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Comment by AnotherGoodName | Hacker News Reader

Grass isn’t any greener at the other tech companies fwiw.

At Google they cut back office space and made every desk a shared desk for many Bay Area teams because hey you work from home now right? We’re not giving you a designated desk to work at anymore. At the exact same time they mandated RTO so you had to be in the office more than half the time.

Essentially the policy is to share a desk that you and another person must both be at for more than half of the time each. You can probably see the stupidity in the policy pretty easily right? Sundar still hasn’t figured this out. You can’t divide a desk in a way that gives two people more than half. If you want us there the majority of the time give us a freaking desk already!

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Tech company office planning has seemed to be neurotic even before the pandemic and WFH-then-RTO-or-hybrid-or-... policies really came into play. And you'd think that the office planning would step back and think "hmm, how can we adjust our office plans to account for how working policies have changed", but instead, it seems all they've changed is how they are justifying their changes.

As someone who came into work full-time post-pandemic because it turns out that living in a 1-bedroom apartment doesn't give you effective home office space to work from home, I was consistently aghast at how much the office planners were fully "oh, we're going to make your office environment much less conducive to work because no one coming to the office to actually work" (and then the return-to-office mandate comes in...).

What hasn't helped has been the most notable change from pre- to post-pandemic: no one takes meetings in a conference room anymore. As I'm typing this, I'm getting half of another meeting thanks to someone sitting two cubicles behind me.

Amazon did this too. No more assigned desks, come in 3+ days a week, and only have desks for 60% of people. Sterile desks that have to be cleaned off at the end of the day, fighting for desks because no one is actually coming in on Mondays or Fridays, and desks basically on top of each other.

Sundar should watch Terry Gilliam's Brazil. It has a neat solution to this desk problem.

The LEGO Movie's double-decker couches are also coming to mind. Double-decker desks both solves the problem and alliterates nicely, making it easy to fit into a Corporate Strategy slide deck ("We plan on increasing RoI with our best-of-breed D3-based RTO strategy in the new quarter, driving measurable revenue growth to the top and bottom couches... errr... lines. Six months after deployment we expect to utilize data-based business decision making analyzing whether top or bottom D3 positions drive more customer engagement to our platforms.").

During the dot-com boom I worked at a company that was hiring furiously, and was struggling to find a way to give everyone a desk. One of our spaces had a very high ceiling, and someone suggested vertically stacked “bunk cubicles”. I guess they took the idea seriously enough that they ran it pass various people, because later I heard that the idea was rejected due to the fire code.

Fire code? I would also think it would open up the company to liability if/when someone would take a tumble climbing up the ladder to their top-story cubicle...

Google already announced this in 2004: https://archive.google/jobs/lunar_job5.html

The full trail starts from https://archive.google/jobs/lunar_job.html

Unless I'm mistaken the teams that share a desk are supposed to come in 2 days a week. For teams that don't do this desk sharing you have to come in 3 days a week. So there shouldn't be an issue of trying to have each person use the desk for more than half the week.

They did eventually state 2 days a week for cloud although it’s still completely schitzophrenic.

“You must all be in the office the majority of the time, the company can’t operate efficiently without this”

“Oh we made it impossible people to be in the office the majority of the time? Ok for the people who our policies make it impossible to come into the office the majority of the time, which we previously required alongside statements that we need to do this we are now making an exception to this since it’s not actually needed and we also made the policy impossible to obey. For those not doing desk sharing though we totally still need you to come in 3days a week minimum because the company can’t operate efficiently even though we just said those guys over there can come in 2 days a week. Thanks for understanding our clear management practices everyone!”

Time for pair programming!

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