solution would be to just build more sitting toilets instead of the standing ones, as those ones weren't used as much. But on 1 floor there were 2 bathrooms for women and 2 for men, so yes, repurposing some would have helped.
- ClumsyPilot 6y ago
  Did you miss this part? "If so that sounds like a facilities growth issue and not a sex imbalance issue" To make this into a gender issue, you have to argue google can't afford toilets
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Of course it’s a growth issue, Google can’t easily afford the prime real estate with the current housing prices. Load balancing is just a temporary measure that can be done. Google tear down meeting rooms to have more space for cranking more people in the same office. Luckily I was working there in the good old days mostly.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      Are you seriously arguing that one of the largest and most profitable megacorps in the world can't afford enough toilets, so we'ce gotta take a toilet away from female employees? Profits aside, we do not consider stopping cramming people in an office, or hiring in a more agfordable location? What happened to common sence and self respect? This the literally shittiest, most submissive argument I've come across. If it weren't a civilised forum, i would've colled it bootlicking

YinglingLight 6y ago

There are important things to address at Google, being in bed with the CCP and facilitating human trafficking for starters.

Wonnk13 6y ago

I've seen these comments on internal email threads, but this is the first time seeing one out in the wild. Still blows my mind people who make >300k a year can't be bothered to walk 100ft to cut a shit.

necheffa 6y ago
I mean, when you have to go, you have to go. If you have to travel to an entirely different floor to find an open shitter, that makes for a poor experience.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Going 1 floor is fine...going through 7 floors, visiting every bathroom sucks. Anyways COVID solved the issue I guess.
  - saalweachter 6y ago
    I keep a list of things that would make me quit, and "shitting my pants in a stairwell looking for an open bathroom stall" is on that list. I went through the floor map one day counting desks & toilets, verifying we were above OSHA minimums.
tomcam 6y ago
Still blows my mind there are people who don’t understand how some folks are older, have conditions like IBS or are disabled, and that that number can be way, way more than 100’. It can even be a multiple building thing on a bad day.
- zeku 6y ago
  Right? I had a CS professor who had to pee every hour. After 4+ years in the same building with him you notice.
unicornmama 6y ago
I used to work at the Google San Francisco office, back when there was just one SFO office. IIRC the office was 5-7 floors with one “bathroom” per floor. I remember having walked up and down the entire building to search for a toilet, eventually giving up to go use the one at Starbucks. Certainly not employee mistreatment all things relative. But it made me stop and think how much Google values engineer time, and how I feel in terms of productivity.

the-rc 6y ago

Most of the time, believe it or not, details like toilets are outside Google's control, let alone unions'. I heard so many stories when I was in the NY office, like facilities not being allowed to do anything about the big gaps along the stall doors in the tenth floor bathrooms until they bought the building for $2B and everything was torn down. Or the two years it took to get approval to place the stupid logos on the outside. They weren't even lighted, which would have definitely added extra years. Every month it was a different person's turn at the city to reject the application, often for something that had been okay the previous time. There's hell, and then there's the NYC DOB. The bathroom situation stank (pun not intended), but frankly there are other hills to die on.