Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4

I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.

But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.

I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.

My personal experience is it's a mixed bag.

- I love my teammates and it is so unbelievably rewarding getting to see them in person and share a space with them. We're social primates and it's soothing at some deep primal level to get to be around my tribe.

- The food is excellent. Not having to cook and wash fucking dishes again is god-damned divine. After two years of eating almost every meal at home, I fantastize about burning my entire kitchen to the ground.

- Just getting out of the house and having a change of scenery is really nice. Being in an office with other people working helps me switch into "Google employee" mode.

- I don't dig open plan offices at all. The one we're in now is a big empty white fluorescent lit box. It has a lot of windows with an excellent view which is great. But otherwise, it feels like sitting in the middle of an empty grocery store and I find it very hard to focus. More often than not, I grab a laptop and hide away in one of the lounge areas to get actual work done, which feels sort of paradoxical. (I'm probably an outlier in that I prefer to work on a couch with a laptop on my lap instead of at a desk with a big monitor.)

There is already a huge google engineer hemorrhage. A number of principal engineers and other folks I thought would be google lifers moved to snowflake. I don't expect this to affect Google's ability to continue to grow at 15-20%, though. There will be armies of younger people who still want to jumpstart their career there.

> We've proven that the big tech companies can go fully remote and not completely crash and burn, that's about it. Some people love the lack of commute and less semi-forced hanging out, some people hate onboarding on a new company as a remote person and so on and so on.

Well said. At these point, anyone who suggests one is superior to the other without discussing the pros and cons of each is probably too biased to have an honest discussion.

Some people prefer in person. Some people prefer remote. Some people can’t or won’t acknowledge that their preferred style isn’t best for everyone or every company.

One thing I’m certain about, though, is that a lot of people who want remote work don’t necessarily do better when remote. I recruited, hired, and managed remote teams for a long time. The number of people who insisted they focused better at home but then couldn’t get anything done without constant performance management or nagging was surprisingly high. This even included several people who later transitioned to our office and did substantially better. A lot of people struggle to stay focused and productive when left alone at home to themselves. Going into the office can be the context shift they need to get productive.

Unfortunately, almost every company expect "total control" [1] over your life during work hours. FAANG companies just pay more.

Also, tech workers probably have way more autonomy on their schedule than most other industries.

Btw, I am just responding to your comment that "FAANG companies own you life"; not making an argument for remote vs in-person. I personally think that a hybrid model is great, and strongly agree with the currently-top comment by librish[2].

[1] significant control, if not total control

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30534539