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

reuters.com

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

#471

Post by bckr »

amyjess wrote: post #159
whiplash451 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh. It is unclear to me that so many people will want to work fully remote when their company offers a (real) office to work in 3 days a week. The mental benefits of in-person working can be significant.

"3 days a week" is untenable because it requires that you live within an 8-hour drive of your office. If they want to make a mandatory mix of remote and non-remote work, it should be like oil rigs, where you go to the office to work and live on campus for two consecutive months out of the year, and then you go home for the rest of the year. Requiring that you be chained to a single metro area for the entire duration…

> where you can live wherever in the world you want

People fantasize about this, but I don't really understand the need for so much stimulation, and lack of appreciation for continuity, simplicity, familiarity, and "putting roots down".

Then again, I suppose you might want these things, but your roots are in Ohio, and you simultaneously want to work for a Bay Area company.

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

#473

Post by scottiebarnes »

nix0n wrote: post #8
c7DJTLrn wrote: post #3

Do Googlers mind working in the office much? They get plenty of free meals/snacks/beverages, great equipment, and great salary allowing them to live close to the office and pay for childcare if needed. I can't see the rest of the industry moving in the direction of returning to the office, because they don't have these things.

Outside of Silicon Valley, it is possible to live close to the office without a FAANG level salary. Beverages and snacks also are not that rare.

Google cafeteria is pretty rare; delicious food free.

https://www.seriouseats.com/lunch-at-google-insanely-awesome...

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

#474

Post by zionic »

MattGaiser wrote: post #460
devoutsalsa wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a job that was onsite. On the first day I learned no one in my team worked in the same office.

My old company is this way. You can work from any of several offices, but work from the office you must. So even when I went in, I never dealt with team members.

CIG? Lol

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

#475

Post by bckr »

ggm wrote: post #218

An entire generation appears unaware of a QDU or delay and its effect on human communication. If we've re-learned what delay and jitter to tolerate in this last 10 years thats good, but personally I don't like the de-coherence from asymmetric delay with my companions online, and my own in-head foldback PA

"QDU" returns nothing relevant on a google search. What does this mean?

> and my own in-head foldback PA

What is this?

I think you're saying you don't like Zoom, and I'm with you on that.

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

#476

Post by Morgawr »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #106
colordrops wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite not making any sense, cost of living adjustments based on your location seem to be the trend that we are heading toward. If you contribute the same work, it seems that it shouldn't matter where you are located, but companies are sociopathic by nature and will reduce costs anywhere they can get away with it. This opens the door to the next step of having salaries match the lowest common denominator - if you ca…

In my experience, it's very easy to see how a software engineer works. Just look at the commit logs. Sheesh. I managed an SWE group for years. It was easy-peasy to unobtrusively keep an eye on things.

> Just look at the commit logs.

Yeah no. I've had to do a lot of investigative, hacky "PoC" work with lots of debugging, design, coordinating work (whiteboarding, email threads, etc) for the last ~5 or so months. I'm a software engineer but if you looked at my actual commit logs for the last quarter or so, it'd seem like I haven't done much. Some people work differently and have different workload, I've been shifting to some more active work now (and I'm glad because I enjoy coding way more) and my commit log "landscape" will probably be very different in the next few months, but if you just looked at the last few months it'd look like I didn't work a single day.

I really hope people don't base productivity just on commit logs, seriously.

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

#477

Post by bckr »

cebert wrote: post #360
2spicy4me wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking for myself, I need the structure and am currently getting very little done. A lot of us aren’t trying to scam the remote work system, we’re just hanging on by our fingernails until the office opens back up.

How does going back to the office help with that?

How does going back to the office help with structure?

Here's an example from my life:

I'm having a terrible time getting myself to the gym. Two options come to mind to fix this:

1) Use discipline (very hard) and shift my mindset so that going to the gym is not optional (also hard).

2) Apply a structure to my day to where I leave the house by default (not that hard) and have to go to the gym before going home (not nearly as hard as going out of my house specifically to work out).

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

#478

Post by tootie »

librish wrote: post #84

I think anyone who's claiming that remote work has been "proven" to be better or worse is wrong. There are some studies but they use estimations and proxies, carrying the same flaws as doing performance reviews based on lines of code. 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, s…

Companies have been operating remotely and/or distributed for much longer than 2 years. Pretty much every company I worked for from 2010 onwards had at least half the team separate from the "sales office" that owned the relationship. Most often this was having dev teams in South America or Eastern Europe, but pretty frequently we just had multiple offices in the US working together. And frequently with clients that were in a third location. Slack, Zoom, JIRA. That's all you need.

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

#479

Post by vkou »

bseidensticker wrote: post #456
vl wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony, of course, that working conditions at Google , of all places, are truly atrocious. For years our desks were in hallways (KIR-C, KIR-D). When I left big G, there were desks literally in staircases (KIR-D). I have no idea how they passed fire inspections.

I worked at Google in KIR for the past 5 years. You calling the working conditions "atrocious" is hilarious. This is why people call Googlers entitled.

KIR-D legitimately sucks. Giant rooms, fifty million desks in each, not a wall in sight.
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