151–160 of 205 posts
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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.
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If I am doing "2 days in office, 3 remote" for my employees, why would I want to pay twice as much so desks can sit vacant more than half the time?
Because the desk-sharing vibes are, as the kids wisely say, cursed. No personalization of decorations or monitors, can't work flexibly, etc. etc. etc.
so why is the lack of monitor personalization cursed, 90% of my coworkers seem great with those options and Iv'e seen a ton with just a laptop and to black monitors or one in use.
yeah lack of decorations, I got you... it's a we-work at that point.
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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…
Sounds like you dodged a bullet.
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> The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think. If you know a person does not like being interrupted don't be selfish and write a message. Why does your productivity matter more than mine?
In my experience working with people who didn't like to help people or people who helped people whenever they felt like it, they became managers or already were managers (because of course you can be super productive when you only help people when you feel like it) and then had revolts of people they managed when everyone got sick of having to waste hours because the other person didn't want to give a few minutes. Pe…
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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…
You might have had 20 years of experience building products that don't need to scale for millions of concurrent users, if you consider all "purely internal architectural changes" to be lower priority than the customer facing work just because it's purely internal. And the Google guy might have tried to spend time scaling a product that will have five concurrent users, because "this is Google" ( https://www.youtube.co…
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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…
I wonder how 2 will work. it'll be interesting. I have too much shit at the office for that, but I also have a lot of unoffical work stuff at my desk, like the tools to fix the monitors (hex wrenches screwdrivers), and the whiskey stash.
3 - I do see a ton of non-eng doing this. I see a lot more eng also just chilling in 'flex spaces' like phone boths, lounges, etc... the stuff that never got used when everyone had desks and now is even tho my office isn't over full. our little mini-single desk rooms I call our intern offices as they seem to just work in there.
is the 2 days a week just the RTO minimum?
4 - this is me but also 1 is kinda me.. I'm in a lot but I travel a lot, and I have very specialized setup that I do use.
5 - I can get this, my whole management chain is remote... I'm senior enough. I'm actually well above average on in office attendance, and just below the rto requirements esp if you account for me working from office for a month in the last 2 months while bein in other cities. or last 3 weeks because there were "synergies" for folks for me to meet.
The true answer for me is I get to pick and choose between days when I need to get stuff done coding, by clearing my calendar, and slamming out code at home... or at the office. Or by forcing a lot of in person meetings and getting 8 months of design convs done in 4 hours. I got a solid 1.5 hour convo done while waiting for traffic to die down on thursday that I had been trying for 2 years to do on remote.
but I had this flexibility in the before times and I'm pretty senior.
The thing I do think sucks is that I suspect everyone is single car riding into the office so traffic in seattle is actually WORSE than pre-pandemic. Traffic sucks till 9:30 am now.
The only true benefit of the march of time is that there's so many "enhanced" cars now that I can just HOV way to the front of the line then cut off a tesla or obviously expensive mercedes in the exit lane at the last second and know they'll stop :)
basically I'm a bad one to ask and I'm making it work well for me.
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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…
Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller? You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat. But yeah, they care about productivity. Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.
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I was in what amazon called double high density once. one guy had to duck under anoterh guys desk to get to his. so basically against fire code. the better way i've seen it there was where you will not quite bump into the person behind you if you push back. I was only in that once. usually I had an extra foot. I'm in low density right now it's good. Amazon never gave us smaller desks, they were always door desks. Tha…
Don't you have fire departments in USA? In Italy they can be called, or just randomly do an inspection and they can just say "this entire building is closed until you adhere to regulations". I work in sweden now and this doesn't seem to be a thing either. Lots of things that in italy would get you shut down happen here. For example doors requiring 2 hands to be opened from the inside. In Italy they have to be hands f…
Here they show up, say fix this shit. and come back and check a week or 2 later.
They came by and we moved around the same time.... the inspections are generally scheduled.
It was only that crazy for about 3 weeks. longer and they would have probbably had a different fix.
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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…
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…
Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.
We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.