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Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket". Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst wa

• thesuitonym 3y ago
  >What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? Google went public is what happened. You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter.
  • erehweb 3y ago
    They don't have to do that, though - founders still retain control so could ignore shareholders.
    • bbor 3y ago
      Not quite - just because the founders have majority control doesn't mean that the BS financial duty "laws" don't apply to the company executives. They have a duty to all the shareholders, not just the controlling ones.
      • layer8 3y ago
        There is no duty to maximize profits though, that is a myth.
        • thesuitonym 3y ago
          They have no legal duty to do so, but why do people buy stock if not to produce a return?
          • layer8 3y ago
            Producing a return doesn’t imply maximizing that return. Short-term profit maximization may actually be detrimental to long-term success. People also buy stocks because they believe in what the company does in terms of meaningfulness, and that meaningfulness tends to decline when trying to maximize profits.
        • bbor 3y ago
          IDK I'm confused about that. I think we can agree that it's at the very least a myth that holds a lot of sway among many investors and executives. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-corporations-obligations-to-shareholders/a-duty-to-shareholder-value https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co... The leading statement of the law's view on corporate social responsibility goes back to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co, a 1919 decision that held that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." That case — in which Henry Ford was challenged by shareholders when he tried to reduce car prices at their expense — also established that "it is not within the lawful powers of a board of directors to shape and conduct the affairs of a corporation for the merely incidental benefit of shareholders and for the primary purpose of benefiting others." Despite contrary claims by some academics and Occupy Wall Street-type partisans, this remains the law today. A 2010 decision, for example, eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark, held that corporate directors are bound by "fiduciary duties and standards" which include "acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders."
    • midoridensha 3y ago
      It's sad: Google has (had?) all the ingredients needed to make an absolutely amazing tech company, but instead they've been consistently shooting themselves in the foot for at least a half-decade. They've had oodles of money, brilliant developers, majority stock ownership by the founders (to avoid being completely beholden to shareholders and their short-term interests), lots of goodwill and a great image at the beginning, and they're just squandering it all with terrible leadership.
  • dilyevsky 3y ago
    Things weren’t like this for a long time after it was already public. I used to work there more than 5 years after ipo and their office environment (especially in zurich) was really good
    • thesuitonym 3y ago
      You're right, and I addressed this in another reply, but keeping a good company culture requires a very special leadership team, and it can't and won't last forever.
      • htag 3y ago
        * Eventually ownership will disperse from the core group of initial owners to investors in general * As a larger ownership moves towards investors, decisions are made that sacrifice the special sauce in order to increase returns. * Appeasing general investors leads towards enshittification. Sometimes a strong leader (Jobs, Cook) can keep the investor class as bay for a period. Sometimes leadership can be consolidated for long periods of time to delay the process (Walton, Zuck), but it feels inevitable after IPO.
    • ornornor 3y ago
      They just did mass layoffs in Zürich too from what I hear. Many will be out of a job at the end of this month at that office.
    • anlaw 3y ago
      Reality isn’t fractal. People leaving for a variety of motives, expansion of some offices, closing others… chip away at the edge of known truth. Entropy forces new relative perspective. Humans need to do better about accepting figurative and literal death and chill. There quite literally is nowhere else to go except insane from repeating ourselves. A rewrite of philosophical priority is a necessity for anyone under 50 and the species. That has to be taken sincerely and seriously because, well they kind of outnumber the ossified pensioner, and if they’re staring down forced obligation to choke on fire smoke for 60 years or dump gramps overboard, no one around to see it happen will be around long enough to insure it’s a footnote in any discussion of history. Self proclaimed STEM minded secular people seem just fine ignoring evidence that does not fit the civic life narrative they’ve been spoon fed like it’s immutable truth. Seems to have latched itself onto whatever quirk of biology religion accidentally exploited; like a nihilism cause it’s all gods plan kind of woo. “Hey look at me, mom! My life goal is making computers do what they were intentionally designed to do!” That can be automated; any acceptable experience is a finite set of constraints. DOOM is pretty DOOMy. Same for Halo. Email clients. But hey we have figurative career ambitions, man; Google Fellow! Boom goes the dynamite. Smaller models first; let’s make an AI to replace the CEO by assigning project management to vetted candidates via publicly audited randomizer. Term limits for geniuses who always seem to end up enjoying their own farts. “I’m sorry general manager of capital intense AI infrastructure, you are tonight’s… weakest link! dropped into literal shark tank” It’s been a long day. Sorry not sorry for the more unhinged off gassing.
  • linguae 3y ago
    I’m sometimes cynical about publicly-traded companies, but Google seemed more forward-thinking in its pre-Alphabet era, and Apple seemed to be very forward thinking from 1997-2011 when Steve Jobs was running the company. Being a publicly-traded company doesn’t automatically mean resorting to bean counting and other bad forms of management.
    • thesuitonym 3y ago
      You're absolutely right that being public doesn't automatically making bad choices--but it does eventually mean making poor choices. As long as you have a strong CEO, they can weather the storm of shareholder requests, but once you get to third or fourth generation leaders it typically becomes a race to the bottom. See: Every company in every industry.
      • bboygravity 3y ago
        Can you explain what things shareholders generally request? As far as I know the only duty a company has towards shareholders is "protect them" (aka: don't mess up and make money). As long as the company eventually does that there is no issue. Even if it takes 8 quarters to become profitable (or 10+ years, see Amazon). There are probably ways in which shareholders can get together and request something (in court?), but that almost never happens? Maybe I'm wrong. If so, would love to see examples.
        • financypants 3y ago
          Their duty is to keep revenue or profitability up and to the right. Every quarter that they don’t do this, analysts will grill the management team about what happened and what will change. The company is forced into a cycle, quarter by quarter, of underestimating earnings, outperforming estimates, and pleasing investors.
          • epicureanideal 3y ago
            Or they could grow a spine and declare they’re not playing that short sighted game.
  • ravst3s 3y ago
    >You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter Ironically, Google doesn't care about their shareholders and quarters like other tech companies. They don't provide a guidance, their earnings calls have little substance, and their disclosure is atrocious.
  • HWR_14 3y ago
    You don't have to base everything around what will make the most profit this quarter. Bezos certainly didn't feel compelled to in the early days of being public.
  • tanepiper 3y ago
    Yes. I love working for a company with no shareholders. We actually get time to look at the problem.
  • bananapub 3y ago
    I'm sort of amazed how often I see this dumb take on HN. just because it's a US tech-world cultural norm for companies to mostly be run in fucking stupid short term ways, it doesn't mean it's actually required. especially in the case of Google, where 1) Eric, Larry and Sergey have stiched up the entire board's voting power, 2) doesn't need to raise cash via bonds or stock at all and 3) it's a magic money tree, so investors will accept being told to fuck off and let the CEO run the company however they think it'll work best. Google also IPOed in 2004...are you seriously suggesting that it hasn't been a > forward thinking and innovative company for ... 19 years? that's a pretty bold take.
    • thesuitonym 3y ago
      I'm sort of amazed how many times this exact reply was added to my comment. Did you read any of them? Of course it's not required. It's just what happens.
• grogenaut 3y ago
  Is google actually hot desking or is that a extrapolation on them cutting office space.
  • krasin 3y ago
    actual hotdesking in some platform areas (for example, Google Cloud). I don't know how universal that is.
    • rwiggins 3y ago
      Not exactly. For engineers, at least (not sure about other roles), the Google Cloud desk options are: 1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal. 2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want. 3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway. 4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner. 5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...) To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking. And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions. Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
      • AtlasBarfed 3y ago
        Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller? You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat. But yeah, they care about productivity. Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.
• chubot 3y ago
  From 2012, to 2016, to 2020, google bled an incredible amount of key talent I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time
  • lern_too_spel 3y ago
    Google management has always been incompetent. It's just that now that economic conditions have forced them to make more drastic decisions that their incompetence is even more obvious.
    • gumby 3y ago
      Actually I think Schmidt was quite good. Sadly he's the only CEO the company has ever had.
      • eftychis 3y ago
        And Schmidt was forced on them.
        • gumby 3y ago
          Yeah, I'd never heard of investors threatening to take their money back, either before or since. I've never had such a clause in any financing docs I've signed.
    • code_biologist 3y ago
      Eric Schmidt seemed very competent, given how much of the famed old Google culture was built during his tenure. I was at Google during the Larry Page era and contrasting him with Schmidt was not favorable.
• alex_lav 3y ago
  > on top of the worst way of working which is in-office. It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact
  • Foobar8568 3y ago
    Hotdesk is the biggest bullshit ever. Can you imagine arriving at your office having to think, will I be able to seat next to team? Having to do conference call because no meeting room available just for the poor guy who cannot be there by 8? Best part, people consider their desks as they own it, I have seen people moving stuff just because some dared to seat there before they arrive with management approval.
    • alex_lav 3y ago
      Did you note the portion of the comment I specifically quoted? Because nowhere does it discuss hot desks.
    • sulam 3y ago
      This is not what Google is doing.
  • bbor 3y ago
    It _is_ objectively true that WFH is better for the environment. But oh well, so far wildfires are contained to just wildfire season, so not a big deal :))))))
    • chaostheory 3y ago
      Yeah, people forget about the energy and pollution costs of forcing everyone to commute. Even if you drive an EV, there’s still pollution from tires. Given that we’ve proven that remote work is viable even without next gen AR VR devices, a lot of corporate PR supporting the environment feels very empty when we learn their stance on remote work
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• nostrebored 3y ago
  Have you considered that maybe your priors are just wrong? I don't know a single person who prefers in-office work who thinks that remote is more effective, but I know many who have the opposite opinion but prefer the flexibility. Maybe there isn't a realistic way to make remote as productive. I'm honest enough to say that the social pressure that people bemoan makes me significantly more productive. I wish it didn't, but it absolutely does. The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think. Managers and leaders have acknowledged this and finally we're moving towards getting work done again.
  • esafak 3y ago
    > The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think. If you know a person does not like being interrupted don't be selfish and write a message. Why does your productivity matter more than mine?
    • nostrebored 3y ago
      Because 10 minutes of your time might save hours of someone else’s. Why is your productivity more important than your entire teams? I feel like people don’t treat achieving business goals as part of their job in dev. I’ve never had people treat this as a problem across other job roles.
      • esafak 3y ago
        If ten minutes of my time is worth hours of yours and you are coming to me, I must know what I'm doing and you ought to respect my concentration. You will still get your help, but respectful of my schedule. Tell me how urgently you need an answer, and I will triage it. If there is an incident, that is different. I do believe that there is room for better tools in this area, and I'm working on it. Tools that help users solve their problems collaboratively without imposing undue burden on their coworkers.
      • norir 3y ago
• skybrian 3y ago
  There's nothing about hot-desking in the article. What's your source on that? A long time ago when I worked there, I didn't like working in the office sometimes, but sitting out on the balcony with a laptop wasn't so bad. Can't do that on a sub :-)
  • sulam 3y ago
    As covered publicly, Cloud is hot desking but only requiring a couple days a week in the office to make it work. Other parts of Google are not hot desking. Most are hybrid, 3 days a week in the office. Honestly hot desking 2 days does not seem like a big deal to me.
• SanderNL 3y ago
  Their business revolves around ads. I don’t know where that’s going, but I’m not betting the house on it. Their AI strategy has been a joke as far as I can tell. That’s not helping. Their “regular” services are ok, but nothing I would pay for. They are downsizing and dropping staff left and right. This might be a good signal: they are being realistic and riding this one out, but I’m not getting good vibes.
• space_invaders 3y ago
  Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (instead of Gerrit or a Gerrit-clone), multirepos or monorepos without Bazel, anything else than gRPC...). And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role? Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.
  • Osiris 3y ago
    I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me. When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on. So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…” I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction. So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.
    • sharts 3y ago
      That's why they say having "Google" on your resume sets you up forever (˃̣̣̥‿˂̣̣̥)
• txdv 3y ago
  You might want to hold on for a few more Qs because short term solutions like this do increase stocks.
• _trackno5 3y ago
  ugh, you're so right about this hot-desking nonsense. But it's not even just Google. I haven't been back to my company's office because they insist on not assigning a desk. Every time I wanna go in I have find a random desk to sit in.
• smarmgoblin 3y ago
  As a googler I understand. Leadership is capricious and petty, chasing trends and seems to be flailing. They have nothing left to offer stockholders than cost-saving measures. Tbh I love the project I work on and I’m still learning tons. But I wish we could have more confidence in our leadership instead of hoping to be insulated from whatever their whims are this month.
• I_am_uncreative 3y ago
  Working in an office is better than working from home in my experience, but hot-desking is a stupid idea.
• HlessClaudesman 3y ago
  Google seems to have taken their eye off the ball when it comes to providing accurate search results. Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days. Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?
  • DieBruderBauer 3y ago
    1st page of most search results is inundated with irrelevant ads. Pitiful. And yes, a small minority know about and actively use uBlock Origin. But that doesn’t mean the core functionality and purpose of Google search isn’t tainted. The rotting and decay has already manifested itself in ugly ways.
• m463 3y ago
  > Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket". Wouldn't some sort of LRU scheme work better as some sort of PAGE-ing algorithm? Maybe RANK the employees to group by locality.
• cauliflower99 3y ago
  I agree with your first statement. When in-person, it isn't good to have a hot desk. You need to reset your space each morning. You can't have anything personalised at the desk. You have new neighbours who you probably couldn't be bothered talking to because they'll be moved tomorrow. But I disagree that in-person is the worst way of working. I think some people are more productive in areas that are well-defined. But if teamwork, group problem solving or large amounts of communication is required (such as onboarding a junior), then there is no comparison: In-person has far more communication points than remote. Working in a team remotely requires you to schedule every communication point. This is frustrating when most information that gets passed between people is by osmosis / overhearing.
• RickJWagner 3y ago
  Google must become the new IBM. As business gets bigger, they have to relentlessly control costs, else they'll end up out-flanked by nimble upstarts. It's the circle of business life.