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Luckily, there will be plenty of remote firms to scoop up all the engineers Google is about to hemorrhage. What a miserable work culture it must be for them to
by adenozine 5y ago
Luckily, there will be plenty of remote firms to scoop up all the engineers Google is about to hemorrhage.
What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this.
Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)
- tick_tock_tick 5y agoOf course they'll lose some people but an office is enough of a competitive advantage to justify it.
- splitstud 5y ago
- dekhn 5y agoThere is already a huge google engineer hemorrhage. A number of principal engineers and other folks I thought would be google lifers moved to snowflake. I don't expect this to affect Google's ability to continue to grow at 15-20%, though. There will be armies of younger people who still want to jumpstart their career there.
- obviouslynotme 5y agoGoogle needs long tenure more than other companies due to its large reliance on in-house software. This is yet another move to shoot themselves in the foot. Luckily, network effects will keep them in business for another few decades.
- scarface74 5y agoEvery large tech company relies on “in house software”.
- bitcharmer 5y agoYes, but I can assure you there are vast differences. Worked for many tier 1 investment banks in the techiest corners of each org and some cases felt like startups with all the shiny new toys everyone else was using vs the dark ages of customized software straight from the nineties or some other entirely-in-house-built abomination in other places.
- eikenberry 5y agoReplacing senior engineers with juniors isn't sustainable though and their software quality is going to get a lot worse. Probably sooner than they think.
- munificent 5y agoI mean... sustainably replacing senior people with junior people is the predominant arc of life throughout all human history. People retire or die. You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.
- ehnto 5y agoIt's not just about experience as an individual though, Google has hordes of arcane institutional knowledge about it's own platforms to maintain, like any large organization. Even if they were replacing everyone with senior devs and not juniors, you'd still be losing little bits of that each time someone left. You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.
- ceras 5y agoGoogle has always lost top people to the next hip large-but-not-too-large tech company as they try something fresh / try to win the tech stock lottery. It was Facebook over 10 years ago, for example. You could get counter-offers to not leave for FB in that era. Is the current attrition any different?
- morgante 5y agoTotally anecdotally, lagging comp and bureaucracy are much bigger sources of attrition than remote work. For the most part, anyone who wants to go remote can.
- opportune 5y agoBut Google let most people who asked to go remote, go remote. And said several times that if you haven’t asked to go remote yet, they’ll give you a 30 day notifications before you need to go back I hate threads like these because people will circle around generic talking points while missing all the nuance and context behind this actual decision, like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks, giving a heads up, having a well-defined policy.
- coderintherye 5y ago>like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks Do you have the policy document or data to back that up? Asking because I am friends with a Google engineer who asked to go remote and was denied (even though nothing about their role requires them to be in-person).
- opportune 5y agoA little birdie told me that most denials were for specific roles (eg some entire departments were not going to let employees go remote, mostly not engineering). In engineering the bird told me most denials were due to being very junior, working on something that needed physical access, or poor performance
- dataflow 5y agoWhat about being a new hire? Do they get generally approved or denied?
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoAnecdatum: a coworker who joined mid-pandemic was approved for remote work.
- dataflow 5y agoThanks! But mid pandemic would be a year ago right? Not quite what I was thinking of as new hire, though cool to know regardless.
- paul9290 5y agoUpvote you and more! I'm not going back to the office ever there's no need to.. the company I work for has experienced explosive growth since we went remote ..brought on and maintained 100 new hires. If they try to force me I'll find something else!! Cities are dying some cause of remote work but aren't we tired of the govt controlling our lives (Biden's remark of all remote workers must go back..ha lmao). Umm the solution is to innovate cities and offer programs for remote workers to come live there for three to six to 12 months ..have a startup that owns buildings in all cities for remote workers to live in and congregate as well let's them jump from town to town every many months. City living Innovation not more govt control/lame ideas is what is needed to spur the economies of cities and their future prosperity.
- Simon_O_Rourke 5y agoThis makes perfect sense, some people will be suited to some days on-site, and some off-site, but there will be others like myself where the commute is now a deal breaker. If you get some talented engineers to join you because of the shortsightedness of Google then kudos to you, and more the loss for Google.