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Why Googleplex Architect Says Luxury On-Site Perks Are 'Dangerous'
- beanjuiceII 5y agoI for one love them, it makes my life so much easier
- trzy 5y agoThe SV “campus culture” is a contributing factor to the area’s overall social dullness. The downsides of this are not immediately apparent but there is an opportunity cost to eating all your dinners with the same group of (mostly) guys and salad bar take-home scavengers. One thing I liked at Apple is that at 4pm, almost everyone went home (many commuted via the company bus). A coworker of mine who had moved from Apple to Google and back to Apple preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home.
- jcims 5y ago> preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home. I would guess this has more to do with Apple’s cohesive product line creating a laminar flow of ideas through the environment versus Googles emergent order out of turbulence. I worked at the MV campus for a spell and all of the campus ‘bennies’ cognitively evaporated within a month or two. The only thing of durable appreciation for me was the shuttle service.
- trzy 5y agoThat’s how it looks from the outside but internally, Apple is also turbulent and decentralized. Products are incubated by engineering teams and only much later in the process do HI and ID get involved. PMs analogous to Google’s don’t seem to exist either (as far as I know it is purely a marketing function with little direct influence). Admittedly I’m not too sure how it works once a product gets released and matures into a flagship like the iPhone but bottom-up incubation work definitely continues even on those.
- southerntofu 5y agoTL;DR > "Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do," he said. "It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."
- UnpossibleJim 5y agoIs it me or does it sound a little more than cultish?
- southerntofu 5y agoIt's a little worse than that, because a cult only destroys your life. These Silicon Valley corporations are destroying Earth as we know it (climate change, etc). (if you doubt it, think about it: how many resources does surveillance capitalism need to build datacenters just to hoard your personal that's unrelated to the service provided? p2p is far greener than any cloud service you can think of)
- closeparen 5y agoDo Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Cupertino want, or would they even allow, more and busier strip malls? I see these perks as fundamentally trying to make the suburban office park experience tolerable to younger workers, who would otherwise get this stuff from the city. I work for a more urban company and we don’t do any of this crap except lunch. We don’t need to; it’s down the street.
- shaftway 5y ago> What does the post-pandemic workplace resemble? Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it's easy to hang out and chat. But not an environment where it's easy to get work done.
- VikingCoder 5y agoI like moving into a shared space for a group conversation, yes. But mainly, I want an office with a door that closes. I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own mouse, again, selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own chair, which I have selected and adjusted for its ergonomic properties. I want to put pictures of my kids on the walls. I want to leave physical notes to myself. And have reference books nearby. I want a plant. I do not want a soul-less hotel-style "business workstation." And I especially don't want one in an open floor plan with everyone talking over everyone else. Get it through your thick, stupid skulls.
- twobitshifter 5y agoPutting it all together - you want to work from your home office.
- throwaheyy 5y agoWhere did they say “home office”? I want all the above, along with face time with co-workers and a half hour commute separating it from home.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- midrus 5y agoI'm sad I can only upvote this once.
- musicale 5y agoInfinite Loop[1] >> Apple Park[2] "It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." -Greg "Joz" Jozwiak [1] https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history/ https://www.wired.com/story/apple-infinite-loop-oral-history... [2] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employees-rebel-over-open-plan-offices-architecture-news/ https://www.dezeen.com/2017/08/10/apple-park-campus-employee...
- 0x500x79 5y agoI worked at a bit campus with lots of perks. It felt more like college than work. Especially with how people stayed for dinner and the campus was busy from 7AM to 10PM. I can see how this could be dangerous. I really felt like the campus made people feel like it was more like college which led to some bad behaviors, IME.
- irrational 5y ago> The office is the fermenting ground for people growing into successful adults. This makes me scream in my head. Do we really believe this? Should we really believe this? Have there been no successful adults who were not fermented in an office?
- lkxijlewlf 5y agoGoogle fermented in a garage at first, right?
- zepto 5y agoFrom the point of the corporate hierarchy, by definition you are not successful if you do not have an executive rank. Therefore only those who have been fermented in the vat, can be considered successful.
- buscoquadnary 5y agoOnce you are in the workplace shouldn't you already be an adult by that point?
- vanusa 5y agoIf that company is Google, apparently not.
- AlexandrB 5y ago“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” This article is an interview with an architect who designs offices for large corporations. He has to believe this, otherwise he's out of a job.
- mc32 5y agoVery much like time manager sessions, collaboration sessions and other assigned trainings. the majority of that imparted is fluff. Occasionally you get a nugget, but by and large, it's not for these nuggets that these people become "experts" in a particular domain but rather they are perpetuating their parasitic relationship with companies.
- atlgator 5y agoAmazon is slowly creating their own nation state, where you can grow up in their ecosystem, live in their housing, attend their schools, train through their job training programs, and work your entire career for them.
- theandrewbailey 5y agoThere's an old song about that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5VMZqgVzRo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5VMZqgVzRo
- Hokusai 5y agoNext step is to pay employees with Amazon gift cards (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip)
- musicale 5y ago> keeping you stuck in this liminal work-like state for as long as possible Pretty much. It's obviously for the benefit of the company because they wouldn't do it otherwise. Still I appreciate the perks since you're expected to overwork anyway.
- president 5y agoIsn't keeping employees working longer by design? Or is it only "dangerous" now because they are somehow finding out that the knock-on effects of these perks are now giving negative returns on productivity?
- gundmc 5y agoDiscussed 3 days ago as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30038144 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30038144
- summerlight 5y agoI think the real problem is that SV doesn't really have any advanced, well developed urban infrastructure and commercial areas within a walk-able distance. The closest to Google's HQ is MTV downtown which doesn't even have capacity to feed thousands of employees. You cannot spend 2 hours in a car to buy some hamburger somewhere in Sunnyvale and get back to the office while being productive. Those free perks are not that cheap for Google but it has no alternatives. It's just a complete failure of urban development thanks to NIMBY. Cities want to keep Google in their area for obvious financial reasons, but don't want to touch any of their precious SFH zoning. So they let Google to do everything they want, even housing. Google's recently trying to develop urban area around their campus (San Jose has the most buzz but it seems MTV and Sunnyvale also has a similar masterplan? You'll be surprised to see how aggressive Google is on purchasing real estates around their campus) and I guess their primary motivation is to outsource as many office functionality as possible to third parties. We'll see how many "free perks" will remain after that.
- hiptobecubic 5y agoYes. Thank you! Google/Facebook offices are one of the best places in the south bay to hang out and that's fucking terrible. Solving it is hard, but the answer is definitely not "make the offices worse so that the crappy soulless neighborhood nearby seems better."
- wodenokoto 5y agoIn this context I’m assuming MTV isn’t music television that for some reason has decided to become a valley startup instead of playing music on television (would fit the whole SV pivot mentality)
- gruturo 5y ago> In this context I’m assuming MTV isn’t music television that for some reason has decided to become a valley startup instead of playing music on television (would fit the whole SV pivot mentality) Mountain View I guess :)
- jfim 5y ago
- david38 5y agoEh. Eating out is a huge money sink. I rarely go to restaurants or cafes. The city certainly isn’t entitled to my money for shit I can make at home for vastly cheaper.
- vineyardmike 5y ago> I can make at home for vastly cheaper. Spoken like a man who doesn't enjoy going out to eat.