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Comment by mattzito | Hacker News Reader

My team at google, we originally told everyone to come and go as they pleased back in February. That seemed the most flexible and the most employee friendly, but when we surveyed the team they didn’t like having no guidance on when they should be in the office.

So we labeled three days “preferred in-office” and made it clear you could still work from home on those days if you wanted. People much prefer this system.

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In my experience, if the company says "we would prefer that you do this, but it's your choice" it means "We don't feel like we can make you do this for whatever reason, but if you don't, you're Not a Team Player, and your career advancement ends here"

Maybe Google is different, but I doubt it. Probably Google used to be different, and no longer is, and a bunch of people are going to be unpleasantly surprised.

This is the conundrum, right? A lot of people dislike having no direction, especially with a lot of local people. My employer for example has one Thursday-Friday every month where the policy is basically "go into your local office, if you are within a commutable distance, and you want to go in." 'Commutable distance' is intentionally undefined, as the goal is for each person to decide whether they are a commutable distance or not. I had a job where I had a 50 minute commute but it was all back roads and I was going 50-60mph the entire time. It was fine, even enjoyable in nice weather. I've also had jobs where I sit on an interstate parking lot for 25 minutes each day and it was hell.

"Preferred in-office" makes sense when it's not as you described. It all just boils down to how much you can trust your boss and their boss, and whether you believe the company will make a good faith effort to communicate policy changes to you effectively. There's always the risk of someone you've never met getting a promotion and all of a sudden the definition of "preferred" changes but isn't communicated.

I mean you can't legitimately impose your suspicions, as founded as they could be about compagnies you know, on a compagny you don't.

What answer do you want really ? It's good to be suspicious but you need to leave room for actual good policies.

I can indeed legitimately impose my suspicions, because behavior of people with power in organizations does not exist in a vacuum and instead tends to follow certain lines based on human behavioral impulses, cultural factors, etc. Of course there are exceptions, but not preparing for fallout from not doing an optional but encouraged thing at work is sort of like showing up at work in your underwear because your new company might be a pants-optional company even though most companies aren't.

In this case, if I were a Google employee looking to advance in the company, I would show up on the suggested days with a convincing-looking smile on my face. If I was already at a level where I didn't expect to advance further without changing companies, I would continue working from home and be prepared to be on the top of the list the next time layoffs came up.

I don't disagree with any of what you say but seeing the devil everywhere has drawbacks too, starting with possibly being plain wrong. In this specific case the policy came precisely because employees asked for it..

Also to speak your language, one of the reasons people propose WFH or other benefits is precisely because they feel they don't hold so much power in a market where SWE are in high demand. So they 'sort-of-expect' you to use the benefits as proof that you 'sort-of-value' them and will stay. That doesn't mean you won't have to s** d** to advance.

Google is a big company, it's very difficult to generalize about what the expectations are universally - and my statement was just about my little corner of it.

Speaking for myself, I don't care at all whether people are in the office or not, and since I work in a totally different location from 80%+ of the team, I wouldn't know anyway unless we have a meeting together. I know that other peer managers I work with feel similarly. I've also been managing people in distributed locations for more than 20 years at this point, so perhaps I have more experience with it than others. I'm sure there are teams that handle things the way you describe - but I don't run one, and I won't work on one.

For myself, I enjoy being in the office because I have small children at home and I find it more challenging to concentrate unless I lock myself away in my bedroom, and if that's what I'm going to do, I'd rather be in-office. That being said, I'm WFH tomorrow and Friday because I have some personal things to take care of that are easier to do from home.

I also want to emphasize that we started off with a fully "you do you" philosophy, and we even pushed the managers on the team to make sure that they worked from home a few days a week at minimum to demonstrate that it was okay and model the behavior we wanted to encourage. My preference would be to keep it that way.

As I said in my original post, though, after a few months we asked people what THEIR preference was, and they (by a significant majority) wanted more structure on when to be in the office. Not to HAVE to go to the office, but to know when to expect to find other people in the office, because people didn't like going to the office only to discover that only two people from a team of 10 were in the office, but 5 of the others had been in the day before. Some teams had already informally started agreeing on "default in-office" days on their own.

We went to great lengths to try to emphasize that there is no obligation or expectation, but that if all other things are equal, these are the days when people should expect to find others on their team in office. Some teams (AFAIK) still pick one or two days a week to focus on in-office for themselves.

In my experience direct management is much more impactful to lived experience than company policy. Every team will be different, and I can only speak to my own experience, not to the experience of anyone under a different manager.

My higher ups have communicated that they're fine with people working from home, and you don't need to tell anyone, just mark your calendar that you're at home so people know to enter online meetings. People range from being in office the recommended 3 days a week, to 5 days a week, to rarely coming in, to never coming in ever, and I think people using any of these permutations are doing great.

One additional detail on the company policy side, we do have available remote work and you do (at least initially) get paid the same moving to remote and staying in the same place. I know at least two people that have successfully applied to work remote and I believe the vast majority of people who applied were approved for remote work. I can't speak for people going for high level management positions but I assume things would be different there.

Opinions are my own.

"Preferred but optional, your choice" sounds like a perfect compromise to me. At my job, it's "three days in minimum or you're fired, and btw the other two are preferred as well".

eh its close but not the same. It says "you can work from home but you need to have a reason" basically.

For a company with an office and colocated employees, this seems like a good balance to me. I'm fully remote now but in my old team as covid began to taper off we had Wednesday as our "preferred in-office" day. People would make the effort to come in if they didn't have a reason not to and we'd take an extended lunch to socialise and catch up.

Our team was split between 2 offices in different cities so all our meetings were still done on video calls but it mean the two sides of the team could get together. Also if we all met up in one office every few months then we had a day of the week we'd default to.

Suggested structure, but freedom to choose!

National holidays have the same coordination role: even if one had the same total days of vacation per year (as paid by employer), having some of them fixed by societal convention is an advantage for those who want to go to their village and meet their friends and relatives.

This is why Christmas shutdowns (and Thanksgiving) are the best holidays. Whenever we have a new person, we tell them how seriously we take the shutdown and to not send the team any emails until after.

In 2020, we had a manager join from a different FANG and she sent two emails the first Monday of break. Apparently another manager immediately texted her and told her to stop!

Why are people reading emails during these breaks? By not reacting everyone would quickly understand that off means off.

Right? On a break like that I don't even have my laptop with me.

Maybe it's because I am French but all these stories about people working during breaks is insane.

In all honesty, I have several work pals who do read their emails when on break (their choice) - I prefer coming back to 500 to 800 emails, quickly go though the important ones and realize that 8/9th of the problems solved themselves without my intervention.

This is great for disciplined employees. It's terrible for junior employees who haven't yet developed their sense of discipline.

Sounds like you should have more faith in your junior employees :)

I’d even say terrible for those who have no experience working remote; you’re entirely right in that it requires discipline. During the pandemic at my old company we had the IT/software department I worked in, and the auditing department. IT had no issues with complete remote having the prior experience and if anything productivity doubled. The auditing department struggled and was forced back in office as soon as possible.

I’m a junior employee working on a “preferred in-office” schedule. The COVID semesters of college tested my discipline much more than this, I really like my hybrid schedule.

Working remotely is a skill to develop, like any other.

I don't understand this. Why do people need such guidance, especially people able to get a job at Google? Especially if it's not enforced in any way.

What are the psychological or social mechanisms behind this?

I'm rather of the kind who don't like to be told what I should do so I can't relate much. (I'd appreciate it if people would tell me they would be pleased to see me and that could actually make me come, but that's different than some emotionless guideline)

Lots of people – even very smart people – like guidance around what expectations are. This can be doubly true in some environments, like certain corporate environments, where the official policy is not in line with what leadership actually wants to see.

As one example, consider the "unlimited vacation" policy and pushback around those. Sure, the official policy is unlimited, but try taking more vacation than your manager wishes you would and see how that affects your next performance review.

> certain corporate environments, where the official policy is not in line with what leadership actually wants to see

Okay. I've not experienced this situation indeed. Official policy / stated expectations has always matched actual expectations perfectly well wherever I worked, to the best of my knowledge. A difference there must be a mess to handle indeed.

> Why do people need such guidance, especially people able to get a job at Google?

You might think that the people who get to Google are independent thinkers, but it's quite the opposite. Look at it this way: they spend 12 years in primary and secondary education being told what to do, and they study standardized tests to advance to the next stage of their education at a university.

They spend 4+ years there, all the while taking tests and exams and going through courses where again they are told exactly what to do every step of the way, with granular feedback as to how they are meeting the standards. Then upon graduating with a degree they put their knowledge to use by studying for what is essentially yet another entrance exam into Google.

The person who follows this kind of trajectory hasn't had an opportunity for truly independent thought probably their entire life. They are conditioned to follow guidelines, and the first questions they'll ask for any task are: "Where is the rubric? What are the rules? How will I be evaluated?" because they know how to succeed when there are guidelines and rules and procedures to follow. Take away those, and they will flail. I've seen it many times.

You are mostly describing my education curriculum though (except the 3 years of PhD, but I'm not sure they fundamentally changed me on this aspect - I already wanted to be left alone back then, and was by the way not totally satisfied on this matter).

As opposed to what people? High school dropouts?

People who finished high school and/or community college, boot camp grads, developers with experience, people joining the field later in life, etc. These people are not represented and the standford college grad is over represented

Directors can waive hiring requirements in most cases. Several high school dropouts with meaningful Linux kernel contributions have received job offers from FAANG without talking to a recruiter or answering a leetcode question.

The "guidance" bit in this context is tied to "when they should be in the office".

For the people who prefer to be in office a few days per week, it would be nice if those few days also overlaps with the in-office days for the people they wanted to meet in person, and it's easier to make this kind of coordination at a higher level. Thus management guidance is basically "let's pick these day(s) of the week where our team would try to be in the office together".

Indeed, makes sense.

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