Google uses in-person office attendance as part of employee performance reviews • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by throwaway173738 » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

extr wrote: post #64

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…

Yes, I am going through this right now as a new hire onboarding to a boutique codebase. As soon as you are 100% reliant on internal docs, you realize just how large the gap is between them and mainstream OSS libraries. I think a decent middle-ground between "Document everything" and "Organically relay all information" is to just write "doc-stubs". Just a list of everything out there with no real content. It gives peo…

I’m also a big fan of having new people document things they wish they had known starting out.

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

#282

Post by hn666 » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

LiquidSky wrote: post #264

rubicon33 wrote: post #253

Worked from home ~5 of my ~10 years in development. Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc. I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving…

>For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I would suggest that it's possible to interact with people outside of work. It's genuinely sad to me how many of these "if I don't go into the office I have no one to interact with" posts I see.

Also the fact that the change of pace helps in general, you can turn his anecdote around and it still sounds plausible (worked in the office for 5y and started to get slightly depressed, really appreciated starting WFH once it came, etc).

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

#283

Post by BlargMcLarg » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

pfannkuchen wrote: post #257

I wonder if all of the WFH excitement would have happened if open offices had never become widespread and we all had an actual office with a door. It’s kind of funny that they’ve made offices so bad that no one wants to go there, but no one (on the corporate side) talks about improving the working environment in the office at all in the context of WFO.

They've tried and were met with all kinds of retorts. It's more difficult to get an employer to spend an extra 50/month on your equipment, than to piss 10x of it away in inefficient code run on cloud computing. WFH at least got a foothold, most individuals don't even know what it is like to work in an area tailormade to your way of working.

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

#284

Post by jonnycomputer » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:12 PM UTC

Well, a lot of company-employee relations is about control. Or fear of loss of control. And so, with work from home, the encroachment on the privacy of the home. I guess I'd rather be spied on at work than at home.

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

#285

Post by Nimitz14 » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:13 PM UTC

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…

Fantastic summary

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

#286

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #160

heavyset_go wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was told developers had enough leverage without unions to prevent this from happening /s

When the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise. When the market goes down, they want a union to protect them from being fired from that +50% job they got knowing they would be paid much less in the current economy. The dev logic is "fuck you I've got mine, you go get yours" but only as long as "line goes up".

>When the market goes up, devs don't want to hear about unions because that would prevent them from jumping ship with a 50% raise.

NOTHING about unions prevents an individual being rewarded for their individual merits or jumping from job to job.

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

#287

Post by ghaff » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:15 PM UTC

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…

Seniority is another factor.

People who have been in the industry and with a company for a long time largely have a network and don't really have problems connecting with people. (And at larger companies that network is often pretty distributed anyway.)

But the--admittedly not universal--consensus is that new folks struggle with onboarding and generally making progress in their careers. And even coming into an office doesn't really help if their managers and more senior co-workers are mostly not there. It's certainly hard for me to imagine graduating school and working remotely.

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

#288

Post by kodah » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

rubicon33 wrote: post #253

Worked from home ~5 of my ~10 years in development. Obviously, the "pros" of WFH are massive. No commute. Comfortable office. Food in the fridge. Daytime exercise + showers. Etc. etc. I found however that too much of a good thing, is bad. For me, the lack of in person communication started to atrophy my enjoyment of life. I wouldn't have been able to really tell you it for the first few years, but I was slowly moving…

That's great that you get something out of being in the office.

I really wish the powers that be would put some data to this. You and I are complete opposites; paying exhorbitant rent, transportation, and living costs usurped much of the enjoyment I could get out of going to an office. I build infra products and in an office setting I usually get a lot of interrupts because product folks generally lack some amount of knowledge/background to fill in gaps on how to use products like mine. When I'm remote they have to follow a support queue, read docs, learn more about infra basics, and attend talks on infra. When I'm in person they can just stop by my desk.

My hypothesis is that folks who like going into an office generally fall into a couple categories:

- people who get/enjoy a substantial amount of social interaction out of work and work adjacent activities

- people who work on public facing products who don't have many internal customers

- people with disruptive home environments

The thing that upsets me is that we're being treated the same and that most of this is to save face for their real estate investment. Not to mention all the half-truths/gaslighting about the universalness of productivity.

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

#289

Post by JamesLeonis » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:16 PM UTC

> "Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in person and then transferred to remote or remained in person performed better on average than people who joined remotely," Zuckerberg wrote in a statement in March.

I'm still waiting for the fucking data Zuck.

None of these CEOs "have the data" about remote work, or they would beat us over the head with it over and over. I would be seeing graphs and pie charts all over the financial press.

It's 3 years and nothing. Every employee should be demanding this data as proof before setting a single foot in an office.

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

#290

Post by jonnycomputer » Fri, Jun 09, 2023, 2:17 PM UTC

So the main benefit for me in going into the office, besides the psychological boost of being outside of the house, is that I often learn things about what is going on that I wouldn't have learned otherwise because they never rose to the level of, "we better should tell him". Instead, I'd just over-hear it, or there'd be a group on-the-fly conversation happening, and someone would mention it. Sometimes those things were rather important, and the only reason it wasn't brought to my attention by the people who knew it, was because they didn't know how important it was.