Realistically, how does the review conversation go if your Impact and areas of Competency are high? I can’t see a ‘yeah but your attendance was low’ holding any water from a credible manager.
Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
121–130 of 366 posts
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#122Sounds like Google is eliminating remote work. Has VP Urs Holzle returned from New Zealand? https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...
You misunderstood. Such rules never apply to _those_ people's performance reviews. They are only for peons.
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
With your Meta experience I am curious - would the people you had to talk to been in the office near you anyways, even if everyone was in office? It seems like with a huge global company the people who would be hard to get context from (so not the people you might have a video standup with daily or weekly) might be in a different office or building requiring a video call anyways
Not everyone, but there would have been enough people around to have dramatically improved my experience. The problem there was Meta does not have a strong culture of documentation, and I didn't know what I didn't know. It was common to spend 2-3 days working on something only to find out on a random zoom call there was an entire team working on the same thing. Discoverability didn't exist. I found the environment un…
At a large unnamed subsidiary of Microsoft, I saw four different teams working on a MSP solution. All of them crash and burned because each were run with 60+ engineers and not a single team talked to each other and they all reproduced the wheel (ignored federated systems and rolled their own)
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#124Quick search on this thread didn't reveal the word "flame" (as in "flame war"), so I can´t resist: That's what the remote vs on-site debate is. About as interesting and ultimately inconclusive as Emacs vs Vi. Neither is universally better. It depends, _primarily_ on the people involved and their preferences. My advice would be to try and work with people that are on the same page about this with you - if possible. If everybody can muster the level of acceptance and respect for their colleagues required to make a hybrid environment work, that'd also do the trick.
What I find fascinating about the remote vs on-site flame war are the _stakes_ though, I don't think we see anything like it in dynamic vs static typing and all the others.
If remote loses, remote workers have to figure out how to relocate their entire families to a place they don't really want to live in, or accept severely limited job opportunities - on top of having to work in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
If on-site loses, people who are fetching large salaries and bought a house in an area with insane real estate prices face a future where their house value shoots lower than the credit they took to buy it (more towards the national average), and where it's increasingly difficult for them to prove that they earn that large salary they're getting. That's on top of working in an environment they might not be productive or happy in.
Both sides have a lot to lose if it all goes either one way or another, that's unlike any other flame war I can think of. I wonder how much of this is at play at Google. Certainly seems to be escalating if someone feels the need to pull a stunt like that (with the performance reviews).
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Still waiting for all the major failures people have been clamoring about. I think the real talk is that you can run a lot of dotcoms on a skeleton crew and when money becomes tight you can trim a lot of fat. It’s not something people like to hear because they realize they are the fat
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#126After 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 think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding. Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, poin…
> t’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something
This feels like a tech choice issue to me. I'm constantly on calls with either slack/pop sharing where anyone can draw on the shared screen, or shared coding session like in vscode where you can see each other's cursors. It... works the same for me as pointing at the screen. Just without it being awkward when it's more than 2 people getting to cram into a a small space.
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#127Sounds like Google is eliminating remote work. Has VP Urs Holzle returned from New Zealand? https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/google-exec-remote-work-wfh...
The idea that Urs was hard core about colocation is absolutely false. I was a direct report to Urs when he was VP engineering and I telecommuted one day every week. Urs successor, Wayne Rosing, was much stricter than Urs ever was.
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#128It's been commonly said that 80 percent of success is showing up.
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#129After 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 think you articulated a sentiment a lot of people have very well. For the non-decision makers, there is a strange dichotomy I see with coding. Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree. But that productivity is almost erased by onboarding new hires. There are so many aspects of software engineering where it’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, poin…
> ’s so much easier to be sitting next to someone, pointing at their monitor, and discussing what and why you are doing something. Instead, you need to hop on a call and awkwardly screen share on a call or write out paragraphs of text to impart the knowledge
For me, it's the exact opposite.
Before the pandemic, I always found the practice (and even the idea!) of "pairing" quite off-putting. You're standing behind someone, breathing in their body odor, awkwardly sweating next to each other, bending over if you want to type something... a really weird experience.
Remotely, none of those apply! You each get your own keyboard, your own screen, your own mouse. Both of you are 100% comfortable in your own environment. Using decent software helps as well, I recommend Tuple which makes sharing the mouse & keyboard seamless.
Re: Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews
#130While I enjoy this whole debate in HN about remote Vs in-person, the point here majority seems to be missing is that the sole attendance is used as a threat for performance review. Effectively a joke. If Google had a problem with people and teams hiding behind a monitor not doing much, I'm sure you can recall a pre-pandemic world where this was also the norm when in the office.
Now that my company has started enforcing RTO, I noticed patterns in some of my colleagues, such as arriving late and leaving early, leaving the laptop in their desk disappearing for a long while, not answering messages for hours with nowhere to be seen, and very vague status updates when asked. It turns out slackers will slack, be it at home or at the office.
I love the fantasy that some management hold that back in my day you couldn't slack in the office and it was a thing that was invented on the first day someone "worked from home".
Over a few drinks they will also tell you stories of the old days where you would leave your jacket on the back of your chair and go to the pub at 11am come back to the office at some point in the afternoon.
But kidz these days...