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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
by singron 5y 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 5y agoCan 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 5y agopeople 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.
- asciimike 5y agoI see you also worked in SF...
- cmrdporcupine 5y agoI remember flying down from Waterloo for the annual display ads multiple day conference thingy to attend sessions and finding that we were split into multiple rooms and VCing into sessions anyways. So in many cases I could have just stayed in Canada and tuned into the conferences from there.