Google recommends all North America employees work from home
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I have a feeling a lot of value is created during casual lunch conversations.
I was a wfh maximalist like many on this thread at the very beginning of my career, but AFAICT it just comes from some combination of a) being a junior engineer that works on isolated bits of work and didn't need to communicate cross-team much or b) having work that doesn't require much creative collaboration. As I got more senior and moved towards different types of problems, my appreciation for the value of (though I still do enjoy and make time for WFH).
For those who say that Slack or email or VC are perfect substitutes: there's no substitute for the high-bandwidth, low-latency medium of personal communication. Get good enough at running meetijgs of more than two people and you realize how much of the task of efficiently running a meeting involves reading micro-expressions and pauses to pick up on cues that help you direct the conversation (not to mention having n points of failure in a VC being accessed by n network connections). My team has been remote for a week and I've already noticed good meeting runners have worse meetings and bad meetings runners have even worse meetings.
Not exactly the most productive WFH conditions.
Most Junior engineers aren't working remotely. I've been working remotely for a decade with different companies and almost all of the developers on my teams have been mid-level to senior. The junior developers always struggled and had so many roadblocks, it made working remotely difficult.
It's really not that difficult to replace an in-person meeting with Webex voice call and/or screensharing. I go onsite once every 3 months for a couple of hours and it's all that's needed.
Our meetings regularly have 10+ people from different departments.
Only for people who can't read.
I will be really happy when this is all over and I can just go into the office and not think about it.
I'm only trying to argue against a common sentiment here on HN, that working from home is more productive.
My personal beliefs are that a single WFH day a week in most instances might be net-positive for the company.
The first year was a struggle but after that I've been solid.
https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...
https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-harvard-study-you-o...
https://www.bisnow.com/london/news/office/the-proof-is-here-...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/billconerly/2018/08/16/open-off...
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/313034
For the bonus:
Commuting is also pretty bad for productivity.
https://www.tlnt.com/how-commute-issues-can-dramatically-imp...
Many employees are new to remote work, and are now distracted by the virus, changes in the workplace, etc. This leads to bottlenecks for anyone relying on upstream work, and there's a chain reaction. I'm waiting a lot longer for work correspondence and code reviews.
It's reasonable to be distracted right now -- doesn't seem too bad yet, but it's impossible to work at capacity with these factors.
And that's in a hard-charging company like Google. Other companies are worse: ~13 years ago I worked at Microsoft and we had a period where the team just didn't do any work at all, for like 2 months. Everyone still showed up and pretended to be busy AF, but nothing got done. Lots of meetings and watercooler conversations got done though. Lots of status reporting as well. By any traditional metric people appeared to be "productive". But nothing got done all the same.
Whether it's amazing or terrible depends on execution (and obviously other things), and transitioning in a week makes it even harder. Lean on someone experienced.
People have been making coffee like this for centuries and continue to do so without a problem. It's a no-cost fixable situation you're in.
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1237577750480740353?s=1...
This is just part of being an adult. You can manage! You can get used to anything.
And is your work actually closer than Starbucks? I don't understand that one.
Hoping I can expense the tp at least.
Unblock yourself maybe? Pitch to your management that your productivity is bad and get them to either: a) let you bring hardware home, or b) expense your monitors for WFH.
So sorry about the dishes, but perhaps your dish washing efficiency will improve? If it's directly impactful to your productivity now for a single individual's daily calories it suggests you've got a lot to learn here! Perhaps a G2G course once normal business returns?
In terms of the monitor I can't help you, my most productive years were on an 11" MacBook air with a single tmux session. A 13" laptop sounds heavy.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google)
Is google not giving its employees monitors during this time? I find that surprising but also you could just go to Best Buy.
(b) If you're really unable or unwilling to cook or do the dishes, food delivery services are still running and the restaurants they deliver from will be happy to have your order. Order hot food and re-heat it on arrival if you're worried about getting infected from your food. Or maybe look at once of the box-meal delivery services, you still need to cook, but most of the prep work is done.
(c) buy a cheap monitor for now and sell or donate it after you go back to work. You can get a refurb 22" monitor for $50 or so which must be better than a 13" laptop display.
You could also make or buy cold brew coffee (Amazon Fresh delivers large Chameleon cold brew containers to many areas). It stays fresh pretty long if you keep it refrigerated.
However, you can’t deny the benefits of going remote if the above is a wash depending on the company.
It's a different thing when you go into it with the attitude that 1) it is permanent 2) you're expected to be productive as any other full time employee on normal days, onsite or not 3) you'll be fired if you goof off too much.
First, the company has always been extremely supportive. Many employees have been working from home exclusively for years and nearly all of us WFH from time to time at least. The processes and expectations are well established. Engineers have always been supplied with a laptop in addition to their workstation, so WFH has always been immediately possible for everyone. You get your pick of hardware, but all the systems and services and processes have been optimized to make it reasonable (not just possible) to get serious engineering work done with nothing but a Chromebook. I've seen many programmers working _at the office_ from a Chromebook because they liked the interface. But for most of us... it's not optimal.
Corp work has to be done on Corp-owned hardware. This is enforced by technical controls that can't readily be circumvented, so even if you have a great computer at home, you'll be working from your laptop. Many of us at the kitchen table. Unless, of course, you've gotten a corp-issued rig in your house... which can't have happened in the past couple of months because the computer hardware supply chain in China has been shut down for a long time. Think you'll just go buy a nice monitor from Best Buy and dock it with your laptop? You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
At a team level, it's been a mess. Productivity is definitely not up. We still get a lot of stuff done and we haven't adjusted any of our forecasts, but coordination has become a whole lot harder. Sure the company has been generally ready for this for a long time, but as individuals we were a bit blind-sided by the suddenness of it. Oh, and the local school district has gone "remote-learning" as well for this month (think WFH, but for 9-year-olds), so local parents are doubling as home-school proctors. It's not a distraction-free environment.
Thing is, we wouldn't have offices if it we didn't work more efficiently there. It's not like working from home is something foreign to us; like I said, we all do it as often as we like. Each of us maybe a couple of days a month, as circumstances require. But sending everyone home at the same time, that hasn't been the utopia it might seem to the casual onlooker.
You have a great computer at home, but it has no monitor and you use it from the kitchen table? I have a "decent" computer at home, and I plug my work laptop into the monitor when I work from home.
You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).
You'd think that living and working in the Seattle area that you'd have heard of a little online retailer based in Seattle called Amazon. They can deliver a name-brand 27" 1920x1080 monitor to you tomorrow for less than $150. Want a nice 32 inch wide screen 3840x2160 like you ahve at work? That's closer to $350 but you can still have it tomorrow. I see lots of monitors in stock there (as well as on Newegg and bhphotovideo, my other go-to online merchants).
If I didn't already have a good monitor at home and desk to put it on, I'd just buy a cheap $99 27" monitor and set it up on the kitchen table during the day, then if I no longer needed it after the office re-opened, I'd donate it somewhere.
At my company, WFH hasn't been an issue so far -- we have multiple offices and everyone was already used to using Slack and video conference meetings. To be honest, it's even easier to hold a meeting now since no one needs to find a conference room (they are always in short supply). But everyone uses a laptop as their primary computer, if they need something more powerful, they use a cloud VM.
Frankly, its a little bizarre that you have non-laptop company issued hardware for doing work. No company I've ever worked at, from small tech startups to large, non-tech Fortune 500 companies in industries not known for being cutting edge, would have these issues. But every company I've worked at issued everyone uses laptops, utilized team software (Slack/Teams), and had options for either using ssh into on more powerful onsite servers or cloud computing, for the instances where it is required.
https://www.teamblind.com/post/Every-Engineer-in-my-team-at-...
I cope with loneliness by throwing parties inviting people I don't know but am somehow connected with, either via language studies, art clubs, hobbies etc. I partied with billionaires, professors from Princeton etc. that way.
I've visited Google offices occasionally on weekends, and they're ghost towns.
It might be that a lot of disagreement about the viability of WFH is simply due to people having different types of work in mind.
IMO, it’s a real estate thing more than a productivity thing.
If we’re talking about weeks-months of WFH, then going from Office->WFH->Office seems like the more likely plan. Like how experiencing a blizzard may mean not going to the office for 1-2 weeks, but at some point a return will happen.
Companies that own/rent nice, expensive buildings to contain hundreds/thousands of employees are not going to write it off and stop using them for full-remote all of a sudden. The physiological value of WFH is not as quantifiable to bean count as property asset value.
I've worked in an office for years, and then transitioned to working from home for years. The initial transition was rough: snacking, lack of motivation, lack of structure.
But it only took about a month to get past that. You start building your own routine and structure, optimized to your life, not a mandated 9-5. Not only am I more efficient and less stressed at home, I'm pretty certain I actually "work" more hours than sitting at an office.
And I'm a pretty extroverted person, that thrives with other human contact. When working from home, I get to choose when to socialize/collaborate, it isn't hoisted on me.
I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Or were you saying that as "they will now learn about the advantages after this experiment"?
I also don't think it's a clean experiment as many other factors are impacting people's productivity anyways, but the results will definitely be interesting to look at.
If 'remote work' were some really expensive investment, then we could see that it would take some to make it's way into big corps.
But it's relatively easy, and trivial to experiment with, and most companies don't do it in most cases.
All of MAGA have though- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540831
And theories why the reaction in the US is or seems to be more intense?
Further the risk of transmission is higher from low wage workers who can neither afford to take time off nor afford health care. Sick days are not a guaranteed (California guarantees only 3) and many employers will fire employees who take even unpaid sick days.
In my current Bay Area employment, if I am sick I stay home. If I feel well enough to work I do, otherwise I don't. No questions/justifications asked besides giving my teammates a heads up over text.
When I worked for a French company, being sick meant having to go to the doctor (writing a 23 euro check out of pocket that was reimbursed a month or two later) to get an official sick note to justify my absence from work, otherwise I would get penalized.
I don't disagree with your hypothesis, but also European paternalism is real.
With the epidemy, remote consultation with a doctor will be more mainstream, it will be easier to book a quick 20 minutes consultation and get the dematerialized note.
In my opinion, requiring people to consult a professional only has benefit. People get help, employers get proof, doctors get work.
I'm not sure how to interpret that table. The range of beds/person is amazing to me. Does that mean that some countries have more demand for beds or that some countries have shorter hospital stays (one bed serves more people per unit time) or that some countries have too few beds with people being turned away. Probably all of the above.
So that table just caused me to ask more questions rather than answering any.
This study looks at ICU/Critical Care beds, and finds also a large range but quite different ranking as above:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3551445/
Number of ICU/Critical care beds per 100,000 people:
US: 20-31.7
Canada: 13.5
Japan: 7.9
UK: 3.5-7.4
China: 2.8-4.6
And then Medicare has a wild model where they work to centralize care at regional hospitals. The local hospital here gets paid more per Medicare procedure by not staffing rooms that it does have (this is basically universal among rural US hospitals that were built more than 10 years ago).
Just as well, my commute sucked (1-2 hours). Our health insurance sucked. $13k deductible, no vision or dental.
I had interviews the very next week, 2 offers within 3 weeks. Higher salary, way better insurance and a 15 minute commute.
Edit: yes, I'm in the US
One recommendation I would make, buy a box of face masks and some hand sanitiser, but only buy the minimum amount you need. I found it absolutely ridiculous that some people here bought all the stock, so that they could keep themselves and their family safe for years, obviously that doesn't help prevent the spread if other people don't have access to those goods.
It seems the measures Hong Kong has taken works, with only around 160 cases so far. I was surprised how quickly it spread over in Europe.
I've been looking for these this past week in Arizona, but the shelves have been empty. I started going to all the stores I usually shop at multiple times per day to find something; its a drain on my time and probably increases my risk of getting stuff just by being outside.
because panic isn't really helping anybody and we've never been a particular panicked bunch. Well I guess unless inflation shoots up and we get Weimar PTSD or something. Just about the only thing that seems to really scare anyone. I think the behaviour of the tech companies is mostly theatrical because they love the PR of being at the cutting edge of pandemic behaviour or whatever but these companies employ hyper-aware nerds who probably won't touch their face in the next three month so meh.
>Germany went from 20 diagnosed cases to 1600 in about a week.
We also only had two deaths or so up until now so I think the conclusion here is that the disease is severely underdiagnosed in other countries with the exception of South Korea. We were able to diagnose so many cases because we have a relatively decentralised medical infrastructure who all have relatively high capacity.
That's one possibility; the other is what is happening in Italy right now, i.e. initial 2 weeks of infections are done and now the severe cases remain and pass away. Like in South Korea 98% cases are in progress, so the outcome is not known yet and making any stats out of those is premature (i.e. too optimistic). I'd say nobody is going to shut down whole megalopolis cities if it was just a more severe flu...
However, R0 is not a constant. For example, with good hygiene, avoiding human contacts etc it is possible to lower the rate of average number of persons each sick person infects. If we manage to do that, the threshold for herd immunity will be lower than 60 %.
My wife and I have both led by example in both choosing to work from home early on and arguing strenuously that our employers should make WFH company/University policy (which has now happened).
Be leading by example and staying home, you make everyone else safer. If the effective R_0 can be brought below 1, the outbreak will burn out. We must show our care for those who cannot fight this virus by staying home, connecting electronically, and practicing good hygiene.
https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/geographical-distribution-2019...
I don’t know if Germany is magical or lucky, but assuming a 1% death rate may be a stretch. They seem to be doing far better than Italy.
Major universities decided to close today. Public events called off. Football games without spectators for next few weeks.
In France, events >5000 and then >1000 people were cancelled.
Though with the exception that if you can't take care of your children, you can bring them to their primary school.
Ie Germany has banned mass gatherings in most states, which the US has not done.
The situation is very fast moving though, I would expect similar reaction in Europe shortly.
https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
There are several other colleges switching to remote learning and limiting on campus activity: https://www.ohio.edu/news/2020/03/president-nellis-provides-...
Sadly, I think the majority of (much larger) US population will get the virus, too. H1N1, for instance, affected 57 million people in the US and caused almost 12K deaths. And COVID19 is much deadlier than H1N1, so we're probably looking at a low six figure death toll at least, when all is said and done, no matter what we do. I'd be surprised if we manage to escape this outcome.
That describes most EU countries. Germany is neither much older than the others nor more interconnected. Population density is high but that's the case for many countries in Western Europe.
- University in southern Switzerland is closed - all universities and middle schools are closed in Slovakia
I hear similar things from my friends in other companies.
My company does not do WFH at all. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want to be 100% WFH (when there isn't a deadly plague going around, that is), but I think having one or two WFH days a week on a regular basis would be awesome for getting some dev tasks done.
I have a nice home office, that mostly goes unused during the week :(
There is no universal health care, and the fewer employees who get sick, the less money a company has to pay out in health expenditures/insurance plan premiums for the next billing cycle.
Also, this means that if you are out of work, you could easily die from preventable illnesses and nobody would really care.
Maybe its just Germany efficiency and pragmatism of just acknowledging some people are going to die and some pension obligations will disappear. Whereas the rest of us are trying not to let those thoughts surface.
EDIT: That same virologist also warned about a "second wave" of cases starting this fall, after a reduction during summer, due to seasonal strength of the immune system.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkKON9te6p3OpxqDskVsx...
If people in positions of power are trying to not let such thoughts surface, they’re being highly irresponsible.
Have you seen how much the tv news networks are loving this? The 24 hour "BREAKING NEWS" about COVID-19 is enough to send your average Joe into a panic.
But as others have pointed out, we really are being messaged to stay home if possible, and I think that's very responsible.
My main concern is that my good gear is all at my workspace, so even if I have the hardware device I'm working on with me, I can't troubleshoot it unless I have my gear.
source: Googler
Also, they might just be expecting their employees to be adults about things and do the responsible thing even if not forced to. Basically the honor system.
They closed schools, and now all the kids are playing together in the park.
There are people around, maybe just 5%, maybe 10%, but some people are definitely in office probably because they all find it easier focus in an empty office than at home, partly because of other family members going in and out, and partly because you are so used to working at your desk.
Having it be mandatory will make it hard IMO.
[BTW I do not work for Google]
I'd like to understand how eating food prepared elsewhere is safe though as it seems like the perfect delivery mechanism from someones hands to your mouth.
Buying food at restaurants is still an option for now, although not every Googler budgets for that. In my opinion, it feels like a lot more food service workers are wearing gloves, too.
Walking for every meal is good way to stay healthy in general (just not during a pandemic.)
I mean sure, most people have no problems muscling through a cold, but there may be others who will be floored by it for longer, or spread it to their families, etc. Is you not missing a day of work worth more to your employer than someone else missing a week? Or their life in the case of corona.
GOOG has 118k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOG/profile?p=GOOG)
APPL has 137k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/profile?p=AAPL)
AMZN has 798k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/profile?p=AMZN) Note: this seems incorrect.
INTC has 110k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/profile?p=INTC)
HPQ has 56k FTE (https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HPQ/profile?p=HPQ)
But there are jobs where you'd have the possibility to do this in industries that will take some re-arranging to make it work. Legal and financial for instance, call centers (some technical issues), most design and creative work.
The impossible ones are anything involving care, production and logistics. Even retail could in principle be done but it would require a massive shift on the part of the consumer. Going shopping is very much ingrained and retooling that industry for home delivery is neither fast nor simple when done on a massive scale.
We did some work with IBM a few years ago and my boss said when he went for an on-site visit it was basically a giant office building that was mostly vacant.
When I was there as a software engineer, I worked from home one day a week.
But at least at a few years ago, you couldn't work from home full-time forever. I knew folks in the Atlanta office, and after it closed they could work from home for a long while (many weeks), but needed to eventually find a position at another office or leave the company.
I try not to take HN or Reddit too seriously, because God knows that I was an idiot in my younger years too. But man, I really do hate this website some days.
Another thong is that there is broader context to what I wrote. My context was that I found it ironic how suffering of thousands improves something for other thousands so obviously plus for some other it moves the cause hence the quote seemed appropriate to express that irony.
Sorry if I hurt anybody, I didn't mean to.
smh
https://www.ft.com/content/ad7ae6b4-5eab-11ea-b0ab-339c2307b...
How is the situation a month from now going to be any better than the situation right now?
Yes, orientation week is nice and you do get to meet a lot of people from offices around the world. You'd sit through a lot of training that introduces you to Google culture. You get to be in a room of a whole bunch of people that are experiencing the same impostor syndrome as you are.
So, yes, missing it will be a bummer.
You will, however, have plenty of other chances. There's still plenty of opportunity to learn, and your team will give you lots of guidance. It'll feel like you are lost, but believe me, most people will feel like that during their first few months at Google anyway.
Take your time, and invest in yourself. Ask for help when you need it. Have a plan for feeling like you are not contributing. You will be; it just takes time.
The best thing you can do as a Noogler now is stay home unless asked. The fewer people who are on main campus makes it safer for the people that do really need to be there. I'll be at home also.
Or, as Sundar tweeted: "Contributing to social distancing if you are able to, helps the overall community spread and most importantly, will help offset the peak loads through critical healthcare systems and also saves it for people in need."
The only moment I remember of that week was them handing me my badge on the first or second day.
I've been on mandatory WFH (not Google, but Bay Area) starting last week and start dates have been pushed out for now.
This might change though if things go on for months, I think people are reevaluating on a weekly basis as we learn more.
I would worry more about the actual crisis the world is going through (not that I'm saying you need to be overly worried, just that in context, that's the bigger issue).