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Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

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Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#141

Post by DieBruderBauer »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #131
oofta-boofta wrote: post #13

Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket". Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office. What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective…

Google seems to have taken their eye off the ball when it comes to providing accurate search results. Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query…

1st page of most search results is inundated with irrelevant ads. Pitiful. And yes, a small minority know about and actively use uBlock Origin. But that doesn’t mean the core functionality and purpose of Google search isn’t tainted. The rotting and decay has already manifested itself in ugly ways.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#142

Post by u801e »

space_invaders wrote: post #50
oofta-boofta wrote: post #13

Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket". Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office. What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective…

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (inst…

> that includes things like Github for code reviews

I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#144

Post by bushbaba »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #75
Osiris wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a startup with just 2 other engineers. They hired a guy from Google with a decade less experience than me. When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on. So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began mak…

If the CEO thought process used in a megacorp was appropriate for a four engineer startup, then he is a fucking idiot and you are better off out of that impending cluster fuck.

Often those who’ve only worked at small companies don’t grock how much organizational bloat is needed to run a large enterprise. Alignment cannot be done in a 50k employee company by having everyone hash it out over beers.

Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#145

Post by moomoo11 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #41

CA is being abandoned. I'm thinking I should leave and not be left behind.

It’s really sad if that happens.

I love this state. I feel so at home here. I have traveled and lived all around the US. I didn’t feel that anywhere else but here in CA. Anywhere in this state, I feel at home. The diversity of people, geographies, and weather. So amazing.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#146

Post by ffgjgf1 »

alex_lav wrote: post #121
bbor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It _is_ objectively true that WFH is better for the environment. But oh well, so far wildfires are contained to just wildfire season, so not a big deal :))))))

If you move the goalposts or are vague enough, anything can be true. Working from home is worse for the environment than abolishing capitalism, which is the driving force behind global warming. See? Conversation is useless if we ignore context or intent.

It’s not like the USSR cared about the environment even the tiniest bit..

Under capitalism at least you get free speech and therefore some public pressure to impose various regulations.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#147

Post by eftychis »

bboygravity wrote: post #63
thesuitonym wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're absolutely right that being public doesn't automatically making bad choices--but it does eventually mean making poor choices. As long as you have a strong CEO, they can weather the storm of shareholder requests, but once you get to third or fourth generation leaders it typically becomes a race to the bottom. See: Every company in every industry.

Can you explain what things shareholders generally request? As far as I know the only duty a company has towards shareholders is "protect them" (aka: don't mess up and make money). As long as the company eventually does that there is no issue. Even if it takes 8 quarters to become profitable (or 10+ years, see Amazon). There are probably ways in which shareholders can get together and request something (in court?), b…

Well just to be complete there are enumerated duties to shareholders (the fiduciary ones):

1. Duty of Care

2. Duty of Loyalty

3. Duty of Disclosure

4. Duty of Confidentiality

5. Duty of Prudence

6. Duty of Good Faith

You can start looking at this rabbit hole here (and it is a rabbit hole): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty

P.S. Just a (fly-by)comment; not advice of any short or kind -- either investment or legal. P.S.2 Oh it does happen that share/stake holders seek enforcement for breach of fiduciary duties. I would say it is quite common.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#148

Post by zeroonetwothree »

rwiggins wrote: post #93
krasin wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

actual hotdesking in some platform areas (for example, Google Cloud). I don't know how universal that is.

Not exactly. For engineers, at least (not sure about other roles), the Google Cloud desk options are: 1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal. 2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partne…

Average cost of a desk is like 10k/yr. That’s very little compared to an employee’s compensation, it only has to make them like 5% more productive to be worth it.

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#149

Post by voytec »

space_invaders wrote: post #50
oofta-boofta wrote: post #13

Google looked at how sailors share space on a sub and were like "yeah, that's the ticket". Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office. What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective…

Google has turned into the "new IBM" for years now. I've worked with Google engineers and managers from different "generations". It's shocking how the newer engineers are just your average consultancy engineer with leet code practice. They have little abstracting capabilities and would be pissed-off if you use some tool/workflow that's not "The Google Way™" (and that includes things like Github for code reviews (inst…

> Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.

Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.

GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.

I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.

Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.

Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".

[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...

Re: Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet

#150

Post by eftychis »

astrange wrote: post #133
jaggederest wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the history of activist investors like Carl Icahn. They will happily start a proxy war to oust management to wring the last cent out of a company, or file a minority shareholder lawsuit alleging all kinds of malfeasance to tank the stock to be able to buy up a controlling interest. The 80s M&A boom had all kinds of crazy things, and it makes recent history look somewhat mild by comparison. These days the vast…

Investors in Google (or Meta) don't have voting rights. You simply can't do any of that stuff. All you can do is not invest, which means the price doesn't go up, but that hasn't been happening.

See my other "sibling" comment. As an owner/shareholder you have duties owed to you by Google.

If a too good offer comes by, for instance, for one to buy Google:

the offer has to be disclosed; and regardless if the founders like it or not -- or what the voting majority says, there is a price where the remaining shareholders can force Google to be sold.

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