> Questioner: Do you recall that a year or so before Mr. Levandowski left, he announced that he was going to leave?
> Page: I mean, I wish I had a penny for every time employees do that and don't go. It happens pretty often.
It's really a testament to the HR and REWS departments that they've constructed a workspace and a compensation package that keeps so many people there despite their own intentions! Masterful really.
Please refrain from insulting every employee of a company as an idiot sheep simply because you don't like the company.
Some people just love what they do.
Stuff like bathroom visits, showers, etc aren't usually a big deal since 1) we didn't get paged that often (see the SRE Book on proper alerting design) and 2) three minutes is longer than you'd think. Usually plenty of time to "wrap things up" and get back to your laptop.
If your internet dropped out, you'd either switch to tethering, get your secondary to cover while you drove to the office or a coffee shop, or worst case contact your manager to help find emergency coverage.
Normally when I was oncall, I'd be on the couch playing video games or watching a movie with my work laptop nearby and logged into a shell on my work desktop.
What's the line from the first episode of Silicon Valley "I don't want to become a Hooli-lifer"?
I've always thought that REWS was much more beneficial for recruiting, in the phase when they walk you around campus and show you all the impressive public spaces, and talk about all the nice services they offer. The one thing they don't show you is the huge, loud, windowless open office space where the team you'll be joining actually works. And by constantly shrinking that space, removing cube walls, and making workplaces more and more miserable, I think they actually hurt retention.
When I left Google in June of 2015, my team was just about to be transitioned from an older building on the main campus where we had actual cubes with walls (nevermind that there were already 6 people per cube) and a few shared offices, into a modern design in Sunnvale, with just a giant room with tables and little/no dividers. Between loosing access to all the cool things on the main campus (cafe choice, gyms, events like TGIF) and the new, crappy workspace, it just seemed like a gigantic downgrade.
I now work from home in the middle of nowhere, where I have an office with a door I can close, and a window for natural light. (and working remotely was something else that was not possible at Google)
'But you ... do ...?'