Despite all the funny ideas, I am happy to see that people are actively thinking about some radical changes in how a tech company office should look like in future. Some ideas won’t work, but some will stay.
Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
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Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#72What the hell?! Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors. It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
Some people like that, some people don't. The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet, and it was pretty depressing and alienating. Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of most buildings don't make tha…
There's definitely a culture associated with offices. I worked at a place for over a decade that had offices (for some) and the norm was doors open unless there was some reason doors weren't open. So you were free to drop in if the door was open and not so if the door wasn't. And doors were usually open.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#73>The company that helped popularize open office plans and lavish employee perks
somehow our BigCo got only open offices with the lavish perks lost in translation.
Anyway, it seems that Google is bringing cubicles (and even offices with the "focused work" pods - implicit recognition that "focused work" (is where other than focused work in programming?) is impacted by the open space office) while avoiding the cu-word and, God-forbid, the o-word.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#74What the hell?! Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors. It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
Not everyone want that, if I need my own private space I don't need to go to office.
The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers.
Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#75> Google is trying to get a handle on how employees will react to so-called hybrid work. In July, the company asked workers how many days a week they would need to come to the office to be effective. The answers were divided evenly in a range of zero to five days a week.
"My responses are limited; you must ask the right questions." What getting your whole team together for 1-2 weeks per quarter? I hear some teams travelled that way in the before time.
> The majority of Google employees are in no hurry to return.… 70% said they had a “favorable” view about working from home compared with 15% who had an “unfavorable” opinion [and 15% neutral].… The company appears to be realizing its employees may not be so willing to go back to the old life.
Will be interesting to see if people actually leave or if it's just bluster.
> “No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model,” [Google's CEO] wrote in an email a few weeks later announcing the flexible workweek.
Like communism: maybe nobody's implemented it correctly before, or maybe it's a bad idea.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#76What the hell?! Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors. It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
Not everyone want that, if I need my own private space I don't need to go to office. The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers. Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.
Not everyone wants a loud, bustling bullpen where you can barely hear yourself think and your productivity is crippled as a consequence.
But yet that's what most everybody in our field gets.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#77As a Googler, I'm pretty disappointed with this plan and I think many colleagues are as well. The office that's being pitched right now has no resemblance whatsoever to the one we left. I just don't see why someone would go through 1+hr commute just to social distance/wear masks, use balloon walls and hotdesk. By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive. Even the hybrid model isn't i…
> By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive. It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler. Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightm…
> (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India)
It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office in the US.
Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents happened often enough to be a sore point.
So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India. They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#78I want to see what statistics management are looking at where going into an office is better than the current WFH arraignment. Tech stocks are at all time highs with the current work situation. I'm personally never working full time in an office again. I can only see an office being good for junior engineers.
Real estate prices, probably. I remember google has something like 100B in assets. If it's necessary to make employees suffer to keep the RE prices up, they will.
> google has something like 100B in assets
I'm confused, are these assets their offices or...real estate investments that they own for some reason? If these assets are just offices, what is the value to Google if those offices are worth more or less as real estate? It's hard to imagine that the market for a giant complex of offices is super liquid?
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#79> Google is trying to get a handle on how employees will react to so-called hybrid work. In July, the company asked workers how many days a week they would need to come to the office to be effective. The answers were divided evenly in a range of zero to five days a week. "My responses are limited; you must ask the right questions." What getting your whole team together for 1-2 weeks per quarter? I hear some teams tra…
The "at our scale" is doing a lot of work there. Once you're split into different campuses I'm not sure why increased size makes remote harder.
Re: Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
#80Reading between the lines of the article, I suspect most of these things will never be put into serious use at google, nor does anyone there expect them to. These are solutions looking for problems. My money is on office work looking much as it did before the pandemic, but a smaller percentage of work hours being spent in offices. It’s hard to imagine anyone preferring to work in the way the article describes compare…
There also appear to have been consultants looking for work.
Where you find consultants, you find solutions to imagined problems...only a consultant can really tell you what those damnable zoomers are thinking, they are basically Martians. Every company must have a zoomer-friendly office.