Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Even the hybrid model isn't ideal, because you still need to be within commuting distance of the office, if it was something like 2 weeks onsite every 2-3 months, it'd be much more doable imo.
For the ones who really miss the office, they should be able to go, but mandatory return-to-office seems far from ideal until mask mandate is over at the very least.
It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.
Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).
The other thing is, even if we went to the office, we won't necessarily be able to have the same face-to-face experience until the mask and social distancing mandates are done with imo.
I also felt people disinterested on collaborations, everyone has their own goals, I wouldn't attribute it to your country per say.
It's easier in-person because you're harder to ignore than an email is. But it can be hard to get support especially from other groups.
I don't work from India, but haven't had much issue with onboarding or access to things.
I can empathize with the problems of remote work across national and cultural divides, but please don't toss flamebait like this into HN threads. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.
It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office in the US.
Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents happened often enough to be a sore point.
So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India. They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.
And if there is a second-class dynamic, would it be in a way that adversely affected the work, directly, or the impact was more about individual treatment?
(For example of affecting the work... when collaboration across sites is needed, for the benefit of the org, would there be difficulty getting it to happen, because some were second-class... such as not being taken as seriously, or working with second-class didn't fit well with promotion strategies, etc.)
There have been a few defrags, but there is a wide array of impactful projects.
Changing how the open plan is arranged is just pointless, accept that you have made an unpleasant work environment and leave it alone so at least people don't have to track whatever new fad you're on. Hotseating makes it even worse, so I can't see why anyone who respected their employees would consider it.
(I, for one, can't see it, but I reckon it's the fight over the desk in Brazil.)
I have a lot opinions on this and continue to say them internally. I encourage you to say this internally as well.
Did you get promoted in the fall? Between backfilled raises and manager discretion comp, my experience has been that the cancelled perf ended up working out alright for most people, except those with failed promos who needed to respond to committee feedback.
Next marketable item is masks with Bluetooth microphones I guess…
I am so glad I found a new fully remote job to skip going back to the office.
[0]https://www.razer.com/concepts/razer-project-hazel
ps. They have been approved from concept phase, so they are being built as we speak
You don't have to worry about a sick person sitting 3 feet away from you if you have a private office.
You don't need to wear a mask sitting at your desk all day if you have a private office.
You don't need specialized "focus rooms" if you have private offices.
You don't need specialized break-out rooms for small informal meetings if people have private offices.
You don't need to call a robot to set up a balloon wall (which won't block sound anyway) every time you want to make a phone call if you have a private office.
If you want people not to work from home, a private office gives them many of the advantages that make them more productive when working from home.
Open office was never about collaboration, it was about cramming more people into less space and the fact that furniture depreciates faster than walls. But, it's not like Google couldn't afford private offices if they wanted to.
Edit: keep adding more as I think of them.
> Google is also trying to end the fight over the office temperature. This system allows every seat to have its own air diffuser to control the direction or amount of air blowing on them.
This is insane. It's the same principle as having separate "driver" and "passenger" temperature controls in a car. You're all in the same box of air. The temperature is going to even out to the average. Maintaining comfort by constantly blowing a person's preferred temperature air on them - only to have it canceled out by the person next to them blowing a different temperature air - is an enormous waste of energy. You know what would give people actual control of the temperature in their space? You guessed it - private offices.
Google employs in some of the most expensive real-estate in the world. It's hard and takes years to build more, larger office buildings.
Some (many? most?) of those buildings were private offices back in the day anyway, so definitely no new buildings needed.
Instead they're announcing their plans to use shared desks, chairs with built-in white-noise speakers, and balloon walls for office spaces as people return from working at home. Perhaps this is Phase I of their super-secret long-term plan to transition to private offices, but I somehow doubt it.
if you let people work from home if they want to, you need far less office space. so instead of trying to cram in a ton of workspaces, just let people who want to work from home do that, and use the space that frees up to give private offices to the people who want to work at the office.
Some companies made investments in properties, or signed multiyear leases, before the pandemic happened. I know of a couple that are itching to get people back to work in-person.
That was unfortunate, but incidental. Larger companies certainly can do the cost-benefit analysis that cancels out those losses if they plan on being around in 10 years.
Trust me, I do not care either. I'm just explaining the motivation some smaller employers have for getting employees back to the office, and hopefully those employees can see through it and advocate for their wellbeing.
There's plenty of people who actually do want to work from an office. it's not like offices will be empty if you simply let people work from home. especially if you stop forcing people to work in a fishbowl and make the office an actual productive place where people can get focused work done.
I quite like the idea of the library model - all communal space is quiet by default with many small rooms for and hoc discussion. It would take serious will to introduce it in most offices though.
But, agreed. Even cubicles (with at least 5ft walls), while terrible, are 1000x better than the dreadful open office.
We were a strategy consulting firm. Everyone had the same skills (in theory), just different levels of experience. The office seating plan paired up a junior consultant with an experienced project leader. You'd both be at your own clients half the time. So in practice you mostly had a private office. But the other person was there enough of the time that:
(a) you wouldn't get lonely;
(b) you'd learn a lot about being an effective consultant by seeing how they worked and hearing their phone calls with clients (of course, treated as strictly confidential between the two of you); and
(c) you'd get to know each other well and you'd feel comfortable asking dumb questions despite the hierarchy difference.
(d) And also every 6 months, there was an "office move" where everyone except the partners (who had sole offices) got paired up with someone else and assigned a new two-person office. This was aligned with promotions and graduate intakes, rebalancing the junior/senior mix. (The office move also encouraged everyone to archive/throwaway notes from old projects, keeping the office tidy).
The same thing would work in software development etc.
I don't know why so many companies went to full-on open plan rather than this kind of half-way house. You get some of the space savings and none of the open plan or hot-desking disadvantages.
It's not like private offices are some new, untested technology. Law firms, investment banks, hospitals, universities, all manage to give private offices to a majority of their professional level staff. It's clearly possible to do and it is not a 10x factor compared to open offices.
That's it right there. First 15+ years of my career always had private office. It's the perfect solution to everything you list and more.
The last decade has been a nightmare of wandering around the buildings trying to find somewhere to work that doesn't have all the problems you list, occasionally succeeding mostly failing. Failing means I've had to work my full workday in the evening at home, since couldn't get anything done during the day in the cursed open office. Effectively working two jobs, getting paid once.
In this respect the pandemic has been a blessing. Finally back to a private office, away from the physical office. The level of relief is life-changing.
Where you find consultants, you find solutions to imagined problems...only a consultant can really tell you what those damnable zoomers are thinking, they are basically Martians. Every company must have a zoomer-friendly office.
Seriously, just have some rooms with doors. Even if that's not the majority of the space.
Examples:
https://officesnapshots.com/photos/164814/
https://officesnapshots.com/photos/150191/
There are also existing solutions for temporary privacy that range from moveable/accordion walls to rolling felt / fabric partitions:
https://www.buzzi.space/acoustic-solutions/buzzishield-free
https://www.darran.com/product/screens/room-divider
The inflatable concept in the article definitely seems more concept that practical solution.
I don’t want to start Google-bashing here, but I have no idea why Google is investing in Gen Z offices. I’m a Gen Z, and I can tell you that none of these changes would make us any more productive, and for the anxious among us (a scary amount) would probably hurt. I think Gen Z would appreciate WFH and private offices best.
> Employees can return to their permanent desks on a rotation schedule that assigns people to come into the office on a specific day to ensure that no one is there on the same day as their immediate desk neighbors.
Why does it matter if I'm wearing a mask or sitting next to someone in an "office of the future" where the pandemic has already abated?
I'm confused, are these assets their offices or...real estate investments that they own for some reason? If these assets are just offices, what is the value to Google if those offices are worth more or less as real estate? It's hard to imagine that the market for a giant complex of offices is super liquid?
The logical conclusion to draw from tech stocks being at all time highs is "the general public being isolated at home forced a huge increase in tech usage and purchases", not "WFH is great for tech companies".
Danger Will Robinson Danger!
Why would anyone try and make decisions based on the preference of jr. High students. Making decisions based on youth in the most unstable period of their life when they are incredibly hormonal and still not all that logical seems like a recipe for disaster.
I don't know about you but my jr. High self was an idiot and nothing he said or did was a good idea.
Or is the idea that we don't want to have the next gen adapt to a new way of socializing and interacting in a professional workplace? That too seems like a bad move.
Additionally, gen Z is growing up with technology in a way that surpasses even millennials. They may have deep expectations about how technology should work in ways that older people don't.
Additionally, these people don't have much work experience. A lot of ideas - such as open offices, work from home or skipping documentation - feel fine until you've worked with them and found their drawbacks. It might work for some, but it does not for a lot of others.
Citation needed, I guess? Teen pregnancies are way down, for example.
Every vaccine that has ever had serious side-effect problems has shown them in the first few months.[1] The FDA requires six months of data for full approval. Those six months have passed.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-history....
You don’t want, they tell you to. It’s like this in most companies now.
That’s what people said right up until the last time top tech management culture turned away from remote work.
Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors.
It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this novelty shit in the long run.
The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet, and it was pretty depressing and alienating.
Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of most buildings don't make that practical.
Of course, the main problem was the thermostat was in the empty office next door so I couldn't close the door without it getting hot.
The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers.
Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.
But yet that's what most everybody in our field gets.
We're not getting private offices any more than we're getting family homes. Both are understandable expectations given our nominal wages, but they are also gross misapprehensions of our place in the pecking order. You may be able to afford all the cars and iPhones and vacations in the world, but that will never hold a candle to land. Land owns you.
Big flat screens are so cheap now.
Though the pacing of the bubble wall does have great comedic potential for holding attention awkwardly, as you're signalling you suddenly want a barrier between you and a coworker. Optional is to also maintain intense eye contact, as they can see the barrier rise between you, initially in their peripheral vision. For the labor-saving eyes-free option, maybe accompany inflation with some milquetoast elevator music.
(If one could move to Google without months of test-prep, someday I'd be happy to share additional perspectives on technology and office dynamics.)
Giving remote participants a proportionate physical presence should help equal the playing field.
I think it hinges on how easy it is to set up the call, so that each face is on a separate screen.
That's been one mildly positive aspect of the pandemic. I'm no longer dialing into calls where there are a bunch of people in a conference room and then there's everyone else.
But everything else looks horrible. Hard surfaces. Completely vertical seatbacks that only go up to your lower back. Little sound isolation. Teeny tiny spaces to put a laptop. Limited surfaces to put a cup of coffee.
Actually they’re looming over them with heads 2x the size like Big Brother.
somehow our BigCo got only open offices with the lavish perks lost in translation.
Anyway, it seems that Google is bringing cubicles (and even offices with the "focused work" pods - implicit recognition that "focused work" (is where other than focused work in programming?) is impacted by the open space office) while avoiding the cu-word and, God-forbid, the o-word.
That just shows how clueless they are. There will always be somebody that will be unhappy somebodys cold air spills over their desk. Air temperature difference in openspace necessarily generates drafts which inevitably irritate some people.
There is a simple existing solution and it is to remove any control over temperature in the office from employees and set it to one predictable setting.
For the past two decades I worked in two dozen offices and every single time I worked in an office with controls in the rooms there were always some people fighting over temperature setting.
But whenever there is no setting available to employees everybody just adjusts and puts on clothes that are suitable to predictable temperature you know you will find when you arrive at the office.
It is my observation that people are clueless about office temperature and given choice will set temperature lower in the summer than in the winter! Which doesn't make any sense, because one part of the discomfort is the temperature difference between outside an inside. It just doesn't make any sense to be cold in the office in summer and hot in winter.
**
I have once arrived at a rather large open space in summer where somebody increased temperature on one side over the weekend. That was presumably because the rest of the office was fricking freezing but the person was too lazy to set the temperature for entire office.
When I came in I thought there was a lot of noise and a small tornado as one side of the office was trying to heat up the air while other was trying to cool it down.
When different parts of a large open space have different temperature it means that the AC will be doing overtime trying to cool the air in some parts and heat it up in other parts.
https://www.theverge.com/facebook/2020/5/21/21265699/faceboo...
the concept of a company providing shuttle bus service instead of just having proper public transport to bussiness parks is very weird when one thinks about it.
I can get into our small city office with a short drive and a longish train trip. I pretty much have to drive to our suburban office.
I wouldn't want to spend a good part of the day indoors with people who aren't vaccinated
Certainly the path of least resistance is to encourage but not require because that way someone who doesn't like that policy can just quit rather than require the company to fire people who don't have the right docs (or submit fake ones).
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/the-googleplex-of-the-...
Maybe a whole grid of inflated condoms in jolly colors is just the ticket.
Really, I wonder how much better telepresence needs to be before there's really no point. Low latency, full duplex audio, largish monitors. The Veldt doesn't seem like much of a stretch.
"My responses are limited; you must ask the right questions." What getting your whole team together for 1-2 weeks per quarter? I hear some teams travelled that way in the before time.
> The majority of Google employees are in no hurry to return.… 70% said they had a “favorable” view about working from home compared with 15% who had an “unfavorable” opinion [and 15% neutral].… The company appears to be realizing its employees may not be so willing to go back to the old life.
Will be interesting to see if people actually leave or if it's just bluster.
> “No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work force model,” [Google's CEO] wrote in an email a few weeks later announcing the flexible workweek.
Like communism: maybe nobody's implemented it correctly before, or maybe it's a bad idea.
You would have thought with Steve Jobs's Apple running in the opposite end of spectrum showing casing everything about Tech and Human interaction. All the changes that happened right in front of your face, People will learn something from it.
But No. Google managed to outdone everyone again. The absolute genius of Google managed to be even worst than Microsoft.
I have also noticed the PR of Google has been way worst for the past 5-6 years. I also notice the change in tone with Apple's PR tactics in the past 5-6 years. I wonder if those that used to work for Google's PR went to work with Apple.
Why should I even go into the office during a pandemic, it just does not make sense.
It seems so insanely thoughtless to me.
Like, is that really the world you want? Gmail surveillance already took over everyone's email, same for maps and apps and YouTube. Anyone with a clue is trying to roll this worldwide trend backward, not make the Google advertising machine more efficient and effective at ingesting every single last molecule your private data and personal activities.
It can be helpful to remember that at big media sites, headlines get written by headline specialists. It's their job to sex up the title, and the rest of our job (the rest of us's job?) not to take the bait. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
I've replaced the title with a suitably neutral, representative sentence from the article body. There nearly always is one.