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Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

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221–230 of 298 posts

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GOOG folks, FB is recruiting stressing on "remote". Call a recruiter today!

No FANG company has good work culture or good work/life balance anymore, and all are entangled in some morally questionable project or another. Go work for a startup.

..or government work.

I get to do meaningful work, and my employer REALLY cares about me (the amount of training we get offered is amazing). UK so YMMV.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#222

Friends and family keep asking me if I'm moving out of my metro area or if I'll move to the deep xurbs. But I've held off any such machinations exactly because of this. My employer has embraced WFH beyond the pandemic but all it takes is a couple bad quarters and a new CEO deciding that working from home is "part of the problem" and "work from the office" is part of some shiny new turnaround plan. And you never know…

We've seen an exodus from London, people buying houses in remoter parts of the country on the basis that they will be able to continue to WFH after the pandemic is over. Personally I think that is quite a rash decision to make right now.

It depends on the company and the individual situation of course. But everything I see suggests that coming in on a fairly regular basis (like 1-2 days per week) is going to be more common than being fully remote, which will generally be on a case by case basis.

Of course if coming into a office is a few days every few weeks sort of thing, people can travel greater distances to do that.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awful in what respects? I was under the impression that it was sort of like Harvard: lots of applications, but a good chunk of those denied could have just have easily been accepted if there was space You seem to have experience with their hiring and I have none (only applying) so I have much more faith in what you're saying than my preconceived ideas.

As in, a significant chunk of candidates cannot write code, have outright lies on their CV, have never used anything other than visual basic, etc... In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company, or your average skill level will go down, which makes hiring just hard mathematically.

Cannot write code is very different from cannot write code on a whiteboard to solve a difficult problem in a limited amount of time in a stressful setting where you constantly have to keep talking and explaining what you are doing and cannot pause to think.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#224
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I (in the CEST time zone) am currently collaborating with a colleague who lives in Australia, because academics often don't get to choose where they end up. Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the us…

When I played EVE Online long ago, we had 1/3rd of people from east coast, 1/6th from west coast, 1/3rd from Europe and the rest from Australia, we came up with pretty efficient framework. It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that. If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all. All those "hybrid/flexi…

I think this comment is coming from a very different place to my experience. Academic work is much less predictable than the sort of work you seem to be talking about.

Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening.

Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#225

What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out…

If I had a dollar each time someone said they wanted to leave badly only to be still in the same company/position 1 or 2 years later....

Many, perhaps most, people have some degree of gripe-age with their jobs. Many also have enough experience to realize that the grass isn't always greener and the devil you know may be preferable.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#226
post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much everyone has experienced what WFH is like a year plus into the pandemic. Those of us who want to go back to the office have experienced WFH, and our quality of life is lower with WFH. It's no longer true that people who say they don't like WFH would change their mind if only they'd experienced it.

Nobody has been experiencing normal remote work during the pandemic. Normal remote work lets you go out and do fun stuff with friends after hours (which you have more of with no commute), spend more time with your kids (who have been at school for most of the day), or even explore other cities or countries (if you have that kind of remote arrangement). All the pandemic has shown us is basically all knowledge work can…

> Normal remote work lets you go out and do fun stuff with friends after hours (which you have more of with no commute), spend more time with your kids (who have been at school for most of the day), or even explore other cities or countries (if you have that kind of remote arrangement).

Some people enjoy socializing at work.

> All the pandemic has shown us is basically all knowledge work can be done remotely, and most sales work too.

For sales, can be done, but can it win over the face to face sales?

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality of life improvement when you work remote is several fold higher. You have to experience it. I've been working remote (consulting) for about 4 years now. My wife has done it about 1/2 her career. We live in sunny SoCal (expensive, but very tolerable when you don't have to get on the freeways). Take care of No. 1 first. That is you. GOOG folks, please don't cringe at FB. There is no difference.

> Take care of No. 1 first. what does this mean exactly? work at any terrible company that does terrible things, as long as the pay is good?

Yes.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everything can be numerically measured. By what metric is Macbeth better than the Da Vinci Code? Also, not all measurements should be shared. Let’s say that they have data showing that new hire productivity and skill growth is much lower when senior engineers are WFH. They’re not going to share that data when forcing senior engineers to be in the office, since it could foment resentment of junior staff.

> Not everything can be numerically measured. So then why shouldn't we trust individual experiences? What's the evidence that those reports are not reliable while management perceptions are if this stuff isn't measurable? > Let’s say that they have data showing that new hire productivity and skill growth is much lower when senior engineers are WFH. They’re not going to share that data when forcing senior engineers to…

I agree that Google management made this decision mostly on gut feel. But I think that it aligns with my own gut feel, which is that it’s going to be very hard for a fully remote team to invent the next Waymo car or iPad or whatever, and I also think that it will be very hard for a junior engineer to get the same learning remotely as they do colocated with 20 year tenured engineers. If I was CEO of Google I would have made the same decision.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#229

What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things. Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out…

"What people say they will do when there's no cost associated with an action and what people will actually do once a cost IS associated with the same action are frequently 2 different things."

This statement makes it sound like you think that Google employees are unable to attach a cost to leaving the company until they actually commit the act. Am I misunderstanding? Because that's obviously not true.

Re: Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit

#230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked with a guy on a project who was simultaneously running two developers teams in India on the side. He knew the local stack inside and out so he was incredibly useful, but he could generate his insights and do his job in 30-60 minutes each day. Was he WFH? Nope. He was running these teams from his desk in the cubicle farm. And he was relatively open about it too with management. But he knew so much that everyo…

How many CEOs and "founders" on LinkedIn list a half-dozen active projects, businesses, and roles (boards, "advisor"), and then blog about the "challenge" of balancing all that with family life, which they still manage to do just fine (the actual secret that cuts to the heart of how they manage that, but which won't make their blog post? None of their jobs demand much time, and they have secretaries and assistants) G…

I sometimes wonder if the widespread elimination of admins, even shared ones, for everyone below a fairly high level is a net positive.

On the other hand, there's a lot more/better self-service capabilities these days and unless you have a dedicated admin who really knows you, having someone else do something for you can be more trouble than it's worth.

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