20 ms·

Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

158 points by nixass 6y ago

kyriakos 6y ago
The cat is out of the box now and it's hard to put it back in.
mxwsn 6y ago
w/o paywall: https://outline.com/AMVLqP https://outline.com/AMVLqP
fnord77 6y ago
> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
- eganist 6y ago
  > taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
  - asah 6y ago
    +1 - it's often best to organize "knowledge workers" by function/capability/project rather than geography/culture/etc. (I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
  - eigenket 6y ago
    I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours. Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
    - lstodd 6y ago
      When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
      - eigenket 6y ago
        I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.
- chronicsunshine 6y ago
  Most major corporations have teams of mixed offshore and onshore developers. If it was okay to have the offshore part of the team working from outside the office before the pandemic, I don't see why onshore developers wouldn't deserve the same treatment now.
  - throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    It's not even a case of onshore vs offshore, companies that manufacture physical things and have even a shred of vertical integration have always done this. The corporate office is in a different state than the manufacturing facility which is in a different state from the R&D facility which is in a different state than that company that used to be your contractor that you acquired a decade ago, etc. etc. And they've managed to do this successfully even before video chat and email, some of them since before the telephone.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
underseacables 6y ago
I travel a lot because I’m in sales, so I’m constantly in and out of the office. I very much want to return to the office, because for me it’s a homebase, where I can connect with my colleagues. It just hasn’t been the same and I feel that my workflow has diminished without the communal nature of the office.
- akmarinov 6y ago
  I don’t travel at all, just a developer in front of a screen 8 hours a day. I very much prefer to stay home and get to work by getting to my desk instead of fighting traffic. To each their own, but remote work is now a perk that some companies will offer and others won’t, not offering it will effectively cut out a fairly large percent of devs that don’t want to go back.
  - ssully 6y ago
    Similar boat here. When we were still in the office, I would go to a handful of meetings, and then the rest of my actual working time was spent alone in a solo or shared office space. Going forward, a hybrid approach where I could go in a day or two for bigger group meetings and then do my actual work at home would be preferred.
  - ReptileMan 6y ago
    The question is what will be included in the fairly large percent. If you lose this way some good, but you filter all the potential slackers it may leave you with a better pool.
- splithalf 6y ago
  So you are getting paid while you are not in the office, but you would make it so that others don’t have that ability?
  - nunez 6y ago
    They weren't saying that. They were just saying that they preferred having an office. I think it's okay to want to have an office. Working from home isn't for everyone. I pay for my own office because I really need my work space to be separate from my home space, but I understand why others would prefer to not have a commute/be closer to the family/enjoy their creature comforts/etc.
dcolkitt 6y ago
It seems strange that Google management would push so hard on this. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture. But it seems like if you let everyone choose, it'd be 50/50 in-person vs. WFH. So, even if you give your employees full flexibility, you'll still wind up with decently full offices that can train junior people, promulgate a corporate culture, etc.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. Certainly not the case for everyone. Many people are struggling to be productive at home, alone. Jobs that require more coordination are also at risk of slowing down. WFH is great for some, but it’s not a panacea.
  - hpoe 6y ago
    How many of them have slowed down b/c of the pandemic vs WFH? I can imagine a job being a lot harder if suddenly your children are home all day, heck my kids aren't even school age and my wife is home fulltime and I still sometimes have my little ones come in asking for juice or to help them put on their shirt, or something like that. Not to mention the additional stress and isolation that comes from all of the pandemic management measures, and the omnipresent low level fear. Honestly if WFH has even remained steady with in office in this hostile environment to me that is a pretty big indicator it is better for businesses.
    - skeeter2020 6y ago
      this matches my experience as a dev manager. We had a bump in productivity initially, probably due to a fully-charged battery of team combined with less disruptions, but now productivity has declined by all our quantative measures (deploys, cycle times, failure frequency,etc). These are all proxies and not prefectly isolated, but better than "gut feel"
heliodor 6y ago
"I'll quit!" they say. It's about as empty a threat as telling the customer service person that you'll sue the company.
- new_realist 6y ago
  Not when other companies offer better pay and a remote option.
- TigeriusKirk 6y ago
  People quit jobs they aren't satisfied with all the time.
- ralusek 6y ago
  People quit Google all the time. Big companies in SV actually have pretty short average retention times.
- whateveracct 6y ago
  Is it? It's at-will employment. Quitting is the easiest thing in the world legally speaking. Way more tenable than suing.
- katbyte 6y ago
  When your recruited multiple times a week it’s not hard. I tell all recruiters I won’t work in an office ever and post pandemic the number who agree to that has jumped by a large percentage
- ok_coo 6y ago
  Are we pretending our industry has a glut of experienced people begging for work? GL to all of the inflexible employers out there.
- topher200 6y ago
  I quit Google last month specifically because I didn't want to move back to MTV in September.
rightbyte 6y ago
It would be interesting to know the median commute time for those who say they will quit or not. For me it is just insane even thinking about going to go back to 2h commute each day. I don't even know why I considered that OK.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  I only have a 15 min drive to work, and while working from home makes a few things easier, like picking up my daughter from daycare, the benefits of the office easily compete with the 30 - 35 minute commute. I get better working conditions, better coffee, better lunch and I feel like I’m not alone during difficult tasks. Ideally I’d like to work from home one or two days week, and be at the office the remaining days.
  - Xevi 6y ago
    I also have about 40 minutes of commute per day. However I get better working conditions, lunch, etc, when I work from home. Not to mention that it's much less stressful, and I can go lay down in my bed for a couple of minutes if I want to. I also do some chores during breaks, which saves me even more time at the end of the day.
    - mrweasel 6y ago
      Based on the comments about working from I read, either here on HN or on LinkedIn, it seems to me that people reluctance to return to the office is often based on two thing, well three in the case of the insane commutes some people have. But in general it's either because they work under poor conditions in their offices, or because they have a personality that's ill suited to modern open plan offices. There's nothing wrong in not wanting to return to an environment that's not right for your personality, or simply a poor environment for any office worker. Sadly I think that those companies who would care to address such issue are the same companies who already have employees wanting to return to their offices. Perhaps one thing we have learnt is that if you're a company who care very little about the work environment you provide, and don't feel like provide better facilities, then you can do away with the office and keep your employees happy that way.
woeirua 6y ago
ITT a lot of tech workers with super plush salaries and benefits are going to find out the hard way, that going back to the office for Google is better than going to work for most other companies.
hpoe 6y ago
It seems to me a big divide in this question is people who derive a sense of identity/value/community from their workplace and those who view it in a more utilitarian light. For me I much prefer WFH but I also have 3 kids and a wife that I'd rather spend time with than any of my co-workers; however when I was younger I enjoyed associating with my co-workers because I didn't have as much other social connection.
- katbyte 6y ago
  Single and live alone and still prefer it. I get more time to hangout with my friends, and for those who also work remote we hang out at a cafe and work together
- pumaontheprowl 6y ago
  I'm purely utilitarian (I don't derive any sense of community from my workplace), but I still strongly prefer working from the office. For a number of reasons: * Access to company cafes means I eat healthier, spend less time cooking/cleaning, and save money on food. * Face-to-face interaction with co-workers makes debugging problems much easier (no more wondering what they're seeing on their screen; just walk over and see). * Arriving at and leaving the office provides a fixed start and end to the work day where I can completely detach from work outside those hours. * There are no internet connection problems when my workstation is hardwired into the company network. * It's much easier to get exercise/go to the gym when I'm already out of the house.
notdonspaulding 6y ago
What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out the percentage of people who responded positively was significantly higher than the percentage of people who ultimately chose to pay for the option in actual sales. I wonder if a similar effect will be seen regarding people returning to work.
- AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
  WTF do I want a heated cupholder? It'll melt my ice.
- hpoe 6y ago
  My situtation is slightly different than the Google one, but I've already resolved if my employer makes me come back into the office with a full-time commute, I'm going to start looking for a different job right away.
  - ckdarby 6y ago
    I think a lot of employees are in this situation but aren't going to say this because they don't want to lose their job or have it held against them and be managed out of the company before they're told they need to come into the office.
  - Jiejeing 6y ago
    Same, there are plenty of competitive offers, and if I cannot upgrade my lifestyle (no commute, house instead of studio, etc) with my current employer, so be it.
- sriram_sun 6y ago
  GOOG folks, FB is recruiting stressing on "remote". Call a recruiter today!
spoonjim 6y ago
Google doesn’t care if most employees quit, they are replaceable. The few that they do care about, they will arrange unofficial exemptions for.
- artembugara 6y ago
  1. I'd assume that a cost to replace 1 SE employee at google is close to USD 1,000,000 2. It's hard as never before to hire someone to from from the office (US tech giants are hiring many H1Bs) So, I disagree. It can become a long-term crisis.
  - throwaway6734 6y ago
    Based on the competitiveness of googles hiring process I imagine there's a pretty big pool of candidates for them to choose from though.
    - throwaways885 6y ago
      Not really. As somebody who has seen both sides of a hiring process like that, the reality is the vast majority of candidates are just awful. You can probably rule out nearly 75% of applicants right off the bat. Add in hiring laws, bureaucracy, immigration, negotiation, candidates withdrawing, and finding a good person who works for your team can take months.
      - throwaway6734 6y ago
        Awful in what respects? I was under the impression that it was sort of like Harvard: lots of applications, but a good chunk of those denied could have just have easily been accepted if there was space You seem to have experience with their hiring and I have none (only applying) so I have much more faith in what you're saying than my preconceived ideas.
        throwaways885 6y ago
        As in, a significant chunk of candidates cannot write code, have outright lies on their CV, have never used anything other than visual basic, etc... In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company, or your average skill level will go down, which makes hiring just hard mathematically.
chrisseaton 6y ago
People have clearly decided it's now completely safe to come out and continue the war on remote working.
- geodel 6y ago
  Described my workplace :) Just this morning had staff meeting about 'come to office from June 1st' announcement.
gaoshan 6y ago
I love working in the office and being around colleagues on a daily basis. If people want to leave that will open more spaces for folks like myself.
freebuju 6y ago
Headline is a bit of a reach. A few employees grumbling on Twitter does not constitute any meaningful representative given the size of Google's workforce. That said, WFH is not for everyone. And a flexible 3-day office presence is a good healthy compromise.
williesleg 6y ago
Babies.
williesleg 6y ago
Can't they just Google search vaccines are effective?
macksd 6y ago
I've always been mystified by the state of remote work at Google, because I understood that they pushed pretty hard on being in the office. And yet I've had many video conference calls with various teams at Google over the last 8 years and in every single one, most of the Googlers on the call were obviously dialing in from home. I even flew to Mountain View once for a big all-day meeting. I got there, met my coworkers in the lobby, and was escorted to a conference room by a manager who dialed us in for the video conference with all the engineers at home. I can't think of a time I've interacted with a group of Googlers in their office. Was this really not the norm? Is it the norm for engineers but not for everyone else or something?
- gipp 6y ago
  Permanent or official WFH arrangements are generally not a thing, but just taking days here and there informally as WFH days is something that many teams are pretty permissive about from what I understand.
  - macksd 6y ago
    Yeah and that's the kind of thing I would hope really does become more normal virtually everywhere. Especially when a job is so easily done remotely most of the time, it should be very low cost for people to be a more available parent when kids are sick, or stay home when they might be contagious, or just get errands done in a timely manner. But this has happened to me so much, it didn't seem like it could be a coincidence that I happened to catch everyone on their WFH day that week...
- sgtnoodle 6y ago
  While I was there, they had a big "mobile first" push, and they were encouraging employees to try working exclusively from phones and tablets one day a week. Of course as an embedded software engineer working within their IT policies, I had my gubuntu workstation, macbook, and a gubuntu laptop, and I also had a windows laptop to pull out once a month or so when I needed to run obscure windows only tools. For a while I had to travel every couple months along with plenty of other coworkers. I worked a few days here and there from other offices and I don't recall there being any particular resistance to it. It was fun visiting other offices. I tried bacon syrup in my coffee in Ann Arbor, climbed around on a giant rope net in Pittsburgh, video conferenced with someone from inside a giant binocular in Santa Monica, and even had Google office lunch in Dubai. We had a 6-12 month period of ambiguity / lack of project direction, and coupled with Google's (toxic in my opinion) perf/promo system it created morale issues. I personally was finding it difficult to make it to the office before 11AM most days, which my manager called me out on, but within the context of trying to understand why there were morale issues. My team was able to figure out the underlying issues and it got better, but that's right around when I decided to give Zipline a try, and it's been 5 years of really satisfying work with a great group of people.
pmoriarty 6y ago
The more people quit this toxic spyware, adware company, the better.
Tepix 6y ago
At a virtual work meeting (in Germany) we were talking about the employer's right to know the employee's vaccination status. Clearly both sides have good arguments. It's going to be interesting.
- LightG 6y ago
  Hah, that did occur to me as a strategy for fending off the soon-to-come "get back to the office" edict. Hopefully we can all meet half way with some form of flexible working. One size doesn't fit all.
DubiousPusher 6y ago
Friends and family keep asking me if I'm moving out of my metro area or if I'll move to the deep xurbs. But I've held off any such machinations exactly because of this. My employer has embraced WFH beyond the pandemic but all it takes is a couple bad quarters and a new CEO deciding that working from home is "part of the problem" and "work from the office" is part of some shiny new turnaround plan. And you never know when you might need a job and the best you can come up with is one with a company with this kind of control freak attendance culture.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  We've seen an exodus from London, people buying houses in remoter parts of the country on the basis that they will be able to continue to WFH after the pandemic is over. Personally I think that is quite a rash decision to make right now.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    It depends on the company and the individual situation of course. But everything I see suggests that coming in on a fairly regular basis (like 1-2 days per week) is going to be more common than being fully remote, which will generally be on a case by case basis. Of course if coming into a office is a few days every few weeks sort of thing, people can travel greater distances to do that.
  - me_me_me 6y ago
    > rash decision? Maybe they like to WFH and they are good at what they do. If they can buy a house and pay half in repayments than what they were paying in rent, then is that rash decision? I'd rather earn less and have a house and no commute. Maybe its a case of people realising that there are other ways of living.
    - xboxnolifes 6y ago
      The rash decision is in the risk of their employer deciding to forbid WFH post-covid and they now have the decision of a a long commute or looking for a new job.
sundaeofshock 6y ago
Google employees are some of the most highly compensated people in tech. I wonder how many people decide to stay at google rather than taking a 30%+ pay cut?
- lstodd 6y ago
  I personally know three people. 30% pay cut is nothing, they took 50-60% just to keep sane and do some useful work instead.
- fernandotakai 6y ago
  i would take a 50% pay cut just to work from home. quality of life > money.
nojito 6y ago
Remote workers are generally less productive than onsite workers for my company (100k+) employees Threatening to quit is fine simply because hiring has never been easier for us. I’m sure it’s even easier at Google scale.
- sthomas1618 6y ago
  Is that take from the gut or is there data to back that up?
KoftaBob 6y ago
One of the most low-value words in a headline or statement is "some". If you take any scenario and ask a large enough group of people their opinions, there's going to inevitably be an arbitrary number (that can then be qualified as some) that will have the reactionary view that makes for an eye catching headline. Put simply, "some" is just vague enough to allow these article writers to get a clickbait headline from a statement that only a handful of people have made. It's lazy and disingenuous, which are two words I've found myself using to describe the journalism industry as a whole lately.
- mLuby 6y ago
  Exactly right. Similar is "over 30% of group says or does controversial thing" (meaning the significant majority don't). Also not a fan of practice of quoting a controversial phrase in the headline to get both the shock value and editorial deniability. > Apple charged of 'anti-competitive' app policies > World's glaciers melting at 'accelerating rate' > Man Utd fans 'disgusted' by ESL plans They literally found one person to say the words.
nunez 6y ago
Google said they would allow WFH until July 2021 last year: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/tech/google-work-from-home-extension/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/tech/google-work-from-home-ex.... They're extending that to September. Googlers knew what was coming. In my brief experience there, Google was staunchly against remote work, even remote work between office locations. A big reason behind me leaving (aside from not enjoying the work) was that I wanted to work from an office in another state but was told that wouldn't be possible despite the recruiter I was working with saying otherwise. The work could have 100% been done from another office (or from anywhere, really), but, nope, not possible.
saos 6y ago
I'm waiting to see if they'll be a massive rug pull in coming month in regards to WFH. If not then I may finally be able to move out of London!
giantg2 6y ago
Our company is pushing us to come back. They expect higher attrition this year since people don't want to come back.
EGreg 6y ago
Wow I have been predicting for 10 years that working from home is super attractive, and the commute is great. And many people kept telling me how that’s so stupid, and they want to have a social life at work etc. I replied you can a social life with your friends and neighbors if everyone works from home... Now it seems it has been tried and many people would rather keep it :)
francisofascii 6y ago
Didn't we just read Google's revenue grew 34% higher than the previous year? And they think they can do better by being back in the office? Huh. Interesting.
wfhbata 6y ago
I’ve told myself I won’t go back to the Bay Area. SF is a joke and the peninsula is ridiculously overpriced even on a tech salary. I’ve loved the last year living outside of the Bay Area. On the other hand, the thought of whiteboard interviews at this stage in my life or taking a massive pay cut to work at a local company is not enticing either. So we’ll see what happens in a couple months when forced to decide. I realize the path of least resistance might win out for me and others.
- pbuzbee 6y ago
  I agree. When I left the Bay Area at the start of the pandemic, I felt a surprising surge of freedom. The salaries and jobs in the Bay Area are great, but they come with the big caveat of choosing between (1) living near work, but spending a fortune to rent small, old apartments forever or (2) having a better living space, but with a nightmare commute. Why would I want to return?
  - wfhbata 6y ago
    > I felt a surprising surge of freedom. Same, it was like a big weight lifted off of me. Felt great, and feels great except for the company’s return-to-office date looming over me.
biffstallion 6y ago
Google likes to project itself as pro-employee when it really ISN'T. Here is one such example.
motohagiography 6y ago
Going back to an office 5 days/week seems absurd at this point, especially for anyone who is planning to move out of a city.
im3w1l 6y ago
Clearly some people want to work from home, whereas other people want to work in the office. There are reasons why mixed teams are bad so it would seem that you have to cater to one or the other. But, can't you make some teams fully remote and others fully onsite?
dqpb 6y ago
They should quite and start startups or join startups. Google is good when you’re right out of college or when you’re nearing the end of your career. But when you’re in the prime of your career, do you really want to waste those precious few years making Larry and Sergey richer?
grphtrdr 6y ago
If I put myself in the head of an executive at a big company, I didn't get to this position to be on zoom calls. I want to feel like the big cheese in an office with a bunch of people. I want my ass kissed in person. Work from home feels like a demotion. It is not good for the "Corporate Culture".
jinushaun 6y ago
Don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather not being “working from my kids’ bedroom”. Tech has had generous WFH policies forever—before the pandemic. Nearly every big meeting I was part of included one or more persons on zoom. I would slack people I sit next to. What’s different now is that we don’t have a choice to stay home. When these big companies recall people back to the office, we’ll all go back to our normal work schedules—which for many pre-pandemic already included a lot of WFH.

158 points by nixass 6y ago

kyriakos 6y ago

The cat is out of the box now and it's hard to put it back in.

mxwsn 6y ago

w/o paywall: https://outline.com/AMVLqP https://outline.com/AMVLqP

fnord77 6y ago

> "Right now I'm managing people in 8 cities spread across 5 time zones. What possible reason do I have to be in an office?" taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?

eganist 6y ago
> taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. Why?
- asah 6y ago
  +1 - it's often best to organize "knowledge workers" by function/capability/project rather than geography/culture/etc. (I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
- eigenket 6y ago
  I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours. Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
  - lstodd 6y ago
    When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
    - eigenket 6y ago
      I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about. Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening. Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    Australia is hard if you're not in Asia. 8hr time differences are doable, but super annoying. I used to do Asia in the morning and California in the evening, and that's really tough. A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did. The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford. That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    In my experience (and it's probably partly because it's what I'm used to), working between US East Coast and Europe--so about 6 hours difference--works pretty well. And many of the teams I work with are distributed that way. It starts to get harder if you bring in the US West Coast and/or APAC.
chronicsunshine 6y ago
Most major corporations have teams of mixed offshore and onshore developers. If it was okay to have the offshore part of the team working from outside the office before the pandemic, I don't see why onshore developers wouldn't deserve the same treatment now.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  It's not even a case of onshore vs offshore, companies that manufacture physical things and have even a shred of vertical integration have always done this. The corporate office is in a different state than the manufacturing facility which is in a different state from the R&D facility which is in a different state than that company that used to be your contractor that you acquired a decade ago, etc. etc. And they've managed to do this successfully even before video chat and email, some of them since before the telephone.
deleted 6y ago
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underseacables 6y ago

I travel a lot because I’m in sales, so I’m constantly in and out of the office. I very much want to return to the office, because for me it’s a homebase, where I can connect with my colleagues. It just hasn’t been the same and I feel that my workflow has diminished without the communal nature of the office.

akmarinov 6y ago
I don’t travel at all, just a developer in front of a screen 8 hours a day. I very much prefer to stay home and get to work by getting to my desk instead of fighting traffic. To each their own, but remote work is now a perk that some companies will offer and others won’t, not offering it will effectively cut out a fairly large percent of devs that don’t want to go back.
- ssully 6y ago
  Similar boat here. When we were still in the office, I would go to a handful of meetings, and then the rest of my actual working time was spent alone in a solo or shared office space. Going forward, a hybrid approach where I could go in a day or two for bigger group meetings and then do my actual work at home would be preferred.
- ReptileMan 6y ago
  The question is what will be included in the fairly large percent. If you lose this way some good, but you filter all the potential slackers it may leave you with a better pool.
splithalf 6y ago
So you are getting paid while you are not in the office, but you would make it so that others don’t have that ability?
- nunez 6y ago
  They weren't saying that. They were just saying that they preferred having an office. I think it's okay to want to have an office. Working from home isn't for everyone. I pay for my own office because I really need my work space to be separate from my home space, but I understand why others would prefer to not have a commute/be closer to the family/enjoy their creature comforts/etc.

dcolkitt 6y ago

It seems strange that Google management would push so hard on this. Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture. But it seems like if you let everyone choose, it'd be 50/50 in-person vs. WFH. So, even if you give your employees full flexibility, you'll still wind up with decently full offices that can train junior people, promulgate a corporate culture, etc.

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> Nearly everyone I've spoken to has reported that WFH productivity has been equal, if not better than pre-pandemic. Certainly not the case for everyone. Many people are struggling to be productive at home, alone. Jobs that require more coordination are also at risk of slowing down. WFH is great for some, but it’s not a panacea.
- hpoe 6y ago
  How many of them have slowed down b/c of the pandemic vs WFH? I can imagine a job being a lot harder if suddenly your children are home all day, heck my kids aren't even school age and my wife is home fulltime and I still sometimes have my little ones come in asking for juice or to help them put on their shirt, or something like that. Not to mention the additional stress and isolation that comes from all of the pandemic management measures, and the omnipresent low level fear. Honestly if WFH has even remained steady with in office in this hostile environment to me that is a pretty big indicator it is better for businesses.
  - skeeter2020 6y ago
    this matches my experience as a dev manager. We had a bump in productivity initially, probably due to a fully-charged battery of team combined with less disruptions, but now productivity has declined by all our quantative measures (deploys, cycle times, failure frequency,etc). These are all proxies and not prefectly isolated, but better than "gut feel"

heliodor 6y ago

"I'll quit!" they say. It's about as empty a threat as telling the customer service person that you'll sue the company.

new_realist 6y ago
Not when other companies offer better pay and a remote option.
TigeriusKirk 6y ago
People quit jobs they aren't satisfied with all the time.
ralusek 6y ago
People quit Google all the time. Big companies in SV actually have pretty short average retention times.
whateveracct 6y ago
Is it? It's at-will employment. Quitting is the easiest thing in the world legally speaking. Way more tenable than suing.
katbyte 6y ago
When your recruited multiple times a week it’s not hard. I tell all recruiters I won’t work in an office ever and post pandemic the number who agree to that has jumped by a large percentage
ok_coo 6y ago
Are we pretending our industry has a glut of experienced people begging for work? GL to all of the inflexible employers out there.
topher200 6y ago
I quit Google last month specifically because I didn't want to move back to MTV in September.

rightbyte 6y ago

It would be interesting to know the median commute time for those who say they will quit or not. For me it is just insane even thinking about going to go back to 2h commute each day. I don't even know why I considered that OK.

mrweasel 6y ago
I only have a 15 min drive to work, and while working from home makes a few things easier, like picking up my daughter from daycare, the benefits of the office easily compete with the 30 - 35 minute commute. I get better working conditions, better coffee, better lunch and I feel like I’m not alone during difficult tasks. Ideally I’d like to work from home one or two days week, and be at the office the remaining days.
- Xevi 6y ago
  I also have about 40 minutes of commute per day. However I get better working conditions, lunch, etc, when I work from home. Not to mention that it's much less stressful, and I can go lay down in my bed for a couple of minutes if I want to. I also do some chores during breaks, which saves me even more time at the end of the day.
  - mrweasel 6y ago
    Based on the comments about working from I read, either here on HN or on LinkedIn, it seems to me that people reluctance to return to the office is often based on two thing, well three in the case of the insane commutes some people have. But in general it's either because they work under poor conditions in their offices, or because they have a personality that's ill suited to modern open plan offices. There's nothing wrong in not wanting to return to an environment that's not right for your personality, or simply a poor environment for any office worker. Sadly I think that those companies who would care to address such issue are the same companies who already have employees wanting to return to their offices. Perhaps one thing we have learnt is that if you're a company who care very little about the work environment you provide, and don't feel like provide better facilities, then you can do away with the office and keep your employees happy that way.

woeirua 6y ago

ITT a lot of tech workers with super plush salaries and benefits are going to find out the hard way, that going back to the office for Google is better than going to work for most other companies.

hpoe 6y ago

It seems to me a big divide in this question is people who derive a sense of identity/value/community from their workplace and those who view it in a more utilitarian light. For me I much prefer WFH but I also have 3 kids and a wife that I'd rather spend time with than any of my co-workers; however when I was younger I enjoyed associating with my co-workers because I didn't have as much other social connection.

katbyte 6y ago
Single and live alone and still prefer it. I get more time to hangout with my friends, and for those who also work remote we hang out at a cafe and work together
pumaontheprowl 6y ago
I'm purely utilitarian (I don't derive any sense of community from my workplace), but I still strongly prefer working from the office. For a number of reasons: * Access to company cafes means I eat healthier, spend less time cooking/cleaning, and save money on food. * Face-to-face interaction with co-workers makes debugging problems much easier (no more wondering what they're seeing on their screen; just walk over and see). * Arriving at and leaving the office provides a fixed start and end to the work day where I can completely detach from work outside those hours. * There are no internet connection problems when my workstation is hardwired into the company network. * It's much easier to get exercise/go to the gym when I'm already out of the house.

notdonspaulding 6y ago

What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out the percentage of people who responded positively was significantly higher than the percentage of people who ultimately chose to pay for the option in actual sales. I wonder if a similar effect will be seen regarding people returning to work.

AlgorithmicTime 6y ago
WTF do I want a heated cupholder? It'll melt my ice.
hpoe 6y ago
My situtation is slightly different than the Google one, but I've already resolved if my employer makes me come back into the office with a full-time commute, I'm going to start looking for a different job right away.
- ckdarby 6y ago
  I think a lot of employees are in this situation but aren't going to say this because they don't want to lose their job or have it held against them and be managed out of the company before they're told they need to come into the office.
- Jiejeing 6y ago
  Same, there are plenty of competitive offers, and if I cannot upgrade my lifestyle (no commute, house instead of studio, etc) with my current employer, so be it.
sriram_sun 6y ago
GOOG folks, FB is recruiting stressing on "remote". Call a recruiter today!

spoonjim 6y ago

Google doesn’t care if most employees quit, they are replaceable. The few that they do care about, they will arrange unofficial exemptions for.

artembugara 6y ago
1. I'd assume that a cost to replace 1 SE employee at google is close to USD 1,000,000 2. It's hard as never before to hire someone to from from the office (US tech giants are hiring many H1Bs) So, I disagree. It can become a long-term crisis.
- throwaway6734 6y ago
  Based on the competitiveness of googles hiring process I imagine there's a pretty big pool of candidates for them to choose from though.
  - throwaways885 6y ago
    Not really. As somebody who has seen both sides of a hiring process like that, the reality is the vast majority of candidates are just awful. You can probably rule out nearly 75% of applicants right off the bat. Add in hiring laws, bureaucracy, immigration, negotiation, candidates withdrawing, and finding a good person who works for your team can take months.
    - throwaway6734 6y ago
      Awful in what respects? I was under the impression that it was sort of like Harvard: lots of applications, but a good chunk of those denied could have just have easily been accepted if there was space You seem to have experience with their hiring and I have none (only applying) so I have much more faith in what you're saying than my preconceived ideas.
      - throwaways885 6y ago
        As in, a significant chunk of candidates cannot write code, have outright lies on their CV, have never used anything other than visual basic, etc... In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company, or your average skill level will go down, which makes hiring just hard mathematically.

chrisseaton 6y ago

People have clearly decided it's now completely safe to come out and continue the war on remote working.

geodel 6y ago
Described my workplace :) Just this morning had staff meeting about 'come to office from June 1st' announcement.

gaoshan 6y ago

I love working in the office and being around colleagues on a daily basis. If people want to leave that will open more spaces for folks like myself.

freebuju 6y ago

Headline is a bit of a reach. A few employees grumbling on Twitter does not constitute any meaningful representative given the size of Google's workforce. That said, WFH is not for everyone. And a flexible 3-day office presence is a good healthy compromise.

williesleg 6y ago

Babies.

williesleg 6y ago

Can't they just Google search vaccines are effective?

macksd 6y ago

I've always been mystified by the state of remote work at Google, because I understood that they pushed pretty hard on being in the office. And yet I've had many video conference calls with various teams at Google over the last 8 years and in every single one, most of the Googlers on the call were obviously dialing in from home. I even flew to Mountain View once for a big all-day meeting. I got there, met my coworkers in the lobby, and was escorted to a conference room by a manager who dialed us in for the video conference with all the engineers at home. I can't think of a time I've interacted with a group of Googlers in their office. Was this really not the norm? Is it the norm for engineers but not for everyone else or something?

gipp 6y ago
Permanent or official WFH arrangements are generally not a thing, but just taking days here and there informally as WFH days is something that many teams are pretty permissive about from what I understand.
- macksd 6y ago
  Yeah and that's the kind of thing I would hope really does become more normal virtually everywhere. Especially when a job is so easily done remotely most of the time, it should be very low cost for people to be a more available parent when kids are sick, or stay home when they might be contagious, or just get errands done in a timely manner. But this has happened to me so much, it didn't seem like it could be a coincidence that I happened to catch everyone on their WFH day that week...
sgtnoodle 6y ago
While I was there, they had a big "mobile first" push, and they were encouraging employees to try working exclusively from phones and tablets one day a week. Of course as an embedded software engineer working within their IT policies, I had my gubuntu workstation, macbook, and a gubuntu laptop, and I also had a windows laptop to pull out once a month or so when I needed to run obscure windows only tools. For a while I had to travel every couple months along with plenty of other coworkers. I worked a few days here and there from other offices and I don't recall there being any particular resistance to it. It was fun visiting other offices. I tried bacon syrup in my coffee in Ann Arbor, climbed around on a giant rope net in Pittsburgh, video conferenced with someone from inside a giant binocular in Santa Monica, and even had Google office lunch in Dubai. We had a 6-12 month period of ambiguity / lack of project direction, and coupled with Google's (toxic in my opinion) perf/promo system it created morale issues. I personally was finding it difficult to make it to the office before 11AM most days, which my manager called me out on, but within the context of trying to understand why there were morale issues. My team was able to figure out the underlying issues and it got better, but that's right around when I decided to give Zipline a try, and it's been 5 years of really satisfying work with a great group of people.

pmoriarty 6y ago

The more people quit this toxic spyware, adware company, the better.

Tepix 6y ago

At a virtual work meeting (in Germany) we were talking about the employer's right to know the employee's vaccination status. Clearly both sides have good arguments. It's going to be interesting.

LightG 6y ago
Hah, that did occur to me as a strategy for fending off the soon-to-come "get back to the office" edict. Hopefully we can all meet half way with some form of flexible working. One size doesn't fit all.

DubiousPusher 6y ago

Friends and family keep asking me if I'm moving out of my metro area or if I'll move to the deep xurbs. But I've held off any such machinations exactly because of this. My employer has embraced WFH beyond the pandemic but all it takes is a couple bad quarters and a new CEO deciding that working from home is "part of the problem" and "work from the office" is part of some shiny new turnaround plan. And you never know when you might need a job and the best you can come up with is one with a company with this kind of control freak attendance culture.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
We've seen an exodus from London, people buying houses in remoter parts of the country on the basis that they will be able to continue to WFH after the pandemic is over. Personally I think that is quite a rash decision to make right now.
- ghaff 6y ago
  It depends on the company and the individual situation of course. But everything I see suggests that coming in on a fairly regular basis (like 1-2 days per week) is going to be more common than being fully remote, which will generally be on a case by case basis. Of course if coming into a office is a few days every few weeks sort of thing, people can travel greater distances to do that.
- me_me_me 6y ago
  > rash decision? Maybe they like to WFH and they are good at what they do. If they can buy a house and pay half in repayments than what they were paying in rent, then is that rash decision? I'd rather earn less and have a house and no commute. Maybe its a case of people realising that there are other ways of living.
  - xboxnolifes 6y ago
    The rash decision is in the risk of their employer deciding to forbid WFH post-covid and they now have the decision of a a long commute or looking for a new job.

sundaeofshock 6y ago

Google employees are some of the most highly compensated people in tech. I wonder how many people decide to stay at google rather than taking a 30%+ pay cut?

lstodd 6y ago
I personally know three people. 30% pay cut is nothing, they took 50-60% just to keep sane and do some useful work instead.
fernandotakai 6y ago
i would take a 50% pay cut just to work from home. quality of life > money.

nojito 6y ago

Remote workers are generally less productive than onsite workers for my company (100k+) employees Threatening to quit is fine simply because hiring has never been easier for us. I’m sure it’s even easier at Google scale.

sthomas1618 6y ago
Is that take from the gut or is there data to back that up?

KoftaBob 6y ago

One of the most low-value words in a headline or statement is "some". If you take any scenario and ask a large enough group of people their opinions, there's going to inevitably be an arbitrary number (that can then be qualified as some) that will have the reactionary view that makes for an eye catching headline. Put simply, "some" is just vague enough to allow these article writers to get a clickbait headline from a statement that only a handful of people have made. It's lazy and disingenuous, which are two words I've found myself using to describe the journalism industry as a whole lately.

mLuby 6y ago
Exactly right. Similar is "over 30% of group says or does controversial thing" (meaning the significant majority don't). Also not a fan of practice of quoting a controversial phrase in the headline to get both the shock value and editorial deniability. > Apple charged of 'anti-competitive' app policies > World's glaciers melting at 'accelerating rate' > Man Utd fans 'disgusted' by ESL plans They literally found one person to say the words.

nunez 6y ago

Google said they would allow WFH until July 2021 last year: https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/tech/google-work-from-home-extension/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/27/tech/google-work-from-home-ex.... They're extending that to September. Googlers knew what was coming. In my brief experience there, Google was staunchly against remote work, even remote work between office locations. A big reason behind me leaving (aside from not enjoying the work) was that I wanted to work from an office in another state but was told that wouldn't be possible despite the recruiter I was working with saying otherwise. The work could have 100% been done from another office (or from anywhere, really), but, nope, not possible.

saos 6y ago

I'm waiting to see if they'll be a massive rug pull in coming month in regards to WFH. If not then I may finally be able to move out of London!

giantg2 6y ago

Our company is pushing us to come back. They expect higher attrition this year since people don't want to come back.

EGreg 6y ago

Wow I have been predicting for 10 years that working from home is super attractive, and the commute is great. And many people kept telling me how that’s so stupid, and they want to have a social life at work etc. I replied you can a social life with your friends and neighbors if everyone works from home... Now it seems it has been tried and many people would rather keep it :)

francisofascii 6y ago

Didn't we just read Google's revenue grew 34% higher than the previous year? And they think they can do better by being back in the office? Huh. Interesting.

wfhbata 6y ago

I’ve told myself I won’t go back to the Bay Area. SF is a joke and the peninsula is ridiculously overpriced even on a tech salary. I’ve loved the last year living outside of the Bay Area. On the other hand, the thought of whiteboard interviews at this stage in my life or taking a massive pay cut to work at a local company is not enticing either. So we’ll see what happens in a couple months when forced to decide. I realize the path of least resistance might win out for me and others.

pbuzbee 6y ago
I agree. When I left the Bay Area at the start of the pandemic, I felt a surprising surge of freedom. The salaries and jobs in the Bay Area are great, but they come with the big caveat of choosing between (1) living near work, but spending a fortune to rent small, old apartments forever or (2) having a better living space, but with a nightmare commute. Why would I want to return?
- wfhbata 6y ago
  > I felt a surprising surge of freedom. Same, it was like a big weight lifted off of me. Felt great, and feels great except for the company’s return-to-office date looming over me.

biffstallion 6y ago

Google likes to project itself as pro-employee when it really ISN'T. Here is one such example.

motohagiography 6y ago

Going back to an office 5 days/week seems absurd at this point, especially for anyone who is planning to move out of a city.

im3w1l 6y ago

Clearly some people want to work from home, whereas other people want to work in the office. There are reasons why mixed teams are bad so it would seem that you have to cater to one or the other. But, can't you make some teams fully remote and others fully onsite?

dqpb 6y ago

They should quite and start startups or join startups. Google is good when you’re right out of college or when you’re nearing the end of your career. But when you’re in the prime of your career, do you really want to waste those precious few years making Larry and Sergey richer?

grphtrdr 6y ago

If I put myself in the head of an executive at a big company, I didn't get to this position to be on zoom calls. I want to feel like the big cheese in an office with a bunch of people. I want my ass kissed in person. Work from home feels like a demotion. It is not good for the "Corporate Culture".

jinushaun 6y ago

Don’t know about anyone else, but I’d rather not being “working from my kids’ bedroom”. Tech has had generous WFH policies forever—before the pandemic. Nearly every big meeting I was part of included one or more persons on zoom. I would slack people I sit next to. What’s different now is that we don’t have a choice to stay home. When these big companies recall people back to the office, we’ll all go back to our normal work schedules—which for many pre-pandemic already included a lot of WFH.