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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

#91

Post by financypants »

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…

Their duty is to keep revenue or profitability up and to the right. Every quarter that they don’t do this, analysts will grill the management team about what happened and what will change. The company is forced into a cycle, quarter by quarter, of underestimating earnings, outperforming estimates, and pleasing investors.

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

#92

Post by murderberry »

Real estate is just a slog. It takes years to build new office space. Lease opportunities come up on weird schedules and tend to be long-term too. They're likely offloading the space they started acquiring pre-COVID, or in the first year of (when the industry was hiring like crazy), because they're not optimistic about being able to fill it any time soon.

They could probably spread things out instead, but real estate is stupidly expensive, and Google was never known for spacious accommodations (maybe except for some remote offices). I can't imagine they have any motivation to spend more if their approach worked fine for more over a decade.

I don't love it, but how many applicants walked away because of cramped open spaces? How many top performers quit for that reason? We just put up with it.

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

#93

Post by rwiggins »

krasin wrote: post #31
grogenaut wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is google actually hot desking or is that a extrapolation on them cutting office space.

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 partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want.

3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway.

4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner.

5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...)

To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking.

And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

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

#94

Post by unglaublich »

Animats wrote: post #80

So do the people at Google who handle real estate rentals talk to the people who ordered everyone to come back to the office?

The observation is that offices are underused, so both space reduction and a presence increase improve this statistic.

It's not like you can only do one thing, then keep the rest of your operations still.

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

#96

Post by jedmeyers »

Osiris wrote: post #68
space_invaders wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.com/watch?v=3t6L-FlfeaI). It's all about perspective, and CEO thought the other perspective was more valuable.

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

#97

Post by I_am_uncreative »

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…

Working in an office is better than working from home in my experience, but hot-desking is a stupid idea.

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

#98

Post by jaggederest »

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…

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 majority of executive comp is in stock - imagine if bad optics could force you to take a 60% pay cut, you'd be pretty conservative with your choices.

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

#99

Post by pempem »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #15
bluefirebrand wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You thought it was bad before, now we're going to cram you into an even smaller open floor plan.

About 6 months ago my manager, who happens to prefer RTO told me how if I only visit office sometime, I should not expect to have a desk. I was amused, but I did not ask if that means I can just stay home then. Clearly management class figured out a fun little plan. Announce RTO so that people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount ( lower cost ), introduce hybrid ( so that you can claim you are flexible in postin…

I love this approach.

Our org had a different plan. They put the entire office (region based) on organized teams and sent out an email. You get team points based on: - visits to the office - meals in the office - attendance at after hours events - etc. etc.

SMDH. I can see the article headline now "Innovative gamification in the office"

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

#100

Post by adastra22 »

thesuitonym wrote: post #20
barbazoo wrote: post #5

They're getting rid of real estate yet force people to work from the office at least n days a week. Why not embrace remote and get rid of even more real estate.

Company I work for did this. Our CFO said he never wants to deal with real estate again. I will follow this man to the depths of hell and back.

No you won’t. You’ll be behind your keyboard on a beach while he goes to hell and back.
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