Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office | Hacker News Reader

Google offers employees free electric scooters to get them back to the office

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Idk why but stuff like this completely turns me off when it comes to working for them.

Recently I was talking with a FB recruiter and the amount of kool-aid that came out of his mouth made me feel uneasy. Stuff like we will get you to use whatsApp it's amazing you will never use anything else again. Then, the metaverse pitch of how FB/Meta is changing the world. Then just defending meta for no reason saying some people say negative things about meta but its a really great company that has done a lot of AMAZING things. His enthusiasm was so toxic I would not want to spend 5 minutes with this individual. Is everyone like this at FAANG?

Maybe I'm just too old for this shit. I get my work done and don't drink the corporate kool-aid.

FAANG recruiters are very different than FAANG engineers.

The problem is that the recruiters are the face of the organization to those looking to become engineers.

This. Judging what engineers are like somewhere based on enthusiasm of one of their recruiters feels like doing the same based on enthusiasm of their HR people.

Just think about your current company and how representative recruiters are of the engineers you work with. It is worlds of difference. Their jobs are to sell/advertise/source roles, engineering jobs are to produce/organize. If two roles don't overlap in function/interaction and goals much, I wouldn't compare them.

However, if you hear the same koolaid drivel from engineers interviewing you, that would definitely be somewhat of a red flag. Especially if every single engineer interviewing you separately tries to make you chug that koolaid. Awkward one-offs could happen accidentally, and they do fairly commonly, but a chain of them is worrysome and serves as a warning sign to me. Not a "instantly run away" sign, mostly because it could be that they are just going by the script provided to them. But once you dig deeper and start paying attention to that explicitly, it usually gets more obvious which one it is.

Not everyone is like this, but there are a lot of candidates who want to feel like they’re doing something important so it’s something recruiters need to compete on. There’s definitely room for careerists in big tech, although if you genuinely don’t care about “making a difference” you could probably get a better offer from Citadel or something.

This is intentional, they are filtering out employees they don't want out of the gate. FAANGs want young, single engineers who will eat, sleep, and breathe the corporate brand and do way over their 40 hrs a week.

A brilliant way to do that while skirting the law would be to arrange for interviewees to have a short walk from the front desk or whatever, with a chaperone and a person who appears to be another candidate but is actually a shill, who shares personal information (the sort that is illegal to ask about) in the manner of small talk.

I wonder if/how many companies do this.

Google employee here. I work in engineering but collaborate very closely with recruiters and executives. While I don't speak for the company nor for all of its countless employees, I can say that in four years of employment, nobody ever, EVER said, implied, or appeared to act in a way that made me think that they want what you describe.

Case in point, I'm in my forties and have a family with young kids and have arguably been successful as well.

The good news is that it is only this weird stuff that makes the news. My experience at Google has been that the vast majority of it is just a workplace. Same stuff from middle management. Same cycles of performance review. Same desks. There isn't any large amount of wackiness on a day to day basis. People are grumpy and complain about Google products internally all the time. I don't observe a forced smile or kool-aid.

The pay is good. You can take advantage of facilities and benefits if you want, but many people don't.

I worked there from 2008 to 2015. The trajectory of the word "Googley" was telling; it went from an occasional tongue-in-cheek reference, to an everyday word used literally and unironically to describe anything that was good or desirable (in the subjective opinion of the speaker, of course).

Toward the end of my time at Google, most uses of the word turned me off, and in particular the lack of self-awareness around how it was used was a pretty appalling kool-aid indicator.

There are all sorts of weird words. I'm currently fuming about the fact that "double-click" has apparently entered PM-speak. My experience has been that although "Googley" does get used frequently and it is indeed a stupid word it basically just means "kind" or "helpful" and I don't read it as some sort of kool-aid that implies that people working at Google are meaningfully different than people working elsewhere. This is, of course, just my personal experience.

Just make sure they don't write it on a whiteboard where the cl can look like a d, which changes the meaning.

The headline seems sensationalist – Is this really an attempt to get workers back to the office, or just one more optional perk among dozens of others that tech companies offer their employees?

The meme of “anything but more pay” really does ring true all the time. Capx vs opx really is the dumbest accounting thing. Getting a 10k raise is “impossible” but a 10k “one time” bonus I get every year is a no brainer.

Would people come back to the office for 100% more salary? For sure yes. What about 1%? For sure no. So just find the price and call it a day. I bet you get critical mass at about 30%.

And I suspect the only reason they want people to come back is that they've invested soooo much in office real estate. They have billions in buildings in the Bay Area, NYC and other locations. They used to be primo buildings and they're probably carried on the balance sheet at a huge valuation. No one wants to come to grips with marking these positions to market.

I read this a lot, but sincerely have my doubts. Google is a 1.7 trillion dollar company and their real estate portfolio seems to be around 50 billion, which is about 2.5 percent.

Certainly google doesn’t want a big loss on that 50 billion. But I think it’s clear that the success of the remaining 1.65 trillion of the company is much more important.

Rather, management probably thinks in-person work is vital for long term success. If you put yourself into an upper manager’s shoes and think about “googleyness”, it’s probably easy to fool yourself with a bunch of qualitative bullshit and come to the conclusion that remote work is an impediment to building value and should be phased out over N years.

Then all that’s left is deciding the value of N, and how to make the phase-out as painless as possible.

It is very hard to keep people in the cult if you aren't surrounding them. Google works by pushing employees to build their entire identity and social circle around the company. Eat and relax on campus, find yourself a spouse in the company, sure. Work way over full time and have way too many ties to ever, ever leave.

Doesn't work if people are at home and can go do stuff outside the campus.

I feel like this is exactly the reason companies want people in the office.

It is a lot harder to leave when you are in the office all the time, you are surrounded mostly by co-workers inside and outside the office. Plus, when you spend 10 hours a day in the office looking for work is difficult. It is super easy to schedule interviews when you are remote with flexible schedule.

Plus, when you are remote and you switch companies the change is not as scary and drastic.

> Google works by pushing employees to build their entire identity and social circle around the company. Eat and relax on campus, find yourself a spouse in the company, sure. Work way over full time and have way too many ties to ever, ever leave.

This hasn't been my experience at all. Granted, I am one person in one team in one corner of a giant company. But my experience is that when I was in the office I went home consistently at 5:30. On days when I spent time playing pinball or got a massage I still went home at 5:30. I am friends with exactly zero of my coworkers. I don't think I know a single person at Google who hangs out with another Googler I know outside of work. And in spite of making very hard boundaries between work and life, my career growth rate has been in the top 5%ile of engineers at the company.

What time do you start though?

I consistently rolled in at 9:30. Unless I was hungry for breakfast, then I'd probably start at 9:45.

Those poor Google engineers, being exploited with their $300k+ compensation and comprehensive benefits. How dare their employer try to incentivize returning to the office.

They’re free to do what they want, I’m not saying how dare they. It’s just a common pattern of companies saying “I will give you anything you to do something against your preference as long as it costs us nothing.”

Exploitative would be forcing employees back to the office.

Why would employees want a subscription though?

Considering you can buy a Xiaomi scooter for like $400 (which is easily affordable to most google employees), then why would someone want the extra hassle of managing a subscription to avoid paying $44/mo… assuming someone wanted a scooter in the first place.

This is basically a faux-perk.

900 dollar scooters selling for a low subscription fee of 50 dollars a month.

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