Google employees generally don't have much difficulty in finding other jobs.
Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
601–610 of 1001 posts
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#602Earlier quoted context omitted.
A) I think there's a lot of confounders here (like the global pandemic and such) that make it to difficult to infer anything from correlations B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input C) I suspect the negative aspects…
Many people end up doing remote work in person anyways at sufficiently large companies where in order to get things done they have to get on video call or phone. The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
There’s a big difference between working with other teams in other places and having your own team be remote. Most companies already had offsites and all hands and such before COVID.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#603Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think a small percentage of people are self-motivated, and more productively at home, but watching this all play out for the last 2 years makes me realize that an awful lot of people are going to try to get away with absolutely anything they can - including working as little as possible - when allowed to be on their own. I have had coworkers literally disappear for days at a time, miss meetings for weeks at a tim…
You're right that there are many reasons people might seem to be underperforming in remote work, but unfortunately it doesn't really improve the situation for managers or coworkers. If many employees are spending their time in childcare instead of their job, it increases the burden on other employees who have to work extra hard to pick up the slack. It's a miserable situation, and because the reason for slacking is a…
> It's a miserable situation
Agreed.
> and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it.
Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools, even though my understanding was science was saying (still is saying, AFAIK) spread through the schools is relatively little and the difference to kids' learning is huge. And on parents, which is important but not as important as the impact on kids.
Our society as a whole doesn't care about young families, and it's never been so clear. There is someone to blame.
btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#604Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cases have plummeted?
Not sure how to answer your question, but US Covid 7-day average deaths is currently higher than at almost any point since the start of 2020. So nothing suddenly "changed" there, that I can see.
Cases. You can look at deaths if you want but those will lag cases by a few weeks.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#605I 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…
The past two years has not been real remote work. When you work remote for real you get together in the office every month or so and your relationships stay high bandwidth. The past two years has been forced separation. Forced virtual, and NOT remote work.
Any assessment looking at remote productivity during a pandemic vs. remote productivity with periodic in-person meetings and considerate, purposeful norms will get wildly different data.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#606Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ne…
Use discipline (very hard)-this would probably solve a lot more of your problems tbh
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#607I'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 Google…
Lonely is an incredibly accurate way to describe working at Google. Everyone says the office perks are there to trick you to stay, but our work area was quieter than a library and no one hung around. If people were talking they'd legit catch themselves and be like, we should grab a conference room. Incredibly polite but also an uncomfortably quiet environment. I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours…
Depends heavily on team. Almost all of my teams have been quite social, with a lot of office banter and regular lunches and social activities together. I was in today, with about half of my team, and we had plenty of non-work conversations and a nice lunch break at Backyard Barbecue (now open as of this week!).
This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#608Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remote and in-office are both pretty inherently social decisions. If you're remote, you don't want to be left out if other team members are in person. If you're in-office, most of the benefits depend on other people also being in-office.
I'll be frank. I don't want to be forced to socialize with coworkers. They need to make friends outside of work if they need socialization time. I may socialize with people from work, but will do it on my own terms. The collaboration thing is almost never really about collaborating or efficiency, it's just the polite way of saying they want to force others to fulfill their social needs.
If the decision to colocated or remote is made at the team/org level, then enough teams should choose to be remote that there will be many options for you, just as there will be many options for people that want a colocated team. These days there's no shortage of remote roles so it's already happening. What's wrong with that model?
Just like you don't want to be forced to socialize, others may not want to be forced to work on a remote team, and a team that has a free-for-all remote policy is effectively a remote team (as others have noted). If the decision is made at a group level, most everyone can get what they want.
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#609Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's way more than just interruptions, travel, etc. I recently found /r/overemployed [1] on VC Twitter, and a lot of folks are using this setup to work two (or more) jobs. They know that they'll only need to dedicate 4 hours a day to any given job and as long as they can schedule non-overlapping meetings, they can get away with it. It's got me thinking though - this might be an opportunity for startups to knowingly h…
MANGA: * Microsoft * Amazon * Netflix? (Why not META?) * Google * Apple
* Meta* Google
* Amazon
* Netflix
* Apple
Source: https://twitter.com/MorningBrew/status/1453797543096238080
Re: Google mandates workers back to Silicon Valley, other offices from April 4
#610Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that there are many reasons people might seem to be underperforming in remote work, but unfortunately it doesn't really improve the situation for managers or coworkers. If many employees are spending their time in childcare instead of their job, it increases the burden on other employees who have to work extra hard to pick up the slack. It's a miserable situation, and because the reason for slacking is a…
> It's a miserable situation Agreed. > and because the reason for slacking is a protected one there's virtually nothing others can do about it. Depends on who you mean by "others". When I was working and struggling, I was grateful to Google, my coworkers, and my managers for their patience with me at work. I was also angry with our society: voters and politicians who prioritized reopening @#!$@#ing bars over schools,…
Yes, politicians and teachers' unions share most of the blame. It's unconscionable how long they insisted on keeping schools closed, despite the massive impact on families and students and the minimal danger posed to kids. I feel sympathy for parents who are trying their best to survive while teachers have taken this as an excuse to work even less.
> btw, I'm not sure the extent to which it is "protected". Being a parent is protected, but I'm not sure that extends to the ability to only put in half the work, even after society has failed. (And in my mind, it did fail.)
Yes, if you can objectively prove that a parent isn't working then they wouldn't be protected. This is very obvious and easily quantifiable in an in-office environment, but with remote knowledge work it's much harder to prove—especially since the result would look like you're suddenly targeting parents for "not working hard enough." Most companies are risk-averse and simply prefer to tolerate underperformance.