Why A.I. Researchers at Google Got Desks Next to the Boss

It is hard to express how much this story reads like a submarine: http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Particularly, there seems nothing super newsworthy here, in terms of the fact that normally speaking, internal arrangement of a workplace office doesn't make the New York Times. But if one of the aforementioned three companies is pushing the AI buzz, dropping the names of Silicon Valley's top executives in a piece like this seems pretty much the stock way to do it.

Google in particular has revamped it's entire imagine and identity as a company around being "an AI company".

It's hard to imagine where this article originated from other than a PR firm.

Brings back memories of Plus team all being close to leadership at Google... this is more of an ego thing for leadership and the lucky few deemed to be the most important.

If the "most important" were really seated next to leadership at Google it should be Adwords team.

Counterpoint, just for the heck of it :-)

How awful! One would expect the vicinity of high-level managers to have a lot of activity... people walking in and out for discussions, visitors throughout the day, high-level management walking around potentially asking questions which might pull a researcher out from 3-levels deep problem solving! Maybe what researchers need are comfortable working environment (desks, chairs, boards, discussion rooms) and the right amount of stimulation -- maybe a few discussions with colleagues to spark ideas, and not too much generally distracting bustle.

My only point is that it is far from obvious whether this seating arrangement is beneficial.

Why on earth would yo want to sit next to the "boss"?!

Kind of reminds me of this old HBR article on a similar topic

https://hbr.org/2012/02/does-it-matter-where-your-top

which had a link to this interesting paper

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...