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Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
- pinewurst 3y agohttps://archive.ph/wJelE https://archive.ph/wJelE "A separate internal document showed that already-approved remote workers may be subject to reevaluation if the company determines “material changes in business need, role, team, structure or location.”"
- fullshark 3y agoWhat are you quoting? that link doesn't have that quote.
- pinewurst 3y agohttps://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/google-to-crack-down-on-hybrid-work-asks-remote-workers-to-reconsider.html https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/08/google-to-crack-down-on-hybr... Sorry, I mistook this topic for the one referencing the CNBC version of this story.
- jleyank 3y agoIt might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations. And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, run test calculations and "interact" using existing technology. Companies either trust their staff or they don't and the staff should act accordingly.
- lupire 3y agoAll in the room works for reviewing ideas, not creating them.
- coffeebeqn 3y agoEven for that I feel like asynchronous works better. You often get stuck on someone’s pet peeve and waste an hour when on something like a Google doc you can have 30 different threads for comments concurrently
- rgblambda 3y ago>It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Hasn't every study on brainstorming found that it's not a good way to generate good ideas? With having people breathing the same air in a small space believed to be a contributing factor to that.
- kpw94 3y agoYeah high CO2 concentration is probably making people less sharp, but mostly I've heard it's about people being less creative due to consensus-driven thinking Per https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1194301106584616960 https://twitter.com/emollick/status/1194301106584616960: > People in groups self-censor and anchor on each others ideas, reducing creativity. Also can be anti-inclusive when "anchor on each other idea" is a euphemism for that guy repeating what a more shy person said, but louder, stealing credit. With remote, usually comes a more doc-driven culture, where someone's original idea can be easier to identify and make sure they get credit.
- BenisMaximus 3y agoLots of people are too shy or anxious to break perceived consensus or even just to challenge a "stronger" personality in person. Put them in a chat room and they get all fired up.
- heavyset_go 3y agoAnd in dysfunctional workplaces, breaking consensus can put your job in jeopardy.
- regularfry 3y agoI have a hunch that the sort of mental incapacity that comes on with higher CO2 levels lends itself to group-think, so it's a combinatorial problem. I think you'd still get the same problems outside, I just think they're more pronounced in a stuffy meeting room.
- maerF0x0 3y agoYes. Brainstorming is better done by 1. Brainstorming questions, not ideas (then go answer them) 2. Soliciting responses anonymously and quietly. This avoids both hierarchical biases and "Loudest person wins" bias. And not to excessively disparage verbal processors (I am one myself). But it's important for them to realize that the constant talking can drown out others' thinking, or their sharing, or their will to live.
- hparadiz 3y agoFully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper. Remote first companies do this all the time. Employees feel way better about it if the company provides hotel and accommodations when doing destination meet ups.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- andsoitis 3y ago> Fully remote with 2-3 day quarterly in-person meet ups would provide tech companies with the in person collaboration they seek and be cheaper I am a fan of hybrid (people can choose whether or not they're in the office). However, you want to be able to collaborate effectively at any time and not have to wait for quarterly gatherings. I've got complex problems to solve together with my team mates!
- wahnfrieden 3y agoHybrid usually means office is required every week. It’s terrible
- ekianjo 3y agoExactly, that's basically "not remote most of the time"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- in_cahoots 3y agoI haven’t found in-person meetups to be that useful. In my experience they only really started happening in late 2021/early 2022 due to the pandemic, and since then they’ve been severely curtailed due to the market downturn. So when you do meet up it’s more about finally seeing people in person, team building, and restating your team’s goals and mission. Any brainstorming I’ve seen happens in over-long sessions with 30+ people in attendance, where a ton of ideas are generated but there’s no actual momentum once everyone gets on the plane back home. The real collaboration happens in the interstitial times- lunch, breaks, and so on. Which again points to the importance of having at least part of the team co-located. Full disclosure, this is at a company that is hybrid and not remote-first. But I’ve seen the pattern repeated enough times across various teams that I don’t think my experience is unique. And I say this as someone who personally prefers to work remotely- I’m just not unaware of what’s lost in that environment.
- gniv 3y ago> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. This is not the dichotomy you make it look. There are lots of other tasks to do, and for those I personally would often go in a cafeteria or public space, since I didn't mind the distractions -- reading code, doing code reviews, reading docs, writing docs, responding to emails. "Coding" was a relatively small part of my day as a SWE at [FAANG].
- rob74 3y agoThe problem is just that there are some people who are able to concentrate while lots of other people are having lots of non-related conversations around them in a cafeteria (sounds like this might be you), while others can't. And the latter will prefer home office to a cafeteria or even to the usual open-plan office...
- ekianjo 3y ago> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Really? what does it bring that you can't do remotely? I can hardly think of a problem where "being in the same room" is a requirement to have a productive discussion
- simonswords82 3y agoI'm pro work from anywhere so long as shit gets done but... Picking up on social cues. Bouncing ideas around using a whiteboard. Speaking quickly without that ever so slight lag on Zoom which means you struggle to get a word in without potentially talking over somebody. Having food or drinks before or afterwards to unwind and build relationships and kick things around informally. There's lots more.
- wildrhythms 3y agoMaybe it's just me but I don't really want to think about work outside of working hours, much less hang out or 'unwind' with my coworkers before or after work.
- simonswords82 3y agoNobody said it was outside of working hours.
- ekianjo 3y agoyou just said food or drinks before or afterwards. people don't have food in the middle of the day after a meeting.
- mattbrewsbytes 3y agoThe differences with in person are that conversations have a much higher fidelity. There can be spontaneous multiple conversations going in the same room which is impossible virtually without spinning up another videoconf session, people leaving, people re-joining, etc. So it really is much better for brainstorming and doing the “figure things out” mode of software engineering. Once you’ve figured things out, the implementation can be dome remotely. Sharing meals during this time together also helps build relationships and trust within a team. I mean as you work, or even offsite at a restaurant - go out to breakfast or lunch during the work day.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y agoI find debugging to be easier when everyone has their own machine. You can screen share the primary person's screen but then have others try out little things and do exploration on the side. And I'm far better with my desktop setup than I would be on a laptop that might not even have a mouse.
- skirmish 3y agoHeard on Blind: soon HR will be calling engineer parents about missed days in office: "your son is smart, he is just not applying himself".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- MathMonkeyMan 3y agoAll of his school work is top notch and delivered on time. He's helpful and kind to his classmates. I'm just not getting a strong senior signal for him. Perhaps it's a behavioral issue?
- blitzar 3y agoWe think he has weak senior signal, we want to put him on these powerful stimulants to boost his senior signal receptors* * side effects may include mild psycopathy
- quantum_state 3y agoThis is yet another sign that Google is in ruin …
- complex_exp 3y agoIt's hardly in ruin, has more cash on the balance sheet than, for example, all the help sent to Ukraine, military and humanitarian. It's just that making a shit ton of money ain't actually that fun because your job is basically to constantly patch holes in this gargantuan ship that never stops.
- Daishiman 3y agoIBM was in this position way back too. Revenue is a lagging indicator.
- majormajor 3y agoIBM was a big driver in viewing teams and employees as fungible and assembly-line pieces and shifting to offshore work. I think the fact that Google isn't yet worried about cost more than productivity is a good sign that they're still a ways away from that.
- andromeduck 3y agoWhat makes you think they aren't? Everything they've done the last few years has been cost driven.
- somsak2 3y agoOn the same order of magnitude, but not quite. Plus, the second figure is from four months ago. https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/#:~:text=Cash%20on%20Hand%20as%20of,accessible%20money%20a%20business%20has https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/cash-on-hand/.... https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-02-24/these-countries-have-sent-the-most-aid-to-ukraine https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2023-02-...
- Simulacra 3y agoIt was only a matter of time before corporation started preference, and those who showed up and those who prefer to work from home
- oofta-boofta 3y agoIn other news, Google has been taken over by High School Principals.
- slt2021 3y ago[flagged]
- Zaheer 3y agoI attended a HR conference a few months ago with several Fortune 500 company heads of people, etc. Most of the sentiment in the room was that WFH flexibility is valuable but so is collaborative time in office. Some more 'forward-thinking' leaders were all in on remote though it was clear this was the minority. The leaders talked a lot about pressures from other execs on wanting to go back in-office even though they knew most employees wanted more flexibility. I think most companies will go back to 3 days a week in office and 2 days remote. Remote companies will continue to hold an advantage on attracting talent. We've recently improved our remote filter on Levels.fyi Jobs - give it a try and lmk your feedback as well: https://www.levels.fyi/jobs?workArrangements=remote https://www.levels.fyi/jobs?workArrangements=remote
- _tdd2 3y agoI think it's relatively well known that heads of people/whatever fancy name HR peeps come up with for themselves are generally sociopathic scumbags, so it's not surprising to me that this was the case.
- barbazoo 3y agoThere is just no way any of this is based on actual data.
- mrguyorama 3y agoActually we have lots of data on sociopath and narcissistic tendencies in management. Management consistently scores higher in these negative personality traits.
- Zaheer 3y agoHave you met any of these people? They're quite normal people like you and I. They've climbed the ranks in some cases by spending 20+ years at the same company. The discussions I attended were HR leaders in attendance only aside from myself. I was just popping into breakout rooms and observing. I left with the impression that the HR leaders are genuinely interested in improving the workplace experience. A central topic for instance was "How can I convince my CEO / board that we should allow hybrid / fully remote?". If they were sociopathic scumbags I would instead expect "How can we force employees to come back to the office" discussions.
- gunshai 3y agoA friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week. Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.
- somsak2 3y ago> PM at google > couldn't afford living in SF
- bezier-curve 3y agoSeriously though, it's a major city with too much single unit family housing. The fact tech exists there is more of an anomaly at this point, our democracy continues to fail us.
- WWLink 3y agoI agree, though I think the problem is that they should've never zoned the city such that you have all the residential areas in one spot and all the commercial areas in another. I mean there are residential units in the business areas, but not that many. That's how downtown gets freaky at night.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- almost_usual 3y agoThey can afford to live in SF, they can’t afford the lifestyle they want.
- sublimefire 3y agothis is a bit bizarre, how do you know what personal issues they have? maybe they need to care for someone or need special assistance due to their disability, maybe she is actually paid less than many other PMs
- acjohnson55 3y agoI never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified. "See, look! The people are using it. They love it." (Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)
- HWR_14 3y agoI never cease to be amazed at the extent to which knowledge workers want to make "replace us with Eastern Europeans/Latin Americans/Indians" as painless a drop in as possible.
- jleyank 3y agoIf they could have done it 10-20 years ago, they would have and Covid would never have been an issue. Was in a company in the 90's trying to do that with Russian developers, and didn't Sun hire 50 when the wall came down? Paid them in Levis and the like. Outsourcing/offshoring is old news.
- biohax2015 3y agoThey are doing it. Slowly, but surely.
- adamisom 3y ago
- extr 3y agoAfter going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the dimension of "we know what we need to do" is actually pretty much orthogonal to the product, size of the company, tenure of the employees, etc. I've been in early stage startups with no PMF that nonetheless have strong product-centric leadership who can set down an unambiguous vision for what they believe needs to be done. And I've been in startups that have PMF yet have no vision, and everyone is standing around in their remote offices twiddling their thumbs on "what to build next". For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2. I worked at Meta remotely for a year. My instructions when I joined were something like "Yeah so just talk to a bunch of people and look for opportunities to contribute". WTF? No wonder remote is not working well for them. You had to go 5-6 layers up the reporting chain to find anyone with any sort of holistic sense of what needed to be done, and they were not exactly empowered to share that vision lest it conflict with someone elses. TL;DR I think remote work is well set up for companies with leadership that resembles a benevolent dictatorship. I think if you are all-remote and your leadership is effectively "managerial" in nature, NGMI.
- majormajor 3y agoYour experience matches mine, where yeah, it could work even in situations where it commonly fails if there was "just" better management... but... well, yeah. EDIT: and so many of the challenges people are running into now are not new, either - companies were incentivized to make remote work work for two decades pre-Covid, and for a while pundits were all convinced that software jobs were all going away overseas as a result, but despite the salary savings the ROI just wasn't there for all but the most basic of work.
- maerF0x0 3y agoI'm curious if you've considered that there is a pretty major cost difference between the two options? (at least for the company) Would you conclude that In Person is much better , in excess of the additional costs ?
- ytch 3y agoOn the other hand, Google encourage underperformed employee to show up for improving review score. If they does well, remote work are acceptable since they has some additional score to be deducted? I guess it means there will have many underperformance co-workers in office?
- myles_d 3y agoRemote works for me. Usually on-site there is always trying to stand over my shoulder asking for something when I’m in the middle of doing what they asked me to do an hour before.
- LawTalkingGuy 3y agofwiw, I get this just as much with remote, but it's a chat message. To fix this, use "the process". Create a ticket for the job for this person and if they want the job done right now, get them to up to priority themselves (presumably with their and your managers' approval).
- batmaniam 3y agoWell nothing can be done about that, Google's trying to force people back and it's gonna do what it's gonna do. Unless people get together an exert their voice. Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen. But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.
- sulam 3y agoGoogle pays by where you live, as determined by your work location. If people move back, they get a bump assuming they took a cut in the first place.
- wildrhythms 3y agoThis is not true. My understanding was that some 'office regions' are paid less than remote workers in the same state. https://archive.is/FQsXB https://archive.is/FQsXB
- eitally 3y agoYou're correct. This famously (within Google) came up in three scenarios: 1) people living in parts of Contra Costa County who were remote, and then paid 10% less than those living in the same place who commuted into a Google office in the bay area, 2) similar situation regarding NYC mapped employees living in Connecticut, and 3) NC-based employees being absolutely abused by being classified as "low cost" and given a 25% haircut in both base salary and equity refreshes.
- sulam 3y agoI did not say people are paid the same based on the state they live in. They are paid based on where they live. Some regions are paid less than others, even within a state.
- badlucklottery 3y ago
- choeger 3y agoThis is just another form of layoffs, I think. The problem is that many other execs will follow. It's bizarre how this is purely about making life worse for the engineers without any rational reason.
- mylons 3y agoit's almost like there should be a union or something
- heavyset_go 3y agoI was told developers had enough leverage without unions to prevent this from happening /s
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoWhen the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise. When the market goes down, they want a union to protect them from being fired from that +50% job they got knowing they would be paid much less in the current economy. The dev logic is "fuck you I've got mine, you go get yours" but only as long as "line goes up".
- mrguyorama 3y ago>When the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise. NOTHING about unions prevents an individual being rewarded for their individual merits or jumping from job to job.
- ChuckNorris89 3y agoUnions, at least in Germany, dictate stric salary bands for all employees, existing and new-commers. You can't have new-hires making 50% more than old-timers who've been 10 years with the company, just because the stock market has an uptick and an increased demand for people where there's a shortage. You can bring in the new-hire at similar wages to everyone already in the company with the same experience as him, or you have to raise wages for everyone else to give him a major increase. Guess which options companies here take. Unionized companies don't grow according to the stock market but according to profits, sales and customer orders, so you never see mass hires because the stock market went up, you also don't see mass fires because the market went down. That's why there isn't a huge salary difference between a senior and a junior, at least not like in the US where seniors can make 4-8 times as much as a junior. Unionized companies here also look down on job hoppers (people who jump ship for more compensation every 2-3 years) and tend not to hire them. So yeah, from historical evidence we have so far, from my PoV, unions and crazy compensations that also grow like crazy in sync with the stock market, are mutually exclusive. Do you want uniuonized slow stable growth that lags the stock market, or do you want to make money in sync or above the stock market? Pick one.
- IlPeach 3y agoWhile I enjoy this whole debate in HN about remote Vs in-person, the point here majority seems to be missing is that the sole attendance is used as a threat for performance review. Effectively a joke. If Google had a problem with people and teams hiding behind a monitor not doing much, I'm sure you can recall a pre-pandemic world where this was also the norm when in the office.
- angarg12 3y agoNow that my company has started enforcing RTO, I noticed patterns in some of my colleagues, such as arriving late and leaving early, leaving the laptop in their desk disappearing for a long while, not answering messages for hours with nowhere to be seen, and very vague status updates when asked. It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.
- sublimefire 3y agoThey are having water cooler conversations and collaborating on the new product engineering.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- blitzar 3y agoI love the fantasy that some management hold that back in my day you couldn't slack in the office and it was a thing that was invented on the first day someone "worked from home". Over a few drinks they will also tell you stories of the old days where you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am come back to the office at some point in the afternoon. But kidz these days...
- vineyardmike 3y ago> you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am I’ve talked to junior employees (in 2023) for non-tech companies and you’d think they work for Amazon warehouses - I’ve heard people say they get criticized or called out for spending a long time in the bathroom “probably on social media”. So there’s probably some cohort of people that truly experience that level of oversight. I don’t know about going to the Pub at 11, but I’ve definitely seen plenty of ways to slack off in person. My manager was buying a new laptop last month and spent 4+ hours measuring random books and objects trying to get an idea of the dimensions of his future laptop… as if he didn’t already spend the day at the Apple Store and didn’t already place the order.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- KKKKkkkk1 3y agoSounds like Google is eliminating remote work. Has VP Urs Holzle returned from New Zealand? https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh-urs-hlzle-employees-complaints.html https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...
- caskstrength 3y agoYou misunderstood. Such rules never apply to _those_ people's performance reviews. They are only for peons.
- himinlomax 3y agoSame with open office plans. Managers who implement them always seem to end up with a private office, for some weird reasons.
- teddyh 3y agoOr, as is often reported, they commandeer one of the conference rooms for themselves.
- lisper 3y agoThe idea that Urs was hard core about colocation is absolutely false. I was a direct report to Urs when he was VP engineering and I telecommuted one day every week. Urs successor, Wayne Rosing, was much stricter than Urs ever was.
- laurentlb 3y agoNo, remote work is still allowed. It might be a bit more difficult to switch to a remote work contract now (but still possible), but people who are already remote will continue like this.
- deelowe 3y ago> people who are already remote will continue like this My understanding is that everyone has to get approval even people who are currently remote. For those who are near an office, they are being told to expect to be asked to come in frequently.
- iovrthoughtthis 3y agoRTO is a manager v labour issue.
- brooksppv 3y agoRealistically, how does the review conversation go if your Impact and areas of Competency are high? I can’t see a ‘yeah but your attendance was low’ holding any water from a credible manager.
- fhd2 3y agoQuick search on this thread didn't reveal the word "flame" (as in "flame war"), so I can´t resist: That's what the remote vs on-site debate is. About as interesting and ultimately inconclusive as Emacs vs Vi. Neither is universally better. It depends, _primarily_ on the people involved and their preferences. My advice would be to try and work with people that are on the same page about this with you - if possible. If everybody can muster the level of acceptance and respect for their colleagues required to make a hybrid environment work, that'd also do the trick. What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others. If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in. If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in. Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).
- iainmerrick 3y agoNobody ever actually wins a flame war, though, right?
- sublimefire 3y agoemacs won, didn't it :D
- Keyframe 3y agoBy admitting defeat with evil mode.
- fuzzfactor 3y agoIt's been commonly said that 80 percent of success is showing up.
- bsimpson 3y agoIt's also being said that HR will get involved if you haven't badged into your designated office in the last 30-60 days. That's the real threat. There are many people at Google who are splitting their time between their desk location and somewhere else. Some are supercommuters - moving their families to a home in another state and coming back periodically for face-to-face meetings. Others are digital nomads, working remotely part time and on-site part time. It's unclear if there's a tenable solution for those people.
- DoingIsLearning 3y agoI've mentioned this in another WSJ just five days ago: "For context, Fortune, WSJ, FT, etc. have all been consistently over the past 2 quarters churning out several opinion articles on the topic of remote work." It is an obvious concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to save commercial real estate investors who were caught with their pants down now that several companies are not renewing leases.
- regularfry 3y agoIt's not just commercial real estate. Those are all print publications bought as physical products by commuters. They're looking at through-the-floor print sales and panicking.
- villgax 3y agoWhat a horrible workplace, the google of early 00s was the place to be, now it's just corporate optimisations taking place
- seydor 3y agoGoogle wants to do layoffs?
- i-use-nixos-btw 3y agoWhat’s the important metric? Performance. What’s one of the measures they use to establish performance? In-person attendance. Why? Because it… improves… performance? I mean, that’s just like testing to see how warm a house is by seeing how often the heating is turned on. Except some houses are in Cuba and some are in Siberia. It’s the wrong approach. But meh. The largest company I’ve worked for had 0.5% of the staff Google has, so who am I to say what does and doesn’t work as a metric for them? It’s an entirely different ballgame, and not one I think I would enjoy being a part of.
- andyish 3y agopeople are getting so hung up on remote vs office as though it's either or. Out side of tech people who want to work in the office 5 days a week are in the minority along with people who want to work at home 5 days a week. The vast majority of people want the _flexability_ to decide when to go in. They'll go in for a change of scenery, to socialise with colleagues (not necessarily after work but idle chit chat in the office) or to informally speak to a few people. Demanding and mandating people come back to the office is a real shitty move, and does nothing but cause stress and anxiety to everyone.
- regularfry 3y agoFrom the point of a rational organisation it doesn't make sense either. Do it half-way and you end up with everyone on video calls to people who aren't there; do it fully and you're overpaying for the space because, yes, really, it's colossally inefficient to have everyone on-site when they don't need to be. Weirdly it also doesn't make sense to give people full flexibility to pick when to be on-site, though - at least, not from the point of view of their role within the larger organisation. Yes, you want them to be able to choose to be on-site when someone they need to work with is there, but also there needs to be a mixing function: as their boss you need to be ensuring that they are physically proximate to functions they haven't previously interacted with. You don't need much of this, but the main benefit of on-site working is discovery, not collaboration within an existing framework. And without a certain amount of curation that's unlikely to happen by accident. When two people get chatting in the kitchen, you need one of them, at least, to have that spark of recognition that says "Ah ha! Your thing is relevant to my thing!" because that's the fundamental innovation and discovery driver. What's happening is that the bosses are leaning on random chance to do that curation job. I think that for most organisations it's very, very unlikely to be doing a good enough job to compensate for the downsides, but it also explains why the 37Signals approach of getting everyone in the building together at once works for them. That's still relying on randomness, but it's stacking the deck. Or rather, un-stacking it. If you allow people to pick which day a week, say, they come into the office, you'll get the Monday people, the Thursday people, and ne'er the twain shall meet. With everyone on-site at once, there's at least a chance a natural Monday will meet with a natural Thursday and produce an outcome that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
- sharts 3y agoCompanies with a school-like atmosphere treating their employees...like school children? Perhaps the culture and hiring/recruitment practices optimize for lack of trust. This is too funny.
- siliconc0w 3y agoThe correct formula is remote with team summits but FAANG is too cheap and dysfunctional to manage that. Travel is cancelled due to perpetual "headwinds" and the budget is strictly used by high level middle management to bounce around the world and vigorously agree with each other.
- euiq 3y agoThe title is essentially clickbait. From the article: > Google is the latest company to tighten its return-to-work policies to get workers to commute more often. In an internal email, the company said it could make office attendance an element of an employee’s performance review if they did not comply with the three-day minimum for in-office work, reports the Wall Street Journal. Why, yes: if you don't come to the office as often as your employer wants you to, you'll get in trouble.
- deelowe 3y agoIt's not that simple. Previously, remote versus in office was sort of at the discretion of the various organizations and leaders. This change which states there will be an expectation or regular in-office work, and that not complying would impact performance, was announced company wide a few days ago. I know someone who literally just hired an employee who must be remote for at least a year and was told that after the year some in office work would be expected, but would be infrequent. Now they have to go back and tell this same person that they probably need to figure out how to come on site several days a week and this will need to be sorted out in the next few months. If this employee decides to comply, it likely means his spouse has to quit her masters program. The manager who hired this person is afraid he's probably violating some sort of labor law/verbal contract given what was stated during the offer period. HR is really helping.
- rqtwteye 3y agoBefore they push for RTO “because collaboration “,they should make sure that everybody works in similar time zones. For me the real killer of collaboration is to work with with people who live in California, India and China on the same project. If you aren’t willing to sacrifice your personal life and talk to them at night, there is almost no collaboration possible. Being in the office doesn’t help at all there.
- mduggles 3y agoAfter trying both for years I don't really know what we're talking about here. I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature. I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature. I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk. Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.
- dogleash 3y ago> It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk. A lot of 'management' doesn't build communication or workflows more advanced than that. And when people are never more than a short walk away, they don't have to. Slack is just the online version of that. A noisy conversation always within earshot. One that you can usually ignore, but should still be a little aware of what's going on overall, and occasionally you get pulled in to the larger conversation.
- johnny99k 3y agoThis is why I started only choosing remote work (contracting/consulting or FT) 10 years ago. I originally did it so I could travel the world (which I did in 2013-2014) and now because I want to be able to spend more time with my family.
- shadowgovt 3y agoBack in the day, Google understood that the reason they offered perks like microkitchens, onsite meals, and so on was that they weren't competing against other companies offering similar perks... They were competing against their own employees, making the decision to work for themselves by freelancing or starting a competing company. It will be interesting to see how the workforce responds to what appears to be a Google increasingly convinced that their employees are dependent upon them for success.
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- rubicon33 3y agoWorked from home ~5 of my ~10 years in development. Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc. I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving toward being mildly depressed. Returning to office restored my excitement for my work. I credit my colleagues and the process of working toward a big goal with other people. We really underestimate how important this is for mental health. If you're in office and you now what I mean, show some love to a fellow co-worker. You gotta admit it's nice to see each other.
- llm_nerd 3y agoThe obvious counterpoint is that many people were and are miserable commuting into a workplace and then putting in the grind. It's actually humorous that most tech "social media" like HN, Reddit, Digg, and so on were much busier back when most of us were in offices, because we all would bide our days doing anything but work. You could see the bursts as the primary demographic timezones started their "work" days. Not everyone, of course: I had a peer once who absolutely couldn't stand his family, and he would be at the office before everyone, staying until late at night. Volunteered on weekends too. Almost all of his contributions were the sort of thing that could have been easily automated, but he was happy just wiling hours away. Mileage varies and everyone's situation is unique. Then of course there's the change element itself being a temporary boost. Turn the lights down and productivity increases. Turn them up and productivity increases. Return them to the normal and productivity increases. Having a varied life is essential. HN's history is littered by posts of people who changed some element of their life and This Changes Everything...at least during the initial period. Then it fades and they abandon it. None of this is to diminish your personal experience that you obviously enjoy.
- bentlegen 3y ago> It's actually humorous that most tech "social media" like HN, Reddit, Digg, and so on were much busier back when most of us were in offices, because we all would bide our days doing anything but work. Do you have a source on this? I’m both curious and skeptical. (And ironically, for many in Europe and Eastern NA/SA it’s the work day right now.)
- pfannkuchen 3y agoI wonder if all of the WFH excitement would have happened if open offices had never become widespread and we all had an actual office with a door. It’s kind of funny that they’ve made offices so bad that no one wants to go there, but no one (on the corporate side) talks about improving the working environment in the office at all in the context of WFO.
- BlargMcLarg 3y agoThey've tried and were met with all kinds of retorts. It's more difficult to get an employer to spend an extra 50/month on your equipment, than to piss 10x of it away in inefficient code run on cloud computing. WFH at least got a foothold, most individuals don't even know what it is like to work in an area tailormade to your way of working.
- pfannkuchen 3y agoYeah I’m referring to e.g. Google the company, not its employees. It’s amazing that companies pretend the modern office environment is a reasonable place to work. IMO office with closed door is much better than WFH, you’d think someone would start offering it again. Is it really that prohibitively expensive?
- taeric 3y agoI put in the last thread that I find having an attendance score rather interesting for a company that is so proud of how well OKRs work for them. That is, I can see some reasons to want more visibility into what people are working on. And when. That is exactly what they pitch OKRs for solving, for as long as the goal is getting achieved, you don't have to measure other things. Instead, this is what happens when you have bean counters look at the system. Everything starts looking like a bean to be counted. You can't, with a straight face, tell me that attendance counts, but lines of code doesn't. Or all sorts of other countable things that we all, as an industry, claim to agree is a bad idea to count.
- jonnycomputer 3y agoWell, a lot of company-employee relations is about control. Or fear of loss of control. And so, with work from home, the encroachment on the privacy of the home. I guess I'd rather be spied on at work than at home.
- JamesLeonis 3y ago> "Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in person and then transferred to remote or remained in person performed better on average than people who joined remotely," Zuckerberg wrote in a statement in March. I'm still waiting for the fucking data Zuck. None of these CEOs "have the data" about remote work, or they would beat us over the head with it over and over. I would be seeing graphs and pie charts all over the financial press. It's 3 years and nothing. Every employee should be demanding this data as proof before setting a single foot in an office.
- jonnycomputer 3y agoSo the main benefit for me in going into the office, besides the psychological boost of being outside of the house, is that I often learn things about what is going on that I wouldn't have learned otherwise because they never rose to the level of, "we better should tell him". Instead, I'd just over-hear it, or there'd be a group on-the-fly conversation happening, and someone would mention it. Sometimes those things were rather important, and the only reason it wasn't brought to my attention by the people who knew it, was because they didn't know how important it was.
- pjdemers 3y agoFor an employer the great advantage of remote work is the ability to hire people who live anywhere in the world (or at least anywhere in your country). But, when you're not hiring, that no longer matters.
- seadan83 3y agoMr Zuckerberg cited a study showing new employees that started as remote performed more poorly. Does anyone know if the level of new hire training and onboarding is the same? My experiences with onboarding is you generally sit with someone for a week, all day - and sometimes for two weeks. Usually the productivity hit of doing this is swept under the rug. When working remote, are managers still designating mentors? In places where this happened unofficially, does that style of onboarding still happen?