A Hybrid Approach to Work
blog.google
blog.google
It just doesn't work when half of the team can walk by each other's desk, do some impromptu planning, and the other half are spread out across the world effectively uninvolved in these conversations. Nobody wants to go through the trouble of setting up a zoom for the 2 min conversation you have about a thing, or nobody is going to loop in a remote colleague when the team has lunch or coffee together.
You either choose to be fully digital, and make digital communication the way work gets done, or you harm people out of the office. Maybe Google will make a miracle happen, but I've never seen "hybrid" work as optimal as either fully in office, or fully remote.
I have set aside 30 minute blocks on my calendar for "drop-ins" for exactly this flavor of conversation. I'm the only person on the invite list, but others know about its existence and will find the link on my calendar as needed. Sometimes no one shows up, other days the block turns into an impromptu large group brainstorm, other times it's back-to-back 2 min conversations.
I say this as someone who managed mixed distributed / WFH teams: If in-person conversations are an advantage (and they are), no company is going to willingly surrender them for the sake of catering to the people who aren't in the office.
That doesn't mean teams can ignore the remote team members. It's everyone's responsibility to communicate and share information. However, there's no sense in reducing the efficiency of in-office employees just to level the playing field.
The strategies that worked best for my teams were to structure the hires and the workloads according to who could work best together. For example, having an in-office back end team combined with a WFH front-end team works well, because the communication is naturally segmented across team boundaries anyway.
On the other hand, if you put one of the front-end devs in the office with the back-end devs while everyone else is WFH, you need to be prepared to make that in-office person the team lead because they're going to become the primary communication point whether you want it or not.
I love my mixed distributed/WFH teams, but I'll never deny that in-office communication still reigns supreme. That said, distributed can be made to work as long as you do your planning and structuring around the natural communication lines rather than trying to fight it.
The organization will never be perfect and stay perfect, but as long as you pay attention to it when hiring and designing teams then it can be close.
Also, there's this new invention called "doors" that I wish companies would get on board with. I hear that "opening" one's "door" can be used as an invitation to chat. :)
They had a new building constructed, including a very coveted corner office. A student organization was absolutely delighted when they received that corner office, and thought it was a sign of growing appreciation for their work. Turns out, it was actually a way out of a political quagmire: professors had fought for that office so bitterly that it had gotten to a web of "ok, I will accept that you're not giving it to me, as long as X doesn't get it either". The student organization wasn't really hated by anybody enough to be part of this web, so they got it just as a way to avoid pissing anyone off too much.
Must be very new since our office had none bar for the meeting rooms.
This reminds me the time I was working at the office. We had an open floor plan, and so no doors (except the CEO).
It was sometimes nice to talk to people, but there were times when I was deeply in code, and someone asked a small random question from me. It was clearly because he/she wanted just to talk. This would have been better to ask through Slack as I could then continue my work and answer later.
So what I usually did was a) stayed home for deep work hours or b) put on my headset and listened to music to indicate that my "door" was closed.
And yes, with the CTO the physical door was an indication: if it was open, we went in and discussed something, and he was always happy to do so. When it was closed, we didn't interrupt him, and when we did, you could feel that he was feeling indeed interrupted.
I am curious on 1) the size of your teams, and 2) your opinion on how this would work with E2E product domain based teams (mixed skill sets) vs skills based teams e.g. User engagement team (front and backend devs covering sign on, emails, etc) vs Backend engineers (maintain all backend systems, etc).
There is no sense in not teaching high level math to gifted children, yet it is still happening in the name of equity. Just watch and see in person meeting getting banned in the name of equity as we progress from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism.
Seems like giving people a choice is the right idea. Maybe being less involved in these impromptu conversations is a worthwhile tradeoff for being able to live where they want.
I have seen this implication frequently in these discussions, that remote workers will get fewer promotions, lower ratings, etc.
The assumption is that this therefore makes remote work non-viable. I don't really get that. Trading off better compensation through promos and ratings is just a business decision for the potential remote worker.
Personally, I would trade never getting a promotion again for remote work. Google and the other companies like it already pay very, very well. If you've reached E6+, it's "FIRE in <10 years" well, even if you get "meets all" ratings forever. If you're in that position, you can be making 10x the median household income. You've basically won at money.
Commuting is miserable, and I bike, easily one of the two least miserable methods (walking being the other) of doing so. Open offices are miserable. Flexibility at home is amazing. Having my own space is amazing. Making my own food for lunch, in my kitchen, is great. Feeling unfocused and deciding to just take a nap in my own bed for an hour.
So yeah, maybe I'll never get a promotion. But, I don't think I'll do poorly enough to get fired, so... good enough for me.
Trade you say? Sounds like win-win to me! Not being made to manage/lead a bunch of other engineers sounds pretty nice
Leadership also implies that you are responsible / accountable for the performance of your team. Both your team as well as outside stakeholders will look to you for answers. Hence "management is not a promotion". Not everyone is cut out take on such a role, and not everyone is willing to take on such so role.
> Eventually you might master your domain of expertise and solving the same problem again and again for different customers may become boring
Can I pick this apart?
In the short run? Perhaps. In the long run? That's highly dependent on the industry and your role. Sure, the foundational challenges might be the same - e.g. reconcile user experience, content management and data storage - but the surface level solutions and problems are always evolving, which can keep the job engaging as you grow into it.
The "you're going to get bored in 5 years time" argument is value attribution. Would you make the same assertion towards a medical specialist having a long career in liver or eye surgery? Or an artisanal cabinet maker? Or a shoe designer? Likely not.
Then there are specialists in other industries like oil, welding, car body work, paint jobs,... I mean, even hair dressers - arguably - do the same thing year in year out. Many make careers out of those, and many others move out after a few years feeling that the job has stopped giving them value.
Now, the big risk with a job is that it becomes extremely repetitive and there's little potential for agency as a worker to change the job. For instance, nobody gets happy spending 20 years in front of a screen clicking the same five buttons doing micro-jobs or data entry, or banging in the same 20 commands on a prompt for that matter,... But this has far less to do with the particular role, and everything with the work itself.
In that regard, it's arguable that "move towards a leadership role", or even "coach co-workers", are the only career options to move out of job which just doesn't give you pride and satisfaction after some time.
Moving lateral towards another engineering role, inside or outside your current organization, are completely valid strategies as well. Heck, it doesn't even have to be an engineering role at all. It's completely valid to leave the industry and do something totally different, if you have the financial freedom, and/or freedom from other personal obligations, to do so.
Of the young co-workers I've coached over a decade ago, about half went on in IT, and the other half moved towards entirely different industries doing entirely different things with their lives. And that's entirely fine by me if that's what helps them live happy lives.
I don't believe it works like that. U get fewer promotion not because you are remote worker. The problem is that you can become less valuable resource, who can effectively make less overall impact on the product. Hence lower rating. So for employer is not trade-off between pay/remoteness, rather between better employee or remoteness. Basically nobody cares if you are remote or not if you can do your job efficiently. And be transparent and manageable.
VC is automatically added to meetings, every room is equipped with the proper AV, and culturally, people often actually click the right buttons to start the VC even when they aren't expecting VC guests. I don't remember ever attempting to join a meeting over VC and having the main location forget to join (although it probably happened to someone every once in a while).
At least on our team, we tended not to have those 2 minute conversations. The code-review tools are top tier, so we would use those if at all possible. Most of our non-meeting communication otherwise was in buganizer (the bug tracker), Google groups via email, Google docs, or IRC (they were getting rid of it around when I left).
I think the only exception was Nooglers. We had Nooglers sit next to a mentor on the team, and they would usually ask lots of simple questions out loud throughout the day.
In at least one Google building I worked in, for a while conference rooms were in such short supply that if you didn't start the VC, after a few minutes some calendar bot would decide that the room wasn't being used, remove your reservation from the room, and five minutes later someone else would show up and try to kick you out.
I don't think these companies have thought this through. Logically, the 3 days a week in office will slowly become 2, then 1. Or maybe teams will decide to only get together 3 days a month or something like that.
At that point, you're effectively fully virtual anyway.
These companies need to just dive right in, because the suggested format smells of poorly thought out compromise.
I’m not going to go across a building and up steps to ask someone a question unless I am out of other options. I’m not. You’re not. I’ve done too many 5 Why’s where one of the answers was “they made a guess because they couldn’t be arsed to cross the building to verify things”.
We might message that person, if we use it and they actually read their messages. At which point being in the office isn’t quite as transformative.
Now I have to find time in our day loaded with zoom meetings with other people with just as convoluted zoom meeting schedules to zoom with Fred for ten minutes. We might not find a good mutual time to meet until next week.
Scheduling zoom calls vs. leaning back in your chair when your coworker has a second is an entirely different animal when it comes to workplace efficiency. I'd say I'm spending a lot more of my working time scratching my head than getting things done vs. before the pandemic.
There are good things about working from home, but this is probably one of the worst parts in terms of work. It's like studying alone in your cramped bedroom vs in the library with your buddies in college.
Some people work half time, should we all not socially interact during their absence, because it would disadvantage them as well?
The enemy of better is best, and I feel you are actually making a case against home working by being so extreme in your demands. Some people would like to work from home, understanding it adds a social challenge, but still prefer it for a myriad of reasons.
And some people need to be in an office to be productive. I think it's a nobler goal to try cater to both, than set up some extreme all or nothing scenario.
It's essentially another of the very popular nudge tricks that are all the rage at the moment, and will result in everybody being back in the office. The 'choice' on offer isn't a choice at all. It's a management device to all but eliminate remote working and allow them back into their comfort zone.
For remote to work everybody has to be remote and work via a central communication device. That way everybody is in the same 'office space' and the culture evolves around that to get the work done. Management then changes natures to suit the remote environment. (Note you can do 'all remote' on a campus - you give everybody an office!)
I can guarantee you that if firms were required by law to pay for the time spent commuting, they would all choose to go remote permanently unless there was a physical reason to be in the same space.
But it is for the workers to see commuting as part of work time, and calculate what they are getting paid per hour accordingly.
This is a tired take. Google Hangouts and Slack Video are quick and work great.
I think it's time we admit that a five day work week is counterproductive.
Even Google notices this but is probably too big to make that change to a shorter work week; the best they can do is "reset days." Smaller companies seem to be doing fine with a shorter week.[1]
[1] Buffer comes to mind first, other examples on 4dayweek.io
"Under the plans, an estimated 200 to 400 Spanish companies will voluntarily take part in the project by reducing their employees’ working week to 32 hours while keeping their salaries the same. The government will compensate participating businesses for any higher costs incurred by the changes, such as the need to hire additional staff or to reorganize scheduling and shift patterns. That investment will be financed through Spain’s share of the EU Coronavirus Recovery Fund."
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/spain-four-day-work-week-n...
(check out the graph "Annual working hours per worker" and see which country has the fewest working hours annually; you might be surprised)
And Microsoft Japan:
https://www.npr.org/2019/11/04/776163853/microsoft-japan-say...
This is strange. They're paying companies to hire extra workers so everyone can work fewer hours? Sounds more like a jobs program than anything.
I haven't seen any studies but I'd not be surprised if this translates into an increase in total employment.
Another benefit I perceive is that by assuming that people will be absent, companies have higher bus factors by default and the increased resilience that goes with it. And of course, the reduced efficiency that comes hand in hand. I've lived through enough crises to favour resilience.
One of the important currencies in our industry is trust, and people only trust That Guy grudgingly. Sharing info is often reciprocated, and you have a clearer picture of the whole project. Something very necessary if you ever hope to be in leadership.
I don't agree with you. My read on why they keep doing reset days is that "down" time doesn't really exist anymore. When in the office at Google, there are lots of "fun" things that can eat up time. Be it team off-sites (this is a big one for me), office events, fun classes, etc... we don't have those. To me, reset days are making up for people working more due to being at home with fewer outlets to take up their time.
I also get the feeling that people are taking way less vacation. Vacation is important to most people's sanity at a company, so reset days help with that as well.
If we make it a 4 day work week, once it becomes the norm whats to say that people wont want a 3 day work week?
I may be biased though as I run https://4dayweek.io/ - Software Jobs with a better work life / balance.
I wrote about the advantages of a 4 day week (for employers) here:
I plan to add a feature where you can advertise yourself on this website that you are looking for part-time jobs. How many hours are you willing to work. What skills do you have. You will be able to login using GitHub account.
Part-time jobs are getting more popular. Anecdotal case: https://twitter.com/zachcodes/status/1390033250148655111
This is the most interesting bit that I saw. For a year+ the official stance has been that there won't be any more fully-remote work after the pandemic than there was before.
My comp is lower now but it's easily a net win.
Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27007898 - May 2021 (179 comments)
This is meaningless. Either WFH completely or not, this in between thing doesn't work. Employees don't have the freedom to live where they want. All those dreams about Silicon Valley dispersing all over the country are just dashed. People still live close to work and they just get to stay home a couple days a week. That's all.
The news here is that they’ll allow some employees to work in remote offices, and some to go fully remote.
Seems like that is the way the valley is headed.
"For my friends everything, for my enemies the law"
Apparently by "Oscar R. Benavides, President of Peru from 1933 to 1939" (https://www.quora.com/Who-originally-said-To-my-friends-ever...)
It's obviously purposefully non-committal, which makes sense, as Google leadership clearly is not inclined to want to be remote-first.
Lots of stuff is really group-specific at many firms. Google aims to be more top-down than most companies its size about these sorts of things, but it's a valid model to say some-teams-this-is-acceptable-some-it-is-not.
I just don't get why they insist on keeping people in a seat? At least for google, offering all these on-site only perks is just a scheme to keep employees at work for as long as possible.
It will be interesting to see how all this ultimately plays out. My best guess is that companies like Shopify, who are fully committing to remote work, with in-office options, are going to end up with better retention. However, it also seems plausible that places requiring in-office schedules will simply attract people wanting that and the places offering remote will attract people wanting that.
From what I see, there is a pretty clear line in the sand between folks that want an office and folks that don't. While a 3/2 hybrid schedule may be better than in the office 5 days a week, it's still quite a bit worse than being remote 5 days a week if that's your preference.
I've been working remotely for the past three years and it's crazy to think back how relatively rare of an opportunity it was when I started doing it. It's everywhere now and a ton of people across the world have gotten the opportunity to try it out. You hear a lot about how COVID accelerated a lot transformations by 3-5 years. I think it accelerated remote work by at least a decade, probably more.
That doesn't necessarily mean their top priority isn't productivity, because the productivity of an organization is not simply the sum of the individual, independent productivities of its members.
They may, for instance, believe something along the following lines. 1. All else being equal, most people are more productive individually at home than in the office. 2. Individuals' productivity in the office is higher when other people are also in the office, because they can cooperate. 3. Individuals' productivity is better directed (i.e., the stuff they're productive at is a better match for the actual needs of the company) if at least some of the time they're physically in the same place as their colleagues. Without that, they may work more efficiently but they are less likely to be working on the right things. 4. Because of 3 (backed up by 2) the amount of value provided to the company is greater when employees spend some time together in the office.
Whether any of that is actually true is another matter. And of course they may also just like the power-trip of seeing all their minions working busily. But it's not true that the words you quoted have to mean that productivity isn't what they care about most.
(In case it matters to anyone: I am not a Googler, have no interest in watching minions working busily and furthermore have no minions, and much prefer working from home though whether I'm actually more productive there I don't know.)
Fwiw I find the opposite to be true: I have had a much easier time disconnecting from work when my workspace wasn't in my bedroom.
Do tell, given what you know about the Google promotion process, how a choice to work remotely would translate to a decreased likelihood to be promoted (and, importantly, to an unfair degree)?
The entire system is a scam and built specifically to keep you at google and drinking the kool aid
I worked at Google for four years. I've seen many people I know basically "play it safe" by making conservative decisions in order to minimize the likelihood of hurting one's promo chances. Despite all the talk about this, nobody really knows for sure what will affect their promo. For example, people will stay on a team they hate rather than risk "resetting the promo clock". There is also a general understanding that being outside the Bay Area hurts your career growth.
Given these tendencies and the fact that people who work remotely often find themselves more isolated than their in-office colleagues, I fully expect that people will hesitate to adopt remote work if they're not in the majority.
Got it. So when it was asked, "how many know they're on the chopping block if they work remotely" and it was redefined to ask "how many know their chances for promotion might be affected by working remotely?"... The answer is "almost everyone".
Many people will happily choose to work remotely, even if it makes promotion harder, because that's a good trade-off for them. Exactly like people will happily work from other offices.
So what's the problem?
That said, I know many people who really miss being in the office, including many former colleagues at Google. Some of them have kids, while others need the social aspect of in office culture. I really believe that at least half the company wants to work from an office.
That makes me wonder what happens with the other half. Having part of a team work remotely isn't ideal for those people - they end up being left out of things. On the other hand, it doesn't really make sense to just forget everything we've learned from the last year of remote work and force a big percentage o people back to a situation where they're less productive.
I suspect though that the latter is exactly what will happen to some extent based on Google's own statement, which is a shame. But we all have to give things up for work and many Googlers would be very reluctant to leave.
Who takes care of the kids while they’re at the office though?
(Also possible that the offices that were opened were more heavy on hardware / "lab" roles, so while maybe it was officially "voluntary", those people effectively had to choose between coming back to the office or doing fake / busy work at home.)
Having worked from the Zurich office myself previously, most people are within walking/biking/a 5 minute train ride to the office, so commute concerns that we have in the US aren't relevant.
Similarly, most people in those locations live in apartments or condos and so may not have a space to make a home office. Returning to the office to make use of the (superior) workspace in the office. I can say that for example on my team, around half of my coworkers (whose offices are open) are consistently in the office.
The new team I'm on is better, as we have a daily standup and more frequent interaction. But I still miss the face to face interaction, spontaneous brainstorming, and ability to just tap someone on a shoulder to ask for help, etc.
Remote works for some people, but it isn't working for me right now.
But I'd like to point out that working from home this last year (with forced kids at home, no chance to travel, services closed etc) was not the common experience people had in non-pandemic times.
So, we were built around a hybrid-ish sort of model from the beginning. I'm honestly not sure how the team would do if we were all together. I know we wouldn't have the same team, that's for sure. A couple of the folks couldn't have taken the jobs if a move had been required.
I oversee work by a number of other teams, they are all working at the international level, and none of them are fully localized. If anything, the one thing I think may change with the pandemic is that people will develop less localization, and travel to visit teammates will become a thing. If I recall, Slack does this: they have everyone meet up once or twice a year. We did that at the beginning and it was super helpful.
The lack of flexibility annoyed me so much that I built https://4dayweek.io/
Software jobs with a better work / life balance
From my perspective, I've been talking to companies and using the 80% salary as leverage - it's clearly not ideal but I think it may be a necessary first step to get more companies to make the switch. I'm also trying to convince companies to list their positions as "open to applications for a 4 day week", rather than advertised as a 4 day week
Small steps...
Google offers really easily 80% time for 80% salary, even for nooglers. You just have to ask for it, some of my friends here went for it straight away after being hired.
Myself I'm on 90% (one every other Friday off) just because that's my optimal balance.
- No fixed offices. Companies rent smaller offies at co-working spaces (e.g. WeWorks) and pay their employees a WeWork pass so that they can hot desk from any WeWork across the world.
- 3.5 days work, 3.5 days off. Ideal work week would be: Monday, Tuesday full days, Wednesday half day, Thursday full day, Friday, Saturday, Sunday off.
- Everyone works from home and there is no fixed quota of people having to be anywhere. Each team can and should independently decide at which co-working space they want to meet and for which purpose. Everything is remote first set up though so that sharing and working over well established tools is the norm and not an afterthought.
This new "hybrid" approach by Google is a tiny step forward, but still a LOOONG way away from the perfect work life balance and actually feels like a step backwards after the pandemic.
That's it, the end of geographic arbitrage. No more working from the mountains on a Silicon Valley salary. Hope everyone enjoyed it while it lasted.
Location-based pay has been the norm at Apple, Google and Facebook already.
Then, consider that much of compensation at higher levels is RSUs you've already been allocated for the next four years anyways.
Yeah. Anecdotally, the adjustment in pay within the USA at Big Cos is much lower than the differences in housing costs between SFBA and everywhere else.
(Between countries is another matter though; several years ago I've heard of folks in Europe making 2x/3x less than their American peers. Not sure what the situation is today.)
From what I've read elsewhere on the internet stopping the flow of CA programmers would actually be a god-sent to people who were raised in Nowhere, Montana, the gentrification taking place in the last few years has had very annoying societal side-effects for said local people. As far as I could understood Colorado is already a lost case, though.
And furthermore, who's checking all of this—do you have to prove where you work, or just have a mailing address and a place to pay taxes?
I know one place that sent an inspector to verify the home office had the minimum required office equipment: a door and a shredder.
I'm not sure exactly how sales tax rules work, but in the US I believe that if a business has a presence in a given state they are required to collect sales tax in that state. This could matter for smaller companies but probably Google already has a presence in every US state.
Regardless, purposefully lying to your employer about your location seems like something most employers would get really upset about simply on principle once they found out.
If you aren't working for a major publicly-traded big tech firm, chances are this is not going to be happening to you in the first place. Big tech's motivation for doing this is clearly cost-cutting and avoiding liabilities they cannot yield total control over. If Google can't get you fat & giggly on paternalistic "benefits," hosted on their corporate campus, they're afraid you won't become the subservient non-skeptical workhorse they believe they need. So, they've got to start finding ways to offset the costs they believe will be coming from having employees who aren't being dominated under the total surveillance and control of Google's ever-present watching eyes.
Also, if everyone is vaccines can we do away with mask requirements?
From my understanding, yes as soon as positive tests in the country (or some wide area you're likely to mingle with) are near zero. Until then, there is the risk of someone (not yet vaccinated) who carries the virus developing a mutation that can then try itself on the immune system of a vaccinated person (you). It'll spread if it's resistent, so we should avoid such contracts. As soon as we don't have it roaming around, I think we can do away with these precautions indeed.
We still don't have any hard evidence that the vaccine stops transmission. It's possible that it keeps you from getting sick while being an asymptomatic spreader.
That's why we're still wearing masks even after vaccination until we have better understanding of how the vaccine affects transmission rates.
Yes we do. I'm not sure that we have peer reviewed published A/B studies yet (but I think we do have some initial ones).
But there is absolutely hard evidence that trasmissions rates decrease among vaccinated populations. We saw this with population level testing among groups that got vaccinated.
> Preliminary data points to substantially lower rates of transmission among vaccinated people. [the article then cites a study in Israel, which I was also referring to]
That is some hard evidence. It may not be absolutely conclusive, but yes its evidence. We don't yet have a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard, yes. But we do have hard evidence.
We absolutely do and such studies exist, and furthermore you can see a rapid decline in new cases in countries that have achieved high vaccine coverage, which would not have occurred if vaccines did not prevent onward transmission.
Source please. CDC hasn't said anything about this.
If vaccinated people can't get it, then it will mean that spreaders have less people to spread it to.
They don’t classify if that’s continuous or one-time to get a laptop replacement. I would guess the latter
Ask that same 60% if they wanted a month of work from home pre-COVID and I'd bet on at least 33% saying yes, if not more.