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> They’re testing new multi-purpose offices and private workspaces, and working with teams to develop advanced video technology that creates greater equity betw

• bsilvereagle 6y ago
  > Nobody wants to go through the trouble of setting up a zoom for the 2 min conversation you have about a thing I have set aside 30 minute blocks on my calendar for "drop-ins" for exactly this flavor of conversation. I'm the only person on the invite list, but others know about its existence and will find the link on my calendar as needed. Sometimes no one shows up, other days the block turns into an impromptu large group brainstorm, other times it's back-to-back 2 min conversations.
  • Vaslo 6y ago
    With Microsoft Teams I just click a button and it calls the person instantly. I do this frequently for very short interactions and we can quickly yank more people in.
    • jmarcher 6y ago
      Same thing with Slack. I like the idea of open hours.
• PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > You either choose to be fully digital, and make digital communication the way work gets done, or you harm people out of the office. I say this as someone who managed mixed distributed / WFH teams: If in-person conversations are an advantage (and they are), no company is going to willingly surrender them for the sake of catering to the people who aren't in the office. That doesn't mean teams can ignore the remote team members. It's everyone's responsibility to communicate and share information. However, there's no sense in reducing the efficiency of in-office employees just to level the playing field. The strategies that worked best for my teams were to structure the hires and the workloads according to who could work best together. For example, having an in-office back end team combined with a WFH front-end team works well, because the communication is naturally segmented across team boundaries anyway. On the other hand, if you put one of the front-end devs in the office with the back-end devs while everyone else is WFH, you need to be prepared to make that in-office person the team lead because they're going to become the primary communication point whether you want it or not. I love my mixed distributed/WFH teams, but I'll never deny that in-office communication still reigns supreme. That said, distributed can be made to work as long as you do your planning and structuring around the natural communication lines rather than trying to fight it.
  • elliekelly 6y ago
    I’m not sure I completely buy that in-person conversations are a net positive. Constantly being interrupted with drop-in conversations definitely hurts productivity. The vast majority of the time those conversations could have been an email and our two minute chat is going to take me ten minutes to get back in the zone of what I was working on.
    • benrbray 6y ago
      It's a matter of etiquette, and of boundaries. In-person conversations are definitely a net positive if your coworkers are well-mannered. Also, there's this new invention called "doors" that I wish companies would get on board with. I hear that "opening" one's "door" can be used as an invitation to chat. :)
• slavapestov 6y ago
  > It just doesn't work when half of the team can walk by each other's desk, do some impromptu planning, and the other half are spread out across the world effectively uninvolved in these conversations. Seems like giving people a choice is the right idea. Maybe being less involved in these impromptu conversations is a worthwhile tradeoff for being able to live where they want.
• garet2 6y ago
  > you harm people out of the office I have seen this implication frequently in these discussions, that remote workers will get fewer promotions, lower ratings, etc. The assumption is that this therefore makes remote work non-viable. I don't really get that. Trading off better compensation through promos and ratings is just a business decision for the potential remote worker. Personally, I would trade never getting a promotion again for remote work. Google and the other companies like it already pay very, very well. If you've reached E6+, it's "FIRE in <10 years" well, even if you get "meets all" ratings forever. If you're in that position, you can be making 10x the median household income. You've basically won at money. Commuting is miserable, and I bike, easily one of the two least miserable methods (walking being the other) of doing so. Open offices are miserable. Flexibility at home is amazing. Having my own space is amazing. Making my own food for lunch, in my kitchen, is great. Feeling unfocused and deciding to just take a nap in my own bed for an hour. So yeah, maybe I'll never get a promotion. But, I don't think I'll do poorly enough to get fired, so... good enough for me.
  • foobarian 6y ago
    > trade never getting a promotion again for remote work Trade you say? Sounds like win-win to me! Not being made to manage/lead a bunch of other engineers sounds pretty nice
    • garet2 6y ago
      At these companies, "management is not a promotion"™, so it's not exactly that. But yeah, you usually have to deal with more people stuff, even as an IC.
    • rhodozelia 6y ago
      Eventually you might master your domain of expertise and solving the same problem again and again for different customers may become boring. Helping more junior coworkers mostly do the projects themselves with your assistance for the cruxes could be rewarding and multiply your output far beyond what you could achieve just working on it yourself.
• singron 6y ago
  Xoogler here. Google has been doing remote-work from the office for years. The campuses are so big and have so many buildings that meetings are often held over VC anyway so people don't have to walk back and forth. I occasionally had VC meetings with people elsewhere in the same building. Meetings between campuses are also common and obviously require VC regardless of laziness. VC is automatically added to meetings, every room is equipped with the proper AV, and culturally, people often actually click the right buttons to start the VC even when they aren't expecting VC guests. I don't remember ever attempting to join a meeting over VC and having the main location forget to join (although it probably happened to someone every once in a while). At least on our team, we tended not to have those 2 minute conversations. The code-review tools are top tier, so we would use those if at all possible. Most of our non-meeting communication otherwise was in buganizer (the bug tracker), Google groups via email, Google docs, or IRC (they were getting rid of it around when I left). I think the only exception was Nooglers. We had Nooglers sit next to a mentor on the team, and they would usually ask lots of simple questions out loud throughout the day.
  • osipov 6y ago
    Can confirm this description as correct. The individual contributors are effective at remote work but the management still wants the luxury of keeping the employees in an office location. Google's people management is notoriously weak and is one of the weakest in the IT industry in my experience. Poor managers prefer management by "walking around" which translates to organizational games played though unaccountable face-to-face meetings and political back-and-forth. Also, the senior management (reasonably) expects that once remote work is freely available, the employees will relocate to other areas of the country to minimize their cost of living. Once that happens, senior management loses sway with municipal and state governments that dish out kickbacks to companies based on their impact on the tax revenue.
  • throwaway197812 6y ago
    people often actually click the right buttons to start the VC even when they aren't expecting VC guests In at least one Google building I worked in, for a while conference rooms were in such short supply that if you didn't start the VC, after a few minutes some calendar bot would decide that the room wasn't being used, remove your reservation from the room, and five minutes later someone else would show up and try to kick you out.
• peder 6y ago
  And this 3 days in the office business won't work well either. If not everyone on the team picks the same 3 days to be in office, then what are you gaining? How would it make sense if there's barely any overlap among team members? I don't think these companies have thought this through. Logically, the 3 days a week in office will slowly become 2, then 1. Or maybe teams will decide to only get together 3 days a month or something like that. At that point, you're effectively fully virtual anyway. These companies need to just dive right in, because the suggested format smells of poorly thought out compromise.
  • geodel 6y ago
    I get what you are saying. But for some folks even few days per week of avoiding commute hell and general dreariness of office is better than everyday at workplace. I'd be happy if my employer allows that.
  • cpeterso 6y ago
    Sounds like teams (and other job factors), not individuals, decide which days will be in-office. The post says: “your product areas and functions will help decide which days teams will come together in the office.”
• hinkley 6y ago
  If people in the building have private offices, and the buildings have floors, there are a lot of psychological barriers that people either didn’t notice of have forgotten about because we’ve been trying to do our best imitation of a feedlot. I’m not going to go across a building and up steps to ask someone a question unless I am out of other options. I’m not. You’re not. I’ve done too many 5 Why’s where one of the answers was “they made a guess because they couldn’t be arsed to cross the building to verify things”. We might message that person, if we use it and they actually read their messages. At which point being in the office isn’t quite as transformative.
  • asdff 6y ago
    There's definitely a balance. I shared an office with one other guy before the pandemic. It was great being able to go, "Hey fred, are you busy? you seen something like this before?" and instantly have the coworker fix some super specific issue they faced before related to our setup that would have taken an afternoon or more stringing together the right generic stackoverflow questions. Now I have to find time in our day loaded with zoom meetings with other people with just as convoluted zoom meeting schedules to zoom with Fred for ten minutes. We might not find a good mutual time to meet until next week. Scheduling zoom calls vs. leaning back in your chair when your coworker has a second is an entirely different animal when it comes to workplace efficiency. I'd say I'm spending a lot more of my working time scratching my head than getting things done vs. before the pandemic. There are good things about working from home, but this is probably one of the worst parts in terms of work. It's like studying alone in your cramped bedroom vs in the library with your buddies in college.
    • nr2x 6y ago
      Depends how you are wired, all of my group study interactions in college were thinly veiled romantic efforts, whereas I got my actually studying done at 2am in a mostly empty cafe.
• ramblerman 6y ago
  > or you harm people out of the office Some people work half time, should we all not socially interact during their absence, because it would disadvantage them as well? The enemy of better is best, and I feel you are actually making a case against home working by being so extreme in your demands. Some people would like to work from home, understanding it adds a social challenge, but still prefer it for a myriad of reasons. And some people need to be in an office to be productive. I think it's a nobler goal to try cater to both, than set up some extreme all or nothing scenario.
• neilwilson 6y ago
  The purpose of the "hybrid working" pitch is to force those who would prefer to work remote back into the central location using "Fear Of Missing Out" (FOMO) It's essentially another of the very popular nudge tricks that are all the rage at the moment, and will result in everybody being back in the office. The 'choice' on offer isn't a choice at all. It's a management device to all but eliminate remote working and allow them back into their comfort zone. For remote to work everybody has to be remote and work via a central communication device. That way everybody is in the same 'office space' and the culture evolves around that to get the work done. Management then changes natures to suit the remote environment. (Note you can do 'all remote' on a campus - you give everybody an office!) I can guarantee you that if firms were required by law to pay for the time spent commuting, they would all choose to go remote permanently unless there was a physical reason to be in the same space. But it is for the workers to see commuting as part of work time, and calculate what they are getting paid per hour accordingly.
• leoh 6y ago
  > It just doesn't work when half of the team can walk by each other's desk, do some impromptu planning, and the other half are spread out across the world effectively uninvolved in these conversations. Nobody wants to go through the trouble of setting up a zoom for the 2 min conversation you have about a thing, or nobody is going to loop in a remote colleague when the team has lunch or coffee together. This is a tired take. Google Hangouts and Slack Video are quick and work great.