Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home • Hacker News Board

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#351

Post by baetylus » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 5:04 AM UTC

jeffbee wrote: post #72

baetylus wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What constitutes an excellent tech culture in your view? Just curious

Eh, I could complain about it at length if you get me started but the root cause is they have a process where you have to take all your ideas before a committee of senior engineers and get permission to do anything, and the people who are on the committee are unfortunately not qualified for that purpose, they just happened to have been early employees who blundered into fancy job titles. Aside from that there's also…

Ah, I understand. That's really interesting. Thanks for sharing your experience

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#352

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 9:24 AM UTC

lukeschlather wrote: post #53

sjg007 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Also most projects are distributed across multiple sites and orgs. In person meetings were always team based and guess what they still are wfh. You lose serendipity and cross pollination but I don’t think companies actually optimize for that. I mean it’s not an OKR nor performance goal.

My company has OKRs directly focused around improving serendipity and cross pollination lost due to Covid WFH.

[deleted]

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#353

Post by fragmede » Fri, Apr 30, 2021, 11:08 PM UTC

lrem wrote: post #335

vlovich123 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google cuts epsilon’s in engineering cost that operate on efficiencies of 10s of thousands engineers or engineering components that underpin multiple high-value products. They have entire teams of very senior engineers dedicated to this problem. Conversely, a smaller project wouldn’t demand this kind of attention because solutions don’t scale well and so are managed as local costs at the most local level possible. Wh…

We're SREs working on the rollout system used for vast majority of internal software. The component in quesiton collected enough tech debt to start showing "unfixable" defects, but still not enough to justify anything more than "make it retry harder". Any year now it will become worthwile to quantify the actual impact.

Sounds like a Sisyphyian effort to have the software retry harder (harder meaning in a different, more effortful way, rather than increment the retry loop counter).

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#354

Post by Trollmann » Sat, May 01, 2021, 7:49 PM UTC

greggman3 wrote: post #290

paxys wrote: post #81

Google is saving $1 billion per year because of COVID-19, not because employees are working from home. This is literally mentioned in the article, but the headline is twisted (for clicks no doubt): > During the first quarter, Google parent Alphabet Inc. saved $268 million in expenses from company promotions, travel and entertainment, compared with the same period a year earlier, “primarily as a result of COVID-19,” a…

It's also not counting any repercussions, short or long term. I don't know Google but several other friends have told me productivity is down at their companies significantly with WFH. Also, if it's just about the perks mentioned, those perks might be part of what retains employees.

Interesting, what position are the people in that told you this? I‘ve only heard this from middle management at my company.

Software project‘s actually have less delay than usual. Don‘t get me started on why every project is ‚late‘. We‘re not even allowed to work overtime while we‘re at home.

We do see problem‘s with new hires though. They have a harder time integrating into their team.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#355

Post by inadequatespace » Mon, May 03, 2021, 4:40 AM UTC

DannyBee wrote: post #327

notbitter wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to share some of that real data? You're right about the haze of wishful thinking around the issue and seem to be in a position to clear it up a bit. You can infer something about the value of face time from the universal FAANG commitment to centralized HQs, despite the huge costs of this policy.

Here's a longer answer: I actually really wish i could (and other companies could), because I think it would make for some really interesting papers/studies/etc. We normally publish a bunch of our productivity, inclusion, etc research in journals and conferences. For example, https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/ts/5555/01/09361116/1r... For this particular topic, I believe we have published some small amount of stu…

Looks like, from the CNBC article, that WFH basically worsened the performance of low-level/ middle managers, which feels about right.

It also feels that some way of improving this group of people in general is sorely needed -- how does the G2G program work exactly?

ninjaedit: found this https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/learning-development-em... . Will evangelize at my company… probably will be ignored though because I'm an IC.