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Comment by foogazi | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean ?

I believe they mean from the perspective of the employer. If a team has been able to fully function these past two years and the employees prefer working from home, there's little — if any — justification the employer can make for the return to office.

Playing devil's advocate, because I enjoy remote working, but it's not the same thing to have a full team remote, and only half of the team.

It honestly really depends. I'm a Googler and work in a team/org that was already heavily distributed all over the world. I am located in Japan, work with people in Europe, US (both coasts), Australia, Taiwan. While me being in the office means I get to talk in person with some people that are in my team (but which I'm not directly working with because my projects are with people located elsewhere anyway), and it's a nice social environment, work-wise it makes no difference for me because the people I have meetings with, I exchange emails, IMs, send code reviews, etc are spread all over the world anyway.

I personally prefer working from home, I have my test devices here, I set up my own home office, I don't need to waste time commuting, I have more time to take care of things around my house and/or my family if needs be, and I actually find myself working more focused and wasting less time than I did when I was in the office. I know this is not for everyone but the fact that my other team members might or might not be in the office has pretty much 0 effect on my work performance because I wouldn't even know nor care about.

Just my two cents.

"Despite shipping more than ever and having higher velocity than ever before remote work clearly does not work hence you must return to the office"

I do think there's something to be said for the long term culture effects remote work has. Maybe the current employees who used to work in the office are more efficient remote, but is the same true for new remote workers? What about in a few years when a large percentage of the employees may have never worked in the office at Google?

If any company Google should be able to create a compelling online employee culture and it does and did before covid.

> "Despite shipping more than ever and having higher velocity than ever before

I've been a member of several manager-centric forums since before COVID.

This was definitely not the case for most teams. The sudden switch to remote was not a productivity or even a morale boost for most.

It's kinda crazy how different perspectives are... From what I hear:

Average employee: "I am just as productive (or even more productive) working from home than when I was at the office. This is totally sustainable."

Average Manager: "I've noticed a huge drop in productivity from my employees since they have been working from home. This is entirely unsustainable."

This is what I hear from friends in other occupations, not just software, but also from my friends in software too.

Of course, both can be true if just a small percentage of employees drop productivity immensely while everyone else's remains the same... But it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their personal productivity.

I just find the dichotomy fascinating. - I don't have a race in the horse as I never went remote.

I obviously can only speak for my company.

> it's probably more likely that the employees are... not great at judging their productivity

At my company "let's get everyone stuffed back into the office asap because productivity" was mgmts slogan, but that position became pretty much indefensible after they announced that 2021 was literally the best year ever (highest revenue, highest revenue rise yoy absolute and %, largest increase in headcount, highest number of projects shipped, highest number of new projects etc.)

$GOOG stock has pretty much doubled since the beginning of the pandemic, meaning the company has been having absolutely no trouble whatsoever doing its job with a fully remote workforce for 2 years now. They don't "need" employees to come back to the office.

I don't think the stock price reflects that too much. You can't attribute the doubling to workers being at home. If it dipped when workers went back to the office.. that also would not mean much.

Using the stock price of a technology company to judge the productivity of it's workers? Surely that's a component of stock price, but man this seems like a huge leap to make such a claim

Maybe argue the inverse-- that most of their employees aren't actually productive? They're at over 150k FTEs and probably well over 100k temps/contractors, how many of them are doing things that materially impact revenue versus steady state or just looking busy? Every refresh of the golden goose Adwords makes it easier to just plug in a credit card and blindly spend without ever hearing from an account rep who manages 100's of other SMB accounts. Once they have so much inertia on their yellow page 2.0 search & video ad monopoly, where else will advertisers turn?

Two years aren't much at the time scale of Google. The effects of switching from in-person to remote (and vice-versa) are much longer term.

I don't think I agree. But I'm curious, in your opinion, how long is long enough to be able to say if WFH has had an impact on the company's bottom line?

A decade, maybe more.

This is a good point. Theranos equity made huge gains for a while so clearly they must have been ultra productive too?

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