Not to mention coming to Google office has many perks, Amazon office is much much more barebones.
Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
21–30 of 296 posts
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
They just want Amazon talent. Then they'll turn up the heat.
You mean the ones that don't want to go to the office? What's the point of taking in talent, getting them up to speed at Google and then having them leave after 12–18 months?
The general opinion here on HN seems to be that the most talented that can easily land a new job are the first to leave - might be a good time to skim the cream of the crop, even if for 12-18 months. Who knows, many might even stay when every other major company moves to RTO.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having been there: it's not that. It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. I knew some folks at Google who worked 100% remote and only came into the office for critical meetings about once a month. They had proven they could operate that way with a more-or-less stellar track record.
> It's that, unfortunately, they have enough hard numbers to know most people do their best work with a boss physically breathing down their neck. While the conclusion — that most people do their best work when in the office — may be correct, why do you think that the cause of that is the boss breathing down people's necks rather than, say, more efficient collaboration among team members? My personal observations of…
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Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO the downside of being that spread out is the infrastructure. Cities subsidize the suburban infrastructure because of the population density benefits. If everyone spreads out then infrastructure will suffer.
Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think…
It is simple enough to break it down by area. If a city has N people per city block, but a suburb has 1/N people per city block you lose out on all economies of scale. Each individual dwelling requires water, electrical, gas, roads, etc. More efficient to amortize that across more people per unit of infrastructure. A road is always going up cost $/foot. Best if that road is being used by 100k people per day instead of 10.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#25They say this now. But in 12 months (or the next layoff period), they will move from hybrid to full RTO. Still a shitty move to mandate RTO. Most people (IT folks) have spoke with do this routine: 0) daily routine to prepare for day 1) 1 hr commute to shitty office 2) login to computer, do calls with cross regional (and international) teams over Zoom/Teams/Webex or whatever conferencing system 3) teleconferencing wit…
I think the worst part is 9) at night, do more work that requires focus time while no one is bothering you, since expectations got calibrated to when everyone had a private office and more control over their own time.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#26I applaud Microsoft and Google for not going with a full RTO. But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office. True remote work enables an economy that is spread out, resilient, and lets people live the way they want. We have this capability so why not do it?
> We have this capability so why not do it? sortof yes, sortof no. Aside from all the conversation about work culture, state taxes are a big barrier to fully remote work. States hate losing tax revenue. Notoriously, it is easier to register to do business in a state than to unregister. This is even harder internationally. For large organizations, remote can be the difference between one state's paperwork + regs + tax…
We see this all the time working at the intersection of the insurance / fintech space. I've had several big, legacy vendors make requests for multiple physical signatures on a piece of paper (printed and mailed or faxed, can't just annotate a PDF) from people who haven't even met eachother in person let alone ever worked at the same address.
The kicker? These papers are access authorization forms to APIs.
Your average tech company is probably reasonably well prepared to go truly distributed, but I bet many of their vendors aren't. Whole workflows in certain industries don't even conceptualize companies with employees distributed across offices, let alone companies with no office at all.
(I've fought similar battles over not being able to provide a direct phone extension because I don't have a phone on my office desk and even if I did I'm not at the office anything close to full time, and I don't provide my personal cell phone number to vendors... but thats a whole different topic. Employees exist without phone numbers! Entire offices exist without phones!)
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#27for the moment. my guess is that in the next 12/18 month all of major tech & big corps will follow the amazon's way.
These folks literally just saw what Amazon did and did the opposite.
I'm not sure it's right to say they did anything here. All the article reports is that an unspecified Google VP made an offhand remark that no changes are expected to their 3-2 hybrid schedule - which used to be Amazon's schedule until Andy Jassy made an unexpected change.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do cities actually subsidize suburban infrastructure? I am skeptical but I don’t know all of the details on how people come to that conclusion. What happens if the economy is more spread out? Also a lot of the people that own and run companies that give a city its tax base live in the suburban areas. It might even be reasonable to say that they are the ones subsidizing the city and not the other way. How do you think…
It is simple enough to break it down by area. If a city has N people per city block, but a suburb has 1/N people per city block you lose out on all economies of scale. Each individual dwelling requires water, electrical, gas, roads, etc. More efficient to amortize that across more people per unit of infrastructure. A road is always going up cost $/foot. Best if that road is being used by 100k people per day instead o…
Yes but that’s a cost of infrastructure angle, not an argument for who is subsidizing whom. I’m saying the fact that the economy is unnecessarily focused into cities makes suburbs look worse in tax revenue but it doesn’t have to be that way.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#29I applaud Microsoft and Google for not going with a full RTO. But hybrid work still requires you to live near an office. True remote work enables an economy that is spread out, resilient, and lets people live the way they want. We have this capability so why not do it?
From Google's perspective a lot of outsourced work is remote work. As its done away from Google offices. And they are doubling down on that.
Re: Google won't be mandating a strict return-to-office plan
#30_yet_