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At the beginning of the pandemic, their policies seemed aligned with WFH. Surprising to hear the opposite so soon.

hellbannedguy 6y ago
I think they were all lying about how they liked WFH? They want employees in their cells. Zuck has been buying up commercial space in SF a few weeks into this pandemic.
- izacus 6y ago
  I don't remember Google ever claiming they're liking WFH and will extend it? Did you mix up the companies?
- dimmke 6y ago
  The insistence on comparing going into an office to jail that I see all over this thread really bothers me. This is such an extremely privileged viewpoint. When you're a minimum wage McDonalds worker, you can get written up for being 5 minutes late. But if you make $350k a year, being asked to come into a physical office to perform work is similar to jail. Okay. I guess the similarity is that they both serve meals :)
cmrdporcupine 6y ago
I wouldn't say that. We were sent home to protect us and our community. I don't think WFH execution at Google has been better than anywhere else. My experience on a team that did embedded/hardware work is I suppose an outlier, but Google has policies like "no source code on laptops" and the like that make remote work tricky in many circumstances -- none of that changed. I am however much happier now that I've transferred into a more traditional cloud-based org. Myself, I am looking forward to a return to the office, 3/5 days a week, despite me having a long commute and driving giving me back pain: because this last year and a bit has not been pleasant at all.
wffurr 6y ago
Google’s network security posture was ideal for WFH. BeyondCorp[1] had already been widely rolled out to most internal services and most internal networks in offices had been converted to MNPs: Managed Non-Privileged networks. The pandemic has been a great stress test for finding the limitations and gaps; like figuring out the remaining use cases for VPN and MNP exceptions, and accelerating the use of data center-hosted VMs instead of desk workstations. None of this had any bearing on the company culture however, which was and is very office-centric. It’s been clear from the beginning that WFH was temporary. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp

I think they were all lying about how they liked WFH? They want employees in their cells. Zuck has been buying up commercial space in SF a few weeks into this pandemic.

izacus 6y ago
I don't remember Google ever claiming they're liking WFH and will extend it? Did you mix up the companies?
dimmke 6y ago
The insistence on comparing going into an office to jail that I see all over this thread really bothers me. This is such an extremely privileged viewpoint. When you're a minimum wage McDonalds worker, you can get written up for being 5 minutes late. But if you make $350k a year, being asked to come into a physical office to perform work is similar to jail. Okay. I guess the similarity is that they both serve meals :)

cmrdporcupine 6y ago

I wouldn't say that. We were sent home to protect us and our community. I don't think WFH execution at Google has been better than anywhere else. My experience on a team that did embedded/hardware work is I suppose an outlier, but Google has policies like "no source code on laptops" and the like that make remote work tricky in many circumstances -- none of that changed. I am however much happier now that I've transferred into a more traditional cloud-based org. Myself, I am looking forward to a return to the office, 3/5 days a week, despite me having a long commute and driving giving me back pain: because this last year and a bit has not been pleasant at all.

wffurr 6y ago

Google’s network security posture was ideal for WFH. BeyondCorp[1] had already been widely rolled out to most internal services and most internal networks in offices had been converted to MNPs: Managed Non-Privileged networks. The pandemic has been a great stress test for finding the limitations and gaps; like figuring out the remaining use cases for VPN and MNP exceptions, and accelerating the use of data center-hosted VMs instead of desk workstations. None of this had any bearing on the company culture however, which was and is very office-centric. It’s been clear from the beginning that WFH was temporary. [1]: https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp