4 ms·

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 ma

by macksd 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.
- swiley 5y ago
  That's surprising. I always thought Android was terrible for development because of a lack of dogfooding but it sounds like they actually try to use it.
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    At the time at least, the extent of working on mobile devices seemed to be catching up on emails and messages, and calling into meetings. Google doesn't allow source code to be stored locally on mobile devices including laptops for security reasons. IT managed laptops can at least connect to some internal systems, and while I was there they rolled out tools to make it productive to code from laptops. As far as I know though, no one codes on an Android device. Maybe that's changed since I left. Google does in general do a pretty good job dogfooding, I think. All the things about Google services that drive folk crazy tend to drive Googlers more crazy by 10x. I still have a special hate for Drive's search functionality, for example...

by macksd 5y ago

gipp 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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.

swiley 5y ago
That's surprising. I always thought Android was terrible for development because of a lack of dogfooding but it sounds like they actually try to use it.
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  At the time at least, the extent of working on mobile devices seemed to be catching up on emails and messages, and calling into meetings. Google doesn't allow source code to be stored locally on mobile devices including laptops for security reasons. IT managed laptops can at least connect to some internal systems, and while I was there they rolled out tools to make it productive to code from laptops. As far as I know though, no one codes on an Android device. Maybe that's changed since I left. Google does in general do a pretty good job dogfooding, I think. All the things about Google services that drive folk crazy tend to drive Googlers more crazy by 10x. I still have a special hate for Drive's search functionality, for example...