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

fortune.com

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

#321

Post by mLuby »

makeitdouble wrote: post #65
extr wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't call it brainstorming. More like "alignment". Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. You can do this quickly if you have an experienced and disciplined PM guiding the discussion, but most people don't, so they just have long conversations. Which works fine IRL, but it's very uncomfortabl…

> Fleshing out the vision you have for what you need to do, and putting that up against your coworkers vision, and figuring out where the disagreements/gaps are. This is a part that probably varies a lot individually...I'm a slow thinker, and have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end…

> have a hard time reacting to fully formed ideas thrown at me thrown at me over a table. The other side coming with fully prepared for the discussion, while on the receiving end you need to do your homework realtime also doesn't help.

That's the feature, not a bug. It gives the meeting initiator a better chance of steamrolling their way to approval.

Notice the difference between meetings where people share agendas and docs ahead of time vs those where you show up and they walk you through the doc.

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

#322

Post by x86x87 »

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 it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days.

There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold.

IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.

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

#323

Post by ghaff »

barbazoo wrote: post #41
karmasimida wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that so? WFH is still a largely a COVID thing, even 3 times a day is still better than going to office 5 times week, as before?

Any number of days > 0 will require people to live near the office. Many people can't afford that anymore and moved away and moved away because of that or other reasons.

One day per week, maybe two, really broadens your living options though. The approximate two-hour commute each way at commuting times I have into the nearest major city is pretty doable once a week. I have a colleague who routinely flies in for a day or two of customer visits. (He actually doesn't take all that much longer than I do to get to the office.) From personal experience, much more than that and it's not really sustainable.

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

#324

Post by rhtgrg »

x86x87 wrote: post #322
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 it's true. This whole office/in office/rto has to do with people being dishonest about why the rto needs to happen and being stuck romanticising the good old days. There is huge overhead to in person work and the benefits are wildly oversold. IMHO a professional software developer in a company with good management/clear direction will thrive in a remote work scenario.

Not to mention that even in-person workplaces (especially at large companies) still involve plenty of remote interaction due to the global nature of the workforce. Plenty of Googlers being required to be in-office will actually be working alone in-office, with their teammates far away...

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

#325

Post by bentlegen »

llm_nerd wrote: post #274
bentlegen wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's actually humorous that most tech "social media" like HN, Reddit, Digg, and so on were much busier back when most of us were in offices, because we all would bide our days doing anything but work. Do you have a source on this? I’m both curious and skeptical. (And ironically, for many in Europe and Eastern NA/SA it’s the work day right now.)

100% anecdotal. Zero credible sources. On the anecdote side I do know that within the past couple of years I saw a discussion on here about how many visitors someone gets from a top of the front page on HN. The numbers were absolutely miserly compared to what I experienced getting the same repeatedly years earlier. Like, 1/20th or less. Maybe it's just HN that declined, but if so where did the tech news community go?…

Right, but you could find and link to that thread instead of “citing it” from memory.

As it is it remains conjecture.

(Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)

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

#326

Post by rhtgrg »

cbarrick wrote: post #265
jkukul wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Quick 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 You nailed it. Ideally, both employees and employers should have the freedom to choose whether to work onsite…

> Using your analogy, it would be like initially giving your future employees the choice between Emacs and Vim, but later giving Vim users extra points in performance reviews. That analogy doesn't quite apply to this Google situation. Google has a distinction between "full remote" and "hybrid" employees. Attendance will NOT be considered in the performance reviews of full remote employees.

Did you miss the part of the email where remote employees near offices are "strongly encouraged" to switch to hybrid?

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

#327

Post by kodah »

ghaff wrote: post #320
kodah wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech pays Industrial Psychologists, I don't know why we don't put them to work on this. I restarted my software career doing remote work. I didn't have a problem finding things to do because my responsibilities were clear (read: I had a good manager) and I was self-taught so I already had a muscle for seeking knowledge on my own. I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how goo…

>I suspect that remote work success is highly influenced by an equation involving how good your manager is I suspect the people on here who like to hate on managers either have a bad one or just don't realize how much crap they're being shielded from--a lot of which is inevitable in a large organization (where you can't tell everyone "hey figure it out on your own").

That could explain some situations, but I very well doubt it's as simple as "managers are unappreciated".

Some managers are given wide latitude in controlling their teams work. Some managers execute on that, others don't.

Some managers are given a lot of control over hiring. Some execute on that, other don't.

Some managers are given wide latitude over reviews. Some managers execute on that while others don't.

The reason managers are perceived to be less useful in tech usually, in my experience, boils down to where they spend their time and political capital. They either spend it on their team and enabling them or on themselves and enabling themselves. All of the above are ways that could go either way and the feeling is generally an accumulation of those decisions over time. I guess I could surmise that there's just a lot of "bad" managers in tech, but I don't think that's a useful sentiment without knowing why.

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

#328

Post by vladak »

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.)

In the company I work for, this is currently in the form of nudging. "Come to the office, we have prepared healthy breakfast for you" (obviously I don't work for FAANG or a startup trying to lure employees with such stuff) and more lately "we encourage you to start coming to the office for our regular team meeting".

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

#329

Post by cultofmetatron »

somsak2 wrote: post #21
gunshai wrote: post #16

A friend of mine who is a PM at google was telling me about this the other week. Her job situation sounded so tenuous, in that a lot of it hinged on how cool her manager was with her living situation not being in SF. Also having to ask a friend to swipe her badge because she couldn't afford living in SF.

> PM at google > couldn't afford living in SF

I had a apartemnt in west oakland. I was paying 1800/month. when I left, they increased the rent to 3000. And that was in the "hood." it was a bargain compared to what my friends in SF proper were paying.

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

#330

Post by llm_nerd »

bentlegen wrote: post #325
llm_nerd wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% anecdotal. Zero credible sources. On the anecdote side I do know that within the past couple of years I saw a discussion on here about how many visitors someone gets from a top of the front page on HN. The numbers were absolutely miserly compared to what I experienced getting the same repeatedly years earlier. Like, 1/20th or less. Maybe it's just HN that declined, but if so where did the tech news community go?…

Right, but you could find and link to that thread instead of “citing it” from memory. As it is it remains conjecture. (Aside, this thread now has 300 comments after just 2 hours. HN’s purported slowdown in the WFH era feels grossly exaggerated.)

Yes, it's conjecture. I explicitly, outright said it was an unproven anecdote. Demanding citations when I'm explicitly giving a "feel" narrative is misplaced and not charitable.

As to how many uniques you can expect from a front-page on HN, go ahead and search. Pre-2020 you can find countless people detailing 30,000+ uniques in the first few hours (my own, personal, direct experience was 50,000+). Now, if you average out more recent reports, you can expect about 11,000 over the first 24 hours.

And sure, the most inclusive possible discussion gets a few hundred comments. Everyone wants to put some paint on the shed. There is a 4 hour old submission on the front page with 2 comments. Eh, guess it doesn't represent much.

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