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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.

But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk. Also, I worked on teams that had people worked out in many offices, mostly not Mountain View. I was surrounded by Googlers in an open-plan office, but it was often lonely. I ate alone sometimes. It was often not worth the commute.

I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.

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Lonely is an incredibly accurate way to describe working at Google. Everyone says the office perks are there to trick you to stay, but our work area was quieter than a library and no one hung around. If people were talking they'd legit catch themselves and be like, we should grab a conference room. Incredibly polite but also an uncomfortably quiet environment.

I think a lot of people just wanted to put in their hours and get home to their families. I love pool but never played with anyone on the table one floor down because it just wasn't a make-friends environment. I think I shot the shit with someone when I got into work a handful of times in the more-than-a-year that I worked there. Huge reason I left.

This isn't even coming from a social person. I prefer WFH. I don't particularly like going out. However, if I'm gonna be forced to be around people I'd at least like it to be pleasant.

That sounds amazing, I dearly wish for "library rules" on the floor. The office has plenty of social and collaborative spaces that aren't where my keyboard/monitor/charger are, and switching to one of those spaces when you're going to have a conversation is a good norm.

That’s how it’s been at my office (even pre-pandemic). The open office is relatively quiet, there are several areas good for quiet conversation, and lots to conference and phone rooms. It’s great for those days I need to get out of the house, and just as productive.

100% agree on this.

I've attended the weddings of multiple friends from my first job. I'm still in touch with 4-5 people from my second job. I haven't spoken to anyone from my team at Google since the day I left. I had good, cordial relationships with all of them, but it was also incredibly impersonal. I don't even recall learning anything about anyone's spouse, for instance.

Is it possible that in general we have more attachment with our colleagues in our earlier jobs than the later ones?

I remember when I got my first job I was extremely social and would try to make friends with anyone. But now that I'm on my nth job I don't feel the need to socialize as much and would prefer to put in my work hours and move on with my life.

This is somewhat true. Definitely at the start of your career you are more gregarious.

I don't think it's a good thing though. Middle aged men especially, I think, generally could do with a wider circle of acquaintances.

I try to keep in touch with a lot of my ex coworkers every 6 months.

Some of them are actually very keen to catch up, years after the job.

I'm friends with people who I was not very friendly with on the job 18 months after I've left the place, after sending them a text message saying "how's it going."

This resonates a lot with me.

I made more enduring friendships in each of my 3yr tenures at Facebook and Microsoft than I did at 8yrs of google

Why do you think that is?

At Microsoft there were a lot of discussion lists for niche passions like paintballing (we drove out to the boonies and just pulled into the woods where some people had built bunkers). It was also my first job out of college, so my cohorts were all looking for friendships.

At Facebook I was part of a startup acquisition. Those members were battle buddies. Facebook also had a cultural value that you should bring your authentic self to work, which I think led to people bonding better. That or it’s because Facebook threw lots of parties with inappropriate amounts of alcohol

Did you work at FB before Google? I wonder if age and family is a confounding factor here. I've lost touch with several friends I made when I was younger as they've prioritized parenting above friendship. I have no kids so I am basically persona non grata (except for the occasional IM). That's a fine choice for them, of course, but it definitely contributed to a reduction in events held outside of work hours.

Bring Your Whole Self To Work is literally a slogan in Google's internal training.

I feel like it should really be:

“Bring The Best 90% Of Your Self To Work”

Honestly, we all have a part of ourselves we should leave at home.

Depends heavily on team. Almost all of my teams have been quite social, with a lot of office banter and regular lunches and social activities together. I was in today, with about half of my team, and we had plenty of non-work conversations and a nice lunch break at Backyard Barbecue (now open as of this week!).

This may be because I'm a middling-social person; I'm an introvert by nature, and don't mind long stretches of alone time, but I can also hold a conversation about non-work topics. All it really takes is two extroverts (or at least reasonably friendly people) on the team to change the dynamic.

Worked for a much lesser international company and it was exactly the same minus the politeness. I had to find a quiet corner to get some work done.

Man that's sad.

The irony, of course, that working conditions at Google, of all places, are truly atrocious. For years our desks were in hallways (KIR-C, KIR-D). When I left big G, there were desks literally in staircases (KIR-D). I have no idea how they passed fire inspections.

I worked at Google in KIR for the past 5 years. You calling the working conditions "atrocious" is hilarious. This is why people call Googlers entitled.

The OP is talking about tech people, obviously. I don't think we need to discuss that a table in a stair case is still awesome compared to working in a coal mine. But these conditions would be borderline even for a small company on the countryside.

Disclaimer: Just going from your two comments, never saw Google's offices.

KIR-D legitimately sucks. Giant rooms, fifty million desks in each, not a wall in sight.

LOL... reminds me of the time I went down to Overture's office in Pasadena. We were supposed to meet some senior engineering guy there. We got out of the elevator, and there was a sea of long tables in that giant floor, wall to wall, with people sitting elbow to elbow.

"Wow, this looks like a call center; I'm glad I'm not in customer support", I thought to myself.

And then one of guys sitting at those big tables stood up, extending his hand: "Hi, I'm ...., glad to meet you guys". It was that senior engineer. Yikes!

My first two jobs had (nice) cubicles, since then I have been stuck with this open office, elbow to elbow nonsense. Cubicles used to be the butt of many jokes, but now it’s desirable. :/

As someone who watched KIR-D get constructed from his desk and later worked right next to the infamous desks-in-the-stairwell spot (and made it a point to detour around so as not to disturb the poor souls seated there), I find this thread wonderfully nostalgic.

Makes me want to drop by and crank that giant net up and down a few times just so everyone in the south wing can hear that soothing creaking sound again.

That said, let me know if you find yourself again stuck in KIR-D and want to escape while still working on the eastside.

Supposedly it is better now given all the people who have decided to WFH. They actually have nice comfy common areas again. This is what I heard during our VC lunch today, I've never been to the office myself (technically my desk was there, but I started during the pandemic).

> I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.

This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.

First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

> it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.

Remember those Yahoos! Whom Marissa had to fire because those adults could not be trusted to do what they were expected to do and be responsible?

Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.

Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…

It's a wonder cities don't just fall apart and stop functioning completely without someone taking an attendance headcount everyday and peaking over their shoulders to make sure they are doing their job.

Cities don’t have a particular mission statement, so that kind of comparison isn’t apt.

My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.

There’s a distributed system of loosely coupled organizations in charge of making cities work. They coordinate by a price system for many urgent voluntary transactions and by bureaucratic organizations with supervision for others. In neither case do they rely on people just doing their jobs because it is the god and honorable thing to do.

What makes you say employees working in cities don't have managers making sure they are doing their jobs?

Yeah, if you don't earn your living you end up homeless and starving.

You can thank capitalism for that.

Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.

It's a fairness thing at scale. In a small org, when you trust people to behave as adults they will generally fall within some band of normal that everyone sees as "reasonable". In a large org, you get outliers that do things someone else would consider unacceptable, and then they set the tone for the organization ("if they can do it, why can't I?"), and soon it's a race to the bottom in behavior.

The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.

I would like to know if you posted that because you have actual experience managing a large team, or you are just taking out of your **.

Yes, there is a great deal of flexibility and patience. I worked from home a couple days a week.

In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.

Why did that office originally close? And haven’t they opened a new, larger one since then?

2010. Google was very different then, and was honestly somewhat immature about location strategy. It is no longer like that, in large part as a response to Atlanta back then.

We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.

Engineering offices need an exec to serve as site lead. Whoever was there left or moved, and I guess they couldn't find a replacement. There is now an engineering office there again, so someone must have wanted (or been willing) to move there.

That would be me. I'm the tech site lead for Atlanta. The first part was certainly true many years ago (Bruce left). However, that was actually a driver for change way back in 2010 because nobody thought that was a good result

> This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.

This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.

Central vs distributed government. Which do you think works better?

A mixture of both is the usual approach I think.

A central government delegating most of the day to day management of citizen's environment to local, highly autonomous entities is a common pattern.

Central allows the majority to rule the minority. Distributed allows the majority to rule the minority but also allows groups to move to a jurisdiction where they can be the majority, or at least have a more friendly government while central does not.

Central is certainly easier for the rulers though and they have much more power and resources.

Federalism!

Depends which tradeoffs you are comfortable with and which aspects affect one's individual definition of "better".

I wonder how much of this consistency is for the sake of feeling in control. (i.e. I hypothesise, that it is only about emotions of the boss)

> First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility

> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?

> But when I was at Google, we would schedule VC meetings with people in a different part of campus just to avoid the walk.

This is a solid point; I work for a company that had four key buildings in two cities at the start of the pandemic; in reality, we were a "remote company" who were just rubbish at remote practises. The pandemic forced us to be remote-first, which fed back into being better organised for day-to-day.

I suspect most companies have this sort of mixed-model, and are just shitty at remote work.

(I will also note, as always, that there is a rich irony that big tech firms who push cloud-everything, remote collaboration tools and so on, won't eat their own dogfood. How much of Google watching Zoom walk away with the video calling market was due to their intransigence on this?)

> I've worked at a startup where everyone being there was essential in how we worked. (We were all pair programming.) It was great. It beats code reviews any day. I learned a lot.

I do pair programming very frequently with my coworkers remotely. We share a VNC connection to a Linux host. It works great.

Indeed - I pair program for much of the day with different people on the same team, and there is only (recently) one city which has two people in it. The notion that pairing need take place physically in the same room is just not correct.

I'd argue pairing is BETTER remote where you both have comfortable access to all your screens. While one person is writing production code, the other can be googling/writing repl style experiments/whatever and in easy communcation while they have the person writing code up on a second screen or at least a background window easily brought back to the foreground.

I worked on a Silicon Valley campus in 1999 and it was just the same: most of the people I interacted with _were_ on campus but it was seldom worth schlepping to whatever building they were in so we mostly used netnews and email.

I tried pairing in an open office environment, and I'd go work at McDonald's for minimum wage before returning to that environment again. It was pure hell for me.

I've never tried it but I feel the same way. If people saw the sort of work I did to test/PoC ideas I think they'd either a) flip their shit or b) stop me in my tracks so they could do it their way.

It sounds like an absolutely terrible way to learn and grow as a developer.

When you work at a startup, VC means venture capital: the lifeblood ever-requisite next-stage of your constant struggle to survive and grow as an early business.

When you work at Google, it means technology for avoiding a walk.

Constant pair programming is one of my deal breakers - along with open offices.

I believe there are teams which will be primarily remote

Individuals as well. My team is going to mixed-remote. Every single application for full time remote work in my org of hundreds was approved.

> pair programming... It was great. It beats code reviews...

this false dichotomy again, who said that pair programming was to replace code review, or vice versa?

I doubt that this is something everyone has to follow. More likely they'll just keep the option for everyone to apply for approval and then they'll negotiate that with the employees they think don't have leverage. People who have options would quit if forced to be back in office, you can boomerang at Google so it's not like they risk much.

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