Are Google employees more productive because of company perks? | Hacker News Reader

Are Google employees more productive because of company perks?

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36 pointsundefined140 comments

Xoogler here; this information is circa 2015.

The infamous perks are low-order bits for personal productivity. For example, on-site food is nice, but making it free actually hurts productivity: larger crowds so you spend more time waiting, you are more likely to travel between different cafes just to sample things, etc.

However company-wide these are much more valuable because they improve recruiting and especially retention. Nothing hurts productivity like employee turnover! This is why they are a smart investment for the company.

As for personal productivity, these were the biggest perks:

1. The shuttle. This gave me effectively two additional hours working instead of driving.

2. Fast hardware. I had a 64 GB Mac Pro, plus laptops and dev servers. Sweet!

But there were also "anti-perks" that hurt my productivity:

1. Cramped and ghastly loud open office (building 40). It was difficult to focus.

2. Insufficient physical space. My job required wiring up a lot of PCBs and prototype hardware, but I had the same desk as someone just writing code. I had to "swap" my physical setups.

3. Highly distributed team. Having key team members in Asia meant ~16 hour cycle time for questions, code review, etc. (Plus expect to spend a portion of each meeting fighting with VC.)

However if we take productivity as literally "producing valuable things" and not false metrics like LOC or bug fix count, then IMO these were the highest company-wide productivity killers:

1. Leadership churn, leading to project churn and cancellation. Not the healthy reevaluation of underperforming projects, but rather arbitrary "make a mark" changes associated with new directors/VPs.

2. Performance review over-weighting "creating something new" leading to unnecessary duplication. A Googler who creates a (say) new build system excels the one who adapts an existing build system. This is visible all the way to the product level, e.g. their many chat apps.

I've had offsite food before and onsite food. Yes onsite food comes with queues, but meet up while working + queue + eat still beats the hell out of travel + meet up while waiting + travel + queue + eat + travel.

In my experience, onsite food (free or cheap) is often 30 to 45 minutes. Offsite food starts at 45 minutes and can be occasionally up to two hours and this is mostly out of your control.

I imagine this is pretty dependent on the exact area you work in though.

I don't work at Google, but I think their productivity comes from not wasting time. I had some interactions over the years so here is what I have noticed (might not be true, might not be all, might depend on the teams I interacted with).

There seems to be a lot of effort to remove day to day time wasters in small things.

Then, if you think about it, having subpar teammates is also a waste of time. They are not only wasting their own time but also everybody elses. So making sure you don't let people with IQ less than certain threshold is also important for everybodys productivity.

Solving a problem once is extremely important. Instead of reinventing infrastructure for each and every project at the company as many companies do (mine, one of the largest banks in the world, in my team there are still people who are devoted to maintaining a handful of servers running Windows -- including completely custom everything from project structure, to build, to configuration mechanisms, everything reinvented for the project). Solving a problem once also means you can focus on a single problem because you are solving this problem for an entire company.

If you do Agile right you get to the part at the core of the process where you mercilessly optimize your process. I think most companies talk about Agile where Google is one of the very few that actually do it.

I was surprised at how much time _is_ wasted. Lunch is free of cost, but because there are long lines at times it can take easily 15 minutes of wait time, and that doesn't even count time spent going to a cafe in a farther building, rounding up coworkers to go with, etc.

Time is wasted when a team works for years on something that ultimately is not bringing value to the company because the vision was not clear or execution was pitiful. Time is wasted when everybody repeats same thing without enough benefit. Time is wasted when you are working on a project while you could do something else with better return for the company.

That 15 minutes in line? Well, you probably had to stand up and socialize anyway...

Having a high IQ is less important than ensuring people can actually work together. Some of the worst people I've worked with were incredibly smart but were absolutely demoralizing to actually be on a team with because of their behavior.

Some of the comments here suggest that the Google's perks are bad because they corrode work/life balance and encourage employees to stay longer.

Having worked at some of the FANGs, I can say that this effect of these perks on work/life decisions is very very small. Most people enjoy the perks and do what they were going to do anyway. Most of my teammates won't stay for free dinner because they'd rather spend time with their friends and families. Most people work from home all the ~once/week.

When work/life balance is bad, it's because of a desire to perform or managerial pressure; not because you get free food and an on-site dentist. Generally the perks are conveniences and genuinely nice to have, and if they are part of a sinister plot to exploit workers, they are pretty bad at it.

Does anyone else thinks this question is not well defined? Because, 1. How do you define employee productivity? 2. How do you know that Google employees have more productivity as opposed to other companies?

The analysis becomes even more convoluted when "employees" encompasses everyone from engineer to janitor to executive.

"Do Google's incredible perks make employees more productive or just way, way, happier?"

Also, one possible answer is that the perks don't make the employees more productive, but they attract more productive employees.

What evidence points towards higher productivity at Google? In my opinion, this is largely a myth.

When Google acquired Motorola, snotty Googlers paraded around claiming to be at least 2X smarter than the average Motorola employee. They publicly proclaimed to turn around a sinking ship and produce iPhone killers, emphasis on plural, within a few quarters.

But none of that famed productivity or genius amounted to measurable results.

An objective analysis will reveal that Google's main business - online advertising- has been so damn profitable for them that they've absorbed hundreds, if not thousands of failed projects burning billions. One might argue that any other company with the ability to subsidize this this kind of failure will churn out scores of projects with little chance of success, projecting an image of productivity.

Ponder on this for a moment, if everyone outside core advertising, AI, YouTube and Android are fired from Google tomorrow, their revenue and profit will barely budge. What % of Google do to think work on those products? So how productive do you deem the average Googler is?

I'm guessing that, even if it wasn't more productive, the perks help keep Google employees at Google and not, say, at a competitor.

A lot of the answers say yes, but I would say no. One of the answers touches on what I think might be the real cause for high productivity:

> The problems you work on are new and interesting

> The people you work with are smart and helpful

I would add the great infrastructure, which is probably the main reason.

But none of these are perks that folks usually think of when they think of Google perks.

I feel as I would hate to work there.

They are creating all these things to make it a 2nd home for people. They want people to be there a LONG time.

I'm happy with 40hrs with some days remote and I don't think I could switch to googles approach.

But you have no idea that you wouldn't be able to continue with your 40hrs and some days remote if you had a job at Google. There are lots of people who have a positive work/life balance at Google. Some take advantage of some perks, some others, and some don't use very many at all, but the fact is that there are many perks available catering to a huge spectrum of desires, whether that means fitness, food, social, cultural, technology, or financial.

Just because Google offers onsite laundry and serves three meals a day doesn't mean employees have to participate. But having them makes it a more appealing place to a broader range of potential candidates, and a friendlier place for employees, too.

Do people who work 40 hours a week get promoted?

Working long hours has zero to do with getting promoted.

I don't think that they want you to stay there for a long time, because they serve only cold food in the evening (Zurich office). It is also OK to work from home from time to time (has to be agreed with manager).

Not covered in first answer: you could leave at 6, but if you stay till 7 there's a roast dinner. I suspect people who still work at Google are sometimes a little blind to their own behaviour.

In college I automatically filtered out companies that provided dinner for this reason. If you want a free meal you have to stay late. But then if you leave immediately after it looks like you were just staying for the free food so you may as well stay until 8 to look like a team player. It's a pattern I didn't want to start

Any option for take out?

Yes. There are (or used to be) to-go containers. Lots of people stayed late enough to just grab food, when I was there. You already stayed that late, it's fine. You can go home without judgement.

Further, a not-insignificant fraction of people stop working in the 4-6 range, do non-work activities on campus (gym, volleyball, various classes), and then eat dinner and leave. I've certainly never felt any form of pressure to work until (or past) dinner.

When I was there (London, finished 2012) they stopped these - apparently some folk were loading up and feeding their families.

Who are the people that actually care about all this? I've yet to find anyone who cares that someone leaves early or stays late or stays just for the meal or whatever. The only thing people seems to care about is, very reasonably, output.

This is true for the 3 big tech companies I've worked for (which is the topic of this thread). Sometimes I get in at 10, sometimes 7. Sometimes I leave at 4, sometimes 8. I've yet to have someone comment on my schedule.

Yet I continue to see people say stuff like "oh free dinner is a trap! ahh!" "A gym on campus? Oh don't fall for it!" I don't get it.

When I was deciding to interview with Google, I picked one of their non-primary offices (which I considered to be Mountain View, Seattle, and NYC). I believe it was a specific decision and continued philosophy of the site director here to not serve dinner to encourage a healthier work/life balance.

Young, brilliant programmers but still totally dependent on the approval of their peers - to the degree that they not only work very late to get food, they stay even longer to avoid someone judging them.

I bet they even make excuses before leaving at 8 pm... Its really very sad that smart human beings act like that due purely to social pressure.

So is this something you've experienced personally, or is it just speculation?

The last couple companies I worked at offered a dinner at ~8:00. There was no pressure to attend and as far as I know hardly anyone did.

I've worked for a company that offered dinner significantly before 8pm. The number of employees actually staying that late, or eating dinner was not particularly high. Primarily it was the people who didn't show up until quite late in the morning, or sometimes not until early afternoon.

Twitter had dinner at the SF office but they discontinued it after they realized that the amount of people that used it didn't justify the cost of operating the kitchen that late. They replaced it with a take-out option, prepared by the kitchen. I really like this since it still allows a useful perk but gives people the option of where/how the take advantage of it.

Edit: it's not free but highly subsidized.

Quora sure does take in a lot of data.

What’s this comment getting at? I don’t follow.

Quora compels users to hand over sensitive personal data, combines that with any other data it can, makes mental health diagnoses on its users, and generally offers creepy content.

Journalism/editing tip: Never start a headline with a question. And definitely never start a headline with a question that can be answered: "No" by a reasonable guestimation.

How did that come to be a best practice? I like titles with questions because they can frame the scope and objective of the article really well.

In journalism, the argument is as follows: If the answer to the question is "yes," it is a stronger/more authoritative headline to simply assert instead of pose a question.

Therefore, any headline that poses a question will result in the answer being "no."

It doesn't apply in this case because it's a Quora question and not an editorialized piece of journalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

Interesting, thanks

In this case it's not a headline, it's literally a question that was asked.

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