[HN Gopher] Over the next year or so, Google will try out new of...
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Over the next year or so, Google will try out new office designs
Author : bryanrasmussen
Score : 73 points
Date : 2021-05-01 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| mycentstoo wrote:
| One of the major drawbacks to going back to the office is dealing
| with the dreaded open office plan. If Google popularizes a new
| office style that discourages the bullpen feel of open offices,
| it would be a welcome relief.
| throwawaygler1 wrote:
| As a Googler, I'm pretty disappointed with this plan and I think
| many colleagues are as well. The office that's being pitched
| right now has no resemblance whatsoever to the one we left. I
| just don't see why someone would go through 1+hr commute just to
| social distance/wear masks, use balloon walls and hotdesk. By
| now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty
| productive.
|
| Even the hybrid model isn't ideal, because you still need to be
| within commuting distance of the office, if it was something like
| 2 weeks onsite every 2-3 months, it'd be much more doable imo.
|
| For the ones who really miss the office, they should be able to
| go, but mandatory return-to-office seems far from ideal until
| mask mandate is over at the very least.
| olliej wrote:
| while I was there I detested the open plan cube farm horror of
| their offices (at least the SF ones) they weren't even full
| cubes, being only half height so constant visual distraction,
| and they didn't completely surround you so you had people
| always moving around behind you.
|
| Changing how the open plan is arranged is just pointless,
| accept that you have made an unpleasant work environment and
| leave it alone so at least people don't have to track whatever
| new fad you're on. Hotseating makes it even worse, so I can't
| see why anyone who respected their employees would consider it.
| rokob wrote:
| I am in the same boat as you and I agree with all you say here.
|
| I have a lot opinions on this and continue to say them
| internally. I encourage you to say this internally as well.
| thoweryo2i344 wrote:
| > By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are
| pretty productive.
|
| It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while,
| but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.
|
| Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind,
| which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up
| to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to
| face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the
| only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly
| folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us
| plebs in "shit-hole" India).
| throwawaygler1 wrote:
| Fair enough, I can see why it would be beneficial for a
| noogler, but everyone struggles initially, no matter how much
| face to face interaction you have. It took me 6+ months
| before I felt comfortable enough with the internal tools and
| I'm still learning lots of new things today, despite being 6+
| years at the company.
|
| The other thing is, even if we went to the office, we won't
| necessarily be able to have the same face-to-face experience
| until the mask and social distancing mandates are done with
| imo.
|
| I also felt people disinterested on collaborations, everyone
| has their own goals, I wouldn't attribute it to your country
| per say.
| ghaff wrote:
| I think every company struggles with collaboration in
| general. People have their "day jobs" so asking them to do
| something they don't really get "credit" for can be tough.
|
| It's easier in-person because you're harder to ignore than
| an email is. But it can be hard to get support especially
| from other groups.
| brandmeyer wrote:
| > (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs
| in "shit-hole" India)
|
| It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into
| this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office
| in the US.
|
| Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs
| got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we
| regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams
| in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work
| on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any
| more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I
| was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you
| aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and
| enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It
| also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents
| happened often enough to be a sore point.
|
| So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India.
| They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.
| neilv wrote:
| Do you know whether people based out of the
| Cambridge/Boston site would be considered second-class
| citizens today?
|
| And if there is a second-class dynamic, would it be in a
| way that adversely affected the work, directly, or the
| impact was more about individual treatment?
|
| (For example of affecting the work... when collaboration
| across sites is needed, for the benefit of the org, would
| there be difficulty getting it to happen, _because_ some
| were second-class... such as not being taken as seriously,
| or working with second-class didn 't fit well with
| promotion strategies, etc.)
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I joined Google in February and I love working remote.
| Definitely not excited about the prospect of sitting in
| traffic for 2 hours a day just to wear a mask at work.
|
| I don't work from India, but haven't had much issue with
| onboarding or access to things.
| dang wrote:
| > who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in
| "shit-hole" India
|
| I can empathize with the problems of remote work across
| national and cultural divides, but please don't toss
| flamebait like this into HN threads. It leads to flamewars,
| which we're trying to avoid here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| > some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always
| rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).
|
| Not sure why the racism, care to back that up?
| hpoe wrote:
| > when the company asked a diverse group of consultants --
| including sociologists who study "Generation Z" and how junior
| high students socialize and learn -- to imagine what future
| workers would want.
|
| Danger Will Robinson Danger!
|
| Why would anyone try and make decisions based on the preference
| of jr. High students. Making decisions based on youth in the most
| unstable period of their life when they are incredibly hormonal
| and still not all that logical seems like a recipe for disaster.
|
| I don't know about you but my jr. High self was an idiot and
| nothing he said or did was a good idea.
|
| Or is the idea that we don't want to have the next gen adapt to a
| new way of socializing and interacting in a professional
| workplace? That too seems like a bad move.
| novok wrote:
| In 7 years their L3 engineers are going to be those jr. high
| gen Z kids, and in real estate, your office furniture and space
| plans need to last at least 10-20 years.
| Laremere wrote:
| It's not that they only consulted them, it's that they included
| them. That seems entirely reasonable - these people are going
| to be entering the workforce. Google wants to be attractive to
| them, or at the very least prevent being actively unattractive.
|
| Additionally, gen Z is growing up with technology in a way that
| surpasses even millennials. They may have deep expectations
| about how technology should work in ways that older people
| don't.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Sure, but the grandparent alludes to the fact that what they
| think of as great now can easily change by the time they
| enter the workforce - and, given that we're talking about
| engineering jobs that usually require a degree, it will take
| some time.
|
| Additionally, these people don't have much work experience. A
| lot of ideas - such as open offices, work from home or
| skipping documentation - feel fine until you've worked with
| them and found their drawbacks. It might work for some, but
| it does not for a lot of others.
| high_derivative wrote:
| Why anyone would ask sociologists about how tech work should be
| done is absolutely beyond me.
| nr2x wrote:
| Think of it as a specialized systems engineering process, but
| with people. Sociologists are good at that.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| I agree. I think as a society, we need to stop fetishizing
| youth. Not contempt - but tone it down a bit. Kids today have
| wanton access to internet and technology but aren't any smarter
| or better at making decisions. One might make an argument that
| they may be worse. Certainly more prone to group think than
| generations previous which is good and terrible at the same
| time.
| phreeza wrote:
| > Kids today have wanton access to internet and technology
| but aren't any smarter or better at making decisions.
|
| Citation needed, I guess? Teen pregnancies are way down, for
| example.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| That could have as much to do with the contemporary social
| environment as it does with actual decisionmaking. Sex
| among youth is down overall - even pre-pandemic, iirc.
| nomdep wrote:
| You don't need to be extra smart to use a condom, just not
| being extra dumb. That's a very low bar isn't it?
| sagivo wrote:
| If top tech companies want to keep attracting top talent, they
| will have to let people choose where they want to work from. That
| means being open to remote. Instead of forcing hybrid models -
| invest in tools and processes that make working from everywhere
| more productive.
| throwaway316943 wrote:
| Exactly, a truly innovative company would be working on a way
| to make WFH as immersive, productive and social as an office
| rather than trying to make the office function during a
| pandemic.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > If top tech companies want to keep attracting top talent,
| they will have to let people choose where they want to work
| from.
|
| That's what people said right up until the last time top tech
| management culture turned away from remote work.
| hulitu wrote:
| It's funny that there are a lot of stories lately which contain
| googla and privacy in the same sentence. It is like they realized
| that they have an image problem and are doing something about it.
| jdhn wrote:
| Why would I want to come back into the office if I have to wear a
| mask?
| Animats wrote:
| As soon as a coronavirus vaccine gets full FDA approval
| (expected soon for Moderna and Pfizer), companies should
| require immunization for employees. Then they can stop
| requiring masks.
|
| Every vaccine that has ever had serious side-effect problems
| has shown them in the first few months.[1] The FDA requires six
| months of data for full approval. Those six months have passed.
|
| [1] https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesafety/concerns/concerns-
| history....
| ghaff wrote:
| While that's long been common in some situations (schools,
| military, healthcare, certain limited international travel),
| it hasn't been the case generally in the past. Put such a
| requirement in, with appropriate medical exceptions, and
| expect to fire a non-trivial portion of your workforce who
| can't work from home and/or need to physically meet with
| other employees/customers/partners. Not making a judgment but
| just observing the reality.
| gpm wrote:
| I'd like to think that the masks are just because they had to
| film these now, and that the actual plan for when people return
| doesn't include them.
| secfirstmd wrote:
| A balloon wall? Hahahahaha, is this an episode of Silicon Valley?
| Forcing people to commute in order to wear masks at their hot
| desk? Google needs to admit reality that WFH is a reality, rather
| than trying to lever people into the office.
| novok wrote:
| Those balloon walls seems the worst possible solution. Noisy,
| obnoxious, slow, fragile and doesn't create any sound privacy
| from whatever you will be talking about.
| gpm wrote:
| And makes it blatantly obvious that you're setting up to talk
| about things in private...
|
| Seriously, just have some rooms with doors. Even if that's not
| the majority of the space.
| mattm wrote:
| I know cubicles were previously mocked but a private space
| with walls where I'm not distracted by people walking all
| around me doesn't sound too bad.
| curiousgal wrote:
| This has to be a joke!
| dundarious wrote:
| Is the need for ad-hoc, purely visual (not auditory) privacy
| even a common scenario? If so, how about some curtains? In the
| 90s, Twin Peaks taught me that drapes can be made whisper
| silent, unlike an electric air pump and possibly crinkling
| cellophane.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/AjNJb
| scribu wrote:
| The Campfire meeting room seems interesting.
|
| Giving remote participants a proportionate physical presence
| should help equal the playing field.
|
| I think it hinges on how easy it is to set up the call, so that
| each face is on a separate screen.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or, you know, have everyone "dial in" from their own computer.
| That was how a number of teams I work with were pre-pandemic.
| If anyone's remote, everyone calls in separately. Otherwise the
| remote experience is inherently going to be worse than the in-
| person one.
|
| That's been one mildly positive aspect of the pandemic. I'm no
| longer dialing into calls where there are a bunch of people in
| a conference room and then there's everyone else.
| bitwize wrote:
| What the hell?!
|
| Give. Developers. Offices. With. Doors.
|
| It's conceptually simple, and will probably cost less than this
| novelty shit in the long run.
| Animats wrote:
| Microsoft once ran ads for programmers, offering an office with
| a door.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| My experience over the past 6 years with offices at MS was
| being doubled up in an office meant for one person, then
| moving to team rooms where we're at the fire safety limit for
| number of occupants.
| crocodiletears wrote:
| That doesn't make the engineers feel clever, though.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Some people like that, some people don't.
|
| The worst physical office environment I've ever worked in was
| one where I had an individual office with a door. It was an
| interior office with no windows, effectively a large closet,
| and it was pretty depressing and alienating.
|
| Maybe you could argue that you should give all developers
| offices with doors and exterior windows. But the dimensions of
| most buildings don't make that practical.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's definitely a culture associated with offices. I
| worked at a place for over a decade that had offices (for
| some) and the norm was doors open unless there was some
| reason doors weren't open. So you were free to drop in if the
| door was open and not so if the door wasn't. And doors were
| usually open.
| matz1 wrote:
| Not everyone want that, if I need my own private space I don't
| need to go to office.
|
| The reason I may want to go to office is to see my coworkers.
|
| Doors/private cubicle defeat the purpose.
| bitwize wrote:
| Not everyone wants a loud, bustling bullpen where you can
| barely hear yourself think and your productivity is crippled
| as a consequence.
|
| But yet that's what most everybody in our field gets.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| If the shuttle buses are to be suspended, but they still expect
| people to come to work, it is a recipe for disaster. When I still
| worked there, about 60% of my co-workers took the shuttle from
| San Francisco. About 90% of those who did, did not own a car.
| Telling them they have to come to the office or quit is
| equivalent to firing them. I doubt anybody is going to buy a car
| AND sit an hour in traffic in the morning and an hour and traffic
| in the evening, to keep a particular job. Xooglers generally have
| no trouble finding jobs, just having that on their resume.
| novok wrote:
| Xoogler or not, you still have to go through the leetcode
| gauntlet, and a bunch of places that would pay you the same are
| all asking to 'go into the office'. FB, Apple, etc.
| zrail wrote:
| I thought FB went permanent remote option. Did that change?
| 0xEFF wrote:
| You may be thinking of Twitter.
| ghaff wrote:
| Not as extreme as Twitter but Facebook has definitely
| indicated they'll be increasingly open to remote work:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/facebook/2020/5/21/21265699/face
| boo...
| ghaff wrote:
| Of course, the vast majority of employees in the tech sector
| manage to get by without shuttle buses, free cafeterias, etc.
| kazen44 wrote:
| the sillicon valley bubble of HN is sometimes hilarious.
|
| the concept of a company providing shuttle bus service
| instead of just having proper public transport to bussiness
| parks is very weird when one thinks about it.
| ghaff wrote:
| Public transit, e.g. commuter rail, works well into a city
| with a public transit system. It works far less well into a
| distributed set of suburban/ex-urban set of industrial
| parks.
|
| I can get into our small city office with a short drive and
| a longish train trip. I pretty much have to drive to our
| suburban office.
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| It is a bubble, but I get it because the default
| infrastructure is so bad. Everybody hopping in a car is
| just not a good solution.
| jahewson wrote:
| > The displays show the faces of people dialing in by
| videoconference so virtual participants are on the same footing
| as those physically present.
|
| Actually they're looming over them with heads 2x the size like
| Big Brother.
| Animats wrote:
| One of the good ideas there is video conferencing screens so
| large that each remote person has their own, and the heads of the
| remote people are as big as the heads of the onside people.
|
| Big flat screens are so cheap now.
| wskinner wrote:
| Reading between the lines of the article, I suspect most of these
| things will never be put into serious use at google, nor does
| anyone there expect them to. These are solutions looking for
| problems. My money is on office work looking much as it did
| before the pandemic, but a smaller percentage of work hours being
| spent in offices. It's hard to imagine anyone preferring to work
| in the way the article describes compared to either full time in
| office or full time remote.
| kazen44 wrote:
| most of my peers seem to want to do a mix of both office work
| aswell as remote work. Mainly because wfh allows for deep focus
| without distraction, while working from the office is far
| easier in terms of collaboration.
| hogFeast wrote:
| There also appear to have been consultants looking for work.
|
| Where you find consultants, you find solutions to imagined
| problems...only a consultant can really tell you what those
| damnable zoomers are thinking, they are basically Martians.
| Every company must have a zoomer-friendly office.
| fasteddie31003 wrote:
| I want to see what statistics management are looking at where
| going into an office is better than the current WFH arraignment.
| Tech stocks are at all time highs with the current work
| situation. I'm personally never working full time in an office
| again. I can only see an office being good for junior engineers.
| akomtu wrote:
| Real estate prices, probably. I remember google has something
| like 100B in assets. If it's necessary to make employees suffer
| to keep the RE prices up, they will.
| mycologos wrote:
| > google has something like 100B in assets
|
| I'm confused, are these assets their offices or...real estate
| investments that they own for some reason? If these assets
| are just offices, what is the value to Google if those
| offices are worth more or less as real estate? It's hard to
| imagine that the market for a giant complex of offices is
| super liquid?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| This kind of requires everyone else to play along, otherwise
| the winner is the big, real-estate heavy corporations that
| keep doing their core business without bringing people back
| on campus, _and_ convert surplus real estate to some other
| profit making venture (whether they run it themselves, or
| spin /sell it off.) As first mover advantage would be an
| issue here, it would be a pretty big gamble for Google to try
| to signal the rest of the market on this the way you suggest.
| phillipcarter wrote:
| Yep. The entire article can be summarized as "SUNK COSTS!"
| and all the balloons and "gen-z friendly" office layouts are
| just them putting on a show.
| izgzhen wrote:
| Despite all the funny ideas, I am happy to see that people are
| actively thinking about some radical changes in how a tech
| company office should look like in future. Some ideas won't work,
| but some will stay.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Am I the only one that doesn't really want to live in any version
| of the future as imagined by Google?
| sneak wrote:
| One wonders about the higher level cognitive abilities of
| someone dedicating much of their waking, productive hours to
| the service of making the staff and contractors of a giant ad
| surveillance company more comfortable and efficient.
|
| It seems so insanely thoughtless to me.
|
| Like, is that really the world you want? Gmail surveillance
| already took over everyone's email, same for maps and apps and
| YouTube. Anyone with a clue is trying to roll this worldwide
| trend backward, not make the Google advertising machine more
| efficient and effective at ingesting every single last molecule
| your private data and personal activities.
| squid32 wrote:
| Definitely not, all of these ideas horrified me.
|
| Why should I even go into the office during a pandemic, it just
| does not make sense.
| dang wrote:
| The article's baity title is not the article. Please let's
| react to the latter, not the former.
|
| It can be helpful to remember that at big media sites,
| headlines get written by headline specialists. It's their job
| to sex up the title, and the rest of our job (the rest of us's
| job?) not to take the bait.
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
|
| I've replaced the title with a suitably neutral, representative
| sentence from the article body. There nearly always is one.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| There's a good alternative to the open floor plans everyone is
| building: noise insulated "pods" with 10~12 devs and a meeting
| room.
| jaytaylor wrote:
| Both open office plans and pods sound more like breeding
| grounds for human transmitted illness and disease, not a future
| I'm keen to optimize for.
| fooker wrote:
| This is why you have an immune system.
| trhway wrote:
| >The company that helped popularize open office plans and lavish
| employee perks
|
| somehow our BigCo got only open offices with the lavish perks
| lost in translation.
|
| Anyway, it seems that Google is bringing cubicles (and even
| offices with the "focused work" pods - implicit recognition that
| "focused work" (is where other than focused work in programming?)
| is impacted by the open space office) while avoiding the cu-word
| and, God-forbid, the o-word.
| neilv wrote:
| Now I want to see that creative design bubble wall snap up
| instantly, like Zodiac inflatable commando boats do in action
| movies.
|
| Though the pacing of the bubble wall does have great comedic
| potential for holding attention awkwardly, as you're signalling
| you suddenly want a barrier between you and a coworker. Optional
| is to also maintain intense eye contact, as they can see the
| barrier rise between you, initially in their peripheral vision.
| For the labor-saving eyes-free option, maybe accompany inflation
| with some milquetoast elevator music.
|
| (If one could move to Google without months of test-prep, someday
| I'd be happy to share additional perspectives on technology and
| office dynamics.)
| ghaff wrote:
| What's unclear from that article is what timeframes are being
| discussed here. It's one thing is they're talking about all these
| changes through, say, the end of the year. It's something else if
| it's a long-term new normal which would presumably make working
| at Google much less attractive than in the past.
| ihsw wrote:
| Any office paired with a dreadful commute is a non-starter.
| aphextron wrote:
| If I need to wear a mask, I don't need to be in an office. This
| is horrifying.
| cmelbye wrote:
| Seriously, this piece is so bizarre.
|
| > Employees can return to their permanent desks on a rotation
| schedule that assigns people to come into the office on a
| specific day to ensure that no one is there on the same day as
| their immediate desk neighbors.
|
| Why does it matter if I'm wearing a mask or sitting next to
| someone in an "office of the future" where the pandemic has
| already abated?
| mLuby wrote:
| > Google is trying to get a handle on how employees will react to
| so-called hybrid work. In July, the company asked workers how
| many days a week they would need to come to the office to be
| effective. The answers were divided evenly in a range of zero to
| five days a week.
|
| "My responses are limited; you must ask the right questions."
| What getting your whole team together for 1-2 weeks per quarter?
| I hear some teams travelled that way in the before time.
|
| > The majority of Google employees are in no hurry to return....
| 70% said they had a "favorable" view about working from home
| compared with 15% who had an "unfavorable" opinion [and 15%
| neutral].... The company appears to be realizing its employees
| may not be so willing to go back to the old life.
|
| Will be interesting to see if people actually leave or if it's
| just bluster.
|
| > "No company at our scale has ever created a fully hybrid work
| force model," [Google's CEO] wrote in an email a few weeks later
| announcing the flexible workweek.
|
| Like communism: maybe nobody's implemented it correctly before,
| or maybe it's a bad idea.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| The "at our scale" is doing a lot of work there. Once you're
| split into different campuses I'm not sure why increased size
| makes remote harder.
| okareaman wrote:
| > The company will encourage -- but not mandate -- that employees
| be vaccinated
|
| I wouldn't want to spend a good part of the day indoors with
| people who aren't vaccinated
| stevenicr wrote:
| not a doc or lawyer, not an antivaxxer, welcoming for new info,
| ymmv etc..
|
| I have heard that the cov vaccines do not prevent someone from
| getting it or transmitting it - (maybe?) at least two of the
| three prominent "vaccines" merely change your dna so that if
| you get it, the effects of it are not as serious as someone who
| has not gotten the shot (?)
|
| If that is true - it seems to me that it does not make much
| difference if you spend time indoors with people that have or
| have not been vaccinated, as it really just protects them and
| not you.
|
| I just quick opened something like:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=mrna+vaccine+does+not+preven...
|
| the top result seems to "debunk" but the details off the page
| are tricky imho - the first "common questions" dropdown from
| the cdc, notes on page: "Although COVID-19 vaccines are
| effective at keeping you from getting sick, scientists are
| still learning how well vaccines prevent you from spreading the
| virus that causes COVID-19 to others, even if you do not have
| symptoms"
|
| am I wrong on this?
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(page generated 2021-05-01 23:01 UTC)