Google CEO tells employees return to office won't happen until at least June 1 | Hacker News Reader

Google CEO tells employees return to office won't happen until at least June 1

cnbc.com

24 pointsdsavant13 comments

Genuine question: do people really expect to be back in the office at all this year, given how high the risk is and that those jobs can almost certainly be done from home? Why?

Yes, it's almost certain that people will be back in the office this year. Not everyone agrees that office jobs can be done remotely; even if they can in principle, many people don't in practice have a good enough home office setup to be truly productive.

Not all jobs can be done from home, and it's not all or nothing. I work with hardware, just having one person be able to work alone in our lab would be a massive improvement as there's test equipment we couldn't move. I don't see much risk there. Others might face similar challenges accessing materials (physical or virtual) that need to be kept somewhere secure.

EDIT: Also need to remember the challenges for parents. It can be incredibly hard to be productive at home with kids around, and ability to trade off the responsibility of watching them and working would be huge.

I'd love to (I'm not in the USA, but I've been working from home since March 3rd). My job is stressful enough as it is, and I want a complete separation of my work life from everything else (after a burnout which wrecked me in 2004, that has been my policy).

I thought my commute (short: 40 mins maximum) was tedious, but then I realized how much it was helping me disconnecting from work mode.

There are 1001 active cases left in Australia so I hope that locked borders will mean that internally we will be back to somewhat normal by July top. Somewhat normal is that something like festivals and concerts will be still banned.

Natural given bay area shelter in place extension to end of May

What was the reason GOOG didn't have work from home before March?

Because there were hardly any Covid-19 cases in Santa Clara County (where Google is based) before March

https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx

I meant, why can Google run now with WFH, but they didn't allow it before. That is, what was the motivation for forbidding WFH?

Cultural inertia.

Wild but fun speculation: WFH decreases housing prices because people can disperse further. The higher the tenure & seniority within a company, the higher the likelihood of real estate ownership (both primary and rental properties). There is a conflict of interest in having more control on WFH policies and seeing your house not appreciating as much in value or not bringing as much rent. I wasn’t able to find data on this but it is hard to imagine any Bay Area exec not having real estate positions in the area.

More realistic reason: Middle management struggles with perceived lack of control and justifying their existence through wider WFH. Their business is their reports, and there is simply less control surface exposed through WFH to them. It is harder to carry out impression management from home. It is simply a higher friction, higher anxiety scenario. Ultimately they influence WFH adoption, whether at team-local levels or upward influence in company-wide decision making.

I can't speak for google but social herd psychology is a thing. And face to face communication is very effective for certain things. As an aside, every type of communication has it's uses. I think bosses in general feel much more in control when using face to face communication because it allows for fine levels of real time back and forth.

This is kind of a weird question, though I don't think it was meant that way. I work at Google, and recommended work (but not mandatory) work from home (which almost everyone I know did), happened way before anyone else. It felt a bit weird doing it, in fact, because everything was still functioning. Even the required WFH felt earlier than everyone else and there was a question in my mind, "will I be one of the only people in my community quarantining?"

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