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

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

#221

Post by __oh_es »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #166
72f988bf wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. true. > For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2 Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say? No, this is FAANG. Yo…

> No, this is FAANG, every building is open office layout, it'd be rude & disrespectful to your colleagues around who are busy coding. But at the same time it's perfectly okay to just come up to your busy colleague and pester them about something, because collaboration.

Establishing working relationships and setting boundaries is a professional skill

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

#222

Post by bryanrasmussen »

throwbadubadu wrote: post #220
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have probl…

> You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there Not sure why this needs to be repeatedly brought up.. I mean it is called "home office" for a reason. If you don't have a real one, remote can suffer.. no surprise.

>Not sure why this needs to be repeatedly brought up

Not sure why you think a home office is going to solve marital problems or other issues that going into an office and being around other people might allow you to not focus on.

Aside from that then we can add inability to get a home office made to the list of things that can affect whether or not remote work is a good solution

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

#223

Post by bluefirebrand »

72f988bf wrote: post #94
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…

> 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. true. > For large companies like FAANG, I actually think they mostly fall in bucket 2 Also true most fall in the "figure it out" bucket... But here's where it gets funny: just meet in-person you say? No, this is FAANG. Yo…

A lot of companies want the benefits of distributed teams, but also want to force everyone to come to offices and do conference calls in meeting rooms instead of work remote.

It's mind boggling to me. All I can think is that there is a lot of ego tied up in offices for some reason.

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

#224

Post by twic »

tomp wrote: post #129
beoberha wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 som…

Pair programming doesn't involve anyone standing behind anyone else or bending over. I think you're describing a sort of "hanging around and kind of doing some programming together", which is probably a more common practice than pair programming, and a rather under-documented one!

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

#225

Post by mduggles »

After trying both for years I don't really know what we're talking about here.

I can go to an office where we can schedule room to have a video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.

I can stay at home to join the video call to sit around and discuss what tickets we're going to create and who will work on them. Those tickets will get worked on and tracked then we end up creating a product or feature.

I don't know what this mysterious in-office inspiration cycle is. It was never polite to just wander up to people working on something and bother them with random junk.

Offices exist for companies where management has sufficiently removed the ability of the people they pay to make decisions. Now you need to come to them and ask to be allowed to do things, so your manager can ponder whether that thing makes sense in whatever weird inter-department power struggle they are working in.

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

#226

Post by wongarsu »

ekianjo wrote: post #186
jleyank wrote: post #3

It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Once the coding starts, this is just a set of distractions I don't need. I suspect many/most of the developers reading HN want peace and quiet far more than the chance of magical hallway conversations. And it's only an anecdote, but we debugged a problem today where people were in two provinces of Canada and the UK. Were perfectly able to share screens, r…

> It might be useful to "all be in the room" when brainstorming. Really? what does it bring that you can't do remotely? I can hardly think of a problem where "being in the same room" is a requirement to have a productive discussion

It's not a requirement, but it helps a lot. The biggest factor might be latency, which makes it much harder to informally coordinate multiple people talking without speaking over each other.

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

#227

Post by johnny99k »

This is why I started only choosing remote work (contracting/consulting or FT) 10 years ago. I originally did it so I could travel the world (which I did in 2013-2014) and now because I want to be able to spend more time with my family.

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

#228

Post by twic »

beoberha wrote: post #50
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 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…

> Remotely, I’m vastly more productive in getting coding work done. I’m sure most people would agree.

I certainly don't agree at all. Home is where all the distractions are. Home is where i can drift off to make a cup of tea and end up spending an hour reading the newspaper without anyone noticing.

I think it would be useful to understand the distribution of peoples' feelings and experience about this. I have seen so many remote work enthusiasts just taking it as read that everyone prefers remote work because they do.

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

#229

Post by civilized »

wepple wrote: post #195
onion2k wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In-person is much better if you don't know what you need to build.. Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? It's clearly nonsense to suggest you have to be collaborating in-person to build big unknown things. There are thousands of examples throughout open source and more where that hasn't been the case, and mil…

> Can you explain how some of the greatest technical research projects of our time like the internet, Linux, etc happened without a big office then? Stating that it’s possible is very different to stating which model might be more effective or faster. Unfortunately we don’t have a parallel universe where torvalds lived on the same street as a bunch of other collaborators to compare

I bet if we talked to Torvalds about it, he'd have an incredibly strong opinion to share, and I don't have any difficulty guessing what it would be.

Indeed, searching for "Torvalds remote work" yields this: https://www.zdnet.com/article/pet-the-cat-own-the-bathrobe-l...

> Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."

> "If you spend hours in online meetings from home, instead of spending hours in meetings at the office like you used to, you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse."

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

#230

Post by whoisthemachine »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #207
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…

There are more conditions that pertain Remote Work is better if 1. You do not have home problems that you will end up focusing on when you are there - so if you are single and do not own your home, or you have a great relationship and you do own your home but there are no problems the remote work is probably better. But just like being in an office and going into a private room can help productivity if you have probl…

#1 can be solved by renting a co-working space if troubles at home are really that severe. I doubt that #2 is really any different than if you are unmotivated while in the office. If anything, one unmotivated employee in the office can more easily spread that lack of motivation to their co-workers.
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