11 ms·

Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

108 points by nickthegreek 4y ago

tchalla 4y ago
> “Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,” the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the same day. “Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment.” If only, there was an easier solution.
- x86x87 4y ago
  What's next? No more food in the office? The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children. Oh yeah. This is going to work out just fine.
  - nojito 4y ago
    How is using float desks being treated like children?
    - kderbyma 4y ago
      you are not important enough to deserve stability....your schedule is not yours....you are directed by the parents and told where to sit...and stand etc...
    - brewdad 4y ago
      This isn't float desks. This is an assigned desk that requires you to share and coordinate office time with a co-worker. This is so much worse than float desks.
    - AlanYx 4y ago
      Snow Crash does a good job satirizing the problems with float desks. Though even Snow Crash is a little optimistic; it didn't predict the typical issues with a person's multi-monitor setup of the day not working quite right, or encountering weird hardware incompatibilities between one's docking station of the day and one's laptop.
  - ElfinTrousers 4y ago
    > The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children. That's always been Google's move. Get some CS graduates from top schools, ideally right after graduation, and stretch out the campus experience as far as they can into the working world. Prevents them from developing the kind of independent thinking that might lead them to conclude that working at Google is not that great.
- amf12 4y ago
  What is an easier solution?
  - barbazoo 4y ago
    Not parent but presumably they mean WFH.
  - temp2022account 4y ago
    WFH, it's a religion for some people. I personally absolutely must have my in-person work, but I understand the desires.
    - amf12 4y ago
      And that is an option too.
  - dpkirchner 4y ago
    Extreme pair programming but with 4 people instead of 2.
  - turtlebits 4y ago
    Hot desks? A reservation system? I work for a remote optional company and employees can reserve desks ahead of time and/or you can get an assigned seat if you come in daily.
    - amf12 4y ago
      This is assigned hot desk which is better than just hot desk + reservation, which doesn't guarantee teams sit together.
- dwrodri 4y ago
  Surely there will be someone who will realize that you can approach this problem by building a matching engine based on Hall's Marriage Theorem[1], and then deploy it onto multiple regions for maximum anti-fragility, get promoted, rally some new hires to launch it as an extension of Google Workplace, get promoted again, abandon the project, and then have the feature die 10 months after public launch wondering why operating it cost so much money. At least, that would be the Google WayTM of doing it, right? 1: https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/ https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/
- CamperBob2 4y ago
  Wow, I thought they were talking about two people sitting at one desk at the same time. This is insane. "Matching process for agreeing on a basic desk setup and establishing norms?" BRB, I have something I need to do over at schwab.com. I'll be back shortly.
  - amf12 4y ago
    Don't believe everything you read on CNBC. They tend to exaggerate. A lot. There is no "matching process". People will be paired up, and have to agree upon the norms. The email isn't opinionated about this. Each org will have to figure out a process.
jollyllama 4y ago
As someone who worked at a place where we had more people needing desks daily than we had desks, sharing with one specific person is probably the worst solution I can think of.
ryanjyyc 4y ago
stack the devs & desks like bunk beds. problem solved.
- readonthegoapp 4y ago
  glad someone else sees the humor in this. i like the image of the grumpy ayn randian product manager using the conference room as his office, evil-eyeing all who pass by and look longingly at that big glass table, imagining the near-perfection of the muffled office noise barely penetrating the sleek glass enclosure...
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goldenchrome 4y ago
Wow Google’s culture has really gone to the dumps. I think this is a direct consequence of hiring too many people and hoping for the best. There’s no way their quality bar is anywhere near what it was 10 years ago. Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.
- kderbyma 4y ago
  Pinchai was never about culture....lmao. I never heard him laugh once.
amf12 4y ago
I don't understand the negative sentiment with this. Do people expect employers to assign everyone a big desk, which is not completely open office and also have the flexibility to come to the office 1-2 days a week? I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.
- readonthegoapp 4y ago
  part of it, for me, is that this policy says, 'hey googlers, we order you to _not_ come to the office -- at least, not at the same time or day as your desk friendo, or your desk friendos.' so when CEO 'x' says, 'everyone back to the office, we need to whisper sweet idea nothings to each other on our way to/from the bathroom, in the office, so that we can $$$$$' -- ceo google just said, "that's obviously untrue, and completely ridiculous, besides". either that, or ceo google just said that the money we save by creating desk friendos will surpass the alleged value we gain by whispering sweet idea nothings to each other in the hallways, or at our covid- and flu-covered desks. but one commenter said 'stackable desks' like bunk beds - which makes sense - kind of like that vertical pig farm in china. not sure how productive that will be -- for the desk jockeys, not the pigs -- but worth a try i guess. https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-get-a-new-dimension-9f36c5e7d7d1 https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-g...
  - Macha 4y ago
    Google is also one of those companies pushing for RTO though, from what I understood.
    - vechagup 4y ago
      RTO is barely being pushed for. They said "you should come to the office these 3 days", but almost no one did and no manager seems to care.
      - whiplash451 4y ago
        Yet another sign of a CEO being completely out of touch.
dwrodri 4y ago
Google's South Lake Union campus cost $802 million[1]. Google's parent company, Alphabet, spent $70 billion on stock buybacks[2]. I know I'm drastically oversimplifying the complexities of accounting required for a trillion-dollar empire, but this comes across as more of a punitive measure than a cost-saving measure. I acknowledge that being able to take the force of money and apply in a direction that results in growth at Google's scale is arguably one of the most difficult problems in business at the moment. But how does downsizing your offices do anything but make the hard times for Googlers a bit more uncomfortable? How does this news attract the talent that could help Google grow? It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders. The Lindy effect[4] suggests that Google will probably be around for another twenty years. To his credit, Sundar has spent the last 3 years navigating one of the largest companies in the history of mankind through an event that society hadn't seen in 100 years. So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter? Google was revered in the media for decades as being one of the best places in the world to work at, you can look Xooglers talking as far back as 2008 and see stories of people who went to work there and left disappointed because of the homogeneous mindset and work benefits failing to match the competition[3]. 1: https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-for-a-record-breaking-price/ https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-... 2: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billion-buyback.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billio... 3: https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/ 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
- rytis 4y ago
  > So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter? Why would he care?
  - dwrodri 4y ago
    Generally, I'm of the opinion that: 1. The CEO is the leader of the company 2. Good leaders are visionaries that have the capacity of picturing a better future, realizing what needs to be done, and then delegating and executing those requirements to manifest that vision into reality. 3. Sundar wants to be a good leader. It would be easy to say that my #2 is correct, but doesn't apply to Sundar as CEO. I've heard his tenure associated with the "MBA-ification" of Google. Solely focusing on maximizing shareholder returns, which in the case of the company sitting on the multi-billion dollar revenue hose, means cutting down on anything that gets in the way of that. That would indeed allow shareholders to get a great return on their investment for some time, but if you reduce google to a private AI research lab and a digital ads platform, there's nothing left to react (or bring forth) to changes in how people interact with technology. I feel like nothing exemplifies this further than Bard. Perhaps I am too much of an optimist. But it really feels like he should care.
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ndneighbor 4y ago
Look... if you want people to RTO, maybe make it so that there's less overhead? Reading this article made me just want to stay at my own desk at home.
- haliskerbas 4y ago
  Agreed, I have the perfect setup at home, I paid for everything (except laptop) and I pay for all of the electricity, bandwidth, accessories and upgrades, and furniture and upgrades. Saving the company a lot of money and I'm at my desk way longer!
  - iamevn 4y ago
    I never bothered but it's definitely easy at google to expense your internet and I remember hearing about someone successfully expensing some amount of their electricity
- ren_engineer 4y ago
  whole thing makes no sense, just feels like leadership is flailing. Is RTO just sunk cost fallacy due to these big companies having spent billions on real estate and fancy buildings? There seems to be minimal benefits to mandating it, it shrinks your talent pool, makes employees less efficient due to commute, forces you to pay more in tech hubs, and makes you spend more on office stuff. The only benefit is the completely non-measurable "improved collaboration" metric
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ancalagon 4y ago
    Makes perfect sense if they’re trying to downsize without paying severance/unemployment.
    - timeless102 4y ago
      If they don't come it and don't resign themselves, then I assume google would fire them in which case they would get severance? Is that how it works? It's only an issue if the people who wfh resign then they would not get severance/unemployment?
vechagup 4y ago
I'm not in the PA that will be sharing desks but sit in one of the affected offices. I can see about 100 desks from where I am right now. All of them are assigned to someone, but only 6 presently have someone sitting there. Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%? Something was bound to happen given all the unused real estate. But it's shitty that those of us who actually use our desks, because we rather like work-home separation, now might end up with a desk time share. Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?
- hypothesis 4y ago
  > Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%? > Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote? Not sure what the rules are at BigCo, but it looks like it would be way simpler to ask office-first people to apply to permanent positions.
- xracy 4y ago
  They didn't want a lot of people to work remote permanently. They explicitly discouraged it with a quota.
mealkh 4y ago
Floating license basically
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Desks? Make those lazy bums sit on the floor. If they want a desk they can bring one from home. No, you can't work from home, obviously, or the Communists win.
russellbeattie 4y ago
Though I think Google's Bay View campus is gorgeous and probably a lovely place to work, I can't imagine it's a particularly efficient use of the space it takes up. I could be wrong though as I've never been inside. I'll give credit to Google for not building another box full of cubicles, but it seems like it was meant to compete with Apple's spaceship in terms of impressive design, rather than somewhere for thousands of employees to get work done. Anyone know how many desks the buildings have and who gets to work there? https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-campus-grand-opening/ https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...
- moandcompany 4y ago
  It seems like the general sentiment from people assigned to Bay View campus hate it, and the campus is an example of form over function as an actual office for doing work.
fatbird 4y ago
> to ensure... desks are kept clean and free from personal items. This was called "hotdesking", then "hotelling", and it's unclear why I would arrange with a coworker to timeshare a desk when a proper hotdesking arrangement would likely be cheaper and easier.
- WastingMyTime89 4y ago
  I guess they think it’s a step too far for now and people would rebel. That’s probably coming next like in a year or two.
- kerblang 4y ago
  I'm supposed to be in one of those "hotelling" env's but human beings are so territorial that it effectively failed. In truth managers sabotaged it but employees were happy to go along. Even with WFH dominating now, it's still That's My Desk Not Yours. I kinda like the hotelling idea because you can mingle with people who work in other domains and mostly avoid that small percentage of really obnoxious folks. I suppose it could get problematic if you're the resident Hot Girl in an office of needy males (sorry if that sounds sexist and I'm sure I would absolutely hate being Hot Guy in an office of needy gals and no I'm not being facetious at all)
mathverse 4y ago
[flagged]
- autoexec 4y ago
  Seriously, the company has billions but can't afford to give everyone a desk? Why would employees accept that?
- dang 4y ago
  Maybe so, but please don't fulminate on Hacker News. We're trying for something else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - mathverse 4y ago
    Sorry. I got too emotional.
Insanity 4y ago
It seems like each day there's an article lately about reasons _not_ to work at Google. Sad to see how they went from an enviable place to work to a place to avoid these past years. (Although internally, things might be better than it looks from the outside of course)
- shmatt 4y ago
  I'd work from a toilet stall for a Google L6 comp band I doubt any Googlers actually care about this stuff
  - carom 4y ago
    I used to say something similar to this but then I worked at Google. It turns out I care a lot more about working on interesting problems than I do about fat checks.
    - moffkalast 4y ago
      Google still has interesting problems to work on? I thought they just printed money with adsense and launched projects just so they could cancel them 2 weeks later. /s
      - roflyear 4y ago
        I think he's saying they don't have interesting problems to work on.
        leros 4y ago
        Companies like Google have a unique problem. They attract the best engineers, but they still have lots of boring work to be done. So they end up hiring brilliant engineers only to have them work on uninteresting things like financial reports. My company created a whole separate job title which basically equates to "less skilled and lower payed developer" so we can hire more average engineers to do that kind of work without diluting our quality of engineers.
unixlikeposting 4y ago
I wonder how their recruiters will respond to those that want an office desk 5 days a week.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
  I remember visiting MS (Redmond), in the 1990s (It was at the "Longhorn" launch, if that helps date it). A friend of mine, worked in one of the nearby buildings, and took me to his office (He was doing documentation, or something for Encarta). I was struck by the narrow, dark, corridors, and the small, windowless, offices. My friend said that all MS engineers had a private office. I have since been told that the building I visited was probably an old one, and not representative of most buildings, and I think that MS went open-plan, since. I have also visited the Facebook (it was still called Facebook, back then) office, in NYC. The programming floor was a really big, noisy, open-plan office, jammed with desks (standing and sitting), and everyone was talking away. No windows. The floor was surrounded by conference rooms and offices, which had windows. The Japanese offices of my own company were sort of like that, but with uniform desks, and quiet as a mouse; even with hundreds of people. No individual offices. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had a small desk, in the corner.
  - int_19h 4y ago
    Microsoft started to transition to open layout company-wide sometime in the mid-10s. Depending on the org, some team at Microsoft still had private offices for their devs as late as 2017.
    - karakot 4y ago
      some still have (bing, some azure teams), though it ends soon.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
flax 4y ago
When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better. I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time". Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.
- Laaas 4y ago
  Well, that could be justified as maintaining the health of the employees by forcing one of two to stand up at any time.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    It would have to be timed so each employee got equal stool time. IIRC standing all day isn't necessarily healthier than sitting all day. You want to alternate.
    - Laaas 4y ago
      That would be incentivised with this system, no? Employees would fight the other off the stool constantly, to get their share of sitting.
      - rootusrootus 4y ago
        And perhaps get a little exercise in the process. Good point.
  - masklinn 4y ago
    It’s not like standing statically is good for your health either, and it can be easy to do that when focusing. I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that for hours at a time was not good.
  - outworlder 4y ago
pram 4y ago
Remember how all those Gen X movies depicted cubicles as the embodiment of the soul crushing rat race. If only we still had it that good!
- shortcake27 4y ago
  100% agree. I thought open plan was bad, then the norm became open plan hotdesking (no permanency). Such a morale killer.
- toastercat 4y ago
  I had low-wall cubicles at one job and thought it was great. Could still see the eyes and noses of my coworkers around me, and it was easy making conversation or asking for help.
  - at-fates-hands 4y ago
    I came here to say the same thing. I worked at a company where a smart manager got low profile cubes for the dev team. We were located in an area that had access to a host of large whiteboards, and large monitors for video conferencing. It was really great. If a dev ran into a problem, it was easy to ask for help. Then you could start working at a whiteboard a few feet from your desk. Whether you were working something out alone or with some other dev, chances are within a few minutes several other devs were there working the problem out with you. I mean the collaboration was really cool and we blasted through so many bugs and bad code, it was really refreshing. Likewise, we had a large portion of the floor dedicated to CSR folks. Again, some smart manager got them 7ft. high cubes so the noise the devs were making wouldn't interrupt what they were doing. They even had a few spare CSR cubes for anybody who really wanted to be heads down and working in absolute quiet.
- brailsafe 4y ago
  Damn idk which I'd rather have. Some cube farms are next-level depressing. When I was younger, I think part of what made the prospect of moving out of my hometown more compelling was the fact that a giant mega-insurance company ended up being the main endpoint for CS grads. I got to visit once and it was _not_ pretty. Tightly enclosed cubes with tall aging white walls, one source of sunlight if that. They must of really liked Java. On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he ate at his desk multiple times a day.
dontreact 4y ago
I am sitting at a Google desk and there are 5/6 people not here in the desks in my vicinity. I would prefer fewer desks and to actually get to sit next to people rather than being scattered among a sea of mostly empty desks due to people WFH.
- dietr1ch 4y ago
  I agree, but I think that the way of achieving that is quite dumb. Id rather enforce something around. The first 1-2 floors in some specific buildings on every campus will turn into shared spaces instead of forcing everyone out of their desks. Decisions seem so poorly though recently that the only way I can make sense of many is thinking that they are trying to get people to quit to avoid paying for severances and taking another morale and press hit at announcing layoffs.
  - dontreact 4y ago
    How do you create 1-2 floors of shared space without forcing some people out of their desks?
    - dietr1ch 4y ago
      You obviously have to move some people, but the way they are executing this now is kicking everyone out of their desks
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  Same, but, they shouldn't be taking away the desks of me of my coworker, as we're in using them five days per week. We come to the office because we find that we're much less productive at home in our shared Manhattan apartments.
  - srj 4y ago
    I agree, I come in 5 days a week and not having a dedicated space would make that experience much worse. I wouldn't rejoin the Cloud PA with this policy in place, and I imagine plenty of people will leave when the tech industry turns around again.
sys42590 4y ago
The problem I have with shared desks is that morning people get the best places close to windows and away from traffic and noisy corners, night owls are at a disadvantage. Also quite often shared hardware is in a sad state (keyboards with broken legs, mice with slippery wheels from people working with greasy fingers, etc.)
- leipert 4y ago
  Yuck. If I just look at my keyboard and mouse, I really do not want that anyone _has_ to use them. I clean them regularly and do not eat at the desk, but still cruft assembles.
- amf12 4y ago
  I have never seen shared desks with morning and evening split. The article says it will be alternate days, with the same desk. Basically, each desk is now assigned to two people, on alternate days.
alecbz 4y ago
This combined with mandatory in-office days seems insane. Are they still insisting on the latter?
posharma 4y ago
Internally Google might be just fine, but optics are equally important in this industry. Before Sundar took over Google never went through bad PR. It's just an observation, not a dig at Google's affairs.
- amethyst 4y ago
  Success hides problems.
- VikingCoder 4y ago
  Google never went through bad PR before Sundar? Sunday became CEO on August 10, 2015. Google+ was launched in 2011. (And the "real name" policy was a PR disaster.) Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (You can hardly find a PR disaster that people in the tech world complain about more.) Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe had an anti-poaching agreement that finally got settled in 2015, but they were getting bad press before that. "Right to be forgotten" bad press was in 2014 and before.
  - posharma 4y ago
    There were a lot of other good things going that masked these. The recent "PR botch ups" are creating more damage. The most famous e.g. is reacting to ChatGPT's hype and rushing to do a demo and then messing it up. It wasn't so much messing up the demo that caught they eye; it was how Google rushed/reacted to do it esp. when Google is considered to be at the forefront of AI. Again, optics. Besides Sundar hasn't come out with anything impressive in the last few years. It's ok to just keep the lights on, but at least don't create bad optics.
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      Actually, I don’t think it’s OK to just keep the lights on.
      - posharma 4y ago
        Hahha. Sure.
curiousDog 4y ago
How quickly the tide turns in our industry..from massages at your desk to sitting on each other's laps. Hey they could perhaps still continue the massage to each other though.
orangesite 4y ago
Hahahahaha!
hprotagonist 4y ago
So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles, you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time. And there's the question of interchangeability. Fed workers, like military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare workstation and get to work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn around a desktop. So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is -- as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms -- having problems.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- lasereyes136 4y ago
  Snow Crash for those that don't know: https://a.co/d/fXWqXr7 https://a.co/d/fXWqXr7
  - 4y ago
rr888 4y ago
Makes a lot of sense given how many people are WFH
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Just cut down on offices- makes even more sense
Wonnk13 4y ago
Not surprising, shit like this was happening pre-covid as well if you look for it.
- convolvatron 4y ago
  after finally landing a job at Google after 8 months of back and forth I was pretty seriously disappointed to be assigned less than 20 square feet in the middle of a row of chairs that guaranteed someone would hit the back of my chair every couple minutes, and that I would be hard pressed to go to the bathroom without doing the same to the other 20 people in the row.
  - sgtnoodle 4y ago
    I worked on a project in X, and we moved from the main campus to The Rails. Not to claim we deserved more space, but we often had a bunch of hardware on our desks and so the norm was for an L shape. A week before the move, I went by to check the new desk setup. The contractors had messed up the spacing, and every row of cubes had about 6" of extra space, except for the last row with my desk. My row had about 3' less space, and you literally had to do a slalom to get to my desk. Thankfully they were able to mostly fix it...
dcchambers 4y ago
I guess I had already figured that Google switched to hotel-style desks when covid started.
Johnny555 4y ago
If only there were someplace the employees could work and not need a desk at the office at all! Discouraging employees to all come at the office at once seems to dilute the “back to the office” mantra of “Employees work better when they can collaborate in person”. My workplace has a hybrid policy where teams pick one day to all be in the office, and employees “should” be in the office 3 days a week, but if your “collaboration” involves people on another team, then you’re usually going to have some of them zooming in (and sometimes people zoom in from conference rooms in the same building because of miscommunication about who is in the office), and at that that point you may as well all zoom in from home.
atleastoptimal 4y ago
Since it seems the days of Google being a fairytale workplace where every whim is catered to on a golden platter are over, which company now is taking up the mantle as the most enviable office environment?
robertwt7 4y ago
Sundar just keep finding reasons to cut cost because he can’t find a way to innovate or create new revenue streams for google
- davidw 4y ago
  Maybe they could - hear me out - do a new messaging system.
filmgirlcw 4y ago
This move strikes me as just the worst of both worlds. First, Google tells employees they need to be in the office X days a week -- and depending on team, from what I know from friends at the Kirkland office, this was enforced. Now, Google is saying, "actually, you still have to come in, but you need to share a desk with a stranger and coordinate with them what days you are going to come in." So goodbye flexibility. If I usually come in Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- but I need to come in on Wednesday this week for a meeting -- I'm now SOL if my desk mate is also in the office. Pre-pandemic, I was really opposed to hot desks because if you're making me come into the office, at least let me have my own workspace and setup. But in this situation, I feel like hot desks would be a MUCH better situation. Allow people to reserve their desk a week or even two weeks in advance for the days they'll be in the office -- you could even have it set to be auto-renewing for certain days each week -- but at least you'd have flexibility if you were needed to come into the office one day instead of another. And personally, I would rather have a hot desk than have a consistent desk I have to share with someone else, because that's worse. It's a consistent workspace, but I can't customize it because someone else uses it too. So I can't have my own keyboard (I'm not sharing things I spend my own money on with strangers, sorry), my own monitor configuration, or the stuff I like on my desk. And unlike a hot space, I'm tied to using it only on specific days. Right before the pandemic, Microsoft started phasing out personal offices (because of real estate taxes, pure and simple) and there was a lot of pushback and upset (totally understandable, going from a personal office to either a group of personal desks or to hot desks is not cool), but since people can still WFH, my understanding is that most people who go into the office X days a week still have a private office at the main campus (not sure about other locations, but I think most of them were more open plan). At GitHub (where they have announced they are phasing out all offices), we can reserve a desk space before showing up to a location, which is great -- plus, people who go in to the office all the time either have a recurring reservation (and have a more customized work space) or are choose to move around. Here's a tip to companies: if you want people to come into the office, don't make coming into the office a punishment. I'm not saying that the lavish perks of the 2010s were sustainable or even good (the whole idea was that you would never leave) -- but workspaces are fucking important and sacred. One of the best parts of Microsoft was that until 2020, nearly everyone had their own private office (maybe you shared with one other person). When they started to phase that out for tax reasons, I was annoyed. But seeing what Google is doing is just capricious and seems to go against reason. If I were told tomorrow I'd have to go into an office two days a week (but only those two days) and sit in a specific location that I was sharing with another person and had no flexibility in that -- oh, and I would be discouraged from booking conference rooms b/c people squat in them) -- I would be beyond livid. And I say that as someone who doesn't think WFH is the holy grail and actually misses being in an office. I get that these companies signed massive leases on offices that now no one is using. That sucks for everyone. But the solution isn't to treat that as a punitive thing for employees. If no one is using your space, get out of the lease or sublease it to other companies. Or find other incentives to get people back into the office. But this worst of both worlds stuff just isn't it.
matt3210 4y ago
I remember when people loved Google... Like most indie games, corporate culture and shareholder priorities have sucked all the fun out of everything.
malkia 4y ago
I don't remember when I've read this anecdote, I think was about Sun and X11 (or the equivalent), where employees can use the first free deskt they see and they can login from that "dumb" terminal to their actual machine (Could've been some other company, not Sun) - wonder if anyone remembers it (was it mentioned here on hny?)
- c4mpute 4y ago
  X-Terminals were a thing before SUN, but SUN had very nice ThinClients called SunRay that could "HotDesk". Your session was tied to a smartcard, as soon as you plugged that in, your session appeared on that workplace. Pull the Smartcard, go somewhere else, plug it in, there was your session. Very cool and almost instant, as opposed to the supposed "alternative" our windows guys suggested, which was smartcard login to an rdesktop server, which took ages. The wire protocol wasn't really X11, but rather something VNC-like. The server software however could talk to either X11 or windows (with some horrible adapter software). Edit: links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal Edit3: ancient demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-nzjdOj1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-nzjdOj1w
  - malkia 4y ago
    Thanks!!!!
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    Sun Rays were indeed very cool. A bit like the thin client VDIs of today, but easier to use IMO. The smartcard was really handy. As always Sun was way ahead of their time. I still have some SunRays I was hoping to use for something but I never found a good use for them :(
    - c4mpute 4y ago
      Ack. I think there would be demand for a modern hotdesking solution that worked as quick and painlessly as SunRays. Like, plug in your Yubikey, do a FIDO exchange, get your VDI session. Should be implementable in software, all thinclients nowadays have USB.
a13o 4y ago
Pretty unlikely for two people to share ergonomic settings across the desk hardware. If you've been in this industry long enough you've got to be careful about wrist, neck, leg, and eye strain and that often boils down to setting your chair and monitor just so, and customized ergonomic peripherals. A policy like this is biased against older and differently abled employees whether that was the intention or not.
- vladvasiliu 4y ago
  I absolutely hate it when someone sits at my desk when I'm out of office and moves my chair, screen, etc. Bonus points for people pulling on cables and leaving a godawful mess behind. My favorite is when they unplug my computer (because no one has a power adapter anymore) and leave it off... But most people I've seen don't give a crap about their working conditions. They'll put up a family picture or two and call it day. I've seen hardly anyone adjust the height of their chairs, let alone the desk (ours are adjustable, but it's more involved than the chair). Many will work hunched over their laptops when they have a perfectly usable screen right in front of them. Yes, there are cables, and yes, they're compatible with the PCs. My company thinks a keyboard is a keyboard, so they figure the crappy basic HP with mushy keys you need to press exactly right and that have your wrists bent up are just fine, so I brought my own peripherals. I have also insisted on having an adequate screen, trading two crappy nonadjustable ones for an OK one that sits at the right height and has decent contrast. It also provides my laptop with power and cuts down on random cables hanging around. It's also cheaper than the standard two crappy screens + docking station, so it's clearly not an issue of spending money. Comfort is simply not a consideration. But no one else complains. But the point is that, in my company, I'm pretty sure no one would bring up ergonomic considerations as an issue with hot desks. And I doubt it's any different in your average corp.
brundolf 4y ago
Really tough to imagine micro-optimizations like this having any visible effect at all on costs for a company Google's size (except by way of employee frustration) You have to wonder what's going on inside those executive conference rooms
- jlarocco 4y ago
  Respectfully disagree - I can see it having a big impact. It cuts their office space requirements roughly in half, which could mean reduced rent, more teams in the same amount of space (real estate runway), or potentially leasing out the extra space. Difficult to pull those off in the short term, but this could be the start of a bigger plan.
  - brundolf 4y ago
    Even then- what percentage of Google's costs is office floorspace? I guess I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it was a significant portion
clolege 4y ago
I understand wanting to make better use of the space, but this seems like the wrong move. Co-location is the entire value of the hybrid model over remote. By forcing 2 employees to use the same desk, you are capping one of their teams to being co-located to 2 days a week. I personally find value being together (with at least some of the team) 4-5 days a week. Imo, it would have been a better move to make “hybrid” workers to actually show up to the office or lose their desk. So many employees are just phoning it in.
zitterbewegung 4y ago
Well, looks like we are in 2023 and maybe the rumor made in 2019 will be true. Where "Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud" https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
jfisher4024 4y ago
Rearranging desk chairs on the titanic
shmerl 4y ago
That's some Brazil level of dystopian already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
mahoho 4y ago
Aside from all the other glaring issues with this model with respect to workers' wellbeing, do they even consider how it affects people who need specific ergonomic or accessibility accommodations? Like, my own desk has a ton of stuff I need just to get through a day of computer use: split keyboard, clamp-on keyboard tray, vertical mouse, trackball. Am I supposed to just haul all that crap in, set it up, tear it down, and haul it back home every day? I doubt the storage situation helps much either; I know someone who works for another company that recently switched to this and he can't even fit basic work tools like a headset into his locker.
elforce002 4y ago
If that's the case, why not encourage WFH instead of this "idea"?
VectorLock 4y ago
The #1 reason everybody gives for "RTO" is "to improve collaboration." It seems like having hot desks if implemented properly could MAYBE actually help facilitate that. Let teams get areas (or, gasp, dedicated OFFICES) where they can sit together when they coordinate for in-office collaboration time. Let people move around to shoulder surf or pair code when they want to. Having hot desks with a hybrid office model makes much more sense rather than having people go in to a 3/5ths full office and try to ignore the distractions. If you want to put headphones in, nose down, and get into flow that is the beauty of WFH. Unless you have a REALLY unconducive home environment to that - which I know some who do but the majority have very well optimized home setups that allow them to focus without distraction.
varelse 4y ago
[dead]
lamontcg 4y ago
> as Google embraces "real estate efficiency." Full time WFH and dumping your office spaces as fast as you can would efficiently remove those real estate costs entirely. Kind of fun watching them flail so hard before they'll have to accept the new economic reality.
1letterunixname 4y ago
Meta did the same thing company-wide (except Menlo Park). It didn't matter if there were surplus desk space or not. It sends a message of collective punishment of the workforce, pressure to shift the burden of providing a workspace onto the employee, and blithe non-concern for anyone who needs routine. Perks are declining as well. Snacks are getting worse and not being stocked. Meals aren't what they used to be. Company services are also in decline: help Desk offices closed permanently. It also looks foreshadowing more layoffs and real estate consolidation.

108 points by nickthegreek 4y ago

> “Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,” the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the same day. “Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment.” If only, there was an easier solution.

x86x87 4y ago
What's next? No more food in the office? The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children. Oh yeah. This is going to work out just fine.
- nojito 4y ago
  How is using float desks being treated like children?
  - kderbyma 4y ago
    you are not important enough to deserve stability....your schedule is not yours....you are directed by the parents and told where to sit...and stand etc...
  - brewdad 4y ago
    This isn't float desks. This is an assigned desk that requires you to share and coordinate office time with a co-worker. This is so much worse than float desks.
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    Snow Crash does a good job satirizing the problems with float desks. Though even Snow Crash is a little optimistic; it didn't predict the typical issues with a person's multi-monitor setup of the day not working quite right, or encountering weird hardware incompatibilities between one's docking station of the day and one's laptop.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  > The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as children. That's always been Google's move. Get some CS graduates from top schools, ideally right after graduation, and stretch out the campus experience as far as they can into the working world. Prevents them from developing the kind of independent thinking that might lead them to conclude that working at Google is not that great.
amf12 4y ago
What is an easier solution?
- barbazoo 4y ago
  Not parent but presumably they mean WFH.
- temp2022account 4y ago
  WFH, it's a religion for some people. I personally absolutely must have my in-person work, but I understand the desires.
  - amf12 4y ago
    And that is an option too.
- dpkirchner 4y ago
  Extreme pair programming but with 4 people instead of 2.
- turtlebits 4y ago
  Hot desks? A reservation system? I work for a remote optional company and employees can reserve desks ahead of time and/or you can get an assigned seat if you come in daily.
  - amf12 4y ago
    This is assigned hot desk which is better than just hot desk + reservation, which doesn't guarantee teams sit together.
dwrodri 4y ago
Surely there will be someone who will realize that you can approach this problem by building a matching engine based on Hall's Marriage Theorem[1], and then deploy it onto multiple regions for maximum anti-fragility, get promoted, rally some new hires to launch it as an extension of Google Workplace, get promoted again, abandon the project, and then have the feature die 10 months after public launch wondering why operating it cost so much money. At least, that would be the Google WayTM of doing it, right? 1: https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/ https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/
CamperBob2 4y ago
Wow, I thought they were talking about two people sitting at one desk at the same time. This is insane. "Matching process for agreeing on a basic desk setup and establishing norms?" BRB, I have something I need to do over at schwab.com. I'll be back shortly.
- amf12 4y ago
  Don't believe everything you read on CNBC. They tend to exaggerate. A lot. There is no "matching process". People will be paired up, and have to agree upon the norms. The email isn't opinionated about this. Each org will have to figure out a process.

jollyllama 4y ago

As someone who worked at a place where we had more people needing desks daily than we had desks, sharing with one specific person is probably the worst solution I can think of.

ryanjyyc 4y ago

stack the devs & desks like bunk beds. problem solved.

readonthegoapp 4y ago
glad someone else sees the humor in this. i like the image of the grumpy ayn randian product manager using the conference room as his office, evil-eyeing all who pass by and look longingly at that big glass table, imagining the near-perfection of the muffled office noise barely penetrating the sleek glass enclosure...

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goldenchrome 4y ago

Wow Google’s culture has really gone to the dumps. I think this is a direct consequence of hiring too many people and hoping for the best. There’s no way their quality bar is anywhere near what it was 10 years ago. Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.

kderbyma 4y ago
Pinchai was never about culture....lmao. I never heard him laugh once.

amf12 4y ago

I don't understand the negative sentiment with this. Do people expect employers to assign everyone a big desk, which is not completely open office and also have the flexibility to come to the office 1-2 days a week? I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.

readonthegoapp 4y ago
part of it, for me, is that this policy says, 'hey googlers, we order you to _not_ come to the office -- at least, not at the same time or day as your desk friendo, or your desk friendos.' so when CEO 'x' says, 'everyone back to the office, we need to whisper sweet idea nothings to each other on our way to/from the bathroom, in the office, so that we can $$$$$' -- ceo google just said, "that's obviously untrue, and completely ridiculous, besides". either that, or ceo google just said that the money we save by creating desk friendos will surpass the alleged value we gain by whispering sweet idea nothings to each other in the hallways, or at our covid- and flu-covered desks. but one commenter said 'stackable desks' like bunk beds - which makes sense - kind of like that vertical pig farm in china. not sure how productive that will be -- for the desk jockeys, not the pigs -- but worth a try i guess. https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-get-a-new-dimension-9f36c5e7d7d1 https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-g...
- Macha 4y ago
  Google is also one of those companies pushing for RTO though, from what I understood.
  - vechagup 4y ago
    RTO is barely being pushed for. They said "you should come to the office these 3 days", but almost no one did and no manager seems to care.
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      Yet another sign of a CEO being completely out of touch.

dwrodri 4y ago

Google's South Lake Union campus cost $802 million[1]. Google's parent company, Alphabet, spent $70 billion on stock buybacks[2]. I know I'm drastically oversimplifying the complexities of accounting required for a trillion-dollar empire, but this comes across as more of a punitive measure than a cost-saving measure. I acknowledge that being able to take the force of money and apply in a direction that results in growth at Google's scale is arguably one of the most difficult problems in business at the moment. But how does downsizing your offices do anything but make the hard times for Googlers a bit more uncomfortable? How does this news attract the talent that could help Google grow? It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders. The Lindy effect[4] suggests that Google will probably be around for another twenty years. To his credit, Sundar has spent the last 3 years navigating one of the largest companies in the history of mankind through an event that society hadn't seen in 100 years. So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter? Google was revered in the media for decades as being one of the best places in the world to work at, you can look Xooglers talking as far back as 2008 and see stories of people who went to work there and left disappointed because of the homogeneous mindset and work benefits failing to match the competition[3]. 1: https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-for-a-record-breaking-price/ https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-... 2: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billion-buyback.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billio... 3: https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/ https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/ 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

rytis 4y ago
> So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter? Why would he care?
- dwrodri 4y ago
  Generally, I'm of the opinion that: 1. The CEO is the leader of the company 2. Good leaders are visionaries that have the capacity of picturing a better future, realizing what needs to be done, and then delegating and executing those requirements to manifest that vision into reality. 3. Sundar wants to be a good leader. It would be easy to say that my #2 is correct, but doesn't apply to Sundar as CEO. I've heard his tenure associated with the "MBA-ification" of Google. Solely focusing on maximizing shareholder returns, which in the case of the company sitting on the multi-billion dollar revenue hose, means cutting down on anything that gets in the way of that. That would indeed allow shareholders to get a great return on their investment for some time, but if you reduce google to a private AI research lab and a digital ads platform, there's nothing left to react (or bring forth) to changes in how people interact with technology. I feel like nothing exemplifies this further than Bard. Perhaps I am too much of an optimist. But it really feels like he should care.

deleted 4y ago

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ndneighbor 4y ago

Look... if you want people to RTO, maybe make it so that there's less overhead? Reading this article made me just want to stay at my own desk at home.

haliskerbas 4y ago
Agreed, I have the perfect setup at home, I paid for everything (except laptop) and I pay for all of the electricity, bandwidth, accessories and upgrades, and furniture and upgrades. Saving the company a lot of money and I'm at my desk way longer!
- iamevn 4y ago
  I never bothered but it's definitely easy at google to expense your internet and I remember hearing about someone successfully expensing some amount of their electricity
ren_engineer 4y ago
whole thing makes no sense, just feels like leadership is flailing. Is RTO just sunk cost fallacy due to these big companies having spent billions on real estate and fancy buildings? There seems to be minimal benefits to mandating it, it shrinks your talent pool, makes employees less efficient due to commute, forces you to pay more in tech hubs, and makes you spend more on office stuff. The only benefit is the completely non-measurable "improved collaboration" metric
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Ancalagon 4y ago
  Makes perfect sense if they’re trying to downsize without paying severance/unemployment.
  - timeless102 4y ago
    If they don't come it and don't resign themselves, then I assume google would fire them in which case they would get severance? Is that how it works? It's only an issue if the people who wfh resign then they would not get severance/unemployment?

vechagup 4y ago

I'm not in the PA that will be sharing desks but sit in one of the affected offices. I can see about 100 desks from where I am right now. All of them are assigned to someone, but only 6 presently have someone sitting there. Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%? Something was bound to happen given all the unused real estate. But it's shitty that those of us who actually use our desks, because we rather like work-home separation, now might end up with a desk time share. Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?

hypothesis 4y ago
> Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%? > Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote? Not sure what the rules are at BigCo, but it looks like it would be way simpler to ask office-first people to apply to permanent positions.
xracy 4y ago
They didn't want a lot of people to work remote permanently. They explicitly discouraged it with a quota.

mealkh 4y ago

Floating license basically

ElfinTrousers 4y ago

Desks? Make those lazy bums sit on the floor. If they want a desk they can bring one from home. No, you can't work from home, obviously, or the Communists win.

russellbeattie 4y ago

Though I think Google's Bay View campus is gorgeous and probably a lovely place to work, I can't imagine it's a particularly efficient use of the space it takes up. I could be wrong though as I've never been inside. I'll give credit to Google for not building another box full of cubicles, but it seems like it was meant to compete with Apple's spaceship in terms of impressive design, rather than somewhere for thousands of employees to get work done. Anyone know how many desks the buildings have and who gets to work there? https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-campus-grand-opening/ https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...

moandcompany 4y ago
It seems like the general sentiment from people assigned to Bay View campus hate it, and the campus is an example of form over function as an actual office for doing work.

fatbird 4y ago

> to ensure... desks are kept clean and free from personal items. This was called "hotdesking", then "hotelling", and it's unclear why I would arrange with a coworker to timeshare a desk when a proper hotdesking arrangement would likely be cheaper and easier.

WastingMyTime89 4y ago
I guess they think it’s a step too far for now and people would rebel. That’s probably coming next like in a year or two.
kerblang 4y ago
I'm supposed to be in one of those "hotelling" env's but human beings are so territorial that it effectively failed. In truth managers sabotaged it but employees were happy to go along. Even with WFH dominating now, it's still That's My Desk Not Yours. I kinda like the hotelling idea because you can mingle with people who work in other domains and mostly avoid that small percentage of really obnoxious folks. I suppose it could get problematic if you're the resident Hot Girl in an office of needy males (sorry if that sounds sexist and I'm sure I would absolutely hate being Hot Guy in an office of needy gals and no I'm not being facetious at all)

mathverse 4y ago

[flagged]

autoexec 4y ago
Seriously, the company has billions but can't afford to give everyone a desk? Why would employees accept that?
dang 4y ago
Maybe so, but please don't fulminate on Hacker News. We're trying for something else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- mathverse 4y ago
  Sorry. I got too emotional.

Insanity 4y ago

It seems like each day there's an article lately about reasons _not_ to work at Google. Sad to see how they went from an enviable place to work to a place to avoid these past years. (Although internally, things might be better than it looks from the outside of course)

shmatt 4y ago
I'd work from a toilet stall for a Google L6 comp band I doubt any Googlers actually care about this stuff
- carom 4y ago
  I used to say something similar to this but then I worked at Google. It turns out I care a lot more about working on interesting problems than I do about fat checks.
  - moffkalast 4y ago
    Google still has interesting problems to work on? I thought they just printed money with adsense and launched projects just so they could cancel them 2 weeks later. /s
    - roflyear 4y ago
      I think he's saying they don't have interesting problems to work on.
      - leros 4y ago
        Companies like Google have a unique problem. They attract the best engineers, but they still have lots of boring work to be done. So they end up hiring brilliant engineers only to have them work on uninteresting things like financial reports. My company created a whole separate job title which basically equates to "less skilled and lower payed developer" so we can hire more average engineers to do that kind of work without diluting our quality of engineers.

unixlikeposting 4y ago

I wonder how their recruiters will respond to those that want an office desk 5 days a week.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I remember visiting MS (Redmond), in the 1990s (It was at the "Longhorn" launch, if that helps date it). A friend of mine, worked in one of the nearby buildings, and took me to his office (He was doing documentation, or something for Encarta). I was struck by the narrow, dark, corridors, and the small, windowless, offices. My friend said that all MS engineers had a private office. I have since been told that the building I visited was probably an old one, and not representative of most buildings, and I think that MS went open-plan, since. I have also visited the Facebook (it was still called Facebook, back then) office, in NYC. The programming floor was a really big, noisy, open-plan office, jammed with desks (standing and sitting), and everyone was talking away. No windows. The floor was surrounded by conference rooms and offices, which had windows. The Japanese offices of my own company were sort of like that, but with uniform desks, and quiet as a mouse; even with hundreds of people. No individual offices. VPs, with billion-dollar budgets, had a small desk, in the corner.
- int_19h 4y ago
  Microsoft started to transition to open layout company-wide sometime in the mid-10s. Depending on the org, some team at Microsoft still had private offices for their devs as late as 2017.
  - karakot 4y ago
    some still have (bing, some azure teams), though it ends soon.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

flax 4y ago

When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better. I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time". Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.

Laaas 4y ago
Well, that could be justified as maintaining the health of the employees by forcing one of two to stand up at any time.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  It would have to be timed so each employee got equal stool time. IIRC standing all day isn't necessarily healthier than sitting all day. You want to alternate.
  - Laaas 4y ago
    That would be incentivised with this system, no? Employees would fight the other off the stool constantly, to get their share of sitting.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      And perhaps get a little exercise in the process. Good point.
- masklinn 4y ago
  It’s not like standing statically is good for your health either, and it can be easy to do that when focusing. I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that for hours at a time was not good.
- outworlder 4y ago

pram 4y ago

Remember how all those Gen X movies depicted cubicles as the embodiment of the soul crushing rat race. If only we still had it that good!

shortcake27 4y ago
100% agree. I thought open plan was bad, then the norm became open plan hotdesking (no permanency). Such a morale killer.
toastercat 4y ago
I had low-wall cubicles at one job and thought it was great. Could still see the eyes and noses of my coworkers around me, and it was easy making conversation or asking for help.
- at-fates-hands 4y ago
  I came here to say the same thing. I worked at a company where a smart manager got low profile cubes for the dev team. We were located in an area that had access to a host of large whiteboards, and large monitors for video conferencing. It was really great. If a dev ran into a problem, it was easy to ask for help. Then you could start working at a whiteboard a few feet from your desk. Whether you were working something out alone or with some other dev, chances are within a few minutes several other devs were there working the problem out with you. I mean the collaboration was really cool and we blasted through so many bugs and bad code, it was really refreshing. Likewise, we had a large portion of the floor dedicated to CSR folks. Again, some smart manager got them 7ft. high cubes so the noise the devs were making wouldn't interrupt what they were doing. They even had a few spare CSR cubes for anybody who really wanted to be heads down and working in absolute quiet.
brailsafe 4y ago
Damn idk which I'd rather have. Some cube farms are next-level depressing. When I was younger, I think part of what made the prospect of moving out of my hometown more compelling was the fact that a giant mega-insurance company ended up being the main endpoint for CS grads. I got to visit once and it was _not_ pretty. Tightly enclosed cubes with tall aging white walls, one source of sunlight if that. They must of really liked Java. On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he ate at his desk multiple times a day.

dontreact 4y ago

I am sitting at a Google desk and there are 5/6 people not here in the desks in my vicinity. I would prefer fewer desks and to actually get to sit next to people rather than being scattered among a sea of mostly empty desks due to people WFH.

dietr1ch 4y ago
I agree, but I think that the way of achieving that is quite dumb. Id rather enforce something around. The first 1-2 floors in some specific buildings on every campus will turn into shared spaces instead of forcing everyone out of their desks. Decisions seem so poorly though recently that the only way I can make sense of many is thinking that they are trying to get people to quit to avoid paying for severances and taking another morale and press hit at announcing layoffs.
- dontreact 4y ago
  How do you create 1-2 floors of shared space without forcing some people out of their desks?
  - dietr1ch 4y ago
    You obviously have to move some people, but the way they are executing this now is kicking everyone out of their desks
CydeWeys 4y ago
Same, but, they shouldn't be taking away the desks of me of my coworker, as we're in using them five days per week. We come to the office because we find that we're much less productive at home in our shared Manhattan apartments.
- srj 4y ago
  I agree, I come in 5 days a week and not having a dedicated space would make that experience much worse. I wouldn't rejoin the Cloud PA with this policy in place, and I imagine plenty of people will leave when the tech industry turns around again.

sys42590 4y ago

The problem I have with shared desks is that morning people get the best places close to windows and away from traffic and noisy corners, night owls are at a disadvantage. Also quite often shared hardware is in a sad state (keyboards with broken legs, mice with slippery wheels from people working with greasy fingers, etc.)

leipert 4y ago
Yuck. If I just look at my keyboard and mouse, I really do not want that anyone _has_ to use them. I clean them regularly and do not eat at the desk, but still cruft assembles.
amf12 4y ago
I have never seen shared desks with morning and evening split. The article says it will be alternate days, with the same desk. Basically, each desk is now assigned to two people, on alternate days.

alecbz 4y ago

This combined with mandatory in-office days seems insane. Are they still insisting on the latter?

posharma 4y ago

Internally Google might be just fine, but optics are equally important in this industry. Before Sundar took over Google never went through bad PR. It's just an observation, not a dig at Google's affairs.

amethyst 4y ago
Success hides problems.
VikingCoder 4y ago
Google never went through bad PR before Sundar? Sunday became CEO on August 10, 2015. Google+ was launched in 2011. (And the "real name" policy was a PR disaster.) Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (You can hardly find a PR disaster that people in the tech world complain about more.) Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe had an anti-poaching agreement that finally got settled in 2015, but they were getting bad press before that. "Right to be forgotten" bad press was in 2014 and before.
- posharma 4y ago
  There were a lot of other good things going that masked these. The recent "PR botch ups" are creating more damage. The most famous e.g. is reacting to ChatGPT's hype and rushing to do a demo and then messing it up. It wasn't so much messing up the demo that caught they eye; it was how Google rushed/reacted to do it esp. when Google is considered to be at the forefront of AI. Again, optics. Besides Sundar hasn't come out with anything impressive in the last few years. It's ok to just keep the lights on, but at least don't create bad optics.
  - whiplash451 4y ago
    Actually, I don’t think it’s OK to just keep the lights on.
    - posharma 4y ago
      Hahha. Sure.

curiousDog 4y ago

How quickly the tide turns in our industry..from massages at your desk to sitting on each other's laps. Hey they could perhaps still continue the massage to each other though.

orangesite 4y ago

Hahahahaha!

hprotagonist 4y ago

So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by partitions, but the EBGOC boys didn't like it, said what would happen if there had to be an evacuation? All those partitions would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the property of the United States of America. You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it. If you want to write little notes or make phone doodles, you're perfectly free to do that at home, in your spare time. And there's the question of interchangeability. Fed workers, like military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare workstation and get to work on that. And you don't have that flexibility if you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn around a desktop. So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is -- as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms -- having problems.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lasereyes136 4y ago
Snow Crash for those that don't know: https://a.co/d/fXWqXr7 https://a.co/d/fXWqXr7
- 4y ago

rr888 4y ago

Makes a lot of sense given how many people are WFH

akmarinov 4y ago
Just cut down on offices- makes even more sense

Wonnk13 4y ago

Not surprising, shit like this was happening pre-covid as well if you look for it.

convolvatron 4y ago
after finally landing a job at Google after 8 months of back and forth I was pretty seriously disappointed to be assigned less than 20 square feet in the middle of a row of chairs that guaranteed someone would hit the back of my chair every couple minutes, and that I would be hard pressed to go to the bathroom without doing the same to the other 20 people in the row.
- sgtnoodle 4y ago
  I worked on a project in X, and we moved from the main campus to The Rails. Not to claim we deserved more space, but we often had a bunch of hardware on our desks and so the norm was for an L shape. A week before the move, I went by to check the new desk setup. The contractors had messed up the spacing, and every row of cubes had about 6" of extra space, except for the last row with my desk. My row had about 3' less space, and you literally had to do a slalom to get to my desk. Thankfully they were able to mostly fix it...

dcchambers 4y ago

I guess I had already figured that Google switched to hotel-style desks when covid started.

Johnny555 4y ago

If only there were someplace the employees could work and not need a desk at the office at all! Discouraging employees to all come at the office at once seems to dilute the “back to the office” mantra of “Employees work better when they can collaborate in person”. My workplace has a hybrid policy where teams pick one day to all be in the office, and employees “should” be in the office 3 days a week, but if your “collaboration” involves people on another team, then you’re usually going to have some of them zooming in (and sometimes people zoom in from conference rooms in the same building because of miscommunication about who is in the office), and at that that point you may as well all zoom in from home.

atleastoptimal 4y ago

Since it seems the days of Google being a fairytale workplace where every whim is catered to on a golden platter are over, which company now is taking up the mantle as the most enviable office environment?

robertwt7 4y ago

Sundar just keep finding reasons to cut cost because he can’t find a way to innovate or create new revenue streams for google

davidw 4y ago
Maybe they could - hear me out - do a new messaging system.

filmgirlcw 4y ago

This move strikes me as just the worst of both worlds. First, Google tells employees they need to be in the office X days a week -- and depending on team, from what I know from friends at the Kirkland office, this was enforced. Now, Google is saying, "actually, you still have to come in, but you need to share a desk with a stranger and coordinate with them what days you are going to come in." So goodbye flexibility. If I usually come in Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- but I need to come in on Wednesday this week for a meeting -- I'm now SOL if my desk mate is also in the office. Pre-pandemic, I was really opposed to hot desks because if you're making me come into the office, at least let me have my own workspace and setup. But in this situation, I feel like hot desks would be a MUCH better situation. Allow people to reserve their desk a week or even two weeks in advance for the days they'll be in the office -- you could even have it set to be auto-renewing for certain days each week -- but at least you'd have flexibility if you were needed to come into the office one day instead of another. And personally, I would rather have a hot desk than have a consistent desk I have to share with someone else, because that's worse. It's a consistent workspace, but I can't customize it because someone else uses it too. So I can't have my own keyboard (I'm not sharing things I spend my own money on with strangers, sorry), my own monitor configuration, or the stuff I like on my desk. And unlike a hot space, I'm tied to using it only on specific days. Right before the pandemic, Microsoft started phasing out personal offices (because of real estate taxes, pure and simple) and there was a lot of pushback and upset (totally understandable, going from a personal office to either a group of personal desks or to hot desks is not cool), but since people can still WFH, my understanding is that most people who go into the office X days a week still have a private office at the main campus (not sure about other locations, but I think most of them were more open plan). At GitHub (where they have announced they are phasing out all offices), we can reserve a desk space before showing up to a location, which is great -- plus, people who go in to the office all the time either have a recurring reservation (and have a more customized work space) or are choose to move around. Here's a tip to companies: if you want people to come into the office, don't make coming into the office a punishment. I'm not saying that the lavish perks of the 2010s were sustainable or even good (the whole idea was that you would never leave) -- but workspaces are fucking important and sacred. One of the best parts of Microsoft was that until 2020, nearly everyone had their own private office (maybe you shared with one other person). When they started to phase that out for tax reasons, I was annoyed. But seeing what Google is doing is just capricious and seems to go against reason. If I were told tomorrow I'd have to go into an office two days a week (but only those two days) and sit in a specific location that I was sharing with another person and had no flexibility in that -- oh, and I would be discouraged from booking conference rooms b/c people squat in them) -- I would be beyond livid. And I say that as someone who doesn't think WFH is the holy grail and actually misses being in an office. I get that these companies signed massive leases on offices that now no one is using. That sucks for everyone. But the solution isn't to treat that as a punitive thing for employees. If no one is using your space, get out of the lease or sublease it to other companies. Or find other incentives to get people back into the office. But this worst of both worlds stuff just isn't it.

matt3210 4y ago

I remember when people loved Google... Like most indie games, corporate culture and shareholder priorities have sucked all the fun out of everything.

malkia 4y ago

I don't remember when I've read this anecdote, I think was about Sun and X11 (or the equivalent), where employees can use the first free deskt they see and they can login from that "dumb" terminal to their actual machine (Could've been some other company, not Sun) - wonder if anyone remembers it (was it mentioned here on hny?)

c4mpute 4y ago
X-Terminals were a thing before SUN, but SUN had very nice ThinClients called SunRay that could "HotDesk". Your session was tied to a smartcard, as soon as you plugged that in, your session appeared on that workplace. Pull the Smartcard, go somewhere else, plug it in, there was your session. Very cool and almost instant, as opposed to the supposed "alternative" our windows guys suggested, which was smartcard login to an rdesktop server, which took ages. The wire protocol wasn't really X11, but rather something VNC-like. The server software however could talk to either X11 or windows (with some horrible adapter software). Edit: links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal Edit3: ancient demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-nzjdOj1w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-nzjdOj1w
- malkia 4y ago
  Thanks!!!!
- wkat4242 4y ago
  Sun Rays were indeed very cool. A bit like the thin client VDIs of today, but easier to use IMO. The smartcard was really handy. As always Sun was way ahead of their time. I still have some SunRays I was hoping to use for something but I never found a good use for them :(
  - c4mpute 4y ago
    Ack. I think there would be demand for a modern hotdesking solution that worked as quick and painlessly as SunRays. Like, plug in your Yubikey, do a FIDO exchange, get your VDI session. Should be implementable in software, all thinclients nowadays have USB.

a13o 4y ago

Pretty unlikely for two people to share ergonomic settings across the desk hardware. If you've been in this industry long enough you've got to be careful about wrist, neck, leg, and eye strain and that often boils down to setting your chair and monitor just so, and customized ergonomic peripherals. A policy like this is biased against older and differently abled employees whether that was the intention or not.

vladvasiliu 4y ago
I absolutely hate it when someone sits at my desk when I'm out of office and moves my chair, screen, etc. Bonus points for people pulling on cables and leaving a godawful mess behind. My favorite is when they unplug my computer (because no one has a power adapter anymore) and leave it off... But most people I've seen don't give a crap about their working conditions. They'll put up a family picture or two and call it day. I've seen hardly anyone adjust the height of their chairs, let alone the desk (ours are adjustable, but it's more involved than the chair). Many will work hunched over their laptops when they have a perfectly usable screen right in front of them. Yes, there are cables, and yes, they're compatible with the PCs. My company thinks a keyboard is a keyboard, so they figure the crappy basic HP with mushy keys you need to press exactly right and that have your wrists bent up are just fine, so I brought my own peripherals. I have also insisted on having an adequate screen, trading two crappy nonadjustable ones for an OK one that sits at the right height and has decent contrast. It also provides my laptop with power and cuts down on random cables hanging around. It's also cheaper than the standard two crappy screens + docking station, so it's clearly not an issue of spending money. Comfort is simply not a consideration. But no one else complains. But the point is that, in my company, I'm pretty sure no one would bring up ergonomic considerations as an issue with hot desks. And I doubt it's any different in your average corp.

brundolf 4y ago

Really tough to imagine micro-optimizations like this having any visible effect at all on costs for a company Google's size (except by way of employee frustration) You have to wonder what's going on inside those executive conference rooms

jlarocco 4y ago
Respectfully disagree - I can see it having a big impact. It cuts their office space requirements roughly in half, which could mean reduced rent, more teams in the same amount of space (real estate runway), or potentially leasing out the extra space. Difficult to pull those off in the short term, but this could be the start of a bigger plan.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Even then- what percentage of Google's costs is office floorspace? I guess I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it was a significant portion

clolege 4y ago

I understand wanting to make better use of the space, but this seems like the wrong move. Co-location is the entire value of the hybrid model over remote. By forcing 2 employees to use the same desk, you are capping one of their teams to being co-located to 2 days a week. I personally find value being together (with at least some of the team) 4-5 days a week. Imo, it would have been a better move to make “hybrid” workers to actually show up to the office or lose their desk. So many employees are just phoning it in.

zitterbewegung 4y ago

Well, looks like we are in 2023 and maybe the rumor made in 2019 will be true. Where "Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud" https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-2023-as-deadline-to-beat-amazon-microsoft-in-cloud?utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlock https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

jfisher4024 4y ago

Rearranging desk chairs on the titanic

shmerl 4y ago

That's some Brazil level of dystopian already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk

mahoho 4y ago

Aside from all the other glaring issues with this model with respect to workers' wellbeing, do they even consider how it affects people who need specific ergonomic or accessibility accommodations? Like, my own desk has a ton of stuff I need just to get through a day of computer use: split keyboard, clamp-on keyboard tray, vertical mouse, trackball. Am I supposed to just haul all that crap in, set it up, tear it down, and haul it back home every day? I doubt the storage situation helps much either; I know someone who works for another company that recently switched to this and he can't even fit basic work tools like a headset into his locker.

elforce002 4y ago

If that's the case, why not encourage WFH instead of this "idea"?

VectorLock 4y ago

The #1 reason everybody gives for "RTO" is "to improve collaboration." It seems like having hot desks if implemented properly could MAYBE actually help facilitate that. Let teams get areas (or, gasp, dedicated OFFICES) where they can sit together when they coordinate for in-office collaboration time. Let people move around to shoulder surf or pair code when they want to. Having hot desks with a hybrid office model makes much more sense rather than having people go in to a 3/5ths full office and try to ignore the distractions. If you want to put headphones in, nose down, and get into flow that is the beauty of WFH. Unless you have a REALLY unconducive home environment to that - which I know some who do but the majority have very well optimized home setups that allow them to focus without distraction.

varelse 4y ago

[dead]

lamontcg 4y ago

> as Google embraces "real estate efficiency." Full time WFH and dumping your office spaces as fast as you can would efficiently remove those real estate costs entirely. Kind of fun watching them flail so hard before they'll have to accept the new economic reality.

1letterunixname 4y ago

Meta did the same thing company-wide (except Menlo Park). It didn't matter if there were surplus desk space or not. It sends a message of collective punishment of the workforce, pressure to shift the burden of providing a workspace onto the employee, and blithe non-concern for anyone who needs routine. Perks are declining as well. Snacks are getting worse and not being stocked. Meals aren't what they used to be. Company services are also in decline: help Desk offices closed permanently. It also looks foreshadowing more layoffs and real estate consolidation.