Google to crack down on office attendance, asks remote workers to reconsider | Hacker News Reader

Google to crack down on office attendance, asks remote workers to reconsider

cnbc.com

The irony of this is Google is very much a culture of spending vast amounts of resources on internal/external tools. They have a significant product category in GSuite. So when I see them making statements about the effectiveness of in person it boggles my mind. You are quite literally in the business of providing productivity tools, many of them facilitating remote work/meetings. How on earth do you go on records making a statement like that? Shouldn't the Google ethos be to improve those offerings to compensate for any perceived shortcomings from not being in person? This is like Zoom saying everyone should go back to in person meetings and flying execs all over the country for business pitches. Incredible...

Is Google still run by engineers who would even consider such a thought? Or are the higher ranks filling with sales and marketing who have and largely different mindset and work preferences?

My own tech employer, who shall remain nameless, just switched (literally!) overnight from being extremely remote friendly to lecturing about the miracles of in-person togetherness. I've gotten a message that WS analysts are pestering upper management about that nearly as much as about our AI posture.

WS = wall street?

Yes

Yes, the ghouls who used to be satisfied with merely hollowing out America’s brick and mortar stores via private equity seem to have decided to move on to “activist investing”, so perfectly profitable and healthy companies have to increase margins to ludicrous levels, hire exclusively from southeast asia going forward, shore up commercial real estate by forcing people back into buildings during a still ongoing pandemic, and drop protections for LGBT. It’s great to live in modern times if you’re a culturally regressive idiot billionaire who lucked into money (or inherited an emerald mine).

I'm not sure what I'm seeing is that reasoned. The analysts I speak with give 'moron' a bad name. They're just blindly repeating what they somehow intuit the zeitgeist is, not even realizing (or caring if there's any capability of such) the consequences of their actions. The likes of my management, so proud of their Google and Microsoft pedigrees, just follow slavishly, in fear of (a) the stock price falling due to bad commentary if they don't submit and (b) being found out that their pedigrees reflect no knowledge of any kind of real business.

I hope every single employee affected by clowns like this "chief people officer" sues their employer for promissory estoppel. Does anyone know of any organizations or individual attorneys who are helping affected employees explore this option? I'd like to donate some money if so.

Nobody who has a remote location on their contract has been affected. This is asking people who are already assigned a specific desk location to be at their desk.

That may be the case for Google, though their request for remote folks to reconsider suggests they may crack down on those people too. Regardless, there have been stories of other companies [1] fully unwinding their remote work policies for all employees, and I’m referring to those as well.

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/insurance-ceo-changes-remote...

Maybe that'll come in the future, but the fact that they are asking people (only those already located within driving distance to an office) to reconsider is evidence in the other direction to me. They could just end remote work altogether but are choosing not to.

That’s true. As I said, I was not referring only to google and there are other companies out there who are not treading as lightly as google is.

Corporate communication can't be isolated from being fundimentally coercive. Your employer can't politely ask you to reconsider anything without it being an implicit threat.

I'd go beyond that. Everything a corporation is doing for you today is tenuous. Google doesn't need to politely ask you to consider switching back to an office desk to have the threat of coercion.

After all, the people who were fired in January weren't given any communication that carried an implicit threat ahead of time. It was just "boom, you are gone." Nothing about the fact that US labor laws give me stupendously little power against my employer has changed between last week and this week.

I really don’t understand asking remote workers to switch to hybrid other than creating an us vs. them culture. Why would anyone who chose to work remote want to do that? They had to put in the effort to apply seeing it as a benefit. A single email talking about corporate “community” is all it takes for someone to give that up?

because they let a lot of people go and the computer job market today isn't the computer job market 1-3 years ago. They have the power to do it and find someone to replace you, and they want to, and everything else "community" etc is all corporate double speak.

There sole goal is to get people to quit, so they can hire cheaper replacements - something they can only do because they’ve created a market where people are afraid of being fired.

But unions are the enemy.

Is there actually any good evidence to support in-person work? I'm surprised that in comms like they they resort to "There's no question that...". Isn't there? And how did they land at 3 days per week?

I used to have a professor who said that when seen in a proof, "it is clear that" means "i have no idea how to prove that", and "it is obvious that" means "i hope that".

Junior engineers are missing out on lots of knowledge transfer that will put them behind an entire career. It's the difference between early working alongside excellent engineers vs working alongside almost no one.

> Junior engineers are missing out on lots of knowledge transfer

I have worked as an engineer for > 20 years, and I currently work at a company of several hundred people that has been remote-only since its founding before the pandemic. I have personally helped to onboard a junior engineer on my team, and it's gone just as well as the junior engineers I've helped onboard at previous (in-office) companies. You can't make blanket statements like this; it's all about the processes that have been set up to facilitate knowledge sharing, camaraderie, etc.

Agreed 100%. Fully remote can be just as (or more) productive as onsite, but the processes need to be created specifically around fully remote work. Very few companies are doing that. They're giving remote work the old college try, throwing up their hands, and finding excuses to bring everyone back in.

This, right fucking here. Bingo. Add activist investors pressuring them for no particularly good reason other than social domineering to push people back into the office.

I'm even more surprised about this one experience I had where I was the only remote member of a team. There weren't really any special processes, but everyone seemed to have a strong desire to make me feel included, and it worked out really well.

This also assumes a level of collaboration and mentoring I've yet to see as routine for Jr engineers. Even in person jr's reach out trusted contacts via chat as opposed to in person. If you've see this signal it might be culturally specific, or during a particular era.

From my experience, the divestment in training and mentoring, stringent job requirements, and lack of job security through arbitrary performance metrics have done more to make folks feel isolated than proximity to bodies.

Honestly I learn mostly from documentation and code and writing and so on, and when I do communicate it’s mostly emails and text even in the office even when people are sitting near me.

This is a myth on the order of “vocal fry permanently damages young female vocal cords”.

They asked for evidence, which you did not procure.

I'm trying to think what I have learnt in the world of engineering from in-person contact with colleagues. Honestly, not very much. Most of the useful stuff I learnt online, when trying to solve problems I Had.

By far the most positive experience I had from learning from colleagues was actually when I was a remote member of a team who were otherwise in an office together. They were just very good people who also shared a preference for written communication. We did meet up in person every few months, and that seemed to be enough.

There are actually huge numbers of studies on the impact of modern offices and collaboration.

They show universally worse outcomes, worse morale, and worse health.

They also force people into hours of additional uncompensated labour each week.

Well I'll take the severance pay then.

Looking for another round of layoffs, eh?

Yup. Oppressing workers might be fun and it doesn't cost in severance as long as you don't set up a lawsuit. Might not even cost unemployment based on state/province rules.

"Oppressing" seems a bit much here. That's great that you prefer working from home, but if the people paying your salary don't share you view on this matter, it is hardly a violation of your rights as a worker.

Was thinking more of people stating that the job parameters were unilaterally changed on the fly. Hired for remote work, sorry, that's been changed, etc. Yeah, it's at will employment, but not everybody likes employment agreements being changed without their input.

Sorry if it seemed flippant but it seemed to convey in a few words what I just wrote in a paragraph. I always viewed "negative job actions" with a jaundiced eye, and started a job search. And I fully believe that getting people to leave is the intent.

Oppression means more than just jackbooted thugs kicking in your door, you know. American companies do stuff to workers daily that would result in them being dissolved and their executives fined into bankruptcy or even jailed here.

The purchaser of work maintains his right as a purchaser to insist working from an office.

The seller of work maintains his right as a seller to insist working from home.

Between equal rights, Force decides.

Not force but power Leverage and need.

Nobody's going to come to your house and drag you into the office. They will however stop paying you. Because you can't force farmer to give you food, you will eventually end up back at the negotiating table and back in the office

No, their first step is to create an environment where mass layoffs are a thing, so people are afraid of them and the ability to freely move to another company is limited, that way you have no negotiating power.

Then they make your life miserable. This makes you quit (which is free for them), or tells them that they’re free to shit on you some more.

if you are an unskilled worker, your negotiating power is limited

solution : be a skilled worker unless there was any legal contract with specific terms and agreement between employers and employee beforehand, this will always be a free market thing, but what kind of market are you proposing? is it a market where everyone work the same job and shit on the same pants?

This is literally an article about skilled workers?

The origin of the phrase "crack down" sets the tone for this sort of action.

Not that keen on giving part of my life to companies who bandy it about.

For me as an outsider from across the ocean, what's wrong with Google ASKING their working to RECONSIDER?

Because they are not asking to reconsider. They are telling or else. The corpo wording is just synaptic sugar to make it sound less threatening.

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