Google cuts office space in Bay Area by more than a million square feet
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They could probably spread things out instead, but real estate is stupidly expensive, and Google was never known for spacious accommodations (maybe except for some remote offices). I can't imagine they have any motivation to spend more if their approach worked fine for more over a decade.
I don't love it, but how many applicants walked away because of cramped open spaces? How many top performers quit for that reason? We just put up with it.
Clearly management class figured out a fun little plan. Announce RTO so that people can 'self-select' thus reducing headcount ( lower cost ), introduce hybrid ( so that you can claim you are flexible in posting even if you offer 1 remote day out of 5 and save real estate at the same time ), sell non-performing real estate ( lower cost ) and cramming employees into rotating cubicles ( efficiency ).
What does it all translate to? Bonuses.
I am not exactly a revolutionary type, but its now or never if you are on a particular side of the fence. Whatever window is there to establish a normal, it is closing now.
Self-select usually mean the brightest and most capable select another job though.
And yet, HRs across the US spectrum seem to be sending the same memo. I am mildly annoyed by this, because I had a mini-conversation today and the tone from an executive was: business won't let this ( WFH ) stand.
Maybe it is not about best possible candidate. Maybe they are ok with less capable people for whatever reason.
Are they, though? Coding well doesn’t make a good programmer. Interaction does, and influence in the office does.
I think remote workers just hate office politics, like everyone else, but that makes them non-contributing to company growth.
I do not personally think that there is no value to politics. Sadly, we have to navigate those waters somehow.
But, if people who self-select out say they do not want to deal with it and instead contribute to company growth one line at a time, why would you not allow them to specialize in that?
Or are they just an easy target practice for politically astute?
FWIW, I am probably not a great remote worker. Still, good enough to get the job done. What more does an employer want from me? They are good enough to me that I can extent some loyalty and goodwill, but why would a company want me to also participate and contribute to its craziness politically?
<< Cliché that the best people are among the remote workers.
Well, it is that way now because fully remote work is in demand if you look at sheer application numbers for those roles. Companies have their picks for those. Anecdotally, my company, where my manager is RTO-oriented, but does not seem to want to rock the boat too much, begrudgingly seems to have accepted that for the position he listed ( niche in niche kinda deal ), he won't get a guy to just move from another state just to sit in a chair one day a week ( and depend on corporate whims ) so he had to accept that reality.
Mebbe its a cliche, but, not unlike stereotype, there is a reason it exists.
Because it requires pre-hashed work. It requires someone else to do the politics for them. But we may be unclear on the definition of office politics.
In this situation, the politics is simply drawing on a whiteboard an architecture with or without Kubernetes, taking note of who cringes and who is unhappy, and extracting the technical reasonings which a very real and legitimate for the future of our app. “I’ll be hella expensive”, “Will be awesome because every dev wants Kubernetes exposure” “Will be a hell because no-one know K8s”, all those concerns are not “playing office politics” but “finding and addressing the technical hurdles”.
Once we know we want K8s, sure, any remoter worker can do it, but this is not the difficult part in that process. It’s like the chain factory was already set up, and here’s your seat.
In a chain factory, the genius is not in the chain worker, but in the engineers who split the work.
Remote people can participate in office politics, but the fact that during 3-days-remote-per-week, office politics only happen on the remaining 2 days, it shows it’s much more smooth in face-to-face.
Perhaps with Apple’s VR…
Your company forces anti-remote policies? If you're worth anything, just leave.
Our org had a different plan. They put the entire office (region based) on organized teams and sent out an email. You get team points based on: - visits to the office - meals in the office - attendance at after hours events - etc. etc.
SMDH. I can see the article headline now "Innovative gamification in the office"
It's not like you can only do one thing, then keep the rest of your operations still.
I love this state. I feel so at home here. I have traveled and lived all around the US. I didn’t feel that anywhere else but here in CA. Anywhere in this state, I feel at home. The diversity of people, geographies, and weather. So amazing.
a) how dense was google office space in the before times?
b) what their remaining portfolio of office space is?
As for question B, Moffett Place alone was 1.9 million square feet, so shedding 1.4 million square feet is not that big of a deal. It’s about what the press reported them acquiring in 2019.
that's got nothing on what my animation co-workers dealt with in movies where they were just far enough not to bump elbows on the perimiter of a sound stage / mocap area. Worse they had a 2nd row of other coders above you on grating. They didn't let women on the upper deck due to look ups.
In Italy they can be called, or just randomly do an inspection and they can just say "this entire building is closed until you adhere to regulations".
I work in sweden now and this doesn't seem to be a thing either. Lots of things that in italy would get you shut down happen here. For example doors requiring 2 hands to be opened from the inside. In Italy they have to be hands free doors.
Here they show up, say fix this shit. and come back and check a week or 2 later.
They came by and we moved around the same time.... the inspections are generally scheduled.
It was only that crazy for about 3 weeks. longer and they would have probbably had a different fix.
Found your problem right there.
They want people to RTO ??? But they're deleting the office? "Never let them know your next move!"
Considering the high CoL people have already moved other places and this is a reflection of that ?
Hot-desking is the worst way to be in-office, on top of the worst way of working which is in-office.
What happened to being a forward thinking and innovative company? These "geniuses" can't use their superior big brains just barely hiding under those infantilizing propeller hats to figure out a way to make remote work effective? You're literally a tech company, you make all kinds of collaborative technology.
I'm selling my Google stock. They've gone full IBM and are legacy tech.
Google went public is what happened. You literally cannot make good decisions when you have to base everything around what will make the most profit for the shareholders this quarter.
https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-co...
The leading statement of the law's view on corporate social responsibility goes back to Dodge v. Ford Motor Co, a 1919 decision that held that "a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders." That case — in which Henry Ford was challenged by shareholders when he tried to reduce car prices at their expense — also established that "it is not within the lawful powers of a board of directors to shape and conduct the affairs of a corporation for the merely incidental benefit of shareholders and for the primary purpose of benefiting others."
Despite contrary claims by some academics and Occupy Wall Street-type partisans, this remains the law today. A 2010 decision, for example, eBay Domestic Holdings Inc. v. Newmark, held that corporate directors are bound by "fiduciary duties and standards" which include "acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders."* As a larger ownership moves towards investors, decisions are made that sacrifice the special sauce in order to increase returns.
* Appeasing general investors leads towards enshittification.
Sometimes a strong leader (Jobs, Cook) can keep the investor class as bay for a period. Sometimes leadership can be consolidated for long periods of time to delay the process (Walton, Zuck), but it feels inevitable after IPO.
Entropy forces new relative perspective. Humans need to do better about accepting figurative and literal death and chill. There quite literally is nowhere else to go except insane from repeating ourselves.
A rewrite of philosophical priority is a necessity for anyone under 50 and the species. That has to be taken sincerely and seriously because, well they kind of outnumber the ossified pensioner, and if they’re staring down forced obligation to choke on fire smoke for 60 years or dump gramps overboard, no one around to see it happen will be around long enough to insure it’s a footnote in any discussion of history.
Self proclaimed STEM minded secular people seem just fine ignoring evidence that does not fit the civic life narrative they’ve been spoon fed like it’s immutable truth. Seems to have latched itself onto whatever quirk of biology religion accidentally exploited; like a nihilism cause it’s all gods plan kind of woo.
“Hey look at me, mom! My life goal is making computers do what they were intentionally designed to do!”
That can be automated; any acceptable experience is a finite set of constraints. DOOM is pretty DOOMy. Same for Halo. Email clients. But hey we have figurative career ambitions, man; Google Fellow! Boom goes the dynamite.
Smaller models first; let’s make an AI to replace the CEO by assigning project management to vetted candidates via publicly audited randomizer. Term limits for geniuses who always seem to end up enjoying their own farts.
“I’m sorry general manager of capital intense AI infrastructure, you are tonight’s… weakest link! dropped into literal shark tank”
It’s been a long day. Sorry not sorry for the more unhinged off gassing.
As far as I know the only duty a company has towards shareholders is "protect them" (aka: don't mess up and make money). As long as the company eventually does that there is no issue. Even if it takes 8 quarters to become profitable (or 10+ years, see Amazon).
There are probably ways in which shareholders can get together and request something (in court?), but that almost never happens? Maybe I'm wrong. If so, would love to see examples.
These days the vast majority of executive comp is in stock - imagine if bad optics could force you to take a 60% pay cut, you'd be pretty conservative with your choices.
If a too good offer comes by, for instance, for one to buy Google:
the offer has to be disclosed; and regardless if the founders like it or not -- or what the voting majority says, there is a price where the remaining shareholders can force Google to be sold.
If too many of them do, the stock goes down, and essentially everyone at the company (especially the executives) take a pay cut. The executives aren't even just thinking about their own pay. The entire company's ability to attract and retain talent depends on the stock price going up.
1. Duty of Care
2. Duty of Loyalty
3. Duty of Disclosure
4. Duty of Confidentiality
5. Duty of Prudence
6. Duty of Good Faith
You can start looking at this rabbit hole here (and it is a rabbit hole): https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/fiduciary_duty
P.S. Just a (fly-by)comment; not advice of any short or kind -- either investment or legal. P.S.2 Oh it does happen that share/stake holders seek enforcement for breach of fiduciary duties. I would say it is quite common.
Ironically, Google doesn't care about their shareholders and quarters like other tech companies. They don't provide a guidance, their earnings calls have little substance, and their disclosure is atrocious.
just because it's a US tech-world cultural norm for companies to mostly be run in fucking stupid short term ways, it doesn't mean it's actually required. especially in the case of Google, where 1) Eric, Larry and Sergey have stiched up the entire board's voting power, 2) doesn't need to raise cash via bonds or stock at all and 3) it's a magic money tree, so investors will accept being told to fuck off and let the CEO run the company however they think it'll work best.
Google also IPOed in 2004...are you seriously suggesting that it hasn't been a
> forward thinking and innovative company
for ... 19 years? that's a pretty bold take.
1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal.
2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want.
3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway.
4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner.
5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...)
To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking.
And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions.
Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.
You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.
But yeah, they care about productivity.
Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.
I wonder how 2 will work. it'll be interesting. I have too much shit at the office for that, but I also have a lot of unoffical work stuff at my desk, like the tools to fix the monitors (hex wrenches screwdrivers), and the whiskey stash.
3 - I do see a ton of non-eng doing this. I see a lot more eng also just chilling in 'flex spaces' like phone boths, lounges, etc... the stuff that never got used when everyone had desks and now is even tho my office isn't over full. our little mini-single desk rooms I call our intern offices as they seem to just work in there.
is the 2 days a week just the RTO minimum?
4 - this is me but also 1 is kinda me.. I'm in a lot but I travel a lot, and I have very specialized setup that I do use.
5 - I can get this, my whole management chain is remote... I'm senior enough. I'm actually well above average on in office attendance, and just below the rto requirements esp if you account for me working from office for a month in the last 2 months while bein in other cities. or last 3 weeks because there were "synergies" for folks for me to meet.
The true answer for me is I get to pick and choose between days when I need to get stuff done coding, by clearing my calendar, and slamming out code at home... or at the office. Or by forcing a lot of in person meetings and getting 8 months of design convs done in 4 hours. I got a solid 1.5 hour convo done while waiting for traffic to die down on thursday that I had been trying for 2 years to do on remote.
but I had this flexibility in the before times and I'm pretty senior.
The thing I do think sucks is that I suspect everyone is single car riding into the office so traffic in seattle is actually WORSE than pre-pandemic. Traffic sucks till 9:30 am now.
The only true benefit of the march of time is that there's so many "enhanced" cars now that I can just HOV way to the front of the line then cut off a tesla or obviously expensive mercedes in the exit lane at the last second and know they'll stop :)
basically I'm a bad one to ask and I'm making it work well for me.
so why is the lack of monitor personalization cursed, 90% of my coworkers seem great with those options and Iv'e seen a ton with just a laptop and to black monitors or one in use.
yeah lack of decorations, I got you... it's a we-work at that point.
I agree, hotdesking when you're in the office most of the time is horrible. But if you want to primarily WFH, I don't understand why you also think you should get nice office space at a second location. When you go to another location for work (e.g. a client if you are a consultant), you don't have a nice personalized desk.
I think that was kinda known in the valley, but not sure any media really covered it
Honestly a lot of the blame goes to Larry Page for turning the company toward G+, pushing top people toward Gundotra, the product failing quite badly, and Larry stepping back as CEO
My view of Eric Schmidt is pretty neutral, but it was a little weird how Larry pushed him aside and ushered Sundar in, then formed Alphabet, etc
This was very chaotic and people got used to neglecting things like search quality and spam in that time
But, yes, from what I understand they could hardly have botched it more if they tried.
I'm thinking of details like using the opportunity to latch onto Facebooks "Real Name policy", and using the same name as their deeply unpopular single sign-on solution + killing their existing social network at the same time.
It's funny how both sides of this debate present their opinions as fact
Given that we’ve proven that remote work is viable even without next gen AR VR devices, a lot of corporate PR supporting the environment feels very empty when we learn their stance on remote work
I've been remote for 14 years, I love it, but I've worked with plenty of people who didn't and went back to an office.
I've seen this level of reasonability probably less than 10 times when the remote vs. office debate breaks out. It's a real shame that sites like HN behave identically to twitter and reddit wrt actual conversation and debate about working environments.
We just added a month and a half to wildfire season, just to keep that true!
See? Conversation is useless if we ignore context or intent.
Under capitalism at least you get free speech and therefore some public pressure to impose various regulations.
I was just observing that WFH is better for the environment than WFO, which I would again say is just an objective fact. Obviously peoples priorities differ, and I guess some people don’t see climate change as real so would fight me on it being a fact, but I feel completely certain about that assertion.
Re: capitalism, I mean, yeah… isn’t that also true? Much much more subjective but capitalism sure seems to be doing a number on the planet. Again what we want to do with that fact is up to priorities but… well tbh I’m confused about what you’re cross about!
I don't know a single person who prefers in-office work who thinks that remote is more effective, but I know many who have the opposite opinion but prefer the flexibility.
Maybe there isn't a realistic way to make remote as productive. I'm honest enough to say that the social pressure that people bemoan makes me significantly more productive. I wish it didn't, but it absolutely does. The inability to tap on someone's shoulder reduces group productivity, regardless of what those who don't want to be interrupted think.
Managers and leaders have acknowledged this and finally we're moving towards getting work done again.
If you know a person does not like being interrupted don't be selfish and write a message. Why does your productivity matter more than mine?
I feel like people don’t treat achieving business goals as part of their job in dev. I’ve never had people treat this as a problem across other job roles.
I do believe that there is room for better tools in this area, and I'm working on it. Tools that help users solve their problems collaboratively without imposing undue burden on their coworkers.
Of course people should make themselves available and not be jerks but I strongly believe that a culture that encourages unrestricted interruptions will achieve worse business outcomes in the long run.
I was a naive intern at my first paid software gig, so I towed the line, but I watched as a startup went from hiring some very smart people to the engineers realizing they could come in at 11 hungover and leave at 4 because they were all smart, management was treating them like crap and they couldn't just fire everyone. There were other issues, but power tripping over personal productivity and not giving engineers time for help or questions about the business was a huge issue at that job.
This is not a promotion of the anti-WFH control busy body managers, but just know if your coworkers are asking you questions so they can do their job you should be mentoring them so they need to ask less questions. If you're the type to answer a slack message hours later, people are slowly growing to hate you and will eventually sabotage you.
A long time ago when I worked there, I didn't like working in the office sometimes, but sitting out on the balcony with a laptop wasn't so bad. Can't do that on a sub :-)
Their AI strategy has been a joke as far as I can tell. That’s not helping.
Their “regular” services are ok, but nothing I would pay for.
They are downsizing and dropping staff left and right. This might be a good signal: they are being realistic and riding this one out, but I’m not getting good vibes.
And the managers... Oh, the managers... They just act for the sake of their own promotion even if that means damaging someone's else career or the company in the long term. And will complain about things not being done the "Google Way", even if the proposed Google Way failed multiple times in that context (startups and scaleups, in my case). But what's really shocking is how they have no interpersonal skills, to the point of making you constantly question yourself: how, why, did this person ended up in a management track in a supposedly Y-career company? How not only did they got there but also promoted multiple times for this role?
Google, as a company, is as cool as Oracle nowadays.
When I arrived I was taking my time to understand the culture, company, needs, etc. before making any suggestions. One example, they did Agile with sprints and I think KANBAN works better. But, I didn’t see it as an important issue to spend time on.
So the Google guy comes in and from day 1 began making suggestions for big changes to both process and the software architecture. He often started by saying, “At Google we…”
I was let go, in part, because the CEO thought I was not contributing to certain technical discussions. I told him I thought the proposed change wouldn’t bring any value to potential customers because it was a purely internal architectural change. We had a lot of actual customer facing work to do and this was a distraction.
So… a guy with only 5 years of professional experience all at Google won over the 26 year old CEO more than someone with 20 years of experience across multiple companies and having built a very similar product just a year before.
Large companies also tend to have sociopaths become the VPs, who only care about their career progression and not the actual company direction.
“Grok” is from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. It was a super important word to me as a kid. I’ve recently started hearing it again used by people who never read the book and find it interesting.
Do you remember where you first heard this word? I assume you heard it as it’s such a memorable word and difficult to misspell.
I heard about it from graybeards and HN, hence why there might be a resurgence now that HN is mainstream.
The new developers managed to convince the leadership that we needed "better" processes, and other technologies. The result of this was rewriting the system into more micro services than developers in different languages and multiple frameworks. The new processes ensured that teams didn't talk together because each team should be independent and effectively blocked any input. The startup failed hard and barely survived even after major cuts
In 95%+ cases that’s a pretty terrible idea
Everyone expects them to be building Kubernetes, Terraform, and other useless bullshit that a startup with a total critical traffic of 10QPS absolutely doesn't need.
We've also had ex-Facebookers back in the day who would throw out perfectly fine coding processes and get everyone to use Phabricator. Bloated software that took many engineering hours to design processes around, and came with features that no one with Atlassian would ever downgrade to use. It was like coding with PHPBB.
2. Terraform isn't a Google product. It's by Hashicorp
Also, do you really need it when you're a startup running 3 EC2 clusters with "potentially tons of customers"? No.
I've never worked at Google, but if you want a clean set of commits to implement a feature (think Linux kernel/subsystem, git, etc), Github makes it unnecessarily hard to do that. The best they have is squash and merge which basically makes one mega commit and a merge commit that references a branch with a single commit.
I think ‘stg’ with a GitHub publish/stack sync option would be a winner.
Feeling rather uncomfortable as Devil's advocate in this case but I was testing Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as a cost-saving replacement for Google Cloud Platform recently and they are worlds apart.
GCP is a cloud service where you can issue a command or click on a web panel to get your resources up. Oracle, on the other hand, will set up multiple meetings with various "specialists" to teach you how a cloud should be used. Unproductive meeting after meeting after meeting and no work gets done.
I felt like an unpaid QA engineer when going over all the unpleasantries of their Terraform provider with them. Documentation is garbage and no variables are are explained[1]? No problem, we've got 5 specialists who will train you how you should use the cloud.
Here's a generous free tier so you can test everything. Oh, want to set up resources using it? Raise a support ticket. Want GPU VMs? No problem, request the hardware for a specific region days in advance and we hope it'll work. Oh, not working? Please share your screen and open a support ticket. Want a second VM instance or a node pool for your cluster? Request limit increase. Want more RAM? Request limit increase. Don't worry, we have a team granting these very quickly.
Absolute shitshow. Oracle Cloud is as frustrating as Digital Ocean when you try to treat it as a cloud and not a VPS vendor. GCP more or less "just works".
[1] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/oracle/oci/latest/do...
The tools you use are culture-defining.
But it's not even just Google. I haven't been back to my company's office because they insist on not assigning a desk. Every time I wanna go in I have find a random desk to sit in.
Tbh I love the project I work on and I’m still learning tons. But I wish we could have more confidence in our leadership instead of hoping to be insulated from whatever their whims are this month.
Someone at the top of Google seems to have cranked the results prioritising slider all the way towards recency of information instead of accuracy, growing a million spammy fly by night sites instead of defaulting to trusted sources of information. As a programmer its so hard to get information from a technical query in Google these days.
Does Google search have a QA dept? Are they able to compare how accurate search is today compared to a year / decade ago? Does anyone at Google listen to them?
Wouldn't some sort of LRU scheme work better as some sort of PAGE-ing algorithm? Maybe RANK the employees to group by locality.
But I disagree that in-person is the worst way of working. I think some people are more productive in areas that are well-defined. But if teamwork, group problem solving or large amounts of communication is required (such as onboarding a junior), then there is no comparison: In-person has far more communication points than remote. Working in a team remotely requires you to schedule every communication point. This is frustrating when most information that gets passed between people is by osmosis / overhearing.
It's the circle of business life.
There are plenty of competent people all over the world that can’t move easily for whatever reason - usually family.
Shout out to a TSMC interview where M.C. was saying TSMC is just better because instead of running 1 shift a day of trying shit, they ran the fab always & got 3x the shifts a day.
Same story, but different timebase. Utilization. How can we do great for space, & utilize it well? We are so far away from that level of smart management. Such idiotic returnalism. Space wasn't good before. If we want to return, how do we de-suck it? Admittedly better utilization feels like an anti goal for de-suck, so extra hard mode: how do we make good utilization a win win win?