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Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

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Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#81

Post by brailsafe »

pram wrote: post #35

Remember how all those Gen X movies depicted cubicles as the embodiment of the soul crushing rat race. If only we still had it that good!

Damn idk which I'd rather have. Some cube farms are next-level depressing. When I was younger, I think part of what made the prospect of moving out of my hometown more compelling was the fact that a giant mega-insurance company ended up being the main endpoint for CS grads. I got to visit once and it was _not_ pretty. Tightly enclosed cubes with tall aging white walls, one source of sunlight if that. They must of really liked Java.

On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he ate at his desk multiple times a day.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#82

Post by malkia »

I don't remember when I've read this anecdote, I think was about Sun and X11 (or the equivalent), where employees can use the first free deskt they see and they can login from that "dumb" terminal to their actual machine (Could've been some other company, not Sun) - wonder if anyone remembers it (was it mentioned here on hny?)

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#83

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

pram wrote: post #35

Remember how all those Gen X movies depicted cubicles as the embodiment of the soul crushing rat race. If only we still had it that good!

Yeah, at the job I just left we had much less square meter space per employee in our open office than what egg laying chickens are required to have in Europe by law. We literally have it worse than farm animals in some offices.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#85

Post by CydeWeys »

dontreact wrote: post #37

I am sitting at a Google desk and there are 5/6 people not here in the desks in my vicinity. I would prefer fewer desks and to actually get to sit next to people rather than being scattered among a sea of mostly empty desks due to people WFH.

Same, but, they shouldn't be taking away the desks of me of my coworker, as we're in using them five days per week. We come to the office because we find that we're much less productive at home in our shared Manhattan apartments.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#86

Post by a13o »

Pretty unlikely for two people to share ergonomic settings across the desk hardware. If you've been in this industry long enough you've got to be careful about wrist, neck, leg, and eye strain and that often boils down to setting your chair and monitor just so, and customized ergonomic peripherals.

A policy like this is biased against older and differently abled employees whether that was the intention or not.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#87

Post by posharma »

VikingCoder wrote: post #72
posharma wrote: post #41

Internally Google might be just fine, but optics are equally important in this industry. Before Sundar took over Google never went through bad PR. It's just an observation, not a dig at Google's affairs.

Google never went through bad PR before Sundar? Sunday became CEO on August 10, 2015. Google+ was launched in 2011. (And the "real name" policy was a PR disaster.) Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (You can hardly find a PR disaster that people in the tech world complain about more.) Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe had an anti-poaching agreement that finally got settled in 2015, but they were getting bad press before…

There were a lot of other good things going that masked these. The recent "PR botch ups" are creating more damage. The most famous e.g. is reacting to ChatGPT's hype and rushing to do a demo and then messing it up. It wasn't so much messing up the demo that caught they eye; it was how Google rushed/reacted to do it esp. when Google is considered to be at the forefront of AI. Again, optics. Besides Sundar hasn't come out with anything impressive in the last few years. It's ok to just keep the lights on, but at least don't create bad optics.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#88

Post by clolege »

I understand wanting to make better use of the space, but this seems like the wrong move.

Co-location is the entire value of the hybrid model over remote. By forcing 2 employees to use the same desk, you are capping one of their teams to being co-located to 2 days a week.

I personally find value being together (with at least some of the team) 4-5 days a week.

Imo, it would have been a better move to make “hybrid” workers to actually show up to the office or lose their desk. So many employees are just phoning it in.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#89

Post by GauntletWizard »

flax wrote: post #34

When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better. I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time". Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.

I liked the fishbowls, but I had a team whose office was just the right size for it - The glass walls kept out the noise well enough, and the view of the rest of the office didn't bother me. I was for a period in the open plan area without an enclosure - That sucked, modulo the Sennheiser headphones we had provided which I blasted music and white noise in.

Re: Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

#90

Post by leipert »

sys42590 wrote: post #39

The problem I have with shared desks is that morning people get the best places close to windows and away from traffic and noisy corners, night owls are at a disadvantage. Also quite often shared hardware is in a sad state (keyboards with broken legs, mice with slippery wheels from people working with greasy fingers, etc.)

Yuck. If I just look at my keyboard and mouse, I really do not want that anyone _has_ to use them. I clean them regularly and do not eat at the desk, but still cruft assembles.
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