Google Wants People in Office, Despite Productivity Gains at Home (bloomberg.com) 110
Employees are waiting to hear whether their remote work plans will be approved. From a report: Google software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home as they did before the pandemic. Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president. Welle declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together."
That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.
That's partially why, despite the rebound in productivity, the technology giant is sticking with its plan to bring most employees back to offices this fall. As Google deliberates which individual employees will get to continue working full time from home and who will need to come in, some staff are increasingly frustrated by the lack of clear direction and uneven enforcement of the policy. Internal message boards lit up this month when a senior Google executive announced he was going to work from New Zealand. Meanwhile, most lower-level staff are waiting to learn if they can relocate, or have to come into the office.
I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyone (Score:5, Insightful)
But it's only the mid-level managers that want people back in. Without people to micro-manage, their jobs are at risk, and we can't have that...
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:5, Informative)
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:5, Insightful)
All managers want to be in the office.
A significant part of being a manager is the in-person status and prestige of being a manager, and that requires people below you to be around as well as personal access and contact with people above you in the organization to increase your chances for promotion further into management. The higher you go in management the less its about tangible, measurable performance metrics (or when they exist, the more they are discounted) in favor of bullshit elements like "culture", "fit", "an attractive face", "helps my golf foursome", etc.
Also, don't forget one of the oldest tricks in the management book -- give someone a title and more responsibility and you can give them less -- or no -- salary increase since the intangible prestige factor makes up for it.
Remote work really fucks up organizations that rely on management because it creates a whole class of workers with added responsibility who have lost part of the rationale for what's often shitty and tedious responsibilities. I would expect remote work to start to cost these organizations more as they have to start paying more money to get people to buy into these enhanced responsibilities that don't come with an intangible prestige element.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm really of two minds on this. I'm CEO of a small (20 person) company right now. When the pandemic hit, we sent everyone home with company laptops and modified the phone system so calls would go through to everyone's cell phones. I and one or two others stayed in the office for several months, more because we still needed some physical presence on premises. I'd say in the early stages productivity went down the tubes, simply because working at home was so alien to many of the staff, coupled with spouses and kids being at home. It took some time for everyone to adapt, but within a few months I'd say overall productivity was good, probably as good as it had been pre-pandemic. For management, it also meant adapting, changing the paradigm by which we measured productivity; not just simply counting it by hours clocked, but by work produced. Some people seemed to stick to an 8am-4pm schedules, I noticed other people getting on at 5am, working until 7:30, getting the kids off to school, back on at 8:30-9, and then working until the afternoon, and then back on in the evening. I think the staff appreciated the flexibility.
But you could see after five or six months that people really were missing in person interactions. Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings. We're social animals, and no amount of technology can ever overcome how humans interact together. I had less of an issue, because I'm an introvert, so not having people showing up at my office at random times served me pretty well. But even I missed being able to go over to Bob's office to talk about something, have Jane and Bill join in and having those peculiar and unpredictable synergies that come from free conversation. You simply cannot reproduce that through Zoom or Teams. It's like there's something sticking in the gears, you can't create the same kind of energy.
Now that we're pretty much all back in the office, with some working at home added, I feel like productivity is improved by people being able to interact in a more natural way. I think some remote work is going to be part of the workflow going forward, and rather than get into the parent-vs-no children conflict that threatened us during the early stages of the recall, it's now available to everyone, but we still want everyone in the office at least a day or two a week. It's just a helluva lot easier to manage.
And yes, the bean counter part of me rattling around 3,000 square feet with two other people in the office was asking "Why the fuck are we paying this lease?" So definitely it feels like we're actually getting our money's worth out of the office space, and if this were to have gone on for another year or so, we might very well have considered downsizing when the lease came up for renewal, and in the long run, maybe that may be a consideration.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:5, Insightful)
But you could see after five or six months that people really were missing in person interactions. Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings.
When I hear this line, I firmly believe I'm being sold something. I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine missing that.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:4, Insightful)
And maybe some people don't. What I detest are organized meetings with agendas and minutes, and Roberts Rules kind of organization. I find the process gets in the way of actually discussing anything meaningful. As a way of airing grievances, sure, but for actually brainstorming, those kinds of meetings suck. Get a few people just chewing the fat and chewing over a problem, and where you don't have the weight of an organized meeting structure, I find those kinds of meetings are far more productive. But I get that it's not to everyone's taste, and some people don't feel comfortable in even small group settings. Some people just don't think quickly on their feet, or at least aren't very good at dealing with people with stronger personalities, so sometimes just presenting them with a problem and letting them go off and work out solutions works best.
The best kind of management is the management that recognizes everyone's strengths, and trying to find a way to forge a group, but still leaving room for those of us who really are better at just bouncing a ball off our own office wall then in the too-and-fro of group settings to do what they do best.
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Interesting FP branch, and mostly enjoyable. It looked dubious, but kudos.
On the brainstorming topic, I've never actually seen an 'official' brainstorming session that accomplished much. There were a couple of periods when management pushed them at us.
In my 'happy days' the productive discussions were basically part of my 'rounds'. Once or twice a day I'd go visit the people I whose projects I was working on. The projects were usually papers headed for conferences. We'd talk about various things, not just t
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On the brainstorming topic, I've never actually seen an 'official' brainstorming session that accomplished much. There were a couple of periods when management pushed them at us.
It depends how focussed they are and what the context and follow up is. You need a good 'umpire' if you want to get to a solution to a problem. It can be good for team morale. It might throw up something useful and unexpected. Or it might just be all blather. Follow up is vital, though, otherwise apart from the team bonding it will result in not that much, IMHO.
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I've been working in software development for 15+ years, and leading teams for 10+ years. In my personal experience, brainstorming meetings are a myth/waste of time/a way to make others do your work.
Every time I heard "brainstorming" from my product managers I translate it to "let's se what I can steal from the development team" or "let's see how can I coax the development team into refining my totally incomplete requirements" depending on the development phase we are.
Maybe other fields are different, but
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I've been working in software development for 15+ years, and leading teams for 10+ years. In my personal experience, brainstorming meetings are a myth/waste of time/a way to make others do your work.
Every time I heard "brainstorming" from my product managers I translate it to "let's se what I can steal from the development team" or "let's see how can I coax the development team into refining my totally incomplete requirements" depending on the development phase we are.
Maybe other fields are different, but I doubt it.
Managers should be in the business of giving credit not taking it. Maybe you've only had poor managers.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to any (Score:1)
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Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:4, Insightful)
What I detest are organized meetings with agendas and minutes...
Because you're the big boss in a small org. That's why you can get away without them. And I bet a bunch of your staff fucking hate it when you pull that shit, because they don't know if there's any reason for them to be there wasting their time.
The absolute best meetings I go to are the ones with agendas and minutes. The worst ones are ones like yours.
This afternoon our standing 1hr meeting was over in 38 minutes, because we only had 38 minutes worth of stuff on the agenda. Since you're required to add items two days prior to this particular meeting, we all know a couple of days before what's going to happen and who needs to be there. If nothing on the agenda impacts you, you can skip it.
This particular one pulls in about two dozen people from 3-4 different departments, and regularly makes million dollar decisions and signs off on things with legal implications.
But it's the greatest meeting, because of the meeting nazi that runs it!
The agenda is controlled by just a couple of people, but it's available to everyone at all times. We can see past agendas, minutes, attendance records, etc. That way when someone acts surprised about something we can go look and be like, "No, motherfucker, you were there. It's in the minutes."
It's pretty magical to sit through those meetings and just watch massively important decisions be made by people who are prepared to make them with a minimum of discussion and debate. Everyone shows up prepped, shit gets done, and when we either get to the end of the agenda or the hour the meeting is over.
I'd take a pay cut for all the rest of my meetings to run like that!
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Or you are being told the reality of human psychology. People are social creatures and require social contact to function effectively.
All other things being equal, people who have a personal social bond with eachother are going to work better together than people who do not ever personally meet. If you are working at a place where you don't want that, you are either working at the wrong job or the wrong company.
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And yet a number of projects spread across the world with people who have literally never met in person have managed to crush large corporate products and did so on a shoestring budget.
If you want human contact and a social bond, organize company picnics and other outings. That way it doesn't break productivity. Maintain a small meeting space somewhere for when a workgroup feels that an in-person meeting might accomplish more.
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You're saying a lot of things, but none of them have evidence to back them up. That would be an improvement.
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Like I said, that's what company picnics and outings are for.
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In most of the teams I worked, the people most vocal about wanting to "socialize" were the ones most vocal against company outings outside the company time. 2 hours lunch during the work day OK, anything after work or team building in the weekend (with the kids).. nah.
They want "work friends", people to fill the hours in the office with small talk.
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Then something is wrong with you. I miss people. In fact, I'm quittibng and missing out on a 6 figure bonus this year because I was so isolated felling I tried to kill myself. So get your head out of your ass and realize not everyone is a loner like you?
Introverts, Extroverts, and Ambiverts... (Score:2)
I was so isolated felling I tried to kill myself.
Get help.
Then something is wrong with you. I miss people. In fact, I'm quittibng and missing out on a 6 figure bonus this year because I was so isolated ... So get your head out of your ass and realize not everyone is a loner like you?
Introverts and extroverts are a continuum, and everybody is on the scale somewhere. Most people (about half) are somewhere in the middle, what researchers call "ambiverts". There are about a quarter who are on either end, the extroverts and introverts. People see the extroverts. People sometimes see the ambiverts. The introverts, not so much. The extroverts control companies, the extroverts are management, the extroverts are decision makers.
Extroverts LOVE in-person offices and meetings. Some ambi
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When I hear this line, I firmly believe I'm being sold something. I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine missing that.
Funny, I'm the exact opposite. I can't believe the people who say that they would never want to go back into the office and like working from home.
I miss going into the office, talking to people, having a little gossip about who left and who is about to be hired. Hearing about my colleague's PTO, and discussing engineering topics on a whiteboard in person. Going into the lab to pull some cables, put a monitor on gear that's acting up. And not to forget: the free snacks.
I don't miss the Bay Area traffic
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We are mostly audio only, with shared screens. No one has replicated the whiteboard interaction yet that I ahve seen. Once developer has a tool for this that he shares on the screen, but it is horrendous, drawing a coherent diagram with a mouse is not so easy. Doing it offline with awful tools like Word or Visio take time.
So a contentious meeting this week about a diagram that was wrong, and it was difficult to explain why it was wrong when you couldn't just walk up to the board and draw a new line. Sur
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But you could see after five or six months that people really were missing in person interactions. Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings.
When I hear this line, I firmly believe I'm being sold something. I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine missing that.
I absolutely do, and I've spent better than half of my 30-year career working remotely, including all of the last eight.
My pre-COVID solution was to spend a week in the office every two months. That worked because everyone I worked with was in the office all the time, so whenever I happened to show up, they were all there and we could spend a few days hanging out. I actually spent a lot of time in hallways, specifically to increase the number of people I ran into, to increase those hallway meetings.
I'm
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I can. Except I'd rather do my socializing at the pub. This idea of standing around in the hallway at work socializing is a bit weird, but most workplaces are weird.
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But you could see after five or six months that people really were missing in person interactions. Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings.
When I hear this line, I firmly believe I'm being sold something. I cannot, in my wildest dreams, imagine missing that.
Whilst I don't mind working from home, a lot of people aren't suited for it.
I'm an escalation point, I have gotten and continue to get an increasing number of stupid calls like "I can't log onto this tool" or "I don't know what to do with this ticket, so I'm calling anyone" when in the before times they would ask their own team before picking up the phone. The phone is less permanent than putting it on their team chat for all and sundry to see how incompetent they are and rather than calling one in their
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That’s generally been my experience as well; productivity didn’t waver that much one way or the other, but employees took advantage of remote work in different ways.
The two things we were unable to do were train junior engineers and instill a sense of accomplishment and career path in a few mid-level engineers. Administrative staff morale is a mixed bag depending on their home situation.
I’ve worked remotely enough to now that I am less productive in that capacity, and significantly less e
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You do know that people hate when managers hang on their shoulder, don't you? It's about as helpful to productivity as when a bored child does it.
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It depends on what the role is, the frequency of doing it, and the trust/relationship level. There are a few things I have signiificant experience with, much of which is done in a very different way to how people do it today. While a formal training program might be better, I have never been able to see comparable results. It makes it much easier for people to ask me questions. When I sense that I am not providing any value, I bugger off and take care of my own stuff.
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3k square feet for 20 people is pretty close quarters. Just by simple division its only 150 sq ft or 12x12 per person, probably much less than that when you subtract halls/passages, doorways, and any other empty space.
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200 sq ft per person is pretty standard for office space. That includes aisles and corridors, but not lunch rooms, toilets, and other ancillary spaces.
A typical private office is around 10'x15'. Bigshots, of course, get more.
I've also worked on call center cubical farms where they would cram 4 people into a ±13'x15' space, though it was shift work, so it was never more than 75% occupied.
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Have you seen the new-ish "open office" concept? 6 desks in a ~12x18 pod.
Oh, and yes they expect to be fully occupied.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:4, Informative)
"Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings..."
In a forty year career I've seen that if you're hanging out in hallways or break rooms chatting with co-workers, you can COUNT on negative commentary (at least) for not being productive or not pulling your weight. Comments like "the workplace is not a place for socialization" are NOT uncommon.
Pre-pandemic, many of us took to messaging apps so the socializing we were doing wasn't quite so obvious.
Hallway meetings are a fantasy.
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But you could see after five or six months that people really were missing in person interactions. Video conferencing, email and phone are no replacement for the kinds of hallway meetings. We're social animals, and no amount of technology can ever overcome how humans interact together.
It is not the purpose of a job to make people feel socially fulfilled. "Missing in-person interactions" sounds like a problem best solved by gathering with friends after the work day is over, not an excuse to force people to waste an extra 90 minutes per day in their cars.
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Sorry, I can only disagree.
First, I hate people. I really do. I don't get the whole "human interaction" thing being wanted or even necessary. Teams meetings are a good compromise between me not wanting to deal with people and having to do so due to professional requirements. At least that way I can turn them off when they really start to get on my nerves (don't try that in real life, for some bizarre reason that's not legal).
People coming to my office and talking to me served one purpose, and one purpose on
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Also, don't forget one of the oldest tricks in the management book -- give someone a title and more responsibility and you can give them less -- or no -- salary increase since the intangible prestige factor makes up for it.
From what I heard a few years ago, this is the only way promotions are done at some of the big-4 accounting firms.
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Also, don't forget one of the oldest tricks in the management book -- give someone a title and more responsibility and you can give them less -- or no -- salary increase since the intangible prestige factor makes up for it.
From what I heard a few years ago, this is the only way promotions are done at some of the big-4 accounting firms.
Title were important because it helps disguise that the "Senior Consultant" a client pays big dollars for is only 1 year out of college. It also impresses people in cultures where titles are a big deal. Banks are great at it as well, everyone is at least a VP.
Re: I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyo (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a manager (director level) and I don't want to be in the office. I've loved working almost entirely from home this last year.
You can have all the personal access and contact you want as a remote manager. Zoom is great for 1 on 1s and group meetings. It's not ideal but it can be made to work.
Before Covid, several people I managed were in separate states and I only saw them in person once or twice a year. It worked fine.
When you manage based on performance metrics you don't have to babysit your staff. You help them set clear measureable goals and you track their progress. This is very common in the tech industry (to manage people at remote sites).
I think the driving force for wanting people to come back into the office is to justify all the office space.
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I'm a manager (director level) and I don't want to be in the office. I've loved working almost entirely from home this last year.
You can have all the personal access and contact you want as a remote manager. Zoom is great for 1 on 1s and group meetings. It's not ideal but it can be made to work.
Before Covid, several people I managed were in separate states and I only saw them in person once or twice a year. It worked fine.
I think a big factor is the type of work being done. I do consulting work, and being in office is very rare, remote work is the norm since we live all over the globe. However, we often work on site at clients its as well, as some things are really al lot easier when you are face to face and can walk around to talk to people.
When you manage based on performance metrics you don't have to babysit your staff. You help them set clear measureable goals and you track their progress. This is very common in the tech industry (to manage people at remote sites).
Provide you have the right metrics. I worked for a consulting firm where consultants were measured on billable hours, managers on project margin, and partners on revenue growth. Pretty
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Provide you have the right metrics.
If you can even have metrics.
With COVID I spent some time thinking about how my value to my organization could be measured. Everything that my org did for management of remote workers was ham-fisted, counter-productive, and absolutely stupid. But the more I thought about measuring my productivity and value, the more I sympathized with them a little.
I don't make a $5 widget on an assembly line, 50 per hour. If I did you could calculate what value I bring to the company. But I sometimes lobby for fairly invis
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Before shut down we were already consolidating office space and trying to get rid of excess costs for leasing and other real estate. To the point that we were crammed into one building while waiting for someone to sub lease our second building. Was hard to justify the space when there are 20+ sites around the world.
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I used to be a manager, and none of that stereotyping matches me. I know there's immense and visceral hatred of all managers on slashdot, but at least try to keep to actual evidence.
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All managers want to be in the office.
I'm a manager. At Google, as it happens. Not only don't I want to be in the office, I've been full-time remote for nearly 8 years, including all of the time I've been a manager. As for my reports... I couldn't care less where they work. Whatever works for them, makes them happy and productive, is fine with me.
Google is asking everyone if they'd like to go remote, or merely relocate to an office in a different region. I've been surprised to find that no one on my team wants to do either, at least not in
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All managers want to be in the office.
No. I am a manager, my team is more productive working remotely, I have no desire to force my team to waste their time going to office any day of the week.
Many companies have geographically diverse team, especially the higher up you go, if you cannot manage workers you cannot meet in the office, you are not competent enough to work as a manager.
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Ok, then as a comrpomise, mingle in the offices and pat each other's shoulders and let us continue to do meaningful work while we're at home, which also makes your quarter reports look good.
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I've just quit because I don't want to be back in the office. New company owner is happy with work at home and in fact most of the staff work remotely, often many hours commute from the office.
Some bosses are a bit more forward thinking it seems.
Re:I'm sure this will come as no surprise to anyon (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people want to be back at the office. Some who genuinely feel they work better around other people, and lots whose job is to bother other people.
That last category includes managers, but also the ones who rise through playing politics or taking credit for other people's work, the "corporate life" planners, etc.
Most jobs are bullshit. A good portion of those rely on disguising themselves in the herd.
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Lots of people want to be back at the office.
At a company I used to work for, the most stated wisdom was that wives didn't want their husbands hanging around the house. Mostly in the context of early retirement. But I can see some of the same logic here. Wives tell their husbands what to think and so they adopt that as their own idea.
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But it's only the mid-level managers that want people back in. Without people to micro-manage, their jobs are at risk, and we can't have that...
Hey, I'm a middle manager and I need staff to bully and micromanage to justify my salary, you insensitive clod.
Look at it from an employee's benefit. It's hard to hook up on a Zoom call and they had to pay for their own beer and pizza on Fridays, being in office solves those problems. they should be grateful I let them in the door.
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Did you even read the summery? It states that the vast majority of employees wanted "collaboration[,] social connections [and] physical proximity"
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I am favoring a mixed model - half-and-half, where we can still have this conversations and reduce traffic, etc.
BTW, those extrovert/boss types - they are working on ways to "reach out" during the WFH times - I see a
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But it's only the mid-level managers that want people back in. Without people to micro-manage, their jobs are at risk, and we can't have that...
With slack, zoom, email, phones, SMS, etc., why can't managers micro-manage remotely, sort of like what they've been doing over the past year?
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It's been my experience that MM requires an immediate action, whereas with electronic methods, I can respond on my time frame, not the MMer. By being at (electronic) arm's length, it puts me back in control on when and how I wish to deal with the MMer.
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Yep. See it, ignore it, get shit done, get back to it too late for the MMer to feel any sort of sanctification.
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No, not true. You're stereotyping managers without providing evidence. Some managers may be like that but it's not a universal truth. I definitely see immprovements in real-estate costs to have fewer people in the office, and upper management most definitely sees this.
Thge summary itself makes an assumption that there were "productivity gains" but provides no evidence for that. There is no linked article either, (the link goes back to the same summary, it's borken). It's feeling like an editorial rather
To be fair.. (Score:5, Interesting)
They didn't necessarily say that they saw more productivity gains, but that people self-reported that they *felt* more productive. Note that this would be a combination of people legitimately feeling less distracted and also people knowing the 'correct' answer to secure the best chance to continue work from home.
Also, 'productive' may not connect to business results in a straightforward way. If I'm chugging along in my corner of the world that is ostensibly something for work, but not really connected to business results, but oblivious a emerging situation that will impact business that I may work with. I've worked for several distributed teams and there is a huge tendency toward re-inventing each others wheels, which might not have happened with proximity.
Of course, without the survey responses, I'm sure they already had their minds made up. In which case issuing the survey at all is just annoying, since it gives the appearance of them caring about feedback, when really the don't. This is more insulting than just not even asking.
I think occasional 'in-the-office' with majority 'work-from-home' is the best balance, but that 'in-the-office' has to be somewhat coordinated (it would be ridiculous to go in for collaboration, but be the only one to happen to choose that day). I know companies would want to cut back on office space, so they may need to institute some schedule based on related teams coming in and other teams being 'home-based' during that time. My work is however screwing that up by making work-from-office first come, first served for 30% of the total workforce, rather than aiming for any coordination, which is the worst of both worlds.
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After doing some digging, and who was tracking badge swipes, I found out that it was real estate trying to justify their existence.
Based on my experience, that was probably real estate trying to justify cutting back expense and you having to be at the badge reader is middle-management forcing you to be part of data to prove to real estate that they need all the real estate the company has, if not more. Real estate staff often get bonuses for eliminating cost. Wouldn't be good to be at zero, but if they can, for example, either get rid of a leased building or start leasing out a building to another company, that's gold for them.
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Individual productivity in a huge organisation like Google is extremely hard to measure in any case. The bottom line is easy to see, but the contribution directly attributable to the work of any one individual is virtually impossible to know.
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It also doesn't matter. Just because every individual member of a team is more efficient doesn't mean the group as a whole is. Serialization issues, communication issues, etc can eat up every bit of that gained productivity and more.
Not to mention the whole "feel more productive" vs "be more productive". And what is productivity? Most programmers find meetings to be unproductive time. But they have some necessary uses. "Feeling more productive" could just mean you're spending more time on what you thi
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I think both sides of the debate are lacking quality data and are largely going off of their subjective feelings.
People that want to work from home see 'data' supporting that remote work is better, people that want to work from office or want *other* people to wonk in the office see 'data' supporting a loss of productivity from remote work. At the best of times 'productivity' and its connection to business results are tricky to figure out, but in a massive economic event like the pandemic it becomes nearly
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Individual productivity in a huge organisation like Google is extremely hard to measure in any case. The bottom line is easy to see, but the contribution directly attributable to the work of any one individual is virtually impossible to know.
For engineers at Google, work artifacts are a pretty effective proxy. Number of changes, lines of code, number of design docs, etc. It wouldn't be effective to measure those things for performance ratings or the like, because when when a measure becomes a goal it ceases to be a useful measure; people start gaming it. But specifically because those things are not measured for rating employee performance, they provide a reasonable measure of productivity.
What Google found was that measured productivity clo
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Eh, you can measure 'amount of stuff done', but there's a giant question of the value of the 'stuff done'.
I know people when left alone will feel very productive and by 'objective' measures seem productive. It's hard not to feel productive when you see lots of code or a prolific commit log or pages of design docs and know it came from your hands. Finally, you have the time to write the proper 10 page design doc you have been meaning to get to. Finally, you can spend a day trying to get some little thing tha
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Eh, you can measure 'amount of stuff done', but there's a giant question of the value of the 'stuff done'.
There's no evidence that size of changes or any other relevant metric changed, nor that the macro-level measurements (pace of releases, feature completion, bug creation and closure, etc.) weren't in line with the finer-grained observables. Also, we're talking about data aggregated over tens of thousands. The details wash out.
More fundamentally, I have a great deal of confidence in the data scientists employed by Google. They're very good, and not likely to miss obvious confounders.
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Data scientists are only as good as the circumstances of the data permit.
In a creative endeavor like software development, ultimately that has to be correlated with revenue (ad revenue owing to more engagement, or sales of their paid offerings). If the wider circumstance is mostly uneventful, then you could see if the creative artifacts correlate to income. However, in this case, some huge qualitative things changed that confounded correlations (huge socio-economic changes due to pandemic). So systemic qua
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Any time I see research backing up going back into the office or working from home, I am disappointing at home poor the data gathering was. I would rather companies continue to encourage more remote work, but don't use employees' opinions of their productivity level. Like you said, employees who want to work from home are likely to answer based on their preference, and visa-versa for those who want to be back in the office.
We likely won't have great data on this until it plays out over the economy. It will
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OTOH, the survey may be phrased so that the question comes down to "Do you prefer a return to working in the office or will you be seeking other employment this week?".
Google was once an innovator (Score:5, Interesting)
Nowadays it seems they are moving options around in their old products and calling them updates. And here we have them acting like some old white collar company with "butts in seats" so middle management has a job and executives can quietly collect their bonuses from their beach front property in some foreign country.
Microsoft seems more progressive.
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That's the whole thing with Agile in web based products. Look productive by having continuous rollout of new "features" that do nothing useful (new icons, move the controls around, avoid doing the hard stuff like fixing bugs or making the product useful).
That's nothing new though, there have always been people who have learned how to look like an amazingly productive person while not contributing to revenue. If the company counts lines of code then spew out tons of code (or have Rational Rose do it for yo
Once Again: Dunning Kruger wrt Communication (Score:4, Insightful)
software engineers reported something in a recent survey that surprised higher-ups: they felt as productive working from home
People who can't see the forest for the trees. More personal production doesn't mean shit if it doesn't fit in with what other people are doing. And that takes good communication. It makes sense developers who grew up only interacting with phones don't know how to deal with real people. It just doesn't work well in the real world.
Re:Once Again: Dunning Kruger wrt Communication (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yup, I rewrote all the foundation classes, migrated to java 11, fixed all the typos in the design docs, responsed to 10,000 emails in a timely manner. Boy, I must be the biggest revenue earner in the company!
delta variant and others are LOLing at you (Score:4, Insightful)
well, things are pretty ok in the bay area RIGHT NOW.
right now.
some areas of the country, not so good. and things are not going to get better, given that we have so many antivaxers out there.
come fall time, we may be back to masks again. many in the bay area already have 'returned' to mask usage even though its not at all mandated for most places.
we all know companies want butts-in-seats. they still think like old school companies, even the newish ones. (funny, they don't LOOK newish. ah, forget it.)
but I'm trying to hold off on job changes until I find out what the stance is, when the virus comes back and we end up finding out that being vaxx'd is actually still not enough to fight the variants that are soon to be dominant. the cases in the hospital are currently 99% unvax'd people, but that may not hold true as we get into fall and winter.
it sure looks like we'll need that 3rd booster and maybe more after that as time goes on.
all I can say is: I dont want to work for someone who is going to INSIST I be back at work, based on some time table that someone came up with. we are not even halfway thru this virus - we have not got to herd imm level and maybe never will (thanks, trumpians, both american AND non; its world wide, for some reason, the anti-vax movement).
companies are just going to have to be dynamic about this and flex with the situation. you cant turn a switch and declare it over. its far far from over.
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some areas of the country, not so good. and things are not going to get better, given that we have so many antivaxers out there.
Current hot spots are strongly correlated with regions of low vaccination rates. The bay area has a high vaccination rate, so there's some reason to believe that it will continue to do well. Yes, a third booster may be needed, but the regions with high vaccination rates will be the same regions that take the booster.
My prediction is that by a year from now COVID is going to have the reputation of being a red state disease. Unfortunately, I live in a red state.
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all I can say is: I dont want to work for someone who is going to INSIST I be back at work, based on some time table that someone came up with.
FWIW, Google employees who are returning to the office (in the bay area, at least) are required either to provide proof of vaccination or wear a mask all the time they're in a Google building or are near other employees. Stickers are affixed to the badges of employees who've provided proof of vaccination, and if you see someone without no sticker and no mask you're supposed to ask them to put on a mask. If they refuse, you're supposed to call security and let them deal with the situation, almost certainly w
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GooglePlex (Score:3)
Diverging interests... (Score:3)
Some people want to work to live. Some people want to live to work.
Some of these big companies think that it is too dangerous to give people these freedoms. Look what 18 months of working at home has already done to folks, they think they own their own lives.
--
Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another. - Toni Morrison
Shocked that this isn't already a thing (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done programming work for over 20 years, at big outfits (think GE big) to small (<100). I speant most of my career working on medical systems or as a defense contractor, i.e. industries that are very sensitive about protecting proprietary data. At all of them no one blinked an eye at someone being mostly or even full remote, even back when remote meant 56.6kbps modem or an ISDN line. I'm surprised these so-called industry leaders are so squirrelly about letting people WFH, especially since they are already global companies and are used to collaborating remotely anyway.
it's about Control (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all about control. Google can't monitor their employees and control what they say and do during work hours.
Internal research at the Alphabet unit also showed that employees want more "collaboration and social connections" at work, according to Brian Welle, a human resources vice president.
I'm not seeing any bias in that statement. What about everyone else?
Wells declined to provide exact figures but said "more than 75%" of surveyed employees answered this way. Most staff also specifically craved physical proximity when working on new projects. "There's something about innovative work -- when you need that spark," Welle said in an interview. "Our employees feel like those moments happen better when they're together."
Why do I think the survey was done in the HR offices during the height of the pandemic?
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All in the phrasing (Score:2)
If you survey people who have largely been on lockdown for 18 months it's no surprise they crave social interaction. *Of course* a survey will say that but the usefulness of that data depends on how you ASK it.
Companies are writing these surveys to try and collect touchy-feely data but doing a generally shit-poor job of it. They're mostly reaching their own pre-determined conclusions because senior management (and to a lesser but still pervasive degree middle management) want people back in the office.
Wha
Also ... from a practical standpoint (Score:3)
It's really hard to justify their expensive eye-candy offices and campuses if they're empty...
The don't be evil has left the building (Score:2)
The guy who coined the don't be evil motto literally quit ages ago and Google has been going to shit ever since. Ground zero for self-decribed smart people who can't be bothered with little things like customer feedback or community contributions to fix Android deficiencies that have been festering on for years. The home of hypocritical. Collaboration software is for everybody else to get sucked into Google's monopoly ecosystem, it isn't for Google employees. The job of Google employees is to glorify the bo
middle management insecurity (Score:2)
This is mostly about middle management worrying about their own jobs. To be seen to be worth their pay, they need to be seen managing - which is hard when the people supposedly being managed are all working from home. Some, no doubt, do not trust their employees to actually be working (though that problem would show up in results, or lack thereof) but that too would generally be a management failure for hiring untrustworthy people.
As to the oft-cited creativity/productivity boom that obviously happens when
Why do they care? The most important thing is that (Score:2)