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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

#41

Post by boulos »

AlbertCory wrote: post #38

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…

> 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

... How? That is, through what mechanism?

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

#42

Post by thorncorona »

Galanwe wrote: post #37
thorncorona wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

I’ve literally never had issues. So like 9/10. Works perfectly when on coffee shop wifi. Google tooling works perfectly with it.

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

#43

Post by JPKab »

naikrovek wrote: post #22
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. hmm... disagree. strongly. have you seen the quality of some publications? surely the line between garbage and not-garbage is lower than this. unless you are someone who considers something extremely political to be the only good publication or something; I hope not

I hate political stuff.

I used to like arstechnica but it's degraded into what I am complaining about. The title of the article implies that people are crammed in desks next to each other by being purposefully vague.

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

#44

Post by jareds »

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

What's the audio latency? I've found remote desktop to be a bad experience as a blind developer. At a prior job we used thin clients which had decent audio performance from my desk in the office. Once Covid hit and we had to connect from home audio latency was awful and it took me an act of god to get a corporate provided laptop.

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

#45

Post by xyst »

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…

you described the work environment at pretty much any Fortune 500 company (tech or not)

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

#46

Post by surajrmal »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #36
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.

Common problems in my experience: * Build performance is crap every morning as the file cache is purged from RAM overnight and needs to refetched from remote disks * Build performance is largely determined by how much cpu and RAM others VMs on the server are using concurrently. Sometimes it's really good when it's underutilized, but sometimes it can be pretty bad as you are no longer using more resources than you were allocated * Trying to interact with it via a GUI (chrome remote desktop for instance) is quite laggy. This doesn't bother me as I am already on the ssh + tmux gravy train.

I really appreciate the consistency of dedicated hardware and really don't want to give it up.

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

#47

Post by thorncorona »

jareds wrote: post #44
thorncorona wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What's the audio latency? I've found remote desktop to be a bad experience as a blind developer. At a prior job we used thin clients which had decent audio performance from my desk in the office. Once Covid hit and we had to connect from home audio latency was awful and it took me an act of god to get a corporate provided laptop.

They are more like a super well connected SSH client. I think you could probably get X11 / audio up on it but I’ve never had the need to.

Development on an internal fork of VS code (web page) which sets up all the build tooling for you to use your cloud top as your build eng. Includes ML based completion as well which is nice.

So if you have used VS code I’d imagine the accessibility is similar as audio is rendered locally?

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

#48

Post by flangola7 »

lovich wrote: post #7
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.

> 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 can't think of any place I've worked where I had my own dedicated seat. There's 168 hours in a week that seat could be used and I only need it for 40.

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

#49

Post by gedy »

_nalply wrote: post #39
gedy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I guess I was referring to more optional type work like inventing their own frameworks and abstractions, refactors for code style, major rework of some in-house blob of code that could easily be done with an off the shelf library, etc.

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

#50

Post by xracy »

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…

This is such a stupid short-term saving for a long-term cost. It's frustrating to me how focused shareholders are on saving a quick buck via stock buy-backs, employee layoffs, leaving real estate agreements. It's a bunch of number misdirection to try and make it look like the company is earning more money when they're just losing a little bit less. https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/google-7billion-re... will have a cost. They just won't see it until it's too late.
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