Google's Sundar Pichai says future of office is employee 'on-sites'

MAYBE it makes things better for a handful of relatively rich, highly paid workers/companies who don't mind spending significant time away from their families/homes, are happy to travel and who are willing to spring for regular accommodation for their workers, but I think for most workers springing for an office at home would be widely preferable.

And I say that as someone who, pre-covid, had to do a couple of nights per couple-of-months away from my family because my employer's work was already distributed around the nation...(honestly, the travel was personally one of the worst aspects of my job, though I know other people loved it).

Now with covid, i'm bitten with the "not enough space at home" problem (though thank god we got an in-built study put in beforehand), but I no longer have to travel long distances or stay overnight at any of the interstate offices, which i personally find a blessing.

But i'd take the all-remote or "two days in" model in preference...

And now, they have to live in a very expensive area and have to work from home except for a week every two monts?

Hot desking is another fuck-you to workers, a new low for people as 'interchangeable' cogs. Snowcrash prophecy.

Subsidizing for a simple cheap desk at home + electricity + Internet for 1 or 2 years is less expensive than any office redesign or move they'll attempt, just the price of the cardboard boxes and moving company exceeds it...

It feels like a psychological trap that no-one wants to switch to 'the new normal' and be done with it...

Glad that it is pretty unusual where I live, apart from sales where it already is quite established. Quite the fluctuation on these positions to be honest, but I don't see it for most engineering professions or even any higher position where organizing your work is more complicated.

The only advantage is cost of space and some failure safety for hardware defects, although many have secondary devices already.

I don't care where you work, nor where your office is, nor how often you appear there each week. I care that VMware is demanding you subsidize your own employment costs by returning up to 18% of your annual pay to the company... because the company chose to build where cost of living is significantly higher than you can afford on the pay VMware has already been paying you.

The answer should be an emphatic NO. "No, I will not take 80% of my original pay simply because I moved. Where I live is none of your business, except with respect to securing company data and property while I am employed by you. You pay me based on an already unfair exchange for the value my skills and time bring your organization. You don't get to make me pay you back for the inconvenience of having to employ me remotely." That's what needs to be said. And there needs to be class action lawsuits to recover damages for this as well. VMware wasn't charging $100 less per license for sales to Midwest companies. They didn't slap a $100 Silicon Valley differential on local sales. This is bullshit, through and through.

And I apologize for my rage and language, but damn it. Every single one of these executives built their companies on keeping pay low. I've got friends who got stuck in dead-end contracts at these tech firms. One of 'em has literally been on contract with IBM for 5 years, waiting for some kind of fulltime opportunity that they never have "need" for. Another just got furloughed after two years on contracts at Ubisoft. Had a friend from school who launched the Palm Pre only to get laid off within 9 months of joining the company. No transfers, no options, just a "hey, so our idea for that... turns out no one wanted to buy it! You gotta go." Well, not our problem, dude. We didn't get to pick which product our work went into. We didn't get to make a career-interest decision after watching you present to us that you'd done the market- and competitive analyses to back some likelihood of demand for what you wanted us to commit no-strings-attached to.

It's immature, and malicious and deceitful. And too many people break bread and break their backs to get their Agile and SCRUM releases out the door every 5 minutes. Everyone under the executives and senior management deserves more damn respect than this.

Edit: And Sundar has needed to go for a long time. The guy is an idiot. How do you turn the largest consumer and commercial OS into a dumpster fire of exploits, half-finished ideas (Settings vs. Control Panel, anyone?!?), and have to give it away for free because you lacked the expertise to implement a logistics plan that would comfortably roll all consumers and commercial deployments forward without exposing them to significant downtime? You employ people like Sundar. If the man spent 5 fewer minutes writing verbose excuses for not getting results, he'd have 5 minutes each day to work toward getting results. If he tries hard enough, he may up it to 10 minutes in a few years.

I have been working fully remote almost 2 years now, and it felt that way at the beginning. Until I started using the benefits that remote work provides. Going to a nearby gym with cheap prices at my convenience, staying in other places for a month without having to ask for holidays (or even ask for it), joining plans and trips with friends without worrying too much if I have enough holidays or even getting advantage of cheap prices for flights and trains to travel somewhere.

I think most people struggle with the reality that the only "downside" of remote work is not "being disconnected with the team", but having to put effort to meet friends (also make new ones) to have the human contact they usually miss.

I also find that simple conversations take way longer, especially when there's disagreement.

Thirdly video calls are super draining.

It's also really difficult to get separation between work and life. I find myself doing home chores doing the day intertwined with work.

Unlike some commenter, the social aspect isn't that important to me, but there's definitely some camaraderie missing. In the office, I feel like part of a team that's working together to achieve something. At home I feel like one of a swarm of drones that occasionally communicate for information exchange. It's not very fulfilling.

I would have thought to be the other way around - parents miss office as they have to supervise and educate their kids while also doing their regular job.

I was setting a bad precedent for my sons when they would try to talk to me and I'd say "I'm working. not right now." Then it becomes ambiguous whether they can talk to me or not. Not good for kids IMO.

Now when I come home i get the biggest hugs you've ever seen and we start playing.

My home office is great: nice desk, chair, good lighting, extra monitor, more than enough space. The literal work facilities are certainly better here for me than at the office. I just miss seeing coworkers, and I even miss my train ride a bit (that used to be my reading time).

And, yes, I live by myself (with my dog, fortunately).

I live in an apartment complex that normally features amenities and is located in a neighborhood with lots of shops, cafes, bars, gyms, etc. All of the third places are currently closed or under very heavy restrictions (e.g. in Seattle you can only dine indoors with members of your household), so now I'm stuck in a two-bedroom apartment. I can still go for walks but it's not quite the same.

There's also the issue of everybody else. On paper, I have gig internet. In practice, I don't think the fiber here was designed for everyone to be simultaneously working from home. And especially with kids staying at home instead of using up their energy at school or at the playground, apartment noise has become more significant.

Work from home would probably be nicer under less strenuous circumstances. Working from home or a coffee shop of your own volition is one thing, working from home because you have to is another. I'm onboarding to a new team and personally I've found it difficult to get the quick 30-second validation I need to see if I'm setting things up right or have the right assumptions, because it very easily snowballs into setting up formal meetings.

My married friends complain more about WFH than otherwise. I think it depends on how many kids you have, and how big your house is.

What's your strategy to counteract this if the people who you enjoy bouncing ideas off of prefer to and/or end up all staying remote?

Some small project teams got it right and reduced meetings and replaced them with asynchronous communication. This was a great experience. But sadly I got pushed into projects were this just wasn't the case.

So probably your experience is more of a Covid-19 experience than remote work.

And I know, just for me. On scale of 1 to 10 if for me WFH is a 3 then work from cafe is a 5 and work from office is a 10 (note: this is with cool people on cool stuff, those numbers and even order might changes of those 2 things were not true). I don't generally talk to anyone at a cafe so I don't get any social interaction quota. I can't bounce ideas off people at the cafe, they aren't generally fellow SWE. So while it feels less isolated than WFH it's not a substitute for me.

It's definitely been better since I've been able to get out and see friends, but I'm still itching to get back to the office.

I imagine that many startups can and will be successfully fully-remote from Day 1, whereas other startups won't possibly be able to work successfully without close and constant in-person communication.

I have a theory this environment slowly corrupts a character in subtle ways, till folks wake up one day being full of shit while being polite and smiling and when asked everything is fine.

At my office (which I haven't seen since March), I have one desk large enough to fit two monitors, and a chair. That's all the space that's for me. My desk is part of a row of 4 desks side-by-side, and there's 4 more desks facing them. If you set up cubicles, with the density I had last time I had a cubicle, you could probably fit half as many people. If you set up offices you could fit even less.

My employer rents half the floors in one building and just about all the floors in the building across the street, so having to find twice as much space would be not only expensive but logistically complex - either we'd all have to move, or you'd have to commute to get to certain teams.

but the trick is that the management chain "saving money" and the management chain that gets screwed by the reduced productivity are different

It's hard to measure productivity, too, so it might not be clear how much the open office is really costing a company

Source? I can't imagine there would be enough space for individual offices larger than a phonebooth per employee in the same space as open offices.

Anyway, to play the devil's advocate for the move fast and beak things type of companies, open offices are not only about cost, but about the ease to move people and teams around instantly as projects/resources change and more people are onboarded without having to constantly tear down and erect walls to accommodate the various sized teams.

> Joel Spolsky said it in 2000 in his "Joel test".

What makes Joel Spolsky so certain? And what makes you so certain he's right? It's all just personal opinions.

One of the big issues here is that developer happiness and productivity doesn’t show up clearly on a balance sheet, which is why open plan offices continue to dominate.

People believe a lot of things about themselves that don't hold up to scrutiny. For example, people think they can multitask, etc and studies show that the aren't nearly as productive doing that as they think they are. People think that open offices help collaboration, but that is not what the research shows.

>Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/its-official-open-plan-of...

>..A study published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology of more than 40,000 workers in 300 US office buildings: "...Enclosed private offices clearly outperformed open-plan layouts in most aspects of IEQ (Indoor Environmental Quality), particularly in acoustics, privacy and the proxemics issues. Benefits of enhanced 'ease of interaction' were smaller than the penalties of increased noise level and decreased privacy resulting from open-plan office configuration."

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/science-just-proved-that-...

An article in the New Yorker summarizes some research on open offices. Besides the effects on productivity, there are also health effects. For example:

>...In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace.

>...In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-open-office-...

One thing that surprised me I didn't expect is, our building has an open ceiling design with the pipes, cables, lighting, structural beams, etc. all exposed. Furthermore they are sprayed with some kind of chunky foam material, and together this has pretty unbelievable noise suppression ability. In a previous building sound traveled a lot further due to flat ceilings, but here I can barely even detect that someone two rows away is talking, let alone make out what they are saying.

But, pre-Covid, I was desperately looking for a fully remote job to guarantee that I never had to work in an open office again.

Then Covid happen and I stopped looking. Management was trying to get us back in an open office in July. It was even going to be worse. No one was using conference rooms for calls and quick chats before. They definitely weren’t going to do it post Covid.

I was desperate to find another job before July. I was lucky enough to find a fully remote role.

I started preferring off hours, when what I would REALLY prefer is to be with my team, just not in this terrible way. Worst is when the guy you are facing has raised is desk to standing height when I am sitting.

A private office doesn't mean don't talk with your team. You get people crowding an in office for discussion, you have meeting rooms, if you feel like hanging our with your team member(s) and they feel like hanging out with you then by all means hang out. If you need to disconnect from them to get something done, shut the door and focus. In any sort of normal place with offices people hang together all the time, but since nobody has offices any more, nobody knows that...

Last job I had, we had "team rooms"; thankfully I was able to provide input and managed to steer them away from doing an open office. That is ideal, I think, if you've got teams working on different things.

I've worked in a fully open office with about 8 teams, that was too much.

I've worked in a half-open office which I was really sceptical about at first (we moved into it while I was working there), it wasn't just an open office but it was three floors with an open atrium in the center. But it worked, somehow; there wasn't too much noise coming from the atrium, and every team had their own area cordoned off with half-walls (whiteboard walls) so you could walk around them, but there was no visual distraction and noise was muted / indirect. I think that's the best way to do open offices. Wouldn't have minded if they put some noise insulation in between the whiteboard walls though.

Apparently you're supposed to go to a meeting room, but in many places they're often 100% used most of the time, and what's the benefit of moving to a different room for an impromptu, 5 min chat?

Basically problems like this are not easily quantifiable and nobody gets bad review because of this, so they don’t get solved.

There's a million scenarios where understanding body language makes you a more successful line engineer.

Umm what? Based on my 15+ year experience in tech sector (similar for my partner), my take is that in-person interaction is absolutely necessary for the middle management layer (though certainly not sufficient). They need to interact with both the bosses and the trench soldiers. If everything else is held constant (same org, same talent, same level, same effort), an in-office middle manager will absolutely outperform a similar person in a remote setup.

I'd go even one step further and say that in-person interaction is critical not only for middle managers but also for those individual contributors who want to jump to management or tech-lead positions.

No way. My VP doesn't have time to read and respond to my carefully crafted email. He might be having 1500+ unread emails. Same with DMs.

> In fact, the more senior a person is, the less office face-time they seem to have.

This is so contrary to what I have seen. Most senior people (including ICs) are busier in meetings compared to more junior guys.

> Phone call?

Meh. No body language, no eye contact, less energy in the conversation.

> Meet at a cafe?

Sure. And once you reach middle management, you will have so many of these cafe meetings that going to the office would be scalable, where you meet everyone. Once a few people do that, everyone who needs these cafe meetings will start doing it because the office is where everyone is.

> I think people should be allowed to play the game as they see fit.

I mostly agree on this with one caveat. If your remote employees are going to suffer in their career trajectories because of an apparent disadvantage, a company has to be super careful that it won't become a New York Times front page story. Imagine if Microsoft allowed this and a majority of their remote employees are women and a majority of their remote employees are getting promoted at a slower rate than in-office people. It will be an unnecessary headache. Better to nip the problem in the bud.

For areas that need to "just build" you'll probably see massive performance improvements. People in their internal accelerator Area 120 this is probably great for them. For people who need to play politics, get buy in, and do a lot of team-based collaboration you'll likely see a massive hit. I'm assuming this is going to really kill a lot of their internal infra stuff that needs to do a lot of meetings to make sure things are backwards compatible and get buy in on decisions.

Although, I've worked with many people with very bad social anxiety who I'm guessing are doing fantastic in a work setting right now since they've developed the online communication skills from talking to a lot of people online throughout their life.

I'd guess the super inflated Bay Area pay is likely going to deflate but the average global pay for SWEs will inflate as those companies start looking for people who can add the same value as a local employee for a reasonable price. Where I work we've been hiring engineers from outside the US recently and we've been giving them US-like salaries which are massive jumps from previous local jobs they had in their country.

I'm assuming other scrappy companies who are in a growth phase right now are doing the same. This is likely especially the case if you need to wisely allocate capital.

I've seen this before, I've been working remotely for a lot of the last 7 years and there's a distinct difference in social dynamics. Even if the people in the office need to use Slack or whatever for communicating, they have their in jokes that they sprinkle in and you can feel a bit alienated or ostracised if you're in a minority of work-from-home employees.

Equally, if some people are not able to work from home, that can build resentment or envy.

So the company culture can be affected by different amounts of in-office vs home-office, every company will have their own sweet spot, but I agree with you, there is no simple one size fits all solution.

Exactly. IMO most people would prefer a few less days of commute, and a less grueling commute overall due to the possibly reduced congestion.

What do you mean?