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Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

arstechnica.com

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Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#31

Post by silverwasthere »

JPKab wrote: post #10
lovich wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors. Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enoug…

Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money. Why is it that we pretend like "shareholders" are these mythical beasts that are different than us? I have money in the stock market. You probably do as well. Why does your money suddenly become ok to waste if it's invested in a company? 5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own…

I absolutely had lower productivity sharing a desk last time I was required to. The chair was always adjusted wrong. May as well just stay home. I'm not OCD but I've been seeing doctors for my back problems since I was 18 so frankly you're an ableist. Enjoy your health while you can.

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#32

Post by victor106 »

JPKab wrote: post #5

Clickbait title because arstechnica is a garbage publication. Employees are expected to work 2 days a week out of the office, and will swap the desk with another employee. They will not sit at the same desk at the same time. Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors.

> arstechnica is a garbage publication.

100% this.

I think they were good about 10 years ago. Now they are just garbage

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#33

Post by gedy »

omeze wrote: post #6

Google (at least circa 2014 when I graduated) has slowly taken on the image of a “retirement home” (i.e. where you go to turn your brain off and clock in to get paid) in elite STEM undergrad programs. Oracle had solidified their spot, but at least at Google it used to be easy to find interesting teams if you knew people there to navigate the team matching process. Now it’s decline is in full swing, its sad but seems…

No connection to Google, but I'd be cautious about ageism in this type of thinking. Been at places before where young guys mostly burn themselves into the ground "working hard" coding all sorts of stuff that really didn't matter, or sacrificing their personal time and life for code. The older guys were considered "unmotivated" because they didn't overwork when they knew it wouldn't matter.

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#34

Post by AtlasBarfed »

robswc wrote: post #9
lovich wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors. Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enoug…

I honestly hate open offices so much. I'm constantly amazed any work gets done with the layout.

The hilarious contradiction:

Companies: please come back to the office

Employees: why? Why have them at all? I don't have an "office" I have a small section of table. At home I have an office.

Companies: we invested money in these work spaces and want them to be used

Employees: you mean the shitty open space you moved to in order to save money rather than real "offices"? the ones that make us provably/demonstrably less productive than being at our home offices? If its about money, get rid of them entirely.

Companies: Um, yes. It helps build interaction and community

Employees: No, being shoved together like cattle breeds resentment and irritation and distraction and a feeling of no privacy or ability to think.

Companies: Just come back to the office. It's about buy-in

Employees: You mean the buy-in you refuse to provide for reasonable work spaces?

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#35

Post by foolinaround »

JPKab wrote: post #10
lovich wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doing anything less is wasteful, and if Google was doing this before it was robbing investors. Overton window keeps moving in the direction of fuck the employees to benefit the shareholders I guess. Having a personalized space used to not be considered a perk but table stacks for working at a company not too long ago. I get that the employees aren’t in office all week but that’s kinda on google for not having enoug…

Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money. Why is it that we pretend like "shareholders" are these mythical beasts that are different than us? I have money in the stock market. You probably do as well. Why does your money suddenly become ok to waste if it's invested in a company? 5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own…

> Nobody but the most OCD germophobe is going to have lower productivity because they are sitting in a desk that someone else was in a day before.

maybe, at the end of the day, the cleaning crew does a deep clean of the surfaces etc..

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#36

Post by AlotOfReading »

Galanwe wrote: post #18

> Google has an internal-only virtual desktop tool for thin clients called "CloudTop" that it would like employees to transition to This is the end. All thin client/remote desktop solutions that I have used are laggy enough to piss off a programmer, while fast enough to fool a manager. It's the perfect killing blow to productivity and morale.

About 3 months ago I went full thin-client using similar internal tools. 90+% of my workflow is using terminals and editors that work brilliantly over an SSH tunnel. For the stuff that can't be done on a remote computer (flashing boards, physical hardware), I have a couple scripts that allow me to do that locally. The whole thing has turned out to be less work than the physical tower under my desk.

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#37

Post by Galanwe »

thorncorona wrote: post #27
Galanwe wrote: post #18

> Google has an internal-only virtual desktop tool for thin clients called "CloudTop" that it would like employees to transition to This is the end. All thin client/remote desktop solutions that I have used are laggy enough to piss off a programmer, while fast enough to fool a manager. It's the perfect killing blow to productivity and morale.

Cloud tops are quite good. I’ve enjoyed using them. Run a mbp as your carry around, and then everything else runs on an overbuilt server vm with a direct connection to shared storage. I’m able to sync to head + rebuild 100k+ files in < 5 mins

How good is it when working from outside the office, on a rate from "painful" to "unusable"?

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#38

Post by AlbertCory »

Google has been getting steadily stingier with personal space for a long time. My last job there was at Crittenden, and the desks were next to each other with no dividers whatsoever. That was the worst of my twelve or so locations, by far. But this really takes the prize.

Personal story: in the 1980's I had about a half hour interview with Eric Schmidt, at Sun (yes, that Eric Schmidt). The one thing I remember is, he said that if you looked at the cost for private offices vs. cubicles, they were about the same, and that must be the case because the market will equilibrate. This was at a time when private offices still existed.

I don't think Google's Real Estate division got the message.

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#39

Post by _nalply »

gedy wrote: post #33
omeze wrote: post #6

Google (at least circa 2014 when I graduated) has slowly taken on the image of a “retirement home” (i.e. where you go to turn your brain off and clock in to get paid) in elite STEM undergrad programs. Oracle had solidified their spot, but at least at Google it used to be easy to find interesting teams if you knew people there to navigate the team matching process. Now it’s decline is in full swing, its sad but seems…

No connection to Google, but I'd be cautious about ageism in this type of thinking. Been at places before where young guys mostly burn themselves into the ground "working hard" coding all sorts of stuff that really didn't matter, or sacrificing their personal time and life for code. The older guys were considered "unmotivated" because they didn't overwork when they knew it wouldn't matter.

Playing the devil's advocate: How would the older guys know that their work didn't matter?

My personal experience: 2001 I got assigned to an internal project to keep me busy. When planning and getting feedback from the internal stakeholders I realized that they weren't interested in the project. I slacked off, because there was nothing else to do. I got laid off six months later.

Re: Google has gotten so cheap, employees now have to share desks

#40

Post by JPKab »

silverwasthere wrote: post #31
JPKab wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you pay to rent a car for 5 days if you were only going to drive it for 2 days? You wouldn't, because you care about your own money. Why is it that we pretend like "shareholders" are these mythical beasts that are different than us? I have money in the stock market. You probably do as well. Why does your money suddenly become ok to waste if it's invested in a company? 5 days a week, yes, everyone gets their own…

I absolutely had lower productivity sharing a desk last time I was required to. The chair was always adjusted wrong. May as well just stay home. I'm not OCD but I've been seeing doctors for my back problems since I was 18 so frankly you're an ableist. Enjoy your health while you can.

Ableist because I didn't factor in that adjusting a chair is a horrific injustice? Can we just agree that that is ridiculous and absurd and comically dramatic?

The ADA legally mandates that accommodations be made for people that need them and if you're not in that category you're being ridiculous and if you are this doesn't even apply to you.

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