Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

fortune.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 366 posts

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#71

Post by HWR_14 »

adamisom wrote: post #69
HWR_14 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never cease to be amazed at the extent to which knowledge workers want to make "replace us with Eastern Europeans/Latin Americans/Indians" as painless a drop in as possible.

If that’s really going to happen, I guess I’ll switch careers. If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions. Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.

> If that happens to every career, I guess I’ll become one of the managers making those decisions.

Because there are as many people who need to manage programmers as there are currently hired programmers? The number of jobs would certainly go down, or there would be no point.

> Stay on top of change, don’t be victimized by it.

Sometimes you can ride change, sometimes you cannot. You focus on being one of the 100(?) US programmers who becomes a manager. Good luck. I'll just continue advocating return to office before that happens. Since the C-suites seem to want to return to office, I'll just enjoy that for now.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#72

Post by HWR_14 »

jleyank wrote: post #61
biohax2015 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are doing it. Slowly, but surely.

True, and the location of your posterior (unless you're in Asia or Eastern Europe) won't matter in the least when the flush your group and move it offshore.

Right now they're convinced I have to show up in the office. I'm happy not to convince them they are wrong.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#73

Post by bart_spoon »

extr wrote: post #20

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…

I don’t think in-person is better if you don’t know what you need to build. I’ve experienced teams where people were totally without direction despite being in-person. I think in-person just makes it easier to look like you are busy when you have no direction, and remote lays the fact bare.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#74

Post by batmaniam »

Well nothing can be done about that, Google's trying to force people back and it's gonna do what it's gonna do. Unless people get together an exert their voice.

Though an interesting question is whether people who took a pay reduction for remote working "somewhere cheaper" will get an IMMEDIATE bump in salary due to now having to move back to SF? Like if Google is gonna uplift the entire lives of its workers, then it's gotta be prepared to pay for that to happen.

But companies are companies, so I think we all know the answer to that unfortunately.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#75

Post by m463 »

extr wrote: post #20

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…

what is PMF? NGMI?

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#76

Post by majormajor »

tikhonj wrote: post #52
extr wrote: post #20

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…

My best experiences working remotely—both during the pandemic and with folks in other locations before that—has been with research-oriented work. The reason? We had the time and space to work and communicate the way that made sense to us. We had plenty of shared pair/group sessions to work out design ideas and experiments, iterate on the system, debug trickier issues... etc. Everything else we could do well asynchron…

I think you're using different phrasing to describe the same effect. Autonomy and the org knowing what it wants to do/needs to do go hand in hand. In your long-term speculative research oriented work, you had autonomy because you knew what you were working on - not what it was in terms of tickets per se, but it sounds like you knew your scope and your objectives.

At 10+ person org sizes, most people can't have long-term scope and autonomy if the management don't know what it wants/needs, since they're just going to change their mind in a week or two. Once those decisions are made you can start delegating responsibility for execution.

The easy thing to do is to blame this all on poor management, but I think that's too pat. I think figuring out the best way to use a team of 20, 100, 1000 engineers to accomplish business goals is just an incredibly hard problem... and one that's often an ongoing, Sisyphean task, where high-bandwidth, low-latency communications are incredibly useful.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#77

Post by extr »

m463 wrote: post #75
extr wrote: post #20

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…

what is PMF? NGMI?

Product Market Fit and Not Gonna Make It. The former is established startup product terminology, the latter is slang.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#78

Post by rodgerd »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #17

I never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified. "See, look! The people are using it. They love it." (Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)

It's great for people who want to do crime, and for people who want to bully their colleagues into doing crime or help cover it up: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/eufm.12426

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#79

Post by ryandrake »

swellguy wrote: post #58
extr wrote: post #20

After going back and forth between in-person and remote jobs, my conclusion: * Remote work is much better if you know what you're building and "just" need to execute. * In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build, are trying to "figure it out as you go along", and are relying on the implicit fast feedback loop of standing next to each other. Obvious, right? But I think what I've realize is the d…

Big companies are also ridiculously overstaffed, as Elon Musk proved empirically. And many of them have only one thing that works and ambitions of doing more than will never work out. So there's a lot of wasted talent, in other words, but this ability to waste talent necessitates in person communication, just to make sure everyone is stack ranked according to the current arbitrary and probably mindless goals.

Musk didn’t prove anything. All he showed so far is that if you turn off the airplane engine mid-flight, it will glide for a time on momentum.

Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews

#80

Post by tdeck »

acjohnson55 wrote: post #17

I never cease to be amazed the extent to which companies are trying to squeeze the remote work genie back into the bottle. They're desperate to find ways to make that expensive office space seem justified. "See, look! The people are using it. They love it." (Just out of frame, guns are pointed at the workers.)

Not only trying, but largely succeeding. I haven't seen one instance where these decisions have been reversed due to pushback.
Post reply on HN