[HN Gopher] Google asks some employees to share desks amid offic...
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Google asks some employees to share desks amid office downsizing
Author : nickthegreek
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-02-23 17:24 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| dcchambers wrote:
| I guess I had already figured that Google switched to hotel-style
| desks when covid started.
| elforce002 wrote:
| If that's the case, why not encourage WFH instead of this "idea"?
| orangesite wrote:
| Hahahahaha!
| a13o wrote:
| Pretty unlikely for two people to share ergonomic settings across
| the desk hardware. If you've been in this industry long enough
| you've got to be careful about wrist, neck, leg, and eye strain
| and that often boils down to setting your chair and monitor just
| so, and customized ergonomic peripherals.
|
| A policy like this is biased against older and differently abled
| employees whether that was the intention or not.
| vechagup wrote:
| I'm not in the PA that will be sharing desks but sit in one of
| the affected offices. I can see about 100 desks from where I am
| right now. All of them are assigned to someone, but only 6
| presently have someone sitting there. Occupancy of our corner
| peaks at maybe 30%?
|
| 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?
| hypothesis wrote:
| > Occupancy of our corner peaks at maybe 30%? > Maybe all those
| people who didn't actually want to come to the office should
| have just filed for permanent remote?
|
| Not sure what the rules are at BigCo, but it looks like it
| would be way simpler to ask office-first people to apply to
| permanent positions.
| amf12 wrote:
| I don't understand the negative sentiment with this. Do people
| expect employers to assign everyone a big desk, which is not
| completely open office and also have the flexibility to come to
| the office 1-2 days a week?
|
| I hope there are exceptions for people who come in everyday, but
| otherwise it's a win-win the way I see it.
| readonthegoapp wrote:
| part of it, for me, is that this policy says, 'hey googlers, we
| order you to _not_ come to the office -- at least, not at the
| same time or day as your desk friendo, or your desk friendos.'
|
| so when CEO 'x' says, 'everyone back to the office, we need to
| whisper sweet idea nothings to each other on our way to/from
| the bathroom, in the office, so that we can $$$$$' -- ceo
| google just said, "that's obviously untrue, and completely
| ridiculous, besides".
|
| either that, or ceo google just said that the money we save by
| creating desk friendos will surpass the alleged value we gain
| by whispering sweet idea nothings to each other in the
| hallways, or at our covid- and flu-covered desks.
|
| but one commenter said 'stackable desks' like bunk beds - which
| makes sense - kind of like that vertical pig farm in china. not
| sure how productive that will be -- for the desk jockeys, not
| the pigs -- but worth a try i guess.
|
| https://medium.com/halting-problem/open-office-floor-plans-g...
| Macha wrote:
| Google is also one of those companies pushing for RTO though,
| from what I understood.
| vechagup wrote:
| RTO is barely being pushed for. They said "you should come
| to the office these 3 days", but almost no one did and no
| manager seems to care.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Yet another sign of a CEO being completely out of touch.
| astrea wrote:
| The negative sentiment is in the being forced to return to
| office then, in the same stroke, diminishing the quality of the
| in-office experience.
| amf12 wrote:
| Google let's you apply for remote work, and Hybrid RTO isn't
| being enforced.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| It's being enforced unevenly is the issue. Some floors are
| packed and some are mostly empty.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| _So Y.T. 's mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and
| gone into her office, actually a large room with computer
| workstations placed across it in a grid. Used to be divided up by
| partitions, but the EBGOC boys didn't like it, said what would
| happen if there had to be an evacuation? All those partitions
| would impede the free flow of unhinged panic. So no more
| partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops.
| Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and
| reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your
| work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only
| you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When
| you're working for the Feds, everything you do is the property of
| the United States of America. You do your work on the computer.
| The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick
| or something, it's all there where your co-workers and
| supervisors can get access to it. If you want to write little
| notes or make phone doodles, you're perfectly free to do that at
| home, in your spare time. And there's the question of
| interchangeability. Fed workers, like military people, are
| intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if your
| workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and
| twiddle your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going
| to move to a spare workstation and get to work on that. And you
| don't have that flexibility if you've got half a ton of personal
| stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn around a desktop.
|
| 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._
| [deleted]
| lasereyes136 wrote:
| Snow Crash for those that don't know: https://a.co/d/fXWqXr7
| [deleted]
| benatkin wrote:
| Long unsightly url after redirection but doesn't appear to be
| an affiliate link.
| jefftk wrote:
| If you want to make a short Amazon link manually the only
| thing you need is the /dp/ID. So in this case,
| https://amazon.com/dp/B00005NZJA
| flandish wrote:
| Is that a good read? I liked Quicksilver.
| teachrdan wrote:
| I loved it. I think it's probably Stephenson's best novel,
| before he went off the rails with books unreadably long to
| anyone but his most devoted followers. And I say this as
| someone who also read Zodiac, Diamond Age, and
| Cryptonomicon.
| karmelapple wrote:
| Is Diamond Age considered unreadably long? Because gosh
| did I like it, but it did seem long-ish.
| teachrdan wrote:
| Not too long to read. But too long to read and enjoy imo.
| I think all his books post-Snow Crash could be 30%
| shorter and would then be about 75% better.
| flandish wrote:
| Ohh I did read Cryptomomicon too. Forgot that one.
|
| I'll give it a shot. Thanks!
| benatkin wrote:
| Dank meme to post it with only your username as the giveaway to
| anyone who can't recall entire paragraphs. I thought it was
| from Snow Crash but had to google a phrase to make sure. Then I
| came back here and noticed your username.
| plaidfuji wrote:
| Have literally been reading Snow Crash for the last couple
| months and just got to this part in the last week. This is
| followed shortly by the glorious multi-page memo on toilet
| paper share pools policy.
| mealkh wrote:
| Floating license basically
| rr888 wrote:
| Makes a lot of sense given how many people are WFH
| akmarinov wrote:
| Just cut down on offices- makes even more sense
| Wonnk13 wrote:
| Not surprising, shit like this was happening pre-covid as well if
| you look for it.
| convolvatron wrote:
| after finally landing a job at Google after 8 months of back
| and forth I was pretty seriously disappointed to be assigned
| less than 20 square feet in the middle of a row of chairs that
| guaranteed someone would hit the back of my chair every couple
| minutes, and that I would be hard pressed to go to the bathroom
| without doing the same to the other 20 people in the row.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I worked on a project in X, and we moved from the main campus
| to The Rails. Not to claim we deserved more space, but we
| often had a bunch of hardware on our desks and so the norm
| was for an L shape. A week before the move, I went by to
| check the new desk setup. The contractors had messed up the
| spacing, and every row of cubes had about 6" of extra space,
| except for the last row with my desk. My row had about 3'
| less space, and you literally had to do a slalom to get to my
| desk. Thankfully they were able to mostly fix it...
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Desks? Make those lazy bums sit on the floor. If they want a desk
| they can bring one from home. No, you can't work from home,
| obviously, or the Communists win.
| [deleted]
| russellbeattie wrote:
| Though I think Google's Bay View campus is gorgeous and probably
| a lovely place to work, I can't imagine it's a particularly
| efficient use of the space it takes up. I could be wrong though
| as I've never been inside. I'll give credit to Google for not
| building another box full of cubicles, but it seems like it was
| meant to compete with Apple's spaceship in terms of impressive
| design, rather than somewhere for thousands of employees to get
| work done. Anyone know how many desks the buildings have and who
| gets to work there?
|
| https://blog.google/inside-google/life-at-google/bay-view-ca...
| moandcompany wrote:
| It seems like the general sentiment from people assigned to Bay
| View campus hate it, and the campus is an example of form over
| function as an actual office for doing work.
| fatbird wrote:
| > to ensure... desks are kept clean and free from personal items.
|
| 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.
| kerblang wrote:
| I'm supposed to be in one of those "hotelling" env's but human
| beings are so territorial that it effectively failed. In truth
| managers sabotaged it but employees were happy to go along.
| Even with WFH dominating now, it's still That's My Desk Not
| Yours.
|
| I kinda like the hotelling idea because you can mingle with
| people who work in other domains and mostly avoid that small
| percentage of really obnoxious folks. I suppose it could get
| problematic if you're the resident Hot Girl in an office of
| needy males (sorry if that sounds sexist and I'm sure I would
| absolutely hate being Hot Guy in an office of needy gals and no
| I'm not being facetious at all)
| WastingMyTime89 wrote:
| I guess they think it's a step too far for now and people would
| rebel. That's probably coming next like in a year or two.
| goldenchrome wrote:
| Wow Google's culture has really gone to the dumps. I think this
| is a direct consequence of hiring too many people and hoping for
| the best. There's no way their quality bar is anywhere near what
| it was 10 years ago.
|
| Google needs a careful visionary at the helm. A surgeon with a
| scalpel.
| kderbyma wrote:
| Pinchai was never about culture....lmao. I never heard him
| laugh once.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| If only there were someplace the employees could work and not
| need a desk at the office at all!
|
| 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.
| clolege wrote:
| I understand wanting to make better use of the space, but this
| seems like the wrong move.
|
| 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.
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Since it seems the days of Google being a fairytale workplace
| where every whim is catered to on a golden platter are over,
| which company now is taking up the mantle as the most enviable
| office environment?
| ryanjyyc wrote:
| stack the devs & desks like bunk beds. problem solved.
| readonthegoapp wrote:
| glad someone else sees the humor in this.
|
| i like the image of the grumpy ayn randian product manager
| using the conference room as his office, evil-eyeing all who
| pass by and look longingly at that big glass table, imagining
| the near-perfection of the muffled office noise barely
| penetrating the sleek glass enclosure...
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Well, looks like we are in 2023 and maybe the rumor made in 2019
| will be true. Where "Google Brass Set 2023 as Deadline to Beat
| Amazon, Microsoft in Cloud"
|
| https://www.theinformation.com/articles/google-brass-set-202...
| Insanity wrote:
| It seems like each day there's an article lately about reasons
| _not_ to work at Google. Sad to see how they went from an
| enviable place to work to a place to avoid these past years.
|
| (Although internally, things might be better than it looks from
| the outside of course)
| shmatt wrote:
| I'd work from a toilet stall for a Google L6 comp band
|
| I doubt any Googlers actually care about this stuff
| scarface74 wrote:
| I can't say the same. I was making $150K in 2020 at 45 years
| old living in my 4 year old newly built house in the burbs
| and I completely ignored any chance at working at BigTech if
| it meant moving.
|
| The only reason I gave a recruiter the time of day at the
| BigTech company I ended up working at is when she suggested I
| do a pivot into the cloud consulting department (cloud app
| dev implementations) and said the position was remote.
|
| But I would go back to my old comp way before I would be
| willing to ever be in an office again.
|
| I was making "enough" in 2020. Everything else was just
| gravy.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Low CoL place? 150k doesn't support paying for a 4 bedroom
| in the suburbs of coastal cities...
| scarface74 wrote:
| Most of the 2.7 million developers in the US don't live
| in a coastal area
|
| I had my house built in 2016 in "the good school system"
| in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K. It was 3200
| square feet 5/3-1/2.
|
| There is a reason I didn't entertain the recruiter until
| she suggested a permanently remote role.
| dgacmu wrote:
| Not a chance. Toilet stalls are in higher demand (during peak
| hours) than desks.
| sct202 wrote:
| My company switched to hot desks and didn't add any
| restroom capacity even though the peak building population
| was much higher. It was pretty terrible on days where
| everyone was there for all hands/townhalls.
| [deleted]
| carom wrote:
| I used to say something similar to this but then I worked at
| Google. It turns out I care a lot more about working on
| interesting problems than I do about fat checks.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Google still has interesting problems to work on? I thought
| they just printed money with adsense and launched projects
| just so they could cancel them 2 weeks later. /s
| roflyear wrote:
| I think he's saying they don't have interesting problems
| to work on.
| leros wrote:
| Companies like Google have a unique problem. They attract
| the best engineers, but they still have lots of boring
| work to be done. So they end up hiring brilliant
| engineers only to have them work on uninteresting things
| like financial reports. My company created a whole
| separate job title which basically equates to "less
| skilled and lower payed developer" so we can hire more
| average engineers to do that kind of work without
| diluting our quality of engineers.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| I'm a Googler who very much cares about having my own desk. I
| hate WFH because I find it to be miserable, strongly prefer
| WFO, and this would make WFO miserable too. I'm not gonna be
| miserable for 8 hours every day for any amount of money.
| scarface74 wrote:
| How is WFH miserable and if it is, it's your home, can't
| you make it more comfortable?
| haunter wrote:
| Not OP but WFH to me is like living at my workplace.
| There is no boundary anymore between work and home. This
| where I work, this is where I live. This gone with WFH. I
| much rather prefer the physical separation of office and
| my private home.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I have (had) a separate room in my house for my office. I
| go in in the morning and i close the door in the evening
| and don't go back in there.
| gwoplock wrote:
| Not OP, but for me, it's the isolation. I wouldn't quite
| call it miserable unless I can't go out. I lasted only a
| few days into WFH for COVID before I went to live with my
| parents until I was forced back to the office. Just a few
| weeks ago I was snowed in for a week and I was about to
| crawl up the walls.
| scarface74 wrote:
| If I were single, I can see how that would make a
| difference. When I was forced to both work from home and
| not go to the gym and hang out with friends after work
| and I was single a decade ago during bad weather, that
| was miserable.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| The existence of familiar faces, even if we don't speak,
| reduces loneliness.
|
| "We are in this together" so to speak.
|
| It's funny how our brains do so many things for us
| without us being aware of them.
|
| Now, the more people return, the more hectic and loud it
| will be which I detest.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| That's assuming that one's issues with WFH can't be
| resolved by _not_ having a bunch of other people around.
|
| It's lost in me why so many nerds don't understand that
| not everyone wants to be wrapped up in their fortress of
| solitude, peeping out of a Zoom window.
| scarface74 wrote:
| I absolutely love being around people _when I am not
| trying to deep work_. Even as far as going to lunch,
| dinner, etc with coworkers. I work in consulting now, I
| have to actually pretend to be a people person.
| outworlder wrote:
| > I'd work from a toilet stall for a Google L6 comp band
|
| For maybe a quarter, until your brain adapts. Once you have
| your needs met, there's diminishing returns. You can still be
| miserable while getting a fat check.
| leros wrote:
| Plus you'd have Google on your resume, so now you get a job
| just about anywhere, so you can leave Google for similar
| pay at a better company.
| jrockway wrote:
| Google definitely doesn't have a spare toilet for you. I
| remember a group of coworkers threatening to file a complaint
| with OSHA because the number of toilets was so limited. (I
| just used the bathrooms that were part of the building but
| not managed by Google. They were not "nice" so nobody was
| ever in there, but it was better than waiting in line to use
| the facilities.)
| dpifke wrote:
| I worked in a building on the Mountain View campus where
| they brought in porta-potties to "solve" the bathroom
| problem. (They were very nice porta-potties, but still...)
|
| For anyone who's curious, OSHA does require a minimum
| number of toilets per male or female employee
| (https://www.osha.gov/restrooms-sanitation), and the law
| doesn't permit co-ed restrooms unless the stall dividers
| and doors go from floor to ceiling. Office buildings are
| generally designed around a 50/50 male/female ratio, and
| when the ratio gets way off, you can wind up not having
| enough restrooms for one or the other, despite being well
| within the total design occupancy limit.
| jrockway wrote:
| I remember that! We had no such luck getting portapotties
| in the NYC office.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Toilet stalls can be booked for no more than 15 minutes at a
| time.
| acchow wrote:
| When you get there and find yourself with other companies
| clambering to hire you, with better perks and pay, you may
| think differently.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| Just got hired as a Google L6. When does this happen?
| shrimpx wrote:
| They seem to have gone from firing people to making people want
| to quit.
| unixlikeposting wrote:
| I wonder how their recruiters will respond to those that want an
| office desk 5 days a week.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I remember visiting MS (Redmond), in the 1990s (It was at the
| "Longhorn" launch, if that helps date it).
|
| A friend of mine, worked in one of the nearby buildings, and
| took me to his office (He was doing documentation, or something
| for Encarta).
|
| I was struck by the narrow, dark, corridors, and the small,
| windowless, offices. My friend said that all MS engineers had a
| private office.
|
| I have since been told that the building I visited was probably
| an old one, and not representative of most buildings, and I
| think that MS went open-plan, since.
|
| I have also visited the Facebook (it was still called Facebook,
| back then) office, in NYC.
|
| The programming floor was a really big, noisy, open-plan
| office, jammed with desks (standing and sitting), and everyone
| was talking away. No windows. The floor was surrounded by
| conference rooms and offices, which had windows.
|
| The Japanese offices of my own company were sort of like that,
| but with uniform desks, and quiet as a mouse; even with
| hundreds of people. No individual offices. VPs, with billion-
| dollar budgets, had a small desk, in the corner.
| int_19h wrote:
| Microsoft started to transition to open layout company-wide
| sometime in the mid-10s. Depending on the org, some team at
| Microsoft still had private offices for their devs as late as
| 2017.
| brundolf wrote:
| Really tough to imagine micro-optimizations like this having any
| visible effect at all on costs for a company Google's size
| (except by way of employee frustration)
|
| You have to wonder what's going on inside those executive
| conference rooms
| jlarocco wrote:
| Respectfully disagree - I can see it having a big impact. It
| cuts their office space requirements roughly in half, which
| could mean reduced rent, more teams in the same amount of space
| (real estate runway), or potentially leasing out the extra
| space.
|
| Difficult to pull those off in the short term, but this could
| be the start of a bigger plan.
| brundolf wrote:
| Even then- what percentage of Google's costs is office
| floorspace? I guess I don't know, but I'd be surprised if it
| was a significant portion
| jfisher4024 wrote:
| Rearranging desk chairs on the titanic
| shmerl wrote:
| That's some Brazil level of dystopian already:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
| flax wrote:
| When I was at Google (Kirkland), the offices were basically open-
| plan fishbowls. WFH was massively better.
|
| 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.
| deckard1 wrote:
| > They provided one stool for 2 standing desks
|
| They had it better in the movie Brazil. At least they had
| offices!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| I liked the fishbowls, but I had a team whose office was just
| the right size for it - The glass walls kept out the noise well
| enough, and the view of the rest of the office didn't bother
| me. I was for a period in the open plan area without an
| enclosure - That sucked, modulo the Sennheiser headphones we
| had provided which I blasted music and white noise in.
| Laaas wrote:
| Well, that could be justified as maintaining the health of the
| employees by forcing one of two to stand up at any time.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| It would have to be timed so each employee got equal stool
| time. IIRC standing all day isn't necessarily healthier than
| sitting all day. You want to alternate.
| Laaas wrote:
| That would be incentivised with this system, no? Employees
| would fight the other off the stool constantly, to get
| their share of sitting.
| outworlder wrote:
| Yeah, that's "amazing" for those employees with very common
| conditions like plantar fasciitis.
| masklinn wrote:
| It's not like standing statically is good for your health
| either, and it can be easy to do that when focusing.
|
| I hit that issue when I got my standing desk early during the
| pandemic, I tend to lock my knees when static and doing that
| for hours at a time was not good.
| manmal wrote:
| I'm not sure standing 4+ hours a day has been established as
| healthy without exception. Long sitting is bad, sure; but
| switching things around ad libitum might be better than
| enforcing standing all the time.
| cududa wrote:
| That's not the employer's purview. They can incentivize
| health but, seriously F right off with that controlling
| nonsense. They're employees, not your charges or children.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Not that I agree with the practice, but many retail
| employees (at least in the USA) are required to stand while
| working, even if the job can easily be done while seated,
| as is the case for receptionists, fast food and grocery
| cashiers, and so on. It's definitely within the company's
| purview, even if the practice is unnecessarily cruel.
| KyeRussell wrote:
| Yeah. Right. We can add it to the long list of ways that tech
| bros assert their false sense of transferable expertise onto
| other people. The average startup...whatever person, has
| never actually asked an expert if standing desks do much if
| any good. The truth is way more nuanced.
| pram wrote:
| Remember how all those Gen X movies depicted cubicles as the
| embodiment of the soul crushing rat race.
|
| If only we still had it that good!
| shortcake27 wrote:
| 100% agree. I thought open plan was bad, then the norm became
| open plan hotdesking (no permanency). Such a morale killer.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Sam Lowry's office at Information Retrieval[1] was supposed to
| depict a dystopianly-terrible office setup, but these day's I'd
| _kill_ for a workspace like that. That 's how bad offices are
| in 2023.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mS5WLkb_Cxk
| keb_ wrote:
| I had low-wall cubicles at one job and thought it was great.
| Could still see the eyes and noses of my coworkers around me,
| and it was easy making conversation or asking for help.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| I came here to say the same thing.
|
| I worked at a company where a smart manager got low profile
| cubes for the dev team. We were located in an area that had
| access to a host of large whiteboards, and large monitors for
| video conferencing. It was really great. If a dev ran into a
| problem, it was easy to ask for help. Then you could start
| working at a whiteboard a few feet from your desk.
|
| Whether you were working something out alone or with some
| other dev, chances are within a few minutes several other
| devs were there working the problem out with you. I mean the
| collaboration was really cool and we blasted through so many
| bugs and bad code, it was really refreshing.
|
| Likewise, we had a large portion of the floor dedicated to
| CSR folks. Again, some smart manager got them 7ft. high cubes
| so the noise the devs were making wouldn't interrupt what
| they were doing. They even had a few spare CSR cubes for
| anybody who really wanted to be heads down and working in
| absolute quiet.
| brailsafe wrote:
| Damn idk which I'd rather have. Some cube farms are next-level
| depressing. When I was younger, I think part of what made the
| prospect of moving out of my hometown more compelling was the
| fact that a giant mega-insurance company ended up being the
| main endpoint for CS grads. I got to visit once and it was
| _not_ pretty. Tightly enclosed cubes with tall aging white
| walls, one source of sunlight if that. They must of really
| liked Java.
|
| On the flipside, the last open office I worked did provide me
| my own desk, but I had to hear everything that was going on
| around me, and when my manager wanted to micromanage me, he'd
| just pull up a chair. I could hear people talking, crunching
| chips, and smell my colleagues disgusting boiled eggs that he
| ate at his desk multiple times a day.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| Well if you get a cube by the window, there's always a chance
| of seeing some merry squirrels.
| octacat wrote:
| There are so many other options besides a football size open
| space (hello, facebook) and corpo cubicles. For example, each
| agile team could perfectly fit in a small room + shared
| areas. And put a couple extra desks for monads like managers.
| WWLink wrote:
| Open or not, the important factor is how much free space you
| have around you. I claim that a crowded cubicle setup will be
| worse than a spacious open office. Granted, SPACIOUS open
| offices are really rare - the largest motivator is to crowd
| as many people in as possible. You know what the icing on the
| cake is? Open office workspaces are almost always crowded
| into a building that was made for cubicles or a warehouse or
| whatever. There's never enough parking, never enough toilets.
| The asshole business owners always play the "well, we're a
| growing company so you'll have to live with this for now"
| card.
|
| When the company I work for was new, we had big desks in a
| huge office space, so we were spread out. It was awesome!
| Like you easily had 8ft of desk to yourself and a cabinet and
| lots of space to breathe.
| outworlder wrote:
| > Open office workspaces are almost always crowded into a
| building that was made for cubicles or a warehouse or
| whatever.
|
| Yeah! See, at least with cubes you know exactly where your
| "space" ends. Not so with many open plan offices, they can
| always try to cram more.
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| Yeah, at the job I just left we had much less square meter
| space per employee in our open office than what egg laying
| chickens are required to have in Europe by law. We literally
| have it worse than farm animals in some offices.
| mahoho wrote:
| Aside from all the other glaring issues with this model with
| respect to workers' wellbeing, do they even consider how it
| affects people who need specific ergonomic or accessibility
| accommodations? Like, my own desk has a ton of stuff I need just
| to get through a day of computer use: split keyboard, clamp-on
| keyboard tray, vertical mouse, trackball. Am I supposed to just
| haul all that crap in, set it up, tear it down, and haul it back
| home every day?
|
| 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.
| mathverse wrote:
| [flagged]
| autoexec wrote:
| Seriously, the company has billions but can't afford to give
| everyone a desk? Why would employees accept that?
| dang wrote:
| Maybe so, but please don't fulminate on Hacker News. We're
| trying for something else here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| robertwt7 wrote:
| Sundar just keep finding reasons to cut cost because he can't
| find a way to innovate or create new revenue streams for google
| davidw wrote:
| Maybe they could - hear me out - do a new messaging system.
| [deleted]
| tchalla wrote:
| > "Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,"
| the internal document stated, noting they expect employees to
| come in on alternate days so they're not at the same desk on the
| same day. "Through the matching process, they will agree on a
| basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and
| teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared
| environment."
|
| If only, there was an easier solution.
| x86x87 wrote:
| What's next? No more food in the office?
|
| The best and brightest minds of our generation being treated as
| children. Oh yeah. This is going to work out just fine.
| nojito wrote:
| How is using float desks being treated like children?
| AlanYx wrote:
| Snow Crash does a good job satirizing the problems with
| float desks.
|
| Though even Snow Crash is a little optimistic; it didn't
| predict the typical issues with a person's multi-monitor
| setup of the day not working quite right, or encountering
| weird hardware incompatibilities between one's docking
| station of the day and one's laptop.
| kderbyma wrote:
| you are not important enough to deserve stability....your
| schedule is not yours....you are directed by the parents
| and told where to sit...and stand etc...
| brewdad wrote:
| This isn't float desks. This is an assigned desk that
| requires you to share and coordinate office time with a co-
| worker. This is so much worse than float desks.
| amf12 wrote:
| What is an easier solution?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Extreme pair programming but with 4 people instead of 2.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Not parent but presumably they mean WFH.
| turtlebits wrote:
| Hot desks?
|
| A reservation system? I work for a remote optional company
| and employees can reserve desks ahead of time and/or you can
| get an assigned seat if you come in daily.
| amf12 wrote:
| This is assigned hot desk which is better than just hot
| desk + reservation, which doesn't guarantee teams sit
| together.
| temp2022account wrote:
| WFH, it's a religion for some people. I personally absolutely
| must have my in-person work, but I understand the desires.
| amf12 wrote:
| And that is an option too.
| dwrodri wrote:
| Surely there will be someone who will realize that you can
| approach this problem by building a matching engine based on
| Hall's Marriage Theorem[1], and then deploy it onto multiple
| regions for maximum anti-fragility, get promoted, rally some
| new hires to launch it as an extension of Google Workplace, get
| promoted again, abandon the project, and then have the feature
| die 10 months after public launch wondering why operating it
| cost so much money.
|
| At least, that would be the Google WayTM of doing it, right?
|
| 1: https://brilliant.org/wiki/hall-marriage-theorem/
| dwrodri wrote:
| Google's South Lake Union campus cost $802 million[1].
|
| 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
| rytis wrote:
| > So, Sundar, when do we start thinking about where Google will
| be in 20 years instead of the next quarter?
|
| Why would he care?
| dwrodri wrote:
| Generally, I'm of the opinion that:
|
| 1. The CEO is the leader of the company
|
| 2. Good leaders are visionaries that have the capacity of
| picturing a better future, realizing what needs to be done,
| and then delegating and executing those requirements to
| manifest that vision into reality.
|
| 3. Sundar wants to be a good leader.
|
| It would be easy to say that my #2 is correct, but doesn't
| apply to Sundar as CEO. I've heard his tenure associated with
| the "MBA-ification" of Google. Solely focusing on maximizing
| shareholder returns, which in the case of the company sitting
| on the multi-billion dollar revenue hose, means cutting down
| on anything that gets in the way of that.
|
| That would indeed allow shareholders to get a great return on
| their investment for some time, but if you reduce google to a
| private AI research lab and a digital ads platform, there's
| nothing left to react (or bring forth) to changes in how
| people interact with technology. I feel like nothing
| exemplifies this further than Bard.
|
| Perhaps I am too much of an optimist. But it really feels
| like he should care.
| suby wrote:
| Right. I want to know how much money this initiative could
| possibly save, especially in comparison to the scale of their
| revenue/profitability/spending on other things. It seems like
| they don't consider the well being of workers and how
| mistreating them will impact the well being of their company.
| People thinking along these lines should not be leading these
| trillion dollar companies.
| VectorLock wrote:
| The #1 reason everybody gives for "RTO" is "to improve
| collaboration." It seems like having hot desks if implemented
| properly could MAYBE actually help facilitate that. Let teams get
| areas (or, gasp, dedicated OFFICES) where they can sit together
| when they coordinate for in-office collaboration time. Let people
| move around to shoulder surf or pair code when they want to.
| Having hot desks with a hybrid office model makes much more sense
| rather than having people go in to a 3/5ths full office and try
| to ignore the distractions.
|
| 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.
| dontreact wrote:
| I am sitting at a Google desk and there are 5/6 people not here
| in the desks in my vicinity. I would prefer fewer desks and to
| actually get to sit next to people rather than being scattered
| among a sea of mostly empty desks due to people WFH.
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Same, but, they shouldn't be taking away the desks of me of my
| coworker, as we're in using them five days per week. We come to
| the office because we find that we're much less productive at
| home in our shared Manhattan apartments.
| dietr1ch wrote:
| I agree, but I think that the way of achieving that is quite
| dumb.
|
| Id rather enforce something around. The first 1-2 floors in
| some specific buildings on every campus will turn into shared
| spaces instead of forcing everyone out of their desks.
|
| Decisions seem so poorly though recently that the only way I
| can make sense of many is thinking that they are trying to get
| people to quit to avoid paying for severances and taking
| another morale and press hit at announcing layoffs.
| closeparen wrote:
| I am sitting in a sparsely populated open plan and it's nice
| because it nearly fixes the noise/overstimulation problems as
| well as walls would.
| filmgirlcw wrote:
| This move strikes me as just the worst of both worlds. First,
| Google tells employees they need to be in the office X days a
| week -- and depending on team, from what I know from friends at
| the Kirkland office, this was enforced.
|
| 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.
| sys42590 wrote:
| The problem I have with shared desks is that morning people get
| the best places close to windows and away from traffic and noisy
| corners, night owls are at a disadvantage. Also quite often
| shared hardware is in a sad state (keyboards with broken legs,
| mice with slippery wheels from people working with greasy
| fingers, etc.)
| leipert wrote:
| Yuck. If I just look at my keyboard and mouse, I really do not
| want that anyone _has_ to use them. I clean them regularly and
| do not eat at the desk, but still cruft assembles.
| alecbz wrote:
| This combined with mandatory in-office days seems insane. Are
| they still insisting on the latter?
| posharma wrote:
| Internally Google might be just fine, but optics are equally
| important in this industry. Before Sundar took over Google never
| went through bad PR. It's just an observation, not a dig at
| Google's affairs.
| amethyst wrote:
| Success hides problems.
| VikingCoder wrote:
| Google never went through bad PR before Sundar?
|
| Sunday became CEO on August 10, 2015.
|
| Google+ was launched in 2011. (And the "real name" policy was a
| PR disaster.)
|
| Google Reader was shut down in 2013. (You can hardly find a PR
| disaster that people in the tech world complain about more.)
|
| Google, Apple, Intel, Adobe had an anti-poaching agreement that
| finally got settled in 2015, but they were getting bad press
| before that.
|
| "Right to be forgotten" bad press was in 2014 and before.
| posharma wrote:
| There were a lot of other good things going that masked
| these. The recent "PR botch ups" are creating more damage.
| The most famous e.g. is reacting to ChatGPT's hype and
| rushing to do a demo and then messing it up. It wasn't so
| much messing up the demo that caught they eye; it was how
| Google rushed/reacted to do it esp. when Google is considered
| to be at the forefront of AI. Again, optics. Besides Sundar
| hasn't come out with anything impressive in the last few
| years. It's ok to just keep the lights on, but at least don't
| create bad optics.
| whiplash451 wrote:
| Actually, I don't think it's OK to just keep the lights on.
| posharma wrote:
| Hahha. Sure.
| cyberlurker wrote:
| When did they drop "don't be evil"?
| ProAm wrote:
| 2015
| ndneighbor wrote:
| Look... if you want people to RTO, maybe make it so that there's
| less overhead? Reading this article made me just want to stay at
| my own desk at home.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| Agreed, I have the perfect setup at home, I paid for everything
| (except laptop) and I pay for all of the electricity,
| bandwidth, accessories and upgrades, and furniture and
| upgrades.
|
| Saving the company a lot of money and I'm at my desk way
| longer!
| iamevn wrote:
| I never bothered but it's definitely easy at google to
| expense your internet and I remember hearing about someone
| successfully expensing some amount of their electricity
| ren_engineer wrote:
| whole thing makes no sense, just feels like leadership is
| flailing. Is RTO just sunk cost fallacy due to these big
| companies having spent billions on real estate and fancy
| buildings? There seems to be minimal benefits to mandating it,
| it shrinks your talent pool, makes employees less efficient due
| to commute, forces you to pay more in tech hubs, and makes you
| spend more on office stuff. The only benefit is the completely
| non-measurable "improved collaboration" metric
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Makes perfect sense if they're trying to downsize without
| paying severance/unemployment.
| [deleted]
| curiousDog wrote:
| How quickly the tide turns in our industry..from massages at your
| desk to sitting on each other's laps. Hey they could perhaps
| still continue the massage to each other though.
| matt3210 wrote:
| I remember when people loved Google... Like most indie games,
| corporate culture and shareholder priorities have sucked all the
| fun out of everything.
| malkia wrote:
| I don't remember when I've read this anecdote, I think was about
| Sun and X11 (or the equivalent), where employees can use the
| first free deskt they see and they can login from that "dumb"
| terminal to their actual machine (Could've been some other
| company, not Sun) - wonder if anyone remembers it (was it
| mentioned here on hny?)
| c4mpute wrote:
| X-Terminals were a thing before SUN, but SUN had very nice
| ThinClients called SunRay that could "HotDesk". Your session
| was tied to a smartcard, as soon as you plugged that in, your
| session appeared on that workplace. Pull the Smartcard, go
| somewhere else, plug it in, there was your session. Very cool
| and almost instant, as opposed to the supposed "alternative"
| our windows guys suggested, which was smartcard login to an
| rdesktop server, which took ages. The wire protocol wasn't
| really X11, but rather something VNC-like. The server software
| however could talk to either X11 or windows (with some horrible
| adapter software).
|
| Edit: links:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_terminal
|
| Edit3: ancient demo video:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1m-nzjdOj1w
| jollyllama wrote:
| As someone who worked at a place where we had more people needing
| desks daily than we had desks, sharing with one specific person
| is probably the worst solution I can think of.
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