Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing

So there is no paper in a Fed office. All the workstations are the same. You come in in the morning, pick one at random, sit down, and get to work. You could try to favor a particular station, try to sit there every day, but it would be noticed. Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is -- as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms -- having problems.

I once worked at a startup (pre-covid) that had an open-plan setup with a significant portion of people using standing desks. They provided one stool for 2 standing desks justifying it because "if you use a standing desk you should be standing most of the time".

Pure cheapskate short-sightedness.

(Although internally, things might be better than it looks from the outside of course)

A policy like this is biased against older and differently abled employees whether that was the intention or not.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, spent $70 billion on stock buybacks[2].

I know I'm drastically oversimplifying the complexities of accounting required for a trillion-dollar empire, but this comes across as more of a punitive measure than a cost-saving measure.

I acknowledge that being able to take the force of money and apply in a direction that results in growth at Google's scale is arguably one of the most difficult problems in business at the moment. But how does downsizing your offices do anything but make the hard times for Googlers a bit more uncomfortable? How does this news attract the talent that could help Google grow?

It feels as though Sundar and the board decide stray away from doing things that keep their employees at the happiest (and most loyal to the company) because that doesn't help the company grow at a rate that would please shareholders. The Lindy effect[4] suggests that Google will probably be around for another twenty years. To his credit, Sundar has spent the last 3 years navigating one of the largest companies in the history of mankind through an event that society hadn't seen in 100 years. So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will be in 20 years instead of the next quarter?

Google was revered in the media for decades as being one of the best places in the world to work at, you can look Xooglers talking as far back as 2008 and see stories of people who went to work there and left disappointed because of the homogeneous mindset and work benefits failing to match the competition[3].

1: https://curiocity.com/seattle-google-lake-union-campus-sold-...

2: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/26/alphabet-announces-70-billio...

3: https://techcrunch.com/2009/01/18/why-google-employees-quit/

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Something was bound to happen given all the unused real estate. But it's shitty that those of us who actually use our desks, because we rather like work-home separation, now might end up with a desk time share. Maybe all those people who didn't actually want to come to the office should have just filed for permanent remote?

Discouraging employees to all come at the office at once seems to dilute the “back to the office” mantra of “Employees work better when they can collaborate in person”.

My workplace has a hybrid policy where teams pick one day to all be in the office, and employees “should” be in the office 3 days a week, but if your “collaboration” involves people on another team, then you’re usually going to have some of them zooming in (and sometimes people zoom in from conference rooms in the same building because of miscommunication about who is in the office), and at that that point you may as well all zoom in from home.

If only, there was an easier solution.

Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a scalpel.

If you want to put headphones in, nose down, and get into flow that is the beauty of WFH. Unless you have a REALLY unconducive home environment to that - which I know some who do but the majority have very well optimized home setups that allow them to focus without distraction.

If only we still had it that good!

This was called "hotdesking", then "hotelling", and it's unclear why I would arrange with a coworker to timeshare a desk when a proper hotdesking arrangement would likely be cheaper and easier.

Co-location is the entire value of the hybrid model over remote. By forcing 2 employees to use the same desk, you are capping one of their teams to being co-located to 2 days a week.

I personally find value being together (with at least some of the team) 4-5 days a week.

Imo, it would have been a better move to make “hybrid” workers to actually show up to the office or lose their desk. So many employees are just phoning it in.

Full time WFH and dumping your office spaces as fast as you can would efficiently remove those real estate costs entirely.

Kind of fun watching them flail so hard before they'll have to accept the new economic reality.

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...

https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...

I doubt the storage situation helps much either; I know someone who works for another company that recently switched to this and he can't even fit basic work tools like a headset into his locker.

It didn't matter if there were surplus desk space or not.

It sends a message of collective punishment of the workforce, pressure to shift the burden of providing a workspace onto the employee, and blithe non-concern for anyone who needs routine.

Perks are declining as well. Snacks are getting worse and not being stocked. Meals aren't what they used to be.

Company services are also in decline: help Desk offices closed permanently.

It also looks foreshadowing more layoffs and real estate consolidation.

Now, Google is saying, "actually, you still have to come in, but you need to share a desk with a stranger and coordinate with them what days you are going to come in." So goodbye flexibility. If I usually come in Monday, Tuesday and Thursday -- but I need to come in on Wednesday this week for a meeting -- I'm now SOL if my desk mate is also in the office.

Pre-pandemic, I was really opposed to hot desks because if you're making me come into the office, at least let me have my own workspace and setup. But in this situation, I feel like hot desks would be a MUCH better situation. Allow people to reserve their desk a week or even two weeks in advance for the days they'll be in the office -- you could even have it set to be auto-renewing for certain days each week -- but at least you'd have flexibility if you were needed to come into the office one day instead of another.

And personally, I would rather have a hot desk than have a consistent desk I have to share with someone else, because that's worse. It's a consistent workspace, but I can't customize it because someone else uses it too. So I can't have my own keyboard (I'm not sharing things I spend my own money on with strangers, sorry), my own monitor configuration, or the stuff I like on my desk. And unlike a hot space, I'm tied to using it only on specific days.

Right before the pandemic, Microsoft started phasing out personal offices (because of real estate taxes, pure and simple) and there was a lot of pushback and upset (totally understandable, going from a personal office to either a group of personal desks or to hot desks is not cool), but since people can still WFH, my understanding is that most people who go into the office X days a week still have a private office at the main campus (not sure about other locations, but I think most of them were more open plan).

At GitHub (where they have announced they are phasing out all offices), we can reserve a desk space before showing up to a location, which is great -- plus, people who go in to the office all the time either have a recurring reservation (and have a more customized work space) or are choose to move around.

Here's a tip to companies: if you want people to come into the office, don't make coming into the office a punishment. I'm not saying that the lavish perks of the 2010s were sustainable or even good (the whole idea was that you would never leave) -- but workspaces are fucking important and sacred. One of the best parts of Microsoft was that until 2020, nearly everyone had their own private office (maybe you shared with one other person). When they started to phase that out for tax reasons, I was annoyed. But seeing what Google is doing is just capricious and seems to go against reason.

If I were told tomorrow I'd have to go into an office two days a week (but only those two days) and sit in a specific location that I was sharing with another person and had no flexibility in that -- oh, and I would be discouraged from booking conference rooms b/c people squat in them) -- I would be beyond livid. And I say that as someone who doesn't think WFH is the holy grail and actually misses being in an office.

I get that these companies signed massive leases on offices that now no one is using. That sucks for everyone. But the solution isn't to treat that as a punitive thing for employees. If no one is using your space, get out of the lease or sublease it to other companies. Or find other incentives to get people back into the office. But this worst of both worlds stuff just isn't it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk

You have to wonder what's going on inside those executive conference rooms

I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.