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Depending on the org, most Google employees are already part of a distributed team. This is nothing but making management appear functional and bean counters th

• ninkendo 3y ago
  Or they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in with the lack of product success and increasing existential threats of LLM’s, the declining health of the open web from which they derive their profits, etc etc, and taking a hard look in the bloat they have in their existing workforce. If management is heavily signaling they don’t want remote work, believe them. When the layoffs come, the remote workers will be very close to the front of the line to get the axe.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    > Or they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in That predates wfh by like 5 years though
  • lmm 3y ago
    "Something must be done, this is something..."?
    • ninkendo 3y ago
      Not saying I agree with it, just that it’s not the idle threat OP was making it out to be… if the bean counters who are saying “something must be done” are actually in charge, maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s really about performance…
      • sitkack 3y ago
        I am not saying the threat is idle. I am saying the action is unwarranted, the performative play is real for all levels. Sundar is larping as a leader. He is at best a substitute teacher.
        • skirmish 3y ago
          If a company is trying to make me dance like a monkey, I would rather get laid off. Either they appreciate productivity, or I will be happy to be out of there.
  • sitkack 3y ago
    :) The number of laid off techworkers that understand the juiciest parts of their former employers market that are now doing their own thing is significant. Layoffs will not help these tech giants. The political and technical structures inside of Big Tech are largely performative, vast swaths of these orgs have literally no skin in the game. Skin in the Game | Nassim Nicholas Taleb https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv6KLbkvua8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uv6KLbkvua8
    • TX81Z 3y ago
      Nodding strongly in agreement as somebody who resigned Big Tech to start my own thing and hired remote first to get premium talent. That’s the other part of startups wanting remote - you get WAY more access to talent compared to a few years ago when remote-first was weird and scary. Likewise, Big Tech haven’t had to compete for so long they forgot the number one rule is to keep the talent happy. Personally, I’m a lot happier now than I was with a big fancy level at a Mega Co.
  • adrr 3y ago
    They are getting their lunch eaten by Microsoft which allows remote. Azure is killing gcloud, Office365 is dominating GSuite. Not to mention msft owning 49% of openAi. Google needs to fire their leadership since it’s strategy failures and not tactical errors.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    • bagacrap 3y ago
      Gcp is profitable, azure is not Google invented LLMs Microsoft can't even build its own browser I don't think Google has anything to worry about, but it's funny to see how widespread this sentiment is. Just goes to show how good of a story teller Satya is.
      • varispeed 3y ago
        > Gcp is profitable, azure is not Asserting that GCP is profitable while Azure is not doesn't necessarily determine their respective successes. A company might reinvest all its revenue back into growth and innovation, hence posting zero profit - this doesn't signify poor performance. Conversely, a company reporting a profit could potentially be stagnating, inflating profits to appease shareholders potentially seeking to exit. Profitability alone isn't a comprehensive measure of a company's health or potential. > Google invented LLMs Poor argument. E.g. Xerox invented GUI, where are they now?
        • bagacrap 3y ago
          Reinvesting profits doesn't mean you didn't have profits. Msft, aapl, goog, meta all reinvest profits in new ventures. Only Amazon can't manage to make a buck and tries to pass it off as reinvestment. Wrt azure vs gcp, I just don't think you can say azure is "killing it" when it's a loss leader for the company. Gcp has proven it can operate profitably, we don't know if azure ever will. Right now its business model approximates Uber.
      • sitkack 3y ago
  • hiddencost 3y ago
    Google's condition is due to jaw droppingly incompetent management. Not the engineers.
    • elefanten 3y ago
      I buy that... but real talk, there's gotta be a ton of bloat in the engineering org, no? I've never worked at Google but I know shitloads of Googlers. And listening to their work problems... it sounds like engineers outnumber the other functions like 10:1 (at a minimum) but still produce mind-bogglingly slow estimates for the simplest shit. Like... 9 months to create a settings page. 6 months to change a few pages cumulatively simpler than a CRUD app. Is it the systems they have to work with? The approvals to connect to this or that? Is everything within Eng bureaucratized to fucking hell and back? Or are >50% of them completely faking it and utterly useless? What the hell's going on there? Edit: for context... yes, the abstracted examples I'm giving are coming for the perspective of PM / Design / Marketing folks. And when I ask my Eng Googler friends they get awkward and cagey and seem to not want to say anything mean about anyone.
      • hn_go_brrrrr 3y ago
        All of the above. Sometimes the system you need to change was written six years ago by an intern from another team that was defragged, in a framework that isn't supported anymore, and everyone keeps piling the tech debt higher. Some parts of Eng are mind-blowingly incompetent. Google is remarkable not for "hiring the best people" but for how widely the quality varies by org. Some orgs have a reputation for incompetence. Security and Privacy is a great example. Half the org is fanatical about protecting users, smart, effective, the works...and the other half is fanatical about ticking the right boxes on their forms and putting roadblocks in front of product teams because it makes them look important. Try getting something done when someone from the second group is paying attention to you, and yeah, it'll take nine months to launch a settings page. Yes, there's bloat, but it's not as simple as "there are too many people so MMM ruins your productivity".
    • Gigachad 3y ago
      OpenAI is all in office and running circles around Google.
  • q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
    > they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in with the lack of product success and increasing existential threats of LLM’s, the declining health of the open web from which they derive their profits, etc <vent> And, leaping into action, carrying the banner of innovation, they're declaring their bold vision of the future: getting sneezed on 20 times a day while attending the exact same meetings as before. Plus, many people get an extra bonus in this future: the addition of 1-3 hours of commute time per day. (Thanks to terrible traffic in every single part of the Bay Area, this is true for many more people than you might imagine.) Time entirely wasted, that neither their family nor their business will benefit from. The saddest part of this stupidity is that all teams still have to collaborate globally anyway. So everyone's still going to spend time dialing into meetings, fumbling with microphones, and running into A/V issues — except now it'll be compounded by the fact that there'll never be a meeting room available, and all the equipment will be covered in a fine layer of snot from everyone sneezing on everything. The fundamental issue with the "RTO or not" question is not the debates about the science of productivity. It's simply the fact that any business choosing to spend time on this is already displaying a failure of judgment and lack of focus. Entire markets are getting overturned by the arrival of AI, and these people are navel-gazing about desk occupancy rates. </vent>
    • repeekad 3y ago
      I find this kind of debate can be polarizing because people have such different mindsets and perspectives on the world. If you view the office as just a “fine layer of snot”, I can only imagine what you think of the subway, or a mall. But people sneezing and fighting traffic aren’t critiques of the office, they’re critiques of leaving your house and going outside… We have immune systems for a reason, and fear of illness (without it coming from your doctor) is not a good reason to be against RTO. People get sick all the time, it’s a normal and necessary process to build our natural immunity. I worry about the damage covid did in making people still paranoid about going in public (e.g. people who continue to feel the need to wear masks today without a medical reason). You imply there’s no value to being in person, but would you really rather catch up with friends over zoom rather than over dinner? Call someone over FaceTime rather than get coffee and go on a walk? Work relationships matter, sharing 3D space allows people to be more creative and collaborative, and companies are recognizing that. Google seems like the last company that would make people come back to the office without doing their homework, there’s clearly data showing that fully remote employees are falling behind.
  • varispeed 3y ago
    When I hear company is calling workers back to office, it means things are going bad and insecure managers want to show they can whip the workers to deliver. Like a last ditch effort. If I was in that situation, as a remote worker, I'd start looking for a new job.
• carabiner 3y ago
  If we are totally honest though, people working in a google office generally have fewer private distractions like porn, taking naps on a sofa, watching Succession, playing with their cat etc. Reading the discussion on Blind is very illuminating on this, like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday.
  • chasd00 3y ago
    > like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday. This would be more believable if he’d said girlfriend.
  • lost_tourist 3y ago
    That's all bogus excuses. If you suck at work you will get fired. If you are producing to the expected point you will retain your job.
    • majormajor 3y ago
      I've heard no shortage of stories from coworkers at big-tech or fancy startups in the past couple of years where line-level managers simply aren't able to make the tough decisions. A third of your team is getting practically nothing done? Are you having the tough conversations that need to happen? Or do you not want to rock the boat (it might not look great on you, either, especially if your peer managers aren't taking things seriously). You're right, you can't hide forever. People do get fired. And in a couple cases this has ultimately resulted in the managers getting fired too when higher-ups realized the sheer obviousness of "they aren't doing a single thing" that was being ignored. Failures all around, but I get why one would say "we didn't have this level of complete abdication back when people were in the office" and take that as the easy solution rather than trying to make huge swaths of both their managers and employees get way better discipline, extremely quickly.
  • ulfw 3y ago
    Oh how awful someone uses their life to have sex rather than sit in a dark cubicle being bored out of their mind, hoping time will pass until the next paycheck comes in. Such better way of living. I find it funny how people equate office = 10hr hard and efficient work vs WFH = 2 mins of work, rest watching tv and having sex. The truth is people do as much work as they're motivated to do and as much as they have to do. There's teams at Google who never are allowed to launch anything due to corporate bullshit politics. I have a friend who has been there 15 years, maybe one or two of his small feature products launched, dozens got cancelled. Like a good soldier he goes to the office because he feeds his family with Google dollars. That's it.
• enieslobby 3y ago
  > Depending on the org, most Google employees are already part of a distributed team citation needed