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Comment by muzani | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing this a lot. I had an interview with a giant telco and the head of recruitment proudly tells me how Google like they are. They have bright colors, beanbags, and nice lighting.

I ask them if devices are part of the workplace, they tell me no, you bring your own laptop. There are lots of open desks, but the seats are uncomfortable and I don't see a single monitor or keyboard.

We go down to the meeting rooms. They show me the coffee + barista, the bowling alley, and the nice grass like carpets.

It seems to surprise them that when I go to work, I actually want to be productive. I enjoy getting things done. I'm not there to go bowling, or play video games, or watch Netflix. A productive developer is a happy developer.

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It's the typical big corporation superficial vision of a trend. Just like when an ad tries to appeal to youngsters: it always looks ridiculous to the target. They use what they think is cool, instead of what actually is because they don't care about understanding anything, they just want to pretend they do.

The corporate equivalent are agile methods with plenty of tooling but no direct communication with the client, open spaces yet still 100 layers of hierarchy, empowerement that means more responsability and no leverage, and the usual "we have plenty of cool looking equipment except what you actually need to get the work done".

I don't want a dual screen and 16Gb of RAM because I feel cool with it. I do because I'm paid $800/day and wasting time with something that can be solved for a few hundred dollars is just bad economics.

> empowerement that means more responsibility and no leverage

Wow, that so succinctly summarizes how I've felt at more than one workplace

Spend 1000$ on a biljards table, save 100,000$ in recruitment cost, and yet another 10 million in salary cost as you will get only new grads, just hope some of them can actually code. Then outsource everything that is technically challenging.

What is the point in having the college grads then?

To find out what parts are technically challenging.

To keep out the riff-raff and unwashed masses. "We hire only the best!"

> The corporate equivalent are agile methods with plenty of tooling but no direct communication with the client, open spaces yet still 100 layers of hierarchy, empowerement that means more responsability and no leverage, and the usual "we have plenty of cool looking equipment except what you actually need to get the work done".

Very well put.

I complained about similar things at Google.

They had this internal newsletter where REWS would expound on new office buildings opening, or renovated buildings re-opening. They would always highlight the impressive public spaces, with baristas, games, living plant walls, old cars built into sculptures, whatever. But they NEVER, NOT ONCE, gave any coverage to the areas where people worked. I don't know about you, but I spend 80-90% of my time at work at my desk. I was in an older building that had actual 6' tall cube walls, with real desks. When visiting other teams, I was horrified to learn that these new spaces had cramped worktables with low or no partitions. At least there were still assigned space, and keyboards & monitors (and workstations for most engineers).

Thankfully I left Google before my group was moved to such a building.

I recently saw the design of my employer's new office. Looks modern and trendy. And yet I'm told they're taking away all of our desktops and laptops, replacing them with thin clients connected to VMs (running on crappy server hardware) and in the new office we won't even have an assigned desk, every day will be a constant battle for a limited number of seats. It's the appearance of being cool while scratch just beneath the surface and it's the exact opposite. God forbid you want to put a picture of your family on your desk or work without an internet connection.

It's really surprising that a large teleco woudln't even supply their own computers... Do they make people install management software on their personal computers, or just not care?

I really like the idea of the same computer being used both for all my personal information and for looking up whatever particularly heinous pornography gets you through another "We won't change anything but the icon and call it 5G" mentally draining and demoralizing meeting.

That part is really difficult for me to believe. I've worked minimum wage jobs where I've been assigned a laptop, a telco required their employees to buy a computer and bring said nasty personal device on their network? What about minimum specs? Network requirements? Motoring and compliance??

I think there must have a misunderstanding or that was a situation I've never seen in corporate america.

Said company wasn't American. I'm not sure if this is related, but they were going through this "flat organization" reorganization, where everyone, from CEO to janitors shared the same benefits. I feel that they cropped out benefits like corporate PCs to the people who needed them.

But it could be a misunderstanding. I hope it's a misunderstanding because it was baffling. They informed me that once upon a time they did have cubicles and desktops, but those are gone.

> cropped out benefits like corporate PCs

But that's not a benefit; that's required for performing the job. Did they also make the janitors bring their own brooms/mops/vacuums?

The fact that they let you bring your own laptop is a good sign. In big french corp, they give you very slow laptop on which they installed a windows with a lot of security so that you can't install work-related programs like docker or sometime even intellij. The french big corp work station is a nightmare and a reason not to work for them by itself.

If you can bring your own laptop, at least you can choose one which can do the job. Big improvement compared to big corp laptop.

I doubt they'll just let you run your personal OS on your byod laptop. Big companies frequently get attacked, at least according to the infosec guy at the place I work. That includes employees stealing info or people including partners with privileged access or former employees trying to get into the office to get information from other people. You can bet you'll end up with a slow craptop bogged down by DLP software once they're done making it "secure" but now it's your laptop on the line.

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