Google's push to bring employees back to offices, some say they'll rather quit
businessinsider.com
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Bob Lutz, in his self-aggrandizing book "Gutz", describes the initial phase of an automobile design project where a survey is conducted asking respondents whether they would prefer a vehicle with heated cupholders. It turned out the percentage of people who responded positively was significantly higher than the percentage of people who ultimately chose to pay for the option in actual sales.
I wonder if a similar effect will be seen regarding people returning to work.
Take care of No. 1 first. That is you. GOOG folks, please don't cringe at FB. There is no difference.
Normal remote work lets you go out and do fun stuff with friends after hours (which you have more of with no commute), spend more time with your kids (who have been at school for most of the day), or even explore other cities or countries (if you have that kind of remote arrangement).
All the pandemic has shown us is basically all knowledge work can be done remotely, and most sales work too.
Some people enjoy socializing at work.
> All the pandemic has shown us is basically all knowledge work can be done remotely, and most sales work too.
For sales, can be done, but can it win over the face to face sales?
I do. I have small children, don't have a lot of time in the evenings, so work is my main social meeting place (granted, there are weekends with friends, but weekdays are much harder).
During the day, I want to talk to real, physical people, have lunch or coffee with them (probably a cultural thing), and talk about things. I sorely miss it.
While I understand that some people can cope with skyping people all day long 5 days a week and have no physical interactions, I find it incredibly wearing in the long run, and am not sure that most people can. It's a bit like comparing facebook and going to a cafe with friends : sure, both allow social interactions, but the quality of said interactions is vastly different with the remote ones fundamentally lacking.
I'd happily have a day of wfh per week though - perfect for uninterrupted, focused work!
"Everyone would like WFH if they'd truly experienced it the 'correct' way! Anyone who says they don't like it just hasn't done it properly!"
Please just accept that not everyone is exactly like you. Plenty of people really do enjoy the in-person office environment more.
I am in the "will return to the office regularly as soon as I can" crowd, but I don't think the "no true Scotsman" is a fair accusation here. The pandemic situation is different and not a good indicator, and a good chunk of the problems people have are obviously connected to that.
Most of my co-workers feel the opposite from me, but my home is a sea of distractions that I'd rather be doing than sitting at a computer working (and I live alone, so no kids or spouse at home). Instead I could be playing piano, practicing violin, writing music, taking photos, developing film, or 100 other things. When I'm at work, I work (mostly).
no traffic in the morning, being able to go for walks in the middle of the day, home cooked meals every day, no alarms in the morning (biggest plus imo).
Would i prefer in-office if i didn't have to commute? Maybe. The downsides are just not worth the upsides, though. To me.
...just a thought :)
Also, I live 300ft up in the Oakland hills so going out and back in the morning to WFH means I have to climb back up or jut ride in the hills which involves more climbing. Going to work is downhill!
what does this mean exactly? work at any terrible company that does terrible things, as long as the pay is good?
I realize that many people love social media and derive happiness from FB, but it’s just not the case for me and the main reason I couldn’t work there.
I wish I could know which company is which by your comment, but I can't, any could be in any place here.
And your use case for Facebook et al is obviously different than how many others see it. Being the first truly wordwide social network has to count for something, even though we're not sure it was a good idea in the first place. The world is big and people use/like different things, and it's all relative in the end.
Hence wfhbata's comment without any naming, can be seen from both perspectives.
Facebook is probably a net negative for the whole world. If fb would evaporate tomorrow no one would care.
Regardless i'm not questing what Google _was_. I'm commenting on what Google _is_.
Or by “squint” do you mean “close?”
It provided multiple platforms that, like Facebook, optimized user clicks in ways that ended up causing significant harm. Radicalizing extremists and pushing racism, homophobia, misinformation, etc.
One may be objectively worse than the other, but lets not pretend that Google conveniently forgot "Do no evil" until it was notified of it's own actions by the public. Only with its back against the wall did it recognize the problem.
As a side note, I personally find it hilarious to associate work/life balance with a startup.
I get to do meaningful work, and my employer REALLY cares about me (the amount of training we get offered is amazing). UK so YMMV.
That’s not to say the DoD is inherently evil from the bottom up. It’s just that the things activists love to hate about FANG (potentially contributing to border control, selling technologies to foreign governments, data collection), the DoD does ten times over.
I also spent 5 years at a well known startup that went public - I think I averaged nearly 12 hours a day over the 5 years there.
In my experience and from a lot of people I talk to, work-life balance is much better at a large Corp than a startup.
Like couldn’t decide which one to implement, so they made both.
What they might find instead is the shock that "grass is greener on the other side" was a lie all along.
Work-from-home as a perk has a negative cost, so it's not crazy to think that companies might start offering it.
Negative cost but also negative revenue / productivity loss if not done properly.
Most data appears to show the hybrid model is the best for productivity. WFH several days a week, enabling focus and limiting distractions. Work from the office a couple days a week to enable coordination, connection, innovation, and alignment.
This forced experiment in 100% WFH was clearly bad for productivity. The reason tech companies provided so many perks in the past wasn't simply as a recruitment technique. A lot of it was to create an environment where workers worked longer hours and thus the firm got more productivity out of each worker. The cost-benefit analysis clearly supported that before. A caterer's salary is far lower than an engineer's.
Could you link to some data that demonstrates that?
> A lot of it was to create an environment where workers worked longer hours and thus the firm got more productivity out of each worker.
"longer hours" "more productivity" is obviously false for the extremes. It is unclear what is the threshold when a programmer starts to introduce more issues than they fix.
It is hard to measure productivity for a programmer (e.g., what might be productive short-term may be counter-productive long-term).
Can we see the data?
> Work from the office a couple days a week to enable coordination, connection, innovation, and alignment.
I see you are fully buzzword enabled.
> This forced experiment in 100% WFH was clearly bad for productivity.
"Clearly"?
Can you back up your dramatic claims with evidence?
When I worked at Google, it was so noisy that I did most of my work from home anyway, but showed up for a few hours a day because I had to.
Also known as: working for free
I'm sure that there is a subset of jobs that ticks all those boxes, but what I don't believe is that they're in such abundance that one can simply quit google and stumble into one by simply waving around their xoogler status.
More likely than not, people following through w/ quitting will realize that work satisfaction does not solely depend on a single dimension (WFH-ness)
Google provides certain benefits to its employees, not out of the kindness of its heart or out of moral consideration, but because business analysis has determined it's in Google's own benefit to do so. To make itself more attractive, build up a prestigious brand as an employer, keep people working longer hours, etc.
The moment they determine it's no longer in their interest to provide you with these benefits - they'll fire you.
So let's stop pretending one party or the other here is acting on some moral basis. This is just business.
People say I think, when they really mean I feel.
And how you feel has nothing to do with how others feel.
There are startups out there that see you and feel there will be great success in hiring you in a CTO role.
They don’t know that you feel like Engineer #56112. They just see a slice of Google that they can inject into their company.
Go test your think
You may work in a large bureaucratic corporation, want to work somewhere more dynamic, but you also have adjusted to the large corp salary.
You may work at a cool startup, but wish for more time for your family, however the jobs offering a better work life balance are uninspiring.
Add to that it takes effort to leave, and less effort to stay, and you have a lot of people "choosing" to stay.
Many of the employees that are angry have already left, and have been working remote for 6+ months. The hard part of moving is already done. If anything, staying with google would be the more difficult choice since they need to move back!
They won't immediately abandon ship once we force them back to the salt mines, so there's no problem.
Even if they come back if the resent the company for economically forcing them back that isn't a good situation for morale or productivity or retention.
This statement makes it sound like you think that Google employees are unable to attach a cost to leaving the company until they actually commit the act. Am I misunderstanding? Because that's obviously not true.
I'm guessing it's (at least partially) because they weren't offered a'la carte, but instead bundled with the "premium" interior package only offered in the most expensive trim.
This bundling is the only way I've ever gotten the option of heated/chilled cupholders (which are awesome, by the way).
I have had people threaten to quit as we transition back to the office. These are tier 1 support people. I dont expect Ill have any no-call no-shows monday though.
We also have people that have straight up MOVED to other cities (or in one case, refused to move to our city despite it being a condition of employment).
I'm curious how those will play out.
What possible upside could there be that justifies forcing the issue and hurting morale by pissing so many people off? Sure, maybe there's an argument that a fully remote company has a hard time propagating a coherent corporate culture. But it seems like if you let everyone choose, it'd be 50/50 in-person vs. WFH. So, even if you give your employees full flexibility, you'll still wind up with decently full offices that can train junior people, promulgate a corporate culture, etc.
Certainly not the case for everyone. Many people are struggling to be productive at home, alone. Jobs that require more coordination are also at risk of slowing down.
WFH is great for some, but it’s not a panacea.
Not to mention the additional stress and isolation that comes from all of the pandemic management measures, and the omnipresent low level fear. Honestly if WFH has even remained steady with in office in this hostile environment to me that is a pretty big indicator it is better for businesses.
I feel that the latter are the type of managers who want everyone back in the office.
I'm going to stay WFH, if my org want to keep me, that will be a requirement. My quality of life has jumped and I'm not moving back to a high COL city just because a manager wants facetime.
The individual employee is not going to be a reliable indicator for any of these questions.
By the same logic implied here, we cannot trust senior management to know what they're doing.
PS - Also Google's measures of productivity are terrible, that's why they keep starting/killing new projects ever other week, and killed their golden goose in their so-called "20-percent rule."
I dunno, seems like they are doing ok at their jobs....
America is one of the best countries in the world, therefore its leadership has to be smart and competent.
They didn’t build the ship, they’re just passengers.
Hence why most companies fall out of the S&P 500 as quickly as they rise. If you think Google is going to stay on top forever you’re in for a rude awakening.
I can think of no product at google that is not overshadowed by their policy of non-support. The culture that leads to their innovation also informs trust. If there is any such thing as "too innovative" then google is it.
This is why Azure is doing so much better than google in cloud computing despite the fact that google invented modern cloud computing. People trust Microsoft to support their products.
And even among those who are genuinely trying to see that the business does well for years to come, rather than the next three months and then who cares, even among the ones of them who are genuinely decent at managing a product, far too few understand the positive relationship between how you treat your employees and what you get out of them.
Because we've spent decades in this country being sold the idea that good management means forcing workers to work more hours, under tighter control, because "workers" are stupid, lazy, and/or malicious, and it is "managers" who really know how to do things right, by the very definition of their jobs.
This is factually untrue. The only difference is Google is much larger, making it harder to launch new products.
The reality is that neither is probably a WFH issue as a first-order effect.
The interests of engineers are often extremely detached from whether development is cost effective and maintainable by others.
The part that's stupid is everyone, even the ones who know better, pretending a bunch of bad statistics and such aren't bad, but if the suits in the room are nodding along you damn well better not point that out. People succeeding in the management track either actually are bad at understanding these things, or (plenty often) do understand but also know to STFU about it.
I don't think engineers are the only rational ones, but I think the rational ones in management have noticed that their numbers being meaningful or correct only rarely matters for getting a "yes" or a promotion, so have responded... rationally, since getting useful figures and proving that they're useful is both 1) usually a lot more work, and 2) often not even practically possible.
This is especially true in large corporations, where upper management is very insulated from the realities of line-level work. It is also especially true in most publicly-traded corporations, where upper management is almost invariably going to care more about the trendline in the company's stock price than in their actual productivity, or even in the well-being of their workers.
Some ammunition for the opposition: this HBR article indicates that companies who managed the transition to remote work the best increased their productivity during the pandemic. So, a question I'd want to ask if my hypothetical boss said "back to the office everybody!" would be why we hadn't been able to adapt as well as the best of our competitors, and why we didn't want to learn from them and get that productivity boost.
https://hbr.org/2020/12/the-pandemic-is-widening-a-corporate...
And management can? Please, tell me how. Give me metrics and methods for measurement that can effectively capture productivity. What's the KPI for "strong corporate culture" or "innovation"?
Because if we can't rely on individual experiences, then clearly the only other option is systemic measurements, so please, tell me how!
Also, not all measurements should be shared. Let’s say that they have data showing that new hire productivity and skill growth is much lower when senior engineers are WFH. They’re not going to share that data when forcing senior engineers to be in the office, since it could foment resentment of junior staff.
So then why shouldn't we trust individual experiences? What's the evidence that those reports are not reliable while management perceptions are if this stuff isn't measurable?
> Let’s say that they have data showing that new hire productivity and skill growth is much lower when senior engineers are WFH. They’re not going to share that data when forcing senior engineers to be in the office, since it could foment resentment of junior staff.
They're already fomenting resentment by making a decision to force people back to work without any evidence to justify it.
That's somehow better?
BTW, I'm not saying they're wrong! They might be completely right. But to disregard individual experience while trusting management is measuring the right things is, frankly, pretty naive. The reality is management is as much about personal beliefs, gut instinct, and good ol' fashion tradition as anything else.
I suspect it's far more likely that management at Google simply doesn't like the idea of fully remote employees, not based on any specific data points, but simply because that's their preference. But assuming that's true, it's better to simply admit that then to make pseudo-scientific arguments to justify those preexisting beliefs.
There's another term for that: Confirmation bias.
That's fine, but let's not pretend your opinion is any more valid than anyone else's, including the individual employees who feel differently.
The reality is no one, here, is actually basing their opinion on data. Absent that this is basically faith. Which is great 'cuz then we can all just agree to disagree. ;)
I like this question. Let’s say that we can create a list of 10 quantitative measures of the story, all binary and all comparative, e.g. which has the best pacing? which makes the best use of supporting characters? Now we can total up the answers and produce a number, e.g. Macbeth is better than the Da Vinci Code in 30% of our measures.
You could repeat this process pair-wise with lots of books and produce a ranking.
Positive or negative?
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
But I do think company leadership likes the psychological aspect of everyone being in the office and are willing to take both a cost and productivity hit to fulfill this need.
That’s bound to happen when you have large workforces. You have groups of people who make it so that productive people can’t have nice things. A kind of tragedy of the commons.
Was he WFH? Nope. He was running these teams from his desk in the cubicle farm. And he was relatively open about it too with management. But he knew so much that everyone kept him around.
Getting bent out of shape when workers do it is just classist bullshit.
On the other hand, there's a lot more/better self-service capabilities these days and unless you have a dedicated admin who really knows you, having someone else do something for you can be more trouble than it's worth.
Examples: is it in the company's best interest for an expensive developer to spend a paid hour getting some time-off set up, using company processes, rather than two minutes sending an email? If the company switches from Asana to Jira, say, or (god forbid) one developer needs to use multiple such tools because they're working for clients with certain preferences, or across teams in an org that have different tools, is all the switching time, plus the actual day-to-day overhead of using either of those systems, for every single developer, a great use of company money? Or would it be better to have a standard interface for all those administrative tools (i.e. a person)? Someone to handle formatting and proofreading proposals, maybe. All that kind of stuff that you 100% do not need someone with a CS degree and 10+ years of development experience to do.
That sort of thing was common when I was a product manager a couple of decades back. Probably each supported more people than that but they handled a lot of annoying administrivia--albeit as part of much more paper-based manual workflows.
The key word is "discovery" not "remote." Measure and reward good workers, identify and help (or fire) bad workers. Is physically watching where the bodies are still the best we can do here?
I feel like this should be taken with a grain of salt, depending on what your bubble looks like.
It is partly true, because not going to work and interacting with people all day will make you have less regrets about leaving for another company. This is not generally a huge factor (compared to, say, salary), but it exists.
Managers with a lot of company cult thinking also believe that you get more attached to the company if they can see you everyday.
At my company they are shocked that engineering talent is leaving despite the great financials results, and are trying to find an explanation. Apparently the "no raises this year" policy they set 6 months ago did not enter their radar.
Out of curiosity, how many of the people you have spoken to have kids? From my perspective, it seems the people without kids seem to handle working from home okay, but the ones with younger kids at home seem to struggle a lot.
I first joked with my wife about finally being able to have sex during meetings at the start of the WFH mandate, but it actually turned out to be more about changing diapers during meetings, and general background screaming for most of the day.
Taxes? Could be that municipalities gave them huge tax write-offs assuming they would bring lots of jobs to the area, and now they may have to write all that off if they don't bring people back.
Management is also terrified of not having hands/eyes on people. They are already so disconnected from people and have no concept of how to manage remote work, that they literally feel powerless without an office to monitor/control their workers in. They can monitor when you sit down at your desk, monitor your internet access, phone calls, structure meetings, and enforce culture. Remote work forces them to admit that they won't have nearly as much control over their workforce.
The "choice" is whether to work in the office, or remotely, or a few days of each. Everyone gets what they want!
Flexibility in this context tends to mean "all employees must do some of each every week." Worst of both worlds.
The Google culture and leadership, right or wrong, hold on to the belief that the spaces they cultivate, do more than just enhance productivity. For example, they believe that (regardless of how rare it may be) their spaces create opportunities for teams to bump into each other and build solutions/products out of that.
That could be a problem over time unless people can met at the office again in some form and go to conferences. Or some remote form of that would be needed.
Google wants to be more than just a job to its employees. They want "being a Googler" to be a part of their employees life and part of their identity. (I'm not saying this as criticism.)
So, what would Google prefer: An upset Googler, or a happy productive person who is employed by Google? I can see why it might be easier to retain the former than the latter. Especially if they think this is a temporary thing that will blow over, and they might be right.
Management went over this in the virtual all-hands meeting. They acknowledged all the reports - 2020 being "The Best Year for The Company, Ever", 2021 on the same road. Then concluded with: "We don't like seeing all that empty office space, so everyone will be brought back as soon as possible". I'm not paraphrasing - they literally said they don't like empty offices.
Labor productivity there is no doubt. Overall productivity is something else entirely, since it is optimized by reducing the amount of labor needed. I've seen projects being spared what would have been _months_ of useless labor because the right person was walking back from his coffee break and overheard some discussion he had an insight about.
It's just an annecdote of course, but it's hard to evaluate the evolution of overall productivity when WFH. Especially since it depends on the existing culture of the company, so even success stories like Gitlab can't be used as a proof of anything.
Whats more:
Late last year experienced search quality increased ever so slightly for me at least.
Granted Google is not my default search engine anymore so I cannot say for sure but I still consult it sometimes. (The quality on Google and DDG has been about the same for me but it is easier to go from DDG and back than the other way around.)
You can think of it as a filter for identifying easy to control employees.
Additionally, it emptied the pipeline. We implemented a lot of work that was queued up, but we are now stalling on product design and engineering design approvals where coordination and communication is key.
The increase in productivity is achievable on the short term, but not long-term. My productivity this year has fallen off a cliff.
Concentrated vs diffuse costs:
Return to normal:
I noticed that some of my colleagues do almost nothing since their supervisors are not checking. I definitely work less and am less productive, too. At least that's my feeling.
Src: Located and working in bay area at FAANG company
I actually sat in a management meeting not so long ago, where we all agreed that efficiency and productivity was higher than before (according to our metrics) – and still, one of the people present said that they missed being able to just pop up, look over direct reports' shoulders, etc.
The rest of us confronted them with the fact that all of us – they too – had celebrated our progress moments earlier, and agreed employees delivered better than ever, but we were still unable to totally persuade them.
I find that infuriating, and kind of frightening.
Not only have managers all over the world done things like stuff people into open floor plans (despite the fact that it was never backed by science, and its selling points are now actually refuted by science), and thought that there is something "special" about physical co-location (ignoring the possibilities of video-conferencing for fifty years);
They are now actively going against better knowledge because of their own need for the feeling of control (which they'll never achieve, of course – slackers will slack anywhere), and will continue to use butts in chairs as a metric.
Sadly, I think this is a huge part of it. Regardless of productivity, "I just want to stand up over my empire and hear the bustle of people in my org talking and doing! Visibly see the movement and activity of My People physically surrounding me, doing Business Things!"
And you never know when you might need a job and the best you can come up with is one with a company with this kind of control freak attendance culture.
Of course if coming into a office is a few days every few weeks sort of thing, people can travel greater distances to do that.
Maybe they like to WFH and they are good at what they do. If they can buy a house and pay half in repayments than what they were paying in rent, then is that rash decision?
I'd rather earn less and have a house and no commute.
Maybe its a case of people realising that there are other ways of living.
You've got to get it in writing though, as you say the policy could be changed on a whim and then you're stuck! Also, I wouldn't trust a recruiter who promised WFH unless they promised it in writing. Recruiters can say whatever nonsense they want in order to convince you to join, and then once you do, it's "oopsie! I was totally wrong about that whole WFH thing. Please report to your office building on Monday!"
I get better working conditions, better coffee, better lunch and I feel like I’m not alone during difficult tasks.
Ideally I’d like to work from home one or two days week, and be at the office the remaining days.
There's nothing wrong in not wanting to return to an environment that's not right for your personality, or simply a poor environment for any office worker. Sadly I think that those companies who would care to address such issue are the same companies who already have employees wanting to return to their offices.
Perhaps one thing we have learnt is that if you're a company who care very little about the work environment you provide, and don't feel like provide better facilities, then you can do away with the office and keep your employees happy that way.
Brutalized is the right wording... It was when I stopped to commute I realized how bad it was for me also.
And yet I've had many video conference calls with various teams at Google over the last 8 years and in every single one, most of the Googlers on the call were obviously dialing in from home. I even flew to Mountain View once for a big all-day meeting. I got there, met my coworkers in the lobby, and was escorted to a conference room by a manager who dialed us in for the video conference with all the engineers at home. I can't think of a time I've interacted with a group of Googlers in their office.
Was this really not the norm? Is it the norm for engineers but not for everyone else or something?
But this has happened to me so much, it didn't seem like it could be a coincidence that I happened to catch everyone on their WFH day that week...
For a while I had to travel every couple months along with plenty of other coworkers. I worked a few days here and there from other offices and I don't recall there being any particular resistance to it. It was fun visiting other offices. I tried bacon syrup in my coffee in Ann Arbor, climbed around on a giant rope net in Pittsburgh, video conferenced with someone from inside a giant binocular in Santa Monica, and even had Google office lunch in Dubai.
We had a 6-12 month period of ambiguity / lack of project direction, and coupled with Google's (toxic in my opinion) perf/promo system it created morale issues. I personally was finding it difficult to make it to the office before 11AM most days, which my manager called me out on, but within the context of trying to understand why there were morale issues. My team was able to figure out the underlying issues and it got better, but that's right around when I decided to give Zipline a try, and it's been 5 years of really satisfying work with a great group of people.
Google doesn't allow source code to be stored locally on mobile devices including laptops for security reasons. IT managed laptops can at least connect to some internal systems, and while I was there they rolled out tools to make it productive to code from laptops. As far as I know though, no one codes on an Android device. Maybe that's changed since I left.
Google does in general do a pretty good job dogfooding, I think. All the things about Google services that drive folk crazy tend to drive Googlers more crazy by 10x. I still have a special hate for Drive's search functionality, for example...
To each their own, but remote work is now a perk that some companies will offer and others won’t, not offering it will effectively cut out a fairly large percent of devs that don’t want to go back.
I pay for my own office because I really need my work space to be separate from my home space, but I understand why others would prefer to not have a commute/be closer to the family/enjoy their creature comforts/etc.
I would rather my kids interrupt me at my home office than having to hear coworkers chatting and eating all day.
If you are a high performer who has manager/VP level approval to stay remote, why would Google HR force you to move back to a Google office? They should just allow some folks to work full remote if they have support and approval from their managers, but instead Google corporate is saying everyone needs to be close to their office on Sept 1.
I will be in this position (the only one remote) in a few months when they all go back in the office. I've talked with my manager about it, and we're trying to prepare this, but I'm not sure it is going to work. Also, the commute argument will get worse then. They kinda expect me to come to the office every couple of weeks, and I do not look forward to the 7 hours round trip.
I am saying there are employees at google who a performing well remotely now, their manager/VP support them staying remote, but Google HR is saying they must return to the office anyways. Google should just allows managers/VPs to let employees stay remote if they are good employees and are performing well. Instead they are pushing a one size fits all policy and haven't said anything about possible manager/VP exceptions.
In my brief experience there, Google was staunchly against remote work, even remote work between office locations. A big reason behind me leaving (aside from not enjoying the work) was that I wanted to work from an office in another state but was told that wouldn't be possible despite the recruiter I was working with saying otherwise. The work could have 100% been done from another office (or from anywhere, really), but, nope, not possible.
On the other hand, the thought of whiteboard interviews at this stage in my life or taking a massive pay cut to work at a local company is not enticing either. So we’ll see what happens in a couple months when forced to decide. I realize the path of least resistance might win out for me and others.
The salaries and jobs in the Bay Area are great, but they come with the big caveat of choosing between (1) living near work, but spending a fortune to rent small, old apartments forever or (2) having a better living space, but with a nightmare commute.
Why would I want to return?
Same, it was like a big weight lifted off of me. Felt great, and feels great except for the company’s return-to-office date looming over me.
2. It's hard as never before to hire someone to from from the office (US tech giants are hiring many H1Bs)
So, I disagree. It can become a long-term crisis.
I was under the impression that it was sort of like Harvard: lots of applications, but a good chunk of those denied could have just have easily been accepted if there was space
You seem to have experience with their hiring and I have none (only applying) so I have much more faith in what you're saying than my preconceived ideas.
In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company, or your average skill level will go down, which makes hiring just hard mathematically.
>In addition, basic statistics suggests you need all new hires to be better than 50% of the existing company,
This seems especially difficult when hiring graduates/junior roles due to the lack of unknowns.
Thanks for taking the time to respond!
I think all companies do this, but it's really easy to game the metrics. People do it unconsciously, even.
> This seems especially difficult when hiring graduates/junior roles due to the lack of unknowns.
Yep, so it takes hours of interviewing per candidate, across dozens of candidates just to hire to minimise the risk for one role. At a global level, FAANGs are hiring loads, but at a team/local level there's never enough people due to specific team needs or turnover.
Google for what is the cost for an average US business is to simply replace an employee. You might be surprised.
Thirty case studies taken from the 11 most-relevant research papers on the costs of employee turnover demonstrate that it costs businesses about one-fifth of a worker’s salary to replace that worker.
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/economy/reports/2012...
So... did you mean $100,000?
Hardly enough time to even know the impact and costs of what you developed and shipped. Kind of makes you wonder what type of work force you're creating when a large percentage of them are constantly leaving. Maybe for ICs this isn't a concern compared to Directors, VPs, or maybe Staff SEs?
[1] https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...
[2] https://buffer.com/resources/employee-tenure/
[3] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2019/10/17/thi...
I mean it intuitively kind of makes sense. If you work in a city with many other high paying prestigious jobs, why wouldn't you job hop? There's little risk, whereas if you were in a city that had very few prospects you'd probably stick around longer.
I live in Boston and I jump around every year'ish getting more salary at each place I've worked at. If you worked at Google (or any other prestigious company), I imagine it's far far easier interviewing else where. Especially if you jump from prestigious company to prestigious company.
I figured people will always need devs and people really blow the "job hopper" thing out of proportion. Every job hopper I know makes a lot of money and they never struggled to find jobs. If anything they seem to have the best jobs from what I see.
If you take any scenario and ask a large enough group of people their opinions, there's going to inevitably be an arbitrary number (that can then be qualified as some) that will have the reactionary view that makes for an eye catching headline.
Put simply, "some" is just vague enough to allow these article writers to get a clickbait headline from a statement that only a handful of people have made. It's lazy and disingenuous, which are two words I've found myself using to describe the journalism industry as a whole lately.
Also not a fan of practice of quoting a controversial phrase in the headline to get both the shock value and editorial deniability.
> Apple charged of 'anti-competitive' app policies
> World's glaciers melting at 'accelerating rate'
> Man Utd fans 'disgusted' by ESL plans
They literally found one person to say the words.
It's about as empty a threat as telling the customer service person that you'll sue the company.
Way more tenable than suing.
I tell all recruiters I won’t work in an office ever and post pandemic the number who agree to that has jumped by a large percentage
GL to all of the inflexible employers out there.
That said, WFH is not for everyone. And a flexible 3-day office presence is a good healthy compromise.
taking a step back, this is such a broken way of running a department. How did we get here?
Why?
(I've been managed distributed teams for 25yrs)
Its a fucking mess, most of the time its ok, we can meet in the early morning here which is late at night there and do most work offline, but when deadlines are looming or issues crop and we have to talk back and forth over stuff urgently it basically cuts the useful time in the day down to like 3 hours at most, and even that results in at least one of us working very unsociable hours.
Remote work I like, I'm very happy working from home and can do so fairly productively, but timezones are a big issue. My example is with two people working in two timezones, if you've got a bunch of people working in different timezones (the person above mentioned 5!) it can quickly become very messy.
It only takes accepting that the work has to be mostly asynchronous, then build processes around that.
If deadlines loom and you have to talk urgently, that means the processes were inadequate - that is all.
All those "hybrid/flexible" schemes are doomed to fail. Remote work isn't office work at all, it's quite different. This is also what drives management nuts in my opinion - they feel that stuff has to be changed significantly and they don't know how, or if they are now in fact redundant.
Like we're doing maths that no one in the world has done before, and which is objectively kinda hard. When we notice a mistake a few days before a big conference deadline (which is actually what happened around the end of last year) its hard to imagine any process could be adequate to stop that happening.
Mistakes get found even in peer reviewed papers all the time, admittedly usually innocuous ones. You seem to be suggesting processes for vetting our internal stuff which are more stringent than actual peer review.
A lot more work than you think can be done remotely though, especially if you can get people together 2-3 times per year. You need good people, but then you always did.
The market is less competitive in a lot of places, which means that you can get much better people than you could otherwise afford.
That being said, it is much much much less effective for mentoring and training junior people, which is a massive concern for full remote.
* Access to company cafes means I eat healthier, spend less time cooking/cleaning, and save money on food.
* Face-to-face interaction with co-workers makes debugging problems much easier (no more wondering what they're seeing on their screen; just walk over and see).
* Arriving at and leaving the office provides a fixed start and end to the work day where I can completely detach from work outside those hours.
* There are no internet connection problems when my workstation is hardwired into the company network.
* It's much easier to get exercise/go to the gym when I'm already out of the house.
Tech has had generous WFH policies forever—before the pandemic. Nearly every big meeting I was part of included one or more persons on zoom. I would slack people I sit next to.
What’s different now is that we don’t have a choice to stay home. When these big companies recall people back to the office, we’ll all go back to our normal work schedules—which for many pre-pandemic already included a lot of WFH.
Google is good when you’re right out of college or when you’re nearing the end of your career.
But when you’re in the prime of your career, do you really want to waste those precious few years making Larry and Sergey richer?
And many people kept telling me how that’s so stupid, and they want to have a social life at work etc. I replied you can a social life with your friends and neighbors if everyone works from home...
Now it seems it has been tried and many people would rather keep it :)
I want to feel like the big cheese in an office with a bunch of people. I want my ass kissed in person. Work from home feels like a demotion.
It is not good for the "Corporate Culture".
30% pay cut is nothing, they took 50-60% just to keep sane and do some useful work instead.
Hopefully we can all meet half way with some form of flexible working. One size doesn't fit all.
Threatening to quit is fine simply because hiring has never been easier for us. I’m sure it’s even easier at Google scale.