14 ms·

Google’s Scientific Approach to Work-Life Balance

93 points by kratiki 13y ago

tootie 13y ago
Interesting stuff. I feel like over the years I've moved from being an integrator to segmentor. I think it just comes with experience. I have a better understanding of what to expect, which "emergencies" I can ignore or postpone. How to avoid putting myself in a potentially stressful situation. I have a metric for this too. I suffer from a mild medical condition that flares up when I'm stressed. I used to suffer from it at least once a month. Now I'm down to every 6 months. I credit maturity.
dethtron5000 13y ago
I would be curious if Googlers on this list feel that Google does a good job putting these insights into practice.
- QuantumChaos 13y ago
  I didn't really get the point of the article, so I'm just going to comment on work-life balance at Google in general. Basically, you are freed from any unnecessary constraints in choosing your own work life balance. You are judged by the work you do, regardless of how long it took you to do that work, or which hours of the day you did that work. The company goes to reasonable lengths to allow remote working, but they can't make up for the inherent disadvantage of not being in the office/campus when other people are. In my opinion, that is the best that a company can do in terms of promoting work life balance. A company could also actively try and stop people from working more than X hours, but I don't see why that is a good thing, if a person really wants to do it. Many posts on HN suggest that when a person chooses to work long hours, this is (A) an irrational choice on their part and (B) imposes externalities on other people, and therefore should be culturally discouraged. On (A), it's hard to judge all cases, but some people really want/need the money. On (B) that is really just wanting to avoid competition. If another person is willing to work longer hours or accept less pay, that is going to harm me, but it is also how the free market works. I'm happy to accept market wages because that's how capitalist societies work, and both in theory and practice, they work* pretty well. * And by "work" I mean that they provided the overall best outcome, including for the worst off. I added this disclaimer because there is always one comment that says something like "yes capitalism works... for the rich".
  - insuffi 13y ago
    Except for B) having nothing to do with free market. 1)The problem with a long-hours work culture is that long hours don't translate to productivity, and it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting. It's an emotional/managerial phenomenon.2)It's not avoiding competition either. If the optimal work hours for a programmer are 4-6 hours, then 10 hours surely will lower his/her productivity and just project "more work". As a result, we get a badly competitive micro climate based on "projections" of more work. I suggest you look at how Finland approaches non-competitive study in elementary and high schools, which propelled them to the top of the world in terms of quality.
    - QuantumChaos 13y ago
      I'm not describing encouraging people to work long hours for the sake of it, but rather people working longer hours in order to get more done. It seems like you don't believe it is possible for a company to reward people based on their actual results, ("it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting") but that is what Google does. No one really notices how much time you spend in the office. So I would accept your points (1) and (2) to the extent that they apply in a particular setting. But these arguments don't apply to Google. If a person at Google chose to work longer hours, and ended up being less productive, that would really only harm themselves.
      - insuffi 13y ago
        1) No such thing as long hours for the sake of it. It's always to get more "done". And like I mentioned in my parent post, there's no such thing after a certain number of hours. 2)I don't believe it's possible for a company to do that, or at least not to the extent that you're saying. 3)Based on some of the interviews people have had here with Google, it seems that Google could use some more "reward based on performance" in their culture.(or a lot) p.s. Keep in mind that my competition point still stands. Longer and longer hours are of no good. It's a slippery slope. And yes, I think such competition is poisonous and detrimental, even if some more work gets done. Working more hours just pulls everyone down,* in regards to your free market comment. It's price competition. *even if it's not projection, but actual performance. Soon enough, everyone is working more and more to catch up to you, and everyone's miserable. That's not sustainable practice.
- ggambetta 13y ago
  Yes. The work-life balance at Google is awesome. More precisely, you have everything you need to find the right balance for yourself, including support at all levels. A personal anecdote I like to tell. After our weekly 1:1, my previous manager strongly suggested I should go get a nap in the room we have specifically for that (http://goo.gl/nhNOIe http://goo.gl/nhNOIe). You can be as cynical as you want, ultimately it's for the company benefit, and so on... but in how many other companies does this happen? And this and the onsite gym and the awesome food are just a trick to make me work 20 hours a day, right? Well, not quite. I work completely normal business hours and then I go home to my wife, my friends and my hobbies. I never work on weekends and thoroughly enjoy my 25 days of holidays.
- cbhl 13y ago
  I think it would be disingenuous to consider two years worth of studies "insights"; I think the truly interesting stuff will likely come out of clustering machine-learning algorithms applied to the data ten, maybe twenty years down the line (when some Googlers' children have grown up and we can see the effect or lack thereof on them as well as on the Googlers themselves). I get the impression that Google errs on the side of "provide more information"; for example, food in the micro-kitchens has been labelled with traffic-light colours for many years now. Many of the interns I met at my last internship there went out of their way to eat more of the food that was labelled "red" because "that clearly means it tastes better". Whether that made the life of the interns in question "better" or depends entirely on the metric you choose to measure with.
- greggman 13y ago
  No idea as like others have said the survey is only 2 years old. What I can say is Google is the first company I've personally worked at where it was easy to always work. At all my previous jobs (video games) the dev kits could not be taken home and even if there happened to be a PC version there's no way I could have taken home the terabytes of source data needed to work on the game. Nor would any company have let me if I could. The short of that meant once I left work I couldn't keep working. At Google on the other hand my work email went up 10-100 fold over previous companies. I could read that anytime day or night and even if I didn't intend to read it at home I'd open up my laptop and given that I left gmail running I'd see new messages, open a few without thinking and get stucked in and 20-60 mins would go by at ~12:00am. I saw several other employees responding to email between 11pm and 1am all from home. I'm not saying that's bad for work/life balance. I have no idea. I certainly felt good to respond to people as soon as I noticed but maybe it would have been better to disconnect? Similarly I could ssh/vnc in if I wanted to. And, working on Chrome which is open source meant I could work anywhere on any machine I chose. Something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. My understanding is some of those things are far more common for other programming jobs. My financial friends all have ways to log into work from home when they need to. Yet another is being involved in a web browser meant it was easy to get sucked into tons of mailing lists. The WebGL list, the Web Audio list, the W3 lists, the Web Apps List. All the places where browser standards are discussed and that discussion goes on 24/7. It's very tempting to keep checking how people are responding to your comments or where some other part of the standards discussion is going. So that's also hard to turn off. Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It certainly feels good to participate. Is that work? Or is it more like going to a PTA meeting or city council meeting? No where was I encouraged to work after hours by Google. It was completely up to me to decide if I checked email at home or if I worked on stuff at home and if I stayed late or went home early. All I'm saying is it was easy to do these things, something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. PS: You don't have to work at Google to participate in those mailing lists. If you want to influence web standards just get involved.
  - jacques_chester 13y ago
    Let me help you. > Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It's bad.
Bulkington 13y ago
Is it possible for anyone who thinks for a living to truly 'segment'? The best I can hope is really intense distraction: mountain biking, sailing, even golf. It's amazing how little I consider anything else while playing golf--but I couldn't get away in the middle of the afternoon unless I had the flexibility to get good work done from 4-7AM. Intuitively, I'd bet job satisfaction is right up there with mate selection as a happiness driver, so it's certainly worth understanding. But thinking about 'work' (the task at hand) should be distinguished from thinking too much about all the merde that is 'the job.'
- gordaco 13y ago
  I achieve my segmentation by studying, and I've been very successful at forgetting about my job when I'm not in the office. Not everyone's cup of tea, though. Other people I know achieve it with sports (not my cup of tea, at least not competitive sports), and considering what we know about how it affects body chemistry, it's probably a very good idea if you're into it. Job satisfaction is, not coincidentally, a lot like money satisfaction. If you're not worried and/or pressured, you can pretty much forget about it; but if it's a problem, it may eat your life pretty quickly. In any case, just remember: the most important resource by far is time, not money. Money can be the most urgent resource to attend, at some shitty/unlucky times; but in the long run, aim for the highest amount of time for yourself. I'll add this: the worst job I've ever had was also the one that paid the most.
- PeterWhittaker 13y ago
  Sample size of one, but yes, it is: Years ago I took my work stresses to bed, each and every night. Eventually I realized these stresses were feeding me to a vicious circle: Stressed in bed, sleep poorly, fail to refresh, get less done - and do stupider things, get more stressed. Eventually I just flipped the switched and stopped it. I wish I could recall the moment (or period?) more clearly so that I could describe what I did well enough to make you believe you can do it too, but it was a long time ago, and I stopped worrying about it pretty soon thereafter. Will those stressors be there in the morning? Is there anything you can do about them in bed? Stop worrying. (And stop convincing yourself there is something you can do about them in bed, because you know very well that you need a fresh mind and a fresh perspective to do your best work. And you know very well you are not going to get those things worrying with your head on the pillow.) Rituals can help, such as commutes: Leave the office stressed, put things out of your mind as you go home. Be mindful of the sky, the clouds, the people around you. Make up stories about them. On the way in to the office, plan how you will evaluate the stressors. And use the "will ignoring this get me fired" rule for everything. That really helps with focus. (I still think for a living - but now I'm quarter-owner of a consulting firm - stressors now are ever so much greater, but my stress is generally less, because I segment and defer.)
jacalata 13y ago
I wonder how they control for the Hawthorn effect in their 'fix it for just some people' experiments.
noobermin 13y ago
While I applaud the effort, the only issue here is the sample is restricted only to "Googlers." That's a bit of bias for their sample already. Google is hardly an average company, so the results they glean from their employees might not generalize as well.
miloshadzic 13y ago
Heh. I took a photo of that same girl(I think) on the cover photo when I was in India: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miloshadzic/7102823323/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/miloshadzic/7102823323/
- cclogg 13y ago
  Nice, that was shot on film right? Love the look. Also, seems like a bit of a light leak... a tip: I once glued some black foam-paper on the door-hinge to my old film camera, because the original one from the 70's had worn off haha.
  - miloshadzic 13y ago
    Yeah all of them were shot on film. I had two cameras, one was a Yashica GTN(those that don't have a leak) and a pocket Fujica. I'd had fixed the leak if I knew about it but the thing is I got it right before the trip heh.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mrjj 13y ago
Blah-blah-blah HR stuff, blah-blah-blah, leaders, goals, performance, roles. The true science approach should aware that massive surveys can measure everything but the thing you want. People don't "trust" that survey anonymous and trying to reflect what they expected to say in survey. Human can't seriously tell something to the stone, communication doesn't work this way. If there is a really stone of anonymous survey, human have to give him imaginary human trait, expectations and ability to evaluate him. "What are you want from me, dear stone?" So, confidentional procedure doesn't mean that people anser like it is confidentional. Interviewer presenation - that the sociological surveys is actually measure, and there is only the ghostly shape of personal realtion behind this. The second thing is the question interpretation: "I don’t like to have to think about work while I am at home." Can mean: 1. I don't like any serious thoughts at home. 2. I thinking all time about work ant don't like this. 3. I just don't like and not thinking. 4. I'm deep in self-estrangement and prefer not to thing about work at all. Event "think" can be perceived in many ways: specific persons, tasks, it domain at all. How massive survey is doesn't matter until we have raw data in hands. Some manipulation with R or whatever and there is a some groups and strict classification, some more and there is completely different classification, one question data can change everything or be just excluded to make picture "clear". The point is that any changes in methodology of survey researches usually demonstrate applied catastrophe theory when any shift can significally change the results. Don't trust any conclusions without detailed step-by-step description of methodology. In general, measure the pressure, scan brains, make tests aimed to somatic responces, use anal probes, but dont't ask the questions if you really want to understand something about people.
zoba 13y ago
I wonder what sort of life experiences might influence whether one is a segmentor or an integrator. I am heavily a segmentor, which I suppose I'd attribute to growing up with divorced parents. I was shared between my parents, one week at moms and one week at dads. Each house had it's own rules, toys, friends, etc. I'd never considered it before, but, it seems like I was raised to be a segmentor.
calibraxis 13y ago
These Boss 3.0 names obscure the old concepts. Google's moves are part of building a "company town." [1] People Operations is "human resources" [2], and its People Science is the same "scientific management" data-gathering used by slave-owners [3], corporations and the military. Model View Culture minces fewer words about how tech corporations mold their workers' individual identities: (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-workers-political-speech-and-economic-threat http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-workers-political-sp...) [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19sfvalley.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19sfvalley.html?pagewan... [2] http://www.google.com/about/careers/teams/people-operations/ http://www.google.com/about/careers/teams/people-operations/ [3] http://hbr.org/2013/09/plantations-practiced-modern-management/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2013/09/plantations-practiced-modern-manageme...
dave1629 13y ago
What's missing from this is that Google's culture is designed to eliminate work-life balance by making as much of life as possible focus around work. A significant part of the compensation for Google employees is in the form of good "free" meals (including dinners), lots of services, entertainment, etc., all without leaving the Google campus. Would be interesting to see how the results are different from similar surveys done at a company like Microsoft that doesn't have such an all-encompassing work environment.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Microsoft pretty much invented the all-encompassing work environment. The nickname in the 90s for the Redmond campus was "The Velvet Sweatshop".
- vdm 13y ago
  Microserfs
pmiller2 13y ago
I'm interested in identifying companies that focus on results and not hours of "butt in seat" time. What's the best way to do that? I prefer to be a segmentor, but it seems like a lot of companies prefer integrators, to the extent that they want, as alluded to in another comment, to eliminate work/life balance by making work and life synonymous. That's definitely not for me.
- overgryphon 13y ago
  This can depend more on the particular product group and manager you work for than which company. All big companies have less than perfect managers, and some people have a hard time accepting work/life balance choices that are different than their own.

93 points by kratiki 13y ago

Interesting stuff. I feel like over the years I've moved from being an integrator to segmentor. I think it just comes with experience. I have a better understanding of what to expect, which "emergencies" I can ignore or postpone. How to avoid putting myself in a potentially stressful situation. I have a metric for this too. I suffer from a mild medical condition that flares up when I'm stressed. I used to suffer from it at least once a month. Now I'm down to every 6 months. I credit maturity.

dethtron5000 13y ago

I would be curious if Googlers on this list feel that Google does a good job putting these insights into practice.

QuantumChaos 13y ago
I didn't really get the point of the article, so I'm just going to comment on work-life balance at Google in general. Basically, you are freed from any unnecessary constraints in choosing your own work life balance. You are judged by the work you do, regardless of how long it took you to do that work, or which hours of the day you did that work. The company goes to reasonable lengths to allow remote working, but they can't make up for the inherent disadvantage of not being in the office/campus when other people are. In my opinion, that is the best that a company can do in terms of promoting work life balance. A company could also actively try and stop people from working more than X hours, but I don't see why that is a good thing, if a person really wants to do it. Many posts on HN suggest that when a person chooses to work long hours, this is (A) an irrational choice on their part and (B) imposes externalities on other people, and therefore should be culturally discouraged. On (A), it's hard to judge all cases, but some people really want/need the money. On (B) that is really just wanting to avoid competition. If another person is willing to work longer hours or accept less pay, that is going to harm me, but it is also how the free market works. I'm happy to accept market wages because that's how capitalist societies work, and both in theory and practice, they work* pretty well. * And by "work" I mean that they provided the overall best outcome, including for the worst off. I added this disclaimer because there is always one comment that says something like "yes capitalism works... for the rich".
- insuffi 13y ago
  Except for B) having nothing to do with free market. 1)The problem with a long-hours work culture is that long hours don't translate to productivity, and it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting. It's an emotional/managerial phenomenon.2)It's not avoiding competition either. If the optimal work hours for a programmer are 4-6 hours, then 10 hours surely will lower his/her productivity and just project "more work". As a result, we get a badly competitive micro climate based on "projections" of more work. I suggest you look at how Finland approaches non-competitive study in elementary and high schools, which propelled them to the top of the world in terms of quality.
  - QuantumChaos 13y ago
    I'm not describing encouraging people to work long hours for the sake of it, but rather people working longer hours in order to get more done. It seems like you don't believe it is possible for a company to reward people based on their actual results, ("it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting") but that is what Google does. No one really notices how much time you spend in the office. So I would accept your points (1) and (2) to the extent that they apply in a particular setting. But these arguments don't apply to Google. If a person at Google chose to work longer hours, and ended up being less productive, that would really only harm themselves.
    - insuffi 13y ago
      1) No such thing as long hours for the sake of it. It's always to get more "done". And like I mentioned in my parent post, there's no such thing after a certain number of hours. 2)I don't believe it's possible for a company to do that, or at least not to the extent that you're saying. 3)Based on some of the interviews people have had here with Google, it seems that Google could use some more "reward based on performance" in their culture.(or a lot) p.s. Keep in mind that my competition point still stands. Longer and longer hours are of no good. It's a slippery slope. And yes, I think such competition is poisonous and detrimental, even if some more work gets done. Working more hours just pulls everyone down,* in regards to your free market comment. It's price competition. *even if it's not projection, but actual performance. Soon enough, everyone is working more and more to catch up to you, and everyone's miserable. That's not sustainable practice.
ggambetta 13y ago
Yes. The work-life balance at Google is awesome. More precisely, you have everything you need to find the right balance for yourself, including support at all levels. A personal anecdote I like to tell. After our weekly 1:1, my previous manager strongly suggested I should go get a nap in the room we have specifically for that (http://goo.gl/nhNOIe http://goo.gl/nhNOIe). You can be as cynical as you want, ultimately it's for the company benefit, and so on... but in how many other companies does this happen? And this and the onsite gym and the awesome food are just a trick to make me work 20 hours a day, right? Well, not quite. I work completely normal business hours and then I go home to my wife, my friends and my hobbies. I never work on weekends and thoroughly enjoy my 25 days of holidays.
cbhl 13y ago
I think it would be disingenuous to consider two years worth of studies "insights"; I think the truly interesting stuff will likely come out of clustering machine-learning algorithms applied to the data ten, maybe twenty years down the line (when some Googlers' children have grown up and we can see the effect or lack thereof on them as well as on the Googlers themselves). I get the impression that Google errs on the side of "provide more information"; for example, food in the micro-kitchens has been labelled with traffic-light colours for many years now. Many of the interns I met at my last internship there went out of their way to eat more of the food that was labelled "red" because "that clearly means it tastes better". Whether that made the life of the interns in question "better" or depends entirely on the metric you choose to measure with.
greggman 13y ago
No idea as like others have said the survey is only 2 years old. What I can say is Google is the first company I've personally worked at where it was easy to always work. At all my previous jobs (video games) the dev kits could not be taken home and even if there happened to be a PC version there's no way I could have taken home the terabytes of source data needed to work on the game. Nor would any company have let me if I could. The short of that meant once I left work I couldn't keep working. At Google on the other hand my work email went up 10-100 fold over previous companies. I could read that anytime day or night and even if I didn't intend to read it at home I'd open up my laptop and given that I left gmail running I'd see new messages, open a few without thinking and get stucked in and 20-60 mins would go by at ~12:00am. I saw several other employees responding to email between 11pm and 1am all from home. I'm not saying that's bad for work/life balance. I have no idea. I certainly felt good to respond to people as soon as I noticed but maybe it would have been better to disconnect? Similarly I could ssh/vnc in if I wanted to. And, working on Chrome which is open source meant I could work anywhere on any machine I chose. Something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. My understanding is some of those things are far more common for other programming jobs. My financial friends all have ways to log into work from home when they need to. Yet another is being involved in a web browser meant it was easy to get sucked into tons of mailing lists. The WebGL list, the Web Audio list, the W3 lists, the Web Apps List. All the places where browser standards are discussed and that discussion goes on 24/7. It's very tempting to keep checking how people are responding to your comments or where some other part of the standards discussion is going. So that's also hard to turn off. Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It certainly feels good to participate. Is that work? Or is it more like going to a PTA meeting or city council meeting? No where was I encouraged to work after hours by Google. It was completely up to me to decide if I checked email at home or if I worked on stuff at home and if I stayed late or went home early. All I'm saying is it was easy to do these things, something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. PS: You don't have to work at Google to participate in those mailing lists. If you want to influence web standards just get involved.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  Let me help you. > Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It's bad.

Bulkington 13y ago

Is it possible for anyone who thinks for a living to truly 'segment'? The best I can hope is really intense distraction: mountain biking, sailing, even golf. It's amazing how little I consider anything else while playing golf--but I couldn't get away in the middle of the afternoon unless I had the flexibility to get good work done from 4-7AM. Intuitively, I'd bet job satisfaction is right up there with mate selection as a happiness driver, so it's certainly worth understanding. But thinking about 'work' (the task at hand) should be distinguished from thinking too much about all the merde that is 'the job.'

gordaco 13y ago
I achieve my segmentation by studying, and I've been very successful at forgetting about my job when I'm not in the office. Not everyone's cup of tea, though. Other people I know achieve it with sports (not my cup of tea, at least not competitive sports), and considering what we know about how it affects body chemistry, it's probably a very good idea if you're into it. Job satisfaction is, not coincidentally, a lot like money satisfaction. If you're not worried and/or pressured, you can pretty much forget about it; but if it's a problem, it may eat your life pretty quickly. In any case, just remember: the most important resource by far is time, not money. Money can be the most urgent resource to attend, at some shitty/unlucky times; but in the long run, aim for the highest amount of time for yourself. I'll add this: the worst job I've ever had was also the one that paid the most.
PeterWhittaker 13y ago
Sample size of one, but yes, it is: Years ago I took my work stresses to bed, each and every night. Eventually I realized these stresses were feeding me to a vicious circle: Stressed in bed, sleep poorly, fail to refresh, get less done - and do stupider things, get more stressed. Eventually I just flipped the switched and stopped it. I wish I could recall the moment (or period?) more clearly so that I could describe what I did well enough to make you believe you can do it too, but it was a long time ago, and I stopped worrying about it pretty soon thereafter. Will those stressors be there in the morning? Is there anything you can do about them in bed? Stop worrying. (And stop convincing yourself there is something you can do about them in bed, because you know very well that you need a fresh mind and a fresh perspective to do your best work. And you know very well you are not going to get those things worrying with your head on the pillow.) Rituals can help, such as commutes: Leave the office stressed, put things out of your mind as you go home. Be mindful of the sky, the clouds, the people around you. Make up stories about them. On the way in to the office, plan how you will evaluate the stressors. And use the "will ignoring this get me fired" rule for everything. That really helps with focus. (I still think for a living - but now I'm quarter-owner of a consulting firm - stressors now are ever so much greater, but my stress is generally less, because I segment and defer.)

jacalata 13y ago

I wonder how they control for the Hawthorn effect in their 'fix it for just some people' experiments.

noobermin 13y ago

While I applaud the effort, the only issue here is the sample is restricted only to "Googlers." That's a bit of bias for their sample already. Google is hardly an average company, so the results they glean from their employees might not generalize as well.

miloshadzic 13y ago

Heh. I took a photo of that same girl(I think) on the cover photo when I was in India: http://www.flickr.com/photos/miloshadzic/7102823323/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/miloshadzic/7102823323/

cclogg 13y ago
Nice, that was shot on film right? Love the look. Also, seems like a bit of a light leak... a tip: I once glued some black foam-paper on the door-hinge to my old film camera, because the original one from the 70's had worn off haha.
- miloshadzic 13y ago
  Yeah all of them were shot on film. I had two cameras, one was a Yashica GTN(those that don't have a leak) and a pocket Fujica. I'd had fixed the leak if I knew about it but the thing is I got it right before the trip heh.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

mrjj 13y ago

Blah-blah-blah HR stuff, blah-blah-blah, leaders, goals, performance, roles. The true science approach should aware that massive surveys can measure everything but the thing you want. People don't "trust" that survey anonymous and trying to reflect what they expected to say in survey. Human can't seriously tell something to the stone, communication doesn't work this way. If there is a really stone of anonymous survey, human have to give him imaginary human trait, expectations and ability to evaluate him. "What are you want from me, dear stone?" So, confidentional procedure doesn't mean that people anser like it is confidentional. Interviewer presenation - that the sociological surveys is actually measure, and there is only the ghostly shape of personal realtion behind this. The second thing is the question interpretation: "I don’t like to have to think about work while I am at home." Can mean: 1. I don't like any serious thoughts at home. 2. I thinking all time about work ant don't like this. 3. I just don't like and not thinking. 4. I'm deep in self-estrangement and prefer not to thing about work at all. Event "think" can be perceived in many ways: specific persons, tasks, it domain at all. How massive survey is doesn't matter until we have raw data in hands. Some manipulation with R or whatever and there is a some groups and strict classification, some more and there is completely different classification, one question data can change everything or be just excluded to make picture "clear". The point is that any changes in methodology of survey researches usually demonstrate applied catastrophe theory when any shift can significally change the results. Don't trust any conclusions without detailed step-by-step description of methodology. In general, measure the pressure, scan brains, make tests aimed to somatic responces, use anal probes, but dont't ask the questions if you really want to understand something about people.

zoba 13y ago

I wonder what sort of life experiences might influence whether one is a segmentor or an integrator. I am heavily a segmentor, which I suppose I'd attribute to growing up with divorced parents. I was shared between my parents, one week at moms and one week at dads. Each house had it's own rules, toys, friends, etc. I'd never considered it before, but, it seems like I was raised to be a segmentor.

calibraxis 13y ago

These Boss 3.0 names obscure the old concepts. Google's moves are part of building a "company town." [1] People Operations is "human resources" [2], and its People Science is the same "scientific management" data-gathering used by slave-owners [3], corporations and the military. Model View Culture minces fewer words about how tech corporations mold their workers' individual identities: (http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-workers-political-speech-and-economic-threat http://modelviewculture.com/pieces/tech-workers-political-sp...) [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19sfvalley.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19sfvalley.html?pagewan... [2] http://www.google.com/about/careers/teams/people-operations/ http://www.google.com/about/careers/teams/people-operations/ [3] http://hbr.org/2013/09/plantations-practiced-modern-management/ar/1 http://hbr.org/2013/09/plantations-practiced-modern-manageme...

dave1629 13y ago

What's missing from this is that Google's culture is designed to eliminate work-life balance by making as much of life as possible focus around work. A significant part of the compensation for Google employees is in the form of good "free" meals (including dinners), lots of services, entertainment, etc., all without leaving the Google campus. Would be interesting to see how the results are different from similar surveys done at a company like Microsoft that doesn't have such an all-encompassing work environment.

jacques_chester 13y ago
Microsoft pretty much invented the all-encompassing work environment. The nickname in the 90s for the Redmond campus was "The Velvet Sweatshop".
vdm 13y ago
Microserfs

pmiller2 13y ago

I'm interested in identifying companies that focus on results and not hours of "butt in seat" time. What's the best way to do that? I prefer to be a segmentor, but it seems like a lot of companies prefer integrators, to the extent that they want, as alluded to in another comment, to eliminate work/life balance by making work and life synonymous. That's definitely not for me.

overgryphon 13y ago
This can depend more on the particular product group and manager you work for than which company. All big companies have less than perfect managers, and some people have a hard time accepting work/life balance choices that are different than their own.