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.
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 posting even if you offer 1 remote day out of 5 and save real estate at the same time ), sell non-performing real estate ( lower cost ) and cramming employees into rotating cubicles ( efficiency ).
What does it all translate to? Bonuses.
I am not exactly a revolutionary type, but its now or never if you are on a particular side of the fence. Whatever window is there to establish a normal, it is closing now.
It's not like you can only do one thing, then keep the rest of your operations still.
I love this state. I feel so at home here. I have traveled and lived all around the US. I didn’t feel that anywhere else but here in CA. Anywhere in this state, I feel at home. The diversity of people, geographies, and weather. So amazing.
a) how dense was google office space in the before times?
b) what their remaining portfolio of office space is?
As for question B, Moffett Place alone was 1.9 million square feet, so shedding 1.4 million square feet is not that big of a deal. It’s about what the press reported them acquiring in 2019.
that's got nothing on what my animation co-workers dealt with in movies where they were just far enough not to bump elbows on the perimiter of a sound stage / mocap area. Worse they had a 2nd row of other coders above you on grating. They didn't let women on the upper deck due to look ups.
They want people to RTO ??? But they're deleting the office? "Never let them know your next move!"
Considering the high CoL people have already moved other places and this is a reflection of that ?
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? You're literally a tech company, you make all kinds of collaborative technology.
I'm selling my Google stock. They've gone full IBM and are legacy tech.
And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?
Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.
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 making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”
I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.
So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.
Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.
GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.
I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.
Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.
Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".
[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...
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.
The tools you use are culture-defining.
I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it
Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO
My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc
This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time
Google went public is what happened. You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter.
just because it's a US tech-world cultural norm for companies to mostly be run in fucking stupid short term ways, it doesn't mean it's actually required. especially in the case of Google, where 1) Eric, Larry and Sergey have stiched up the entire board's voting power, 2) doesn't need to raise cash via bonds or stock at all and 3) it's a magic money tree, so investors will accept being told to fuck off and let the CEO run the company however they think it'll work best.
Google also IPOed in 2004...are you seriously suggesting that it hasn't been a
> forward thinking and innovative company
for ... 19 years? that's a pretty bold take.
Ironically, Google doesn't care about their shareholders and quarters like other tech companies. They don't provide a guidance, their earnings calls have little substance, and their disclosure is atrocious.
Their AI strategy has been a joke as far as I can tell. That’s not helping.
Their “regular” services are ok, but nothing I would pay for.
They are downsizing and dropping staff left and right. This might be a good signal: they are being realistic and riding this one out, but I’m not getting good vibes.
Tbh I love the project I work on and I’m still learning tons. But I wish we could have more confidence in our leadership instead of hoping to be insulated from whatever their whims are this month.
But I disagree that in-person is the worst way of working. I think some people are more productive in areas that are well-defined. But if teamwork, group problem solving or large amounts of communication is required (such as onboarding a junior), then there is no comparison: In-person has far more communication points than remote. Working in a team remotely requires you to schedule every communication point. This is frustrating when most information that gets passed between people is by osmosis / overhearing.
A long time ago when I worked there, I didn't like working in the office sometimes, but sitting out on the balcony with a laptop wasn't so bad. Can't do that on a sub :-)
It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact
But it's not even just Google. I haven't been back to my company's office because they insist on not assigning a desk. Every time I wanna go in I have find a random desk to sit in.
Wouldn't some sort of LRU scheme work better as some sort of PAGE-ing algorithm? Maybe RANK the employees to group by locality.
It's the circle of business life.
Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days.
Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?
I don't know a single person who prefers in-office work who thinks that remote is more effective, but I know many who have the opposite opinion but prefer the flexibility.
Maybe there isn't a realistic way to make remote as productive. I'm honest enough to say that the social pressure that people bemoan makes me significantly more productive. I wish it didn't, but it absolutely does. The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think.
Managers and leaders have acknowledged this and finally we're moving towards getting work done again.
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?
There are plenty of competent people all over the world that can’t move easily for whatever reason - usually family.
Shout out to a TSMC interview where M.C. was saying TSMC is just better because instead of running 1 shift a day of trying shit, they ran the fab always & got 3x the shifts a day.
Same story, but different timebase. Utilization. How can we do great for space, & utilize it well? We are so far away from that level of smart management. Such idiotic returnalism. Space wasn't good before. If we want to return, how do we de-suck it? Admittedly better utilization feels like an anti goal for de-suck, so extra hard mode: how do we make good utilization a win win win?
