11 ms·

I was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate. During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high

I was at Google during their initial “return to office” mandate. During the TGIF (company all hands) discussing this, the architect of the policy, someone high up in the HR org, explained why it was necessary. I don’t recall what they said, but I do recall that they happened to be working remotely at the time, after the policy against remote work had already gone into effect. The brazenness of lecturing us on why remote work was harmful to Google while working remotely was shocking. Predictably, the internal anger over this was enormous. Rules for thee but not for me, some animals are more equal than others, etc.

kurthr 2y ago
The Stanford Hospital Nurses strike was driven by similar dynamics. Nurses had to work overtime through the entire pandemic while executives literally phoned it in for years! They were shocked, shocked, to discover that there was anger and resentment. It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries. It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.
- cogman10 2y ago
  The nature of nursing is that you have to be in person. What HR did (and has been doing) is keeping the number of staff at a barebones level. They don't, for example, hire enough nurses that if one is out sick (during covid!) that there could be someone to cover the shift. They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse. That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes. Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
  - fjjjrjj 2y ago
    > Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours. HR works for management and the board.
  - kurthr 2y ago
    I thought I had seen businesses run by every conceivable group, founders, engineers, sales, marketing, finance... and then I saw a hospital and realized it was run by HR. Every "may" in a rule becomes "shall" since anything else could be perceived as preferential. It makes the lives of both supervisors and supervised hell. Only the spiteful or incompetent rise. Of course the "why" is driven by the greatest risk in healthcare. Where most income comes from insurance is stable, the real risk is being sued. Hence rises "there shall be no exceptions" HR rule based hegemony.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    I’m in a different country and have different almost everything, but one thing is constant: nurses are treated like crap. I’m a radiographer and moaned to a colleague about the holdup I’d have with my 7am x-ray ward round in ICU. ‘The nurses are still doing handover at 8am, so won’t help and I can’t do anything.’ An older radiographer told me that the nurses stopped getting paid at 7am. The overtime they were working every single day after a night shift was all unpaid.
  - arebop 2y ago
    Your numbers are way off [https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stanford-Health-Care/salaries/Registered-Nurse/Palo-Alto-CA https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stanford-Health-Care/salaries/Reg...]
techpeach 2y ago
I would imagine the logic from the HR director is something like “the reason you’re not as successful as me is you don’t know how to manage your time well”
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  A role worth replacing with Gemini.
  - xvilka 2y ago
    Most of the management, as well as bureaucracy could be substituted with AI for sure.
- hyperhopper 2y ago
  Which is ironic because they manage our time for us to force us to have less of it.
alabastervlog 2y ago
Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever) A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests. (The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all) You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  It’s funny how often Silicon Valley (the tv show) gets referenced. There are so many painfully accurate cliches.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  Class is a really great book, as is are most of the books that Paul Fussell wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell
  - alabastervlog 2y ago
    I can't speak from personal experience to the accuracy of some of his characterizations, but he nailed the ones that (I now see) form parts of my background and are common in my family: various levels of "prole", plus "middle". It was really weird to see our quirks of behavior and taste (some of which I'd never have noticed if not for the book) dissected and analyzed that way, but fun and gave me new ways of looking at all of it. I've found his upper-middle and upper class descriptions constantly useful for deepening my insight into media, the news, work-life, and even history. Usually in small ways, but it's still pretty cool. Class markers are everywhere in media, and a lot of it I was surely noticing subconsciously, but being aware of them and able to point out many elements of them is a different experience. It's like seeing into the minds of the set designers, costume designers, and actors.
jumpman500 2y ago
It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.
- einszwei 2y ago
  Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize. There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against". I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
  - chrisweekly 2y ago
    Admitting in a survey that you're pro-union might be (rightly) perceived as high-risk, no reward.
    - smallmancontrov 2y ago
      Yes, but the hyper-individualism is very familiar. I wonder if the balance has changed since the 2022 wake-up call.
  - callc 2y ago
    Wow that really sounds like a captor killing a few captives and then asking the rest of the “ok, so who else wants to try to work together to escape?”
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
mjmsmith 2y ago
This attitude seems more easily explained by the belief that, unlike you, the peons haven't earned their perks yet.
- jumpman500 2y ago
  Yup, that's the problem. They view people as peons. Not people with lives, ambitions, family and friends. The only way to correct that view is to disobey.
mlinhares 2y ago
It's a great reminder to tech people that they're still peasants.
- AlwaysRock 2y ago
  The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires is even more true for tech workers than most Americans. Especially for any who have entrepreneurial dreams or who are at start-ups for the stock options. The carrot is right there...
  - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
    It's literally true, even without dreams or stock option bets, that many tech workers are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The source tweets are by an Amazon VP; an Amazon SWE salary with even moderately responsible spending is enough to retire as a multimillionaire.
    - recursivecaveat 2y ago
      I mean, the steinbeck quote is from 1960.. You will need probably ~$30 million dollars at retirement if you are 30yo today to retire as a 1960s millionaire.
      - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
        The Steinbeck quote from the 1960s said "temporarily embarassed capitalist". Someone who has "entrepreneurial dreams" or is "at start-ups for the stock options", hoping to get wealthy through appreciation of their equity ownership, is unambiguously a capitalist. "Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
  - loeg 2y ago
    The phrase originally means that the subject is not a millionaire and likely will never be one, whereas many of us in tech are already millionaires or very likely to become one if we work in industry for any amount of time. It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.
switch007 2y ago
HR are professional gaslighters and internal-PR masters. I'm not even surprised by their ability to twist things anymore
ein0p 2y ago
As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".
hyperhopper 2y ago
It's more insidious than that. Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. It also makes it harder to leave an org, as orgs are also desperate to hold on to and develop existing talent due to forward looking working age population demographics. This is a desperate immune response. (also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India) Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
  - tbrownaw 2y ago
    > It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?
    - scott_w 2y ago
      > Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…
    - PantaloonFlames 2y ago
      The power in the market for labor. If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee. The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional. But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic. But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
grandempire 2y ago
Imagine expecting equal treatment to higher ups who run your company. Anyone who told you otherwise lied to you. Set expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.
- rybosome 2y ago
  Imagine a very fat king standing before his starving populace, explaining why there would be even less food this winter as he munched on a turkey leg. I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company. That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
  - grandempire 2y ago
    Proverbial kings are a fact of life. Use your circle of influence to ensure your concern is heard, but don’t set yourself up for disappointment when you find out they get better Christmas bonuses, time off, and cooler parties.
- horns4lyfe 2y ago
  I would hope that they see people as people, but that’s clearly not the case
wnc3141 2y ago
It's not about reciprocity or coherent rules. Its about power distance. "you work for me" sort of thing.
drstewart 2y ago
lmao! It's the same as all the sysadmin folks at my organization who have a policy of locking down all our computers without admin rights whereas I noticed they DID have admin rights. Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.
- __turbobrew__ 2y ago
  Somehow the people making policies always exempt themselves.
Velorivox 2y ago
Also a recent Xoogler. There was a pretty popular thread where someone essentially ragequit due to being talked down to by someone in an all-hands, after having tried to resolve their issues with specific policies via other means. They took a principled stand, which seems exceedingly rare at Google. The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm. If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition… Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.

kurthr 2y ago

The Stanford Hospital Nurses strike was driven by similar dynamics. Nurses had to work overtime through the entire pandemic while executives literally phoned it in for years! They were shocked, shocked, to discover that there was anger and resentment. It was little surprise that more than half were showing up daily on picket lines as admin was apparently surprised that they couldn't find "travelers" to fill critical ICU roles, while surgeons continued scheduling elective surgeries. It's still the case that the HR executive officer resides in LA and that Payroll is managed (with financially catastrophic results) from Hawaii. Both discipline and scheduling are also done almost entirely remote. It would be hilarious if not for the effects on staff and patients.

cogman10 2y ago
The nature of nursing is that you have to be in person. What HR did (and has been doing) is keeping the number of staff at a barebones level. They don't, for example, hire enough nurses that if one is out sick (during covid!) that there could be someone to cover the shift. They went so far as to only hire travel nurses (temps), who were commanding 100k+ salaries, when things got bad enough rather than filling a full time position. And, to add insult to injury, the nurses themselves have been getting salaries in the 30->50k range. So HR could have literally filled 2+ positions for the cost of a single travel nurse. That's what has lead to a nursing shortage and burnout. HR cost cutting because "we just need the minimum and no backups". It's a big part of the strikes. Believe it or not, many nurses and doctors working in healthcare actually care about their patients. Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours.
- fjjjrjj 2y ago
  > Something HR is more than willing to exploit to get them to work ridiculous hours. HR works for management and the board.
- kurthr 2y ago
  I thought I had seen businesses run by every conceivable group, founders, engineers, sales, marketing, finance... and then I saw a hospital and realized it was run by HR. Every "may" in a rule becomes "shall" since anything else could be perceived as preferential. It makes the lives of both supervisors and supervised hell. Only the spiteful or incompetent rise. Of course the "why" is driven by the greatest risk in healthcare. Where most income comes from insurance is stable, the real risk is being sued. Hence rises "there shall be no exceptions" HR rule based hegemony.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  I’m in a different country and have different almost everything, but one thing is constant: nurses are treated like crap. I’m a radiographer and moaned to a colleague about the holdup I’d have with my 7am x-ray ward round in ICU. ‘The nurses are still doing handover at 8am, so won’t help and I can’t do anything.’ An older radiographer told me that the nurses stopped getting paid at 7am. The overtime they were working every single day after a night shift was all unpaid.
- arebop 2y ago
  Your numbers are way off [https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stanford-Health-Care/salaries/Registered-Nurse/Palo-Alto-CA https://www.indeed.com/cmp/Stanford-Health-Care/salaries/Reg...]

techpeach 2y ago

I would imagine the logic from the HR director is something like “the reason you’re not as successful as me is you don’t know how to manage your time well”

toomuchtodo 2y ago
A role worth replacing with Gemini.
- xvilka 2y ago
  Most of the management, as well as bureaucracy could be substituted with AI for sure.
hyperhopper 2y ago
Which is ironic because they manage our time for us to force us to have less of it.

alabastervlog 2y ago

Fussell’s Class (1983) covers some of this. His upper-middle (in class—income tends to track with these social classes, but not always) are accustomed to very free lifestyles relative to, especially, the middle class (or the lower two tiers of his multifaceted “prole” class—the upper tier of that class does stuff like own successful plumbing or welding businesses, not work at Wal Mart or whatever) A major class marker distinguishing the upper-middle from the middle ends up being that the former are barely surveilled, largely free to set their own schedule, and basically are trusted to do the right thing (never mind that perfectly ordinary behavior patterns from them would be regarded as instantly fireable for others; it’s a different standard), while the middle gets constant status reports, return to office mandates, stricter start and stop times, maybe drug tests. (The actual upper class, of course, simply don’t meaningfully have managers at all) You know that older, expert manager everyone says is great that they bring in to run the business in the show Silicon Valley? Who spends a bunch of his time ignoring the place to breed horses or whatever, and seems to think that’s normal and fine? That’s this kind of thing. He doesn’t even get why that might be wrong, or why it might be shitty to take a big paycheck and ask hard work from others then fuck off to a rich-dude hobby half the time—that’s just what his kind of people do.

lostlogin 2y ago
It’s funny how often Silicon Valley (the tv show) gets referenced. There are so many painfully accurate cliches.
PaulHoule 2y ago
Class is a really great book, as is are most of the books that Paul Fussell wrote: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Fussell
- alabastervlog 2y ago
  I can't speak from personal experience to the accuracy of some of his characterizations, but he nailed the ones that (I now see) form parts of my background and are common in my family: various levels of "prole", plus "middle". It was really weird to see our quirks of behavior and taste (some of which I'd never have noticed if not for the book) dissected and analyzed that way, but fun and gave me new ways of looking at all of it. I've found his upper-middle and upper class descriptions constantly useful for deepening my insight into media, the news, work-life, and even history. Usually in small ways, but it's still pretty cool. Class markers are everywhere in media, and a lot of it I was surely noticing subconsciously, but being aware of them and able to point out many elements of them is a different experience. It's like seeing into the minds of the set designers, costume designers, and actors.

jumpman500 2y ago

It's time to unionize. The top is out of touch and the valuations of these tech titans aren’t just staggering; they’re symptomatic of a system that values profit over people. These tycoons at the helm are not just steering companies—they’re puppeteering democracy, pushing political agendas that many of us find abhorrent and irrelevant to our lives. Unionization isn’t merely about better pay or working conditions; it’s about reclaiming power from this oligarchy that’s grown too powerful, too influential. The tech community needs to wake up and get these clowns in line, we could shut these companies down if we organize.

einszwei 2y ago
Tech and Software adjacent professions have to be ones that are least likely to unionize. There was an internal survey (unofficial) at my workplace right after a mass layoff 2 years back about how many were interested in forming a union. There were 3 options - Interested, Not Sure and Against. The option with most votes was "Against". I could go into the reasons which were submitted in survey but in short most were related to hyper individualism that is so pervasive.
- chrisweekly 2y ago
  Admitting in a survey that you're pro-union might be (rightly) perceived as high-risk, no reward.
  - smallmancontrov 2y ago
    Yes, but the hyper-individualism is very familiar. I wonder if the balance has changed since the 2022 wake-up call.
- callc 2y ago
  Wow that really sounds like a captor killing a few captives and then asking the rest of the “ok, so who else wants to try to work together to escape?”
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago

mjmsmith 2y ago

This attitude seems more easily explained by the belief that, unlike you, the peons haven't earned their perks yet.

jumpman500 2y ago
Yup, that's the problem. They view people as peons. Not people with lives, ambitions, family and friends. The only way to correct that view is to disobey.

mlinhares 2y ago

It's a great reminder to tech people that they're still peasants.

AlwaysRock 2y ago
The phrase temporarily embarrassed millionaires is even more true for tech workers than most Americans. Especially for any who have entrepreneurial dreams or who are at start-ups for the stock options. The carrot is right there...
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  It's literally true, even without dreams or stock option bets, that many tech workers are temporarily embarrassed millionaires. The source tweets are by an Amazon VP; an Amazon SWE salary with even moderately responsible spending is enough to retire as a multimillionaire.
  - recursivecaveat 2y ago
    I mean, the steinbeck quote is from 1960.. You will need probably ~$30 million dollars at retirement if you are 30yo today to retire as a 1960s millionaire.
    - SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
      The Steinbeck quote from the 1960s said "temporarily embarassed capitalist". Someone who has "entrepreneurial dreams" or is "at start-ups for the stock options", hoping to get wealthy through appreciation of their equity ownership, is unambiguously a capitalist. "Millionaire" was added in a 2004 misquote by Robert Wright, and $1 million in 2004 dollars is about $1.7 million in 2025 dollars.
- loeg 2y ago
  The phrase originally means that the subject is not a millionaire and likely will never be one, whereas many of us in tech are already millionaires or very likely to become one if we work in industry for any amount of time. It took me about seven years in industry, starting from my first internship, to hit my first million. Non-FAANG and nothing magical happening with appreciating options or stock, just ordinary W-2 work.

switch007 2y ago

HR are professional gaslighters and internal-PR masters. I'm not even surprised by their ability to twist things anymore

ein0p 2y ago

As Laszlo Bock (head of HR at the time) quipped at TGIF when he announced Obamacare cuts to Google's healthcare coverage: "But hey, you get unlimited colonoscopies".

hyperhopper 2y ago

It's more insidious than that. Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so, all while knowing the layoffs were planned while they were telling me to move across the country, is fucked.

toomuchtodo 2y ago
It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. It also makes it harder to leave an org, as orgs are also desperate to hold on to and develop existing talent due to forward looking working age population demographics. This is a desperate immune response. (also why employers are trying to staff up offices offshore in LATAM and India) Edit: @tbrownaw all of the responses to your inquiry are accurate.
- tbrownaw 2y ago
  > It’s happening because employers are desperate to get their power back while workers have no rights. What does this mean in concrete terms? What useful power do they gain based on physical presence, and what rights are currently absent but coming (back?) soon?
  - scott_w 2y ago
    > Being forced to RTO across the country, then immediately laid off after I uprooted my life to do so Definitely power there if you know your staff have just uprooted their lives and now depend on you for their immediate term existence…
  - PantaloonFlames 2y ago
    The power in the market for labor. If remote labor is the norm, then every tech company has to compete with every other, across all geographies. If local labor is required, the employers can manage or restrict their competitive environment. There are fewer options for the employee. The bulk layoffs of the past couple of years have a similar effect - gaining power. It makes every employee a little more conscious that their employment is provisional and conditional. But I think RTO goes beyond just market power gains. There are many workers who are conscientious, attentive, and dedicated. For each one of those there are plenty who are just punching their time card. I’m no expert but it seems to me that RTO gives the employer and mid-level managers better visibility into all of that dynamic. But RTO fights against the reality that employers have constructed distributed teams, with people working from all over the globe on the same project. If that’s the case, what is the difference whether I work from my home office, or a hotel desk space in a big building alongside people I don’t know.?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

grandempire 2y ago

Imagine expecting equal treatment to higher ups who run your company. Anyone who told you otherwise lied to you. Set expectations accordingly and you won’t be disappointed.

rybosome 2y ago
Imagine a very fat king standing before his starving populace, explaining why there would be even less food this winter as he munched on a turkey leg. I know executives have different rules and laws that govern them. But I can remember a time when they would’ve had the decency, shame or whatever else to attempt to obscure this. That HR VP could have come into the office for one day, the day that he was explaining his RTO mandate to the entire company. That he didn’t feel embarrassed about delivering this mandate while very visibly defying it himself is beyond differentiated treatment, it is open disdain for the (upper) working class.
- grandempire 2y ago
  Proverbial kings are a fact of life. Use your circle of influence to ensure your concern is heard, but don’t set yourself up for disappointment when you find out they get better Christmas bonuses, time off, and cooler parties.
horns4lyfe 2y ago
I would hope that they see people as people, but that’s clearly not the case

wnc3141 2y ago

It's not about reciprocity or coherent rules. Its about power distance. "you work for me" sort of thing.

drstewart 2y ago

lmao! It's the same as all the sysadmin folks at my organization who have a policy of locking down all our computers without admin rights whereas I noticed they DID have admin rights. Rules for thee but not for me, typical tech nerds.

__turbobrew__ 2y ago
Somehow the people making policies always exempt themselves.

Velorivox 2y ago

Also a recent Xoogler. There was a pretty popular thread where someone essentially ragequit due to being talked down to by someone in an all-hands, after having tried to resolve their issues with specific policies via other means. They took a principled stand, which seems exceedingly rare at Google. The main theme of their post was that engineering had become a second-class profession at a de-facto engineering firm. If I recall correctly, Steve Jobs had something to say about that very transition… Edit: By thread I mean internal Email thread at Google.