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Google Businesses

Google Offers On-Campus Hotel 'Special' To Help Lure Workers Back To the Office (cnbc.com) 151

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Google is hoping to lure workers back to the office with a new on-site hotel special, but some workers aren't convinced it's a good deal. From a report: The company said full-time employees can book a room at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View for $99 a night in what it's deeming a "Summer Special," according to materials viewed by CNBC. The description states that the special will run through Sept. 30 in hopes it'll "make it easier for Googlers to transition to the hybrid workplace." Since the promotion is for unapproved business travel, the company will not reimburse their stays, but will require employees to use their personal credit cards, the special's description states.

"Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts." The ad goes on to say that after the work day ends, "you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities." The Google-owned hotel is situated on a newer campus in Mountain View, California, that it opened last year. The 42-acre campus is adjacent to NASA's Ames Research Center and has capacity to house 4,000 employees working on its ads products, the company said upon its opening.
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Google Offers On-Campus Hotel 'Special' To Help Lure Workers Back To the Office More

Google Offers On-Campus Hotel 'Special' To Help Lure Workers Back To the Office

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  • going back to the company store days! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Joe_Dragon ( 2206452 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:55AM (#63740458)

    going back to the company store days!

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Train0987 ( 1059246 )

      Ummm, no. Spending your company-issued scrip at the company store was required in "the company store days.". This seems to be optional. Not quite the same.

      Google employees are not slaves. It's embarrassing seeing so many act like they are. They're free to work for whoever they choose that will hire them.

      • Re:going back to the company store days! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Riceballsan ( 816702 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @12:48PM (#63740608)

        I think the gist is, as time goes on, the world is turning into a company town. The fear is these big companies start enabling the same shoddy practices at the same time. The barrier to entry is insurmountable for a new contender, and the old contenders have all been starved out, and no one without 50 billion to gamble on a 1 in 100 shot has a chance of making a new big tech company, top it off if you do go to a smaller tech company, in the chance that it doesn't implode, it's probably going to get bought out by one of the giants

        It's roughly the same problem that say people who don't want to buy from amazon and walmart have. You don't want to buy your toys from amazon that's fine, just go to toys r us... and buy your electronics from circuit city and your books from barns and nobel and... well you get the idea. Anyway even as I'm sure you are going to say the other guys are imploding from their own decisions or people making choices. But they weren't MY choices, and no matter how you look at it our choices are disapearing faster and faster. More and more businesses are consolodating and the barrier to entry is constantly getting larger.

        • We have been here many times before, and in many places. Henry Ford was well known for similar [umich.edu], but there were some serious catches [thehenryford.org]. There are many more examples from history- I guess it goes from plantations to the tech industry today.

        • The company town will be far more insidious than the old one. Instead of forcing you to stay because you owe your soul to the company store, they will just make it really, really, REALLY inconvenient to leave. I mean, you can of course quit, but you lose your house and you might have a really hard time meeting up with your friends inside the company because, well, it's a gated community (for your security) and non-corporate people are not allowed in here, which is also why you don't really have a lot of fri

          • That's pretty much what many Japanese companies did for a few decades; they would encourage marriage between employees and provide housing so your entire life was devoted to them. Even your own wife (who stopped working) would push you to stay loyal to the company. Obviously that model fell apart once Japanese companies started to fire people...

      • Re:going back to the company store days! (Score:4, Funny)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @01:38PM (#63740770)

        Google employees are not slaves.

        Too bad. I heard somewhere that they could learn some desirable skills, like being a blacksmith. :-/s

      • There is a lot of resentment on both sides here: those who are jealous that Google isn't a "typical company" with all the associated bullshit; and those who are upset that it is becoming just that, and that it's best days as an employer are probably in the past.

    • So what's the digital equivalent to 16 tons of number 9 coal?

      • TPS Reports, and a bunch of unreasonable software development sprint tasks that no human could reasonably complete in 2 weeks.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • What's the benefit? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gruntbeetle ( 6802064 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:59AM (#63740470)
    > "Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning and instead, you could have an extra hour
    > of sleep and less friction," the description reads. "Next, you could walk out of your room and
    > quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts."

    I don't understand the benefit of this. I can do this currently when working at home. I don't have to spend $99 on top.
    • lol, maybe they're hoping to lure in people who already pay more than $3000/mo in rent with a hotel room that costs a bit less.

    • Re:What's the benefit? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @01:04PM (#63740646)

      I don't understand the benefit of this. I can do this currently when working at home. I don't have to spend $99 on top.

      Yeah, that's the weird thing - and what struck me right away as I read the summary. Why are they charging anything? If it were free, some people might consider it an incentive.

      • It would be a taxable benefit, and I'm sure they'd rather hand out benefits which don't increase their tax bill.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by uncqual ( 836337 )

          A taxable benefit increases the employee's, not the employer's, tax bill.

          There is a minor exception to this in that the company would be responsible for their half of the payroll tax on that benefit -- but any employee at Google who would likely qualify for this benefit is already above the Social Security cap so Google would only be responsible for the 1.45% Medicare tax. I.e., if they gave the room away to the employee and it was worth $99, the cost to Google in payroll taxes would be less than $1.50 - fa

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by uncqual ( 836337 )

        Would those who instead bought or rented a home nearby get a $99/day raise? If not, this could result in a morale problem with the "in office" employees who are paying big bucks out of their own pockets to live nearby because they find "in person" work is more productive for teams.

        It likely wouldn't be a problem for a few days a year (just as paying to put a remote employee up in a hotel and pay for their travel expenses for a couple trips a year to the "mothership" isn't likely to cause a morale problem) b

    • I don't understand the benefit of this. I can do this currently when working at home. I don't have to spend $99 on top.

      I see a benefit to Google: about $3, 000 per month paid by each employee to the Google-owned and no-doubt under-booked silicon valley hotel.

    • It looks like Google has come to be run by managers who possess the classic disconnect when it comes to an engineer's reward calculus. Someone needs to read Daniel H. Pink's "Drive". These concepts go back to the 1950's why must they be rediscovered every decade?

  • Or - hear me out... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WeighedAndMeasured ( 9308045 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:59AM (#63740474)
    ...you could enjoy all of those things by simply working from home. For free, btw.

    • Is it really "free", though? Silicon Valley rents are insane, mortgages even more so.

      Unless you took the opportunity that the COVID lockdown provided to move to the boonies, you might actually be better off living at Hotel Google.

  • dystopian nightmare (Score:4, Insightful)

    by darkain ( 749283 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @11:59AM (#63740476) Homepage

    dystopian nightmare

    is there really anything else that needs to be said here?

  • Working from home is free (Score:4, Interesting)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @12:04PM (#63740492)
    Working from work is 99$, that is a pretty strong disincentive.

  • What the..? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sysadminafterdark ( 10330935 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @12:09PM (#63740504)
    I apologize in advance for my strong opinion but what. the. hell. Who on earth thought this was a good idea? Why would an employee want to spend $99 dollars to stay at a hotel to "ease transition"? There's a snowball's chance in hell I'm going to pay my employer ANYTHING. It seems in the 90's everyone was bright eyed and bushy tailed on what computers and the internet could do for humanity and what that meant for an individual's work and home life. Well, we're here and it seems those ideas have come and gone. God damn internet company doesn't want people to work from the internet...can you believe it?
    • I recall that the startups like Google back in the early 90s would spend astronomical sums of money they didn't even earn (they were unprofitable for many years) to make the offices like upscale dorm housing for the employees to literally live there and work without needing a home or apartment. Now that they're making billion$ upon billion$ in profit they want to charge the employees for stuff they gave away in the early days.

    • Geez, Google is simply offering an employee discount on a hotel room and you're all acting like they're putting you in chains.

      • Geez, Google is simply offering an employee discount on a hotel room

        From the summary:

        at an on-campus hotel in Mountain View for $99 a night

        If they were booking a nearby Marriot, you might have a point...but they're not.

        Google is charging Google employees to stay in a hotel room that Google owns, which exists on Google property, as a means of "easing a transition" that is demonstrably unnecessary.

        The issue isn't the discount, it's the principle.

    • Imagine you're a Google employee. During the pandemic when you started working from home, you bought a house in a way more affordable area, perhaps even out-of-state. Now you're being required or pressured to come to the office every once in a while. This would be the most convenient thing in the world, fly/drive in and stay at the hotel for 4 nights and then drive back home for the weekend. As the article says, they're reducing the "friction" of employees coming back to the office if they've already pl

      • Now long-term this seems like a crummy solution. You're essentially treating your time going to the office as a business trip, when you'll be away from friends and family. But I've known people who "commuted" from a different city for years at a time.

        Well, if you can get classified as a 1099 contractor rather than a W2 employee....you could write off all this expense on taxes.

      • Imagine you're a Google employee. During the pandemic when you started working from home, you bought a house in a way more affordable area, perhaps even out-of-state. Now you're being required or pressured to come to the office every once in a while.

        Also: If they had a house in Silicon Valley and sold it they're hosed for buying back in. Prices have continued to climb, supplies to dwindle, and they may have paid substantial taxes on the sale of the old place. They spent a bunch of that money on the new p

      • Imagine me saying "LOL, no. I can do my work from here just as fine".

        insert signature here

  • Stop insisting employees come back! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @12:11PM (#63740512) Homepage
    Why should any employee, who doesn't have to be on site, actually show up? The performance and efficiency improvements of working at home make the case of returning to an office idiotic. You might see an easy 50% productively increase, maybe 100% or 200% in some cases.

    When companies force employees back to the office, they're stating several realities:

    1. Your time has no value.
    2. Your productivity is worthless.
    3. We're unwilling to adjust and evolve.
    4. You're not worth any value to us.

    Unless you have an excellent reason for demanding a return, such as, your productive can be shown to be practical, or you're known to be goofing off, doing other work, missing meeting, and so on, then you have no case.

    The other reality is, are you going to duplicate or improve our home offices at the office? Are you going to give me a 10k budget to design and outfit my private and personnel office? No, then why should I come back?

    • The other reality is, are you going to duplicate or improve our home offices at the office? Are you going to give me a 10k budget to design and outfit my private and personnel office? No, then why should I come back?

      While I sympathize with where you're going with this....your questions are a bit rhetorical in nature.

      The answers are:

      1. No.

      2. If you want a job you will, if not, you quit / are fired.

      Pretty simple really.

      Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of work from home, but it is a business rela

      • Re:Stop insisting employees come back! (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Murdoch5 ( 1563847 ) on Friday August 04, 2023 @01:20PM (#63740720) Homepage
        I understand all of that, but my point is there's almost no good argument. I can understand having someone in IT available at the office, or the front desk, but how many people really need to be there?

        If you need your developers in the office, you either don't understand their job, or you're on a power trip. If you require HR in the office, then you don't understand the job, or you're on a power trip. How many roles can I repeat that for? I understand that security guards need to be on sight, and IT to some level should be on sight, but outside of that, you require office support, and that's it.

        Come back to the office? Why, I save ~10 hours a week in commute time, and I save ~$70 in gas, so I'll put that towards my work environment. Instead of you having to buy chairs, desks, pens, pencils, paper, etc... let me cover that, and you let me work at home.

        I have known people to goof off and get nothing done, but those are rare occurrences, and sure those people should be in an office, but most people, no.

        • I'm in security. It's near impossible to actually measure productivity in this field. I have no choice but to trust my people. Whether they are in office or at home, because if they really wanted to goof off, they easily can. Whether in office or at home.

          If you don't trust your employee, fire them. Just plain and simple. If you have reason to assume they're goofing off, fire them. Because a "professional" goof will be able to do so whether he's in the office or at home. If you think you have more "control"

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by sfcat ( 872532 )

        If you want a job you will, if not, you quit / are fired.

        Then why doesn't Google do this? Maybe because they know it would backfire spectacularly. Cry wolf and lose your voice. Its like the Russians who have threatened to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine 57 times so far during this war. Nobody even listens anymore, it doesn't even make the news. That's the thing about bluffing, sometimes, you actually have to be holding the winning cards.

        • In the eternal words of my drill sergeant, never draw a gun if you're not also absolutely willing to use it. If you draw a gun and you are not willing to use it, you're putting yourself in mortal danger because the other party will act in the assumption that you will use it and will use any force necessary to ensure you don't.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by r0nc0 ( 566295 )
        Yeah, you are right - they can just fire everyone. That's basically what they did at Apple - come in 3 days/week, no exceptions. No badge swipe that day then you need a valid reason/excuse. Anyone that couldn't do that was let go - I had to let go several people. It made me more angry than I can possibly convey - those were damn good engineers and you can't find those just anywhere. One of the previous comments touched on the unwillingness to evolve and I agree with that. I also somewhat agree that when peo

        • Of course they were damn good engineers. The damn good engineers don't have to put up with that kind of bullshit, they already found something else before that order was officially handed to them. What you're now likely stuck with is the duds that have to grin and bear it and accept the terms because they could not find something else.

      • Works for me.

        I'm old. Which entails that I have quite a bit of money stashed simply by virtue of, well, being old and having worked a long time. Also, I have a skill set that is in incredibly high demand an in equally incredibly short supply.

        You will cater to my whim. If you don't, the next company does. I know how this game works and I know how to play it. Here's my demands, take it or leave it.

        I'm done playing that corporate game. I simply and plainly don't want to anymore.

      • Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge proponent of work from home, but it is a business relationship between employee/employer and either party are free to disagree and part company.

        Sure, but it goes both ways. If you want employees, then you'll have to find a way to make them happy.

        One way or another, if Google truly thinks that employees are more valuable when they come into the office, then they will have to pay for that extra value. Either explicitly, with perks or bonuses for those who come in, or silently, in general salary.

  • For $99, I'd want a lot more than a bed and breakfast:

    1) A couple of kids for my emotional health
    2) A wife to tuck me in (nudge-nudge-wink-wink)
    3) A well-stocked fridge and pantry, and midnight snacks too!
    4) A well stocked bar (at least 1 single-malt scotch please)
    5) All my favorite streaming services on a big screen TV. With surround-sound, and a Roku stick, and an XBox, and a PS5.
    6) A dog with big floppy ears
    7) I won't ask for an en-suite BBQ, but it sure would sweeten the pot.

    I'm sure I missed a few, but man, they missed a lot!

  • Roughly 3000 a month to live on site and have all utilities taken care of. Sure you are living in a hotel but people right out of college would see a ton of value in it.
    • Actually when you put it in those terms of $3k/month it probably is cheaper than the rent many people pay in the area. I wonder what sort of limitations they would have on length of stay? The up side is that if you leave the company and need to relocate just pack up and go. The downside is if you leave the company and want to stay in the area you still have to go.
      • It's crap. You can get an apartment in the area for $3k a month without difficulty. Then you have a whole apartment (not just a hotel room), with a full kitchen and most likely a washer and drying in your room. Also it would have closets and can hold your stuff, like a normal living space.
        • Yeah but you have to pay utilities, you have to lock in for a year, you have to furnish it. A hotel does all those things for you. Again, if you are moving to CA to work at Google, it is not a bad deal to start at this hotel while you figure out your next steps.
          • Utilities aren't that much.

            • The hotel room also gets cleaned daily for you. And dealing with a fault it just going to the front desk, nt arguing with the landlord.

              I wouldn't do it, but I can see it would have value to some. You pay rent-ish prices and just everything is taken care of automatically.

  • These buffoons just do not get it. I hope they will feel to stick their on-campus hotel special up there where the sun never shines.
  • Not even with hookers and coke and foosball. Well, maybe sushi, if it was good fresh and free. Do they offer turn down service and wake-up call. No, I didn't RTFA. I also want a Sergey Brin cameo shaped mint on my pillow each evening. That sushi should be sent to my room by robot. And a south window. It does have windows?

  • Just imagine spending most of your earnings on a $99 a night place to sleep on campus, essentially giving your salary back to the company. One step closer to conscripted labor.

  • Why does google, a company that is all "online", need people in physical offices?

    I am a technologist working in a manufacturing research organisation. I have to visit customers sites to understand their manufacturing challenges, but the rest of the time, apart from a few rare "we need to whiteboard this together" scenarios, I work from home. I basically work from home all the time. How could an online company need on-site staff? Is it just so they can physically abuse them to work harder? (Yes, I've been th

  • What a joke !

    If anything, Google is SELLING hotel space to its OWN employees !!

    Looks like a major fail in incentivization there.

  • ... I knew a few people studying law, looking for a prestigious firm to join. The word was: If the firm advertised the availability of on-site dining, locker rooms, showers and company apartments, run like hell. They were expecting you to put in long hours. And this way, they knew right where you'd be.

  • Let me get this straight...Google is asking people to pay $99/nt to stay in a hotel to avoid traffic jams from driving into the office?

    How about I just keep working from home, avoid the traffic and you can keep your $99/nt hotel?

    So we have gone from free pizza and massages to ME paying for a hotel so that YOU can see me sitting in a cubicle? How about YOU pay for the hotel and I'll think about it? Or better yet, I'll just take my talents elsewhere.

  • Google is hoping to lure workers back to the office....

    Okay, let's see what it has to offer for a hundred bucks a day.

    Just imagine no commute to the office in the morning....

    They already have that at home, but for free.

    ...instead, you could have an extra hour of sleep and less friction....

    They already have that at home, but for free.

    Next, you could walk out of your room and quickly grab a delicious breakfast or get a workout in before work starts.

    They already have that at home, but for free.

    ...you could enjoy a quiet evening on top of the rooftop deck or take in one of the fun local activities.

    They don't have that while working from home, but I'm sure they have equally appealing (to those for whom stuff like it is appealing), or better, alternatives at home, but for free.

    My verdict: Google's fucking insane if they think people want to spend $100 a day to get nothing they're not already getting at hom

  • Google could read the room, let people work how they want to work and let them save 100 bucks by, you know, not going to a building for no reason?

    Seriously, all the tools are there for effective distributed software development. The days of the super expensive workstation and fast internet only at a office are long, long gone.

    Just write off the office space, sell it for mixed use and housing, save the gas and stress on the infrastructure already.

  • I wouldn't mind this to avoid long commutes like I did during my college days.

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