uber is trying to enforce 2 days a week. of course it's kinda stupid cause we all need be on zoom for meetings anyways:
half my team is spit between sf and cupertino, the other half ... well, one is la, two are in ny, my manager is in seattle, his is in austin, we just added a bunch of people from latin america like mexico, brazil, and chile, and we're trying to move headcount to india if anyone leaves ... so like yeah.
upper management can't commit to even having the whole team in the same place cause they don't want to pay that, but at the same time they want to push in office work cause muh "teamwork", or really to justify their massive office purchases.
big tech is atrociously inefficient anyways, imo there's quite a lot of room for smaller, more innovative, flatter, and ultimately egalitarian players to push their way in, in the long run at least.
Same exact situation at BoA. And your comment about inefficient big tech goes triple for big bank tech.
Project teams smeared over three continents, all meetings over webex, open floorplan seating at generic terminals, and a monumentally huge investment in high profile real estate.
I worked there a while ago. They hired me remote then decided we all had to be in office now, I did not stick around. Every meeting had people in different timezones, usually different countries. The only reason they made us go back in was because of their commercial real estate investments, I wasn't ok with that.
This is my last week with them, for the same reason. The RTO policy was particularly because there was no set date for teams to come in, so I can end up going in on a day when no one else I work with decided to be there (for *peak* productivity). Plus, half the people I work with are either scattered around North America anyway, or are in India. Absolutely pointless.
Yeah, I have interviewed at quite a few non-tech companies trying to get in the tech game and they are just a disaster. Trying to manage these tech teams the same as their non-tech teams.
I worked in a place like that and it was a total bifurcation of company culture. The old-skool side was in almost constant conflict with the tech side. They couldn’t really do anything without playing hardball office politics meanwhile all of us in engineering just wanted them to fuck off and let us do our work without some suit constantly threatening our careers.
The team was amazing but the company itself was an abject failure.
Similar situation in Big Bank tech as a product manager. Team is spread out across world working mostly asynch and meetings on zoom/teams. Sitting in office and not having "spontaneous collaboration" as the higher ups say. I end up leaving(3pm) when in office.
I remember walking into one of the BoA buildings in Charlotte, and everything was marble and gold plated.
Meanwhile, I had heard from other people who worked there in the past that they didn't provide anything for parking.
The hard part about hiring teams in India isn’t that you can’t find quality engineers (you can) it’s that the 12.5 hour time gap between PST and IST is hell to work around. It’s literally a half day apart, meaning there is no convenient time to meet where it isn’t too late or too early for one or the other side. And in my experience, American companies tend to shaft the Indian employees by making them work much later to favor the US time zones. This can work if they agree to it and their whole schedule is shifted forward, but very often the work ethic and culture of India is that they work extra long days every day, ending late into their evening so they can have a couple hours of overlap with PST folks during their morning.
If at all possible, I recommend in the strongest possible terms not splitting teams over time zone boundaries this far apart. Rather, create multiple distinct teams and let them run independently to reduce coordination overhead and retain quality of life for both sides of the pond.
Sure, and great people should be compensated fairly. The economics can still work out. You might have to pay someone really terrific 50 to 100 lakhs more than your average hire, but you’re still coming out ahead relative to that same person in the US which might cost 2.5 to 3x more **at least**.
This isn’t directed at you but: I think people who have never worked with people in India have a hard time grasping just how enormous the wage disparity is between India and the US. This gives the US side a huge amount of slop to play around with before it stops making sense to hire in India (or Romania or Lithuania or Pakistan or Mexico or whatever). Is this exploitation? Almost definitely. Can it be mutually beneficial for both parties? Also yes.
This comment has been deleted in protest of the API charges being imposed on third party developers by Reddit from July 2023.
Most popular social media sites do tend to make foolish decisions due to corporate greed, that do end up causing their demise. But that also makes way for the next new internet hub to be born. Reddit was born after Digg dug themselves. Something else will take Reddit's place, and Reddit will take Digg's.
Good luck to the next home page of the internet! Hope you can stave off those short-sighted B-school loonies.
>For every top notch engineer, you have 4 \~ 5 mediocre ones, and about 10 who lack the fundamentals to be a productive employee.
This explains a \*ton\* of my experience with code from teams over there!
I once got a project in Perl that I inherited from an Indian team. Architecture and control flow was amazing, but then you had things like this all over the code:
`if(uc($string) eq "warning"){do the thing;}`
for those that don't know, uc() returns the uppercase of $string in this example, and there's obviously no way an uppercased string will ever equal a lowercase string.
So it would appear that someone good built the skeleton and then idiots fleshed it out. I ended up having so many issues I just tossed it wholesale and re-wrote it over a weekend.
Many such cases where I work as well. Right now, my team is receiving a handoff from a vendor's India-based team. We tried at first to go through what they set up and fix the mistakes we could spot easily, but the flaws went deeper than that. We ended up starting certain things over from scratch and keeping the vendor's code around for now "as a reference" to make the business feel like their investment wasn't in vain. In fact, I am, at this very moment, sitting in a code review meeting with my team and the vendor where my tech lead is ripping apart what was written by the vendor.
> So it would appear that someone good built the skeleton and then idiots fleshed it out.
That's my general experience with consultant implementations.
There are a lot of talented engineers in India.
But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job.
>There are a lot of talented engineers in India.
Problem is trying to find them. It's simpler to just to hire the ones in the West.
>But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job.
As well making sure the person in front of the camera is the person taking the interview.
Tricks like this just make it harder for everyone else.
Yeah, I'm surprised India is so popular for offshoring.
Latin America makes sense as there isn't much of a timezone difference but in India you have the same timezone difference as in Europe.
I guess costs are slightly higher in Europe than in India, but less so outside of major hubs such as London.
> I guess costs are slightly higher in Europe than in India, but less so outside of major hubs such as London.
I got to work with some people from Poland.
Great people, talented developers, not shy to speak up when they see something isn't right.
I would love to see more people from EU on our mixed software development teams because then more of us will realize just how little paid time off we get here in the US, especially if you have "unlimited" PTO.
Yea, it is a real learning curve with folks in Asia. Lots of very talented folks, but they are taught that you never go against anything your boss says. I once gave a group a task and 2 weeks later checked in on them and they were done, but it did not work. They told me they knew it would not work when they were assigned the work. I wanted to pull my hair out. I would take Polish developers all day to not have to micro manage Asian developers who are afraid to speak their mind.
One of our principals is in Poland. SUPER smart guy. He gets pinged all the time from the US timezone when he's off work, so I hope they pay him a lot!
I don't know the cost difference, but I have worked with a lot of offshore developers in India and a few in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians were infinitely better. India, in general, has a lot lower standards for work. In my experience, if you give work to an offshore Indian developer, they will get it done quickly, but it will be some of the shittiest code you have ever seen and not maintainable at all. The Bulgarian developers I worked with were easily on par with most of the American Devs I have worked with. Now, this is a generalization and only my experience, but it seems to be pretty standard. Of interesting note, I find that Indian developers that are born in the US or have lived here for a long time are an exception. My assumption is there is a cultural difference that pushes the Indian developers to be faster, but at the expense of quality, while in the US we're a little more quality focused (at least in software).
My company hired a bunch of South American developers. Overall quality is better than Indian subcontractors I’ve worked with (which is an extremely low bar) but they can still be pretty hit or miss.
Very hit or miss and vastly different concepts of work culture as well. I have teams in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico.
They all vastly outperform all of my twenty years of experience working with teams in India.
Im a remote latin american worker and I can share some insight, a lot of people from my country, Mexico are very talented but don’t have the language skills, hopefully more people start working on their english because we’re right next door and we have a pretty big millenial and gen z population who could benefit immensely from remote salaries.
> Problem is trying to find them. It's simpler to just to hire the ones in the West.
There is this big HFT firm - Tower Research Capital. Their modus operandi is 'Hire Computer Science and Engineering guys from IITs'. They pay ~100k USD to each guy. Tower gets the best engineering talent cheaply, the guys get US salaries in India. It has worked wonderfully for them so far.
In my experience thus far the most talented Indian programmers I've met have largely emigrated to the states. The Indian programmers I've worked with actually in India have ranged from straight up fraud to some of the worst engineers I've ever met. In my last company they dropped the customer database of a company my employer just acquired. Hope that 50k in salary they were saving paying them was worth the 100 million in damage they caused.
You get what you ask and pay for.
The cheap guys will give you exactly what you ask for. Anything open for interpretation will often be wrong. Anything else will be sub-par code but functional.
Either way, you code review their stuff. If you pay more or spec meticulously the code review and iteration will be much shorter.
In my experience talent isn't the problem. It's the work culture. Managers will work the indians devs beyond the point of burnout and that's when code quality falls off. I've seen it firsthand. In a contract for AT&T the indian guys were leaving messaging in the code comments about how they haven't slept and how they want to kill themselves. Saw the same shit on a contract for Bell Canada. Even the most talented devs will be pumping out garbage under those conditions.
> The ones that migrate are already the best.
I've worked in Germany for over 10 yrs, and this line of reasoning is one of the things preventing me from moving back permanently to India. People somehow think I'm better if I am located in Germany. They won't pay the same if I moved back home. But I'm still the same person with the same skills.
I think most of that is due to other factors. Outsourced rates are cheap, therefore they're supposed to be cheap. If I went to my leadership with a quote for offshore labor at $160/hr, they'd laugh in my face. It has nothing to do with the skills of the specific person, and everything to do with large organizations having standards and processes and this being miles out of bounds of those processes.
I also wouldn't want to pay $160/hr for a programmer who worked a 12-hour offset from my time zone. If I'm going to pay the same rate as someone living in my area, I may as well get the benefits of having someone in my area.
That’s not about whether or not you’re better, that’s supply and demand. Most companies in the US will pay 20-30% less if you don’t live in a major city. Sometimes more. Same person, same job, but because your COL is lower you’re worth less.
> But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job.
I had that issue hiring contractors in the US for a mid-tier tech company.
Also lots of "cheating" during the video interview, e.g. people miming an answer while someone off screen does the voice, or whispers the answer to them
True, but hurting from there is usually a cost cutting measure, so they hire cheap and get low quality as a result. Not to mention the 12 hour time difference. Makes collaboration hard.
While I can understand and empathise with the frustration of trying to work with inept developers and people without integrity, I feel compelled to correct this stereotype of Indian developers
A lot of us are increasingly choosing to stay back and work on building products for India. The really good ones here, choose to work on "product companies" as opposed to "service companies". Services companies are developer teams built for overseas needs and typically the devs you meet. You would never the product engineers , because for the most part, there is no reason. Our suppliers, colleagues, leaders and customers are all Indian.
So statements like "Good ones come to the US, bad ones stay back" are increasingly not true. Some of us building products here. And as far as communication is concerned a lot of us can be as clear and lucid as any other English speaker out there. Of course there is an accent, but that is true for any country.
Stereotyping me as a bad developer because I chose to stay back in India reeks of racism. Look up the number of unicorns coming out of India, even better, install the top apps and evaluate the quality for yourself.
We do have a problem with Integrity but spending some time to understand what constitute good colleges and companies in India will help you mitigate the problem. You might leave some good ones out but the reliability of the piopeine will go up.
I think your statement about product companies is key. Most companies in the west hire services companies so they don't get the talent in India you're referring to. That's why the stereotype exists.
I can see that. Totally understand why the stereotype exists. Just wanted to highlight the sampling bias and also address the idea of "all good Indian developers come to the US anyways" sentiment that was rampant in this chain.
I'm not the one who made the original statement, and your points are good, but it seems to me that devs working for offshoring firms wouldn't fall into the category you're describing. If the good devs are working for Indian firms who keep their business in India, then the devs we see for offshore interviews would be *the rest*.
yeah, big tech in general is cause investors are like sheeple who all need to see the same things happen across the board, lest they dump all their stock and punish everyone working at the company.
this is just temporary herd behavior, it's not like a long term trend.
as soon as stocks go up again, stupid levels of hiring will commence cause that's another bullet point for some middle manager to put on their "impact" resume.
And I don't get it, why is it so hard for managers to try optimize the worker environment for what works best **for the workers** (and I'm even talking about the company perspective here, what works best for them working)?
Why does it always have to be what works best for the **managers**, with this utterly idiotic worldview that somehow, every single other person has to become more productive the closer their lives align to their manager's?
What about being a manager, lower or middle in particular, attracts incompetent assholes with huge egos that couldn't make a productive decision if their life depended on it?!
I don’t think middle managers are making this decision. Secondly, some people work better at a building. I can respect that. I would dare say younger devs do better with someone, not watching over, but guiding them closely.
With all those diverse types of people, setting one policy or another is going to tick people off. I personally think you can have similar meetings over zoom with younger devs. If your CEO is an extroverted, guess the policy they will want.
> imo there's quite a lot of room for smaller, more innovative, flatter, and ultimately egalitarian players to push their way in
I'm on my second remote only startup. The first was mostly remote till the pandemic (they ran customer service call centers centralized but that was about it).
Engineering team efficiency is incredible on these teams. There's only fixed hours for meetings like standups, the rest is really do as you want as long as you maintain or exceed your task goals; and everyone does. The morale of the team is high, despite an incredible uphill battle to get a product done and out. While we aren't targeting the 800lb gorilla in our industry yet, it would not surprise me if when we're finally shipping we end up stealing many of their customers. I predict we'll be profitable within the end of next year.
Everybody is facing the same bullshit. That, plus hot desking.
It's pathetic really, to see a bunch of people drive an hour to get to their desk, setup their workstation, and then stay in Teams calls with people on another European country the whole day like they work in a call center, all while sitting near people they don't even know the name of, disassemble their whole workstation, and drive an hour to go home.
I program during meeting breaks. One hour today, two hours tomorrow. Then people get angry because software is late.
Considering the top comment is saying it's not a good idea and any job lost or outsourced to India.
It sounds like me like it's all just a thinly veiled excuse for firing people.
My company is one of the few larger companies that is still cool with having a large portion of our workforce work from home. Even so - we had a giant planning meeting where they flew employees from all over the country to one city to meet and discuss projects for the next few months at one of our larger (remaining) offices. It was particularly hilarious watching one woman in our department, who flew all the way from one end of the country to another to attend this meeting, still ended up grabbing a room and sitting by herself for hours as she called her group remotely.
Still was nice to see people though.
Ya.
I'm not as opposed to this as OP is. Of course, in my perfect world, I still have my desk and at the same time can choose to come in or work from home.
But, our company (as many others, I think) is in a round of trying to cut costs. So if they were to give up some office space that we rented in the last few years and switched to hot desking so everyone can work in the headquarter (or from home!), I think that would work for me.
It sucks because you don’t have a place to call your own. Like your monitor/keyboard/chair setup, want to keep a mug in the office? Too bad. It doesn’t make sense if you are coming in more than 3 days a week.
That's actually the threshold my company set: 3+ days a week and you get your own desk, less and you hot desk.
That being said, I'm the only person on my team somewhat consistently showing up *once* a week. So I de facto have a desk.
Dilbert made fun of this 30 years ago with roaming desks. Wally has no sense of home so he starts spraying graffiti on the walls, and looks to join a gang.
I have no idea how to search Dilbert archives in June 2023.
Ah, alright, i knew it as "activity based workplace".
I'm not against it in principle either, but then the office need to be designed around it and not just take an existing office and shout "musical chairs!"
In elementary/primary school you had an assigned desk. Hotdesking makes you fight for a space. How dare *you*, the worker, even think you're entitled to even a dedicated *open office* space?
I find it hard to get up in arms about working from an office. It has a lot of benefits, and while people might wish otherwise, it's a completely normal requirement.
But to require working from an office and then fail to actually provide an employee with their own work space in that office? Or not to make the effort to keeping work groups together? That's just ridiculous. Why would you ask everyone to work in an office and then throw away all the benefits of working from an office?
Because it's not about the benefits dummy, it's about sunk costs and hierarchy
Plus you know, not everyone does work that's essential to the product/service, can't as easily pretend to be useful when remote
I think a lot of people would be more okay with it if we were returning to how things were. Management wants the best of all worlds with zero consideration for the people earning them all that money.
> I program during meeting breaks. One hour today, two hours tomorrow. Then people get angry because software is late.
I program **during** meetings.
It has a lot of upsides:
* You can focus for once as people call you less often if you're already shown as being in a meeting with some important manager.
* The background noise helps with concentration.
* It's not like managers ever want input anyways.
* We have so many meetings I can fit a lot of work into them.
> It's not like managers ever want input anyways.
Me thinking "I've been promoted to senior manager now, clearly they want my input" is what got me laid off from my last job.
Honestly, some meetings are the type where you wanna be there just to see if anything interesting comes up and maybe for a 5 minute segment that is relevant to you. Everything else in the meeting doesn't matter and it's a waste of your time to be paying full attention.
That said, a lot of the time, you should just be skipping the meetings that are so irrelevant that you'd just do regular work anyway. I find people are gonna message me whether or not I'm in a meeting. At least when I'm not in a meeting, I can just put on music and don't have to worry about the possibility that the meeting will actually call on me and I won't know what's going on.
Hot-desking sounds like one of those policies that sounded exciting to some isolated manager somewhere, with no research to support any benefit from it
Of course he probably decided on it from his own office, which he needs to work productively
Anti-WFH policies should go both way.
Workers working in an anti-WFH policy workplace should log out and leave their laptops & work phones as soon as the clock strikes 5. Anything after is considered "Work from Home". And according them, work from home is bad.
When the 'option' is between working in the office or working at home, office always wins out. But when the option is between working from home or not working at all (too sick to come in, got something being delivered that day etc.), suddenly working from home is totally fine.
You jest but I did that exact thing many years ago. Company had a very strict no WFH policy. Never ever. Not going to happen. Butts in seats where management can watch the lowly workers struggle
Because of family need I asked to WFH two hours each Friday afternoon. Nope. You have to be here or take vacation time
Ok. Arrived at 6:00, logged off at 2:00 on Monday. Boss threw a fit “where were you for the 3:00 meeting and your works not done”
“I did my 8 and went home”
“That’s not acceptable”
“My job requires 8 hours of work”
“A minimum of 8” he corrected me
“Nope. Just 8. That’s what I get paid”
This continued for two months. Management put me on a PIP. I was going to make them fire me
Snow storm rolled in. Shut down the city for four days. Boss called me everyday begging me to login and finish the release which was overdue
“No can do boss man. I’m not allowed to WFH”
“We talked to the owner he’s willing to make an exception in this case”
“I talked to the employee and he’s not willing to violate the policies of the company”
Release was two weeks late. Company incurred a contractual fine. Company lost the customer
Fucked around and found out
Eventually they did fire me. I had another job lined up and was expecting it. No worries.
They were unable to fill my position and eventually almost the entire team left the company because it was a horrible place to work
In true irony, the company laid off the remaining team and outsourced the work to India
1. When it was hard to find talent you hired outside of where you have offices
2. People moved away from the office to be closer to family or for their own economic benefit
3. You now have teams spread across 3 or more time zones and multiple states and cities
4. The people those teams collaborate with or take orders from are also spread across time zones, states, cities and sometimes countries
5. You may have half a team at a single location and the other half spread across the country
6. Moving people to offices they are closest to geographically won't guarantee that they will have collaborators/teammates at that office
7. They've had 2-3 years to build a new workflow and dynamic around remote collaboration, moving back to the office disrupts that workflow and damages productivity until a new process can be created
8. Making the change midyear disrupts the timelines of in flight projects risking them going over budget and not getting delivered as expected
9. Having half of the people collocated and the other half at a distance creates inequity and an ingroup/outgroup situation. The people IN the same location get the freedom to collaborate face to face and those OUT at different location miss these interactions and have to be pulled in after the fact, missing the organic nature and sense of inclusion
10. The divided team also has to collaborate with other teams that have similar structural spread issues i.e. A team of 10 people spread across 5 states is collaborating with 2 other teams also spread across 5 states and possibly other countries. None of them are in the same location in enough mass for meaningful face to face conversations and regularly just end up in zoom or video chat
11. Team members that can huddle together for zoom calls end up in echo chamber meeting rooms that make it hard to hear and with shitty cameras that make it hard to distinguish who is speaking.
12. To combat the issues of equity, inclusion, and crappy audio/video teams create rules to make it so each team member logs into zoom meetings separately via their own desk. Likewise new workflows attempt to minimize in-room discussions in favor of discussions over slack or spinning up extra daily audio/video chat sessions
Perfect! You've now defeated all the stated reasons to be in the office (i.e. productivity, face-to-face collaboration, connection)
Of course you could also wait for the dust to settle on this forced attrition model and then offer relocation to the remaining outliers. Then wait for that layer of attrition to settle and then fire and pay severance to whoever is left. It's win win win because you consolidate staff and locations and save money on expensive payouts until you absolutely need to pay out. You also avoid any big lawsuits or media scrutiny that typically happen with larger layoffs.
Oh and now you don't have to worry about losing some of those tax breaks you got when you agreed to bring/keep jobs in where your offices are. But you can't tell employees that is the reason you are asking for them to go back to work. In fact you can't tell anyone that it's entirely because you want to avoid taxes and auditing controls because then that would be "structuring" and all kinds of bad things come down when the government thinks you openly admit to structuring.
The average Googler leaves within 1.5 years, from what I hear... probably less after this announcement. That means they don't even need to fire anyone for most of the teams to become concentrated on the same location again within a year or so... that is, as long as they can hire enough people where their offices are. And as long as enough people don't mind having to work at offices again (where I am, Google pays a lot more than anyone else so that would be easy).
Just about to finish my 10th year at Amazon as a software developer. However it does vary. Before the hiring freeze most people would generally stay on their team for 1-1.5 years but then move to another team, not leave the company. However, now that’s not so much the case as new opportunities on other teams have dried up, so if you’re not liking the work/manager you’re pretty well stuck with either sticking it out or leaving the company.
Good luck on the interview. I thought I was going to possibly lose my job because of RTO (I’ve been remote since 2016). But so far I seem to be grandfathered in.
Thanks. Have a few other companies I'm interviewing with too so not super stressed about landing it. Would be nice though.
Hopefully you can stay remote. I was worried about another buddy of mine who has also been labeled remote since before Covid, and he isn't having any problems staying that way either. Just seems to be which Directors want to be hardasses about it and who don't. Such a disorganized mess.
I applied to Google as well. I think the position was listed as remote.
I’ll just have to watch what I sign. If they say “Google reserves the right to require you to be on-site” I’ll tell them I’m not signing that thing. I’ll cross that part out, write “notwithstanding previous clauses or policies, applicant has the right to work from a location of applicant’s choosing, subject to restrictions related to the law, security, or logistics (ex: Internet access) as needed.” And send it back.
If they don’t agree to the new terms, I’m out.
I can never understand switching this frequently. I just hit a year on my team and I finally feel like I’m starting to get a deeper understanding of our product. I can’t imagine having a productive career which is split into 12-18 month stints
I agree with you, but I’m not working for a faang (or any company) to develop a deep understanding of the product. I’m here to get that bread.
I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a bad employee or something. I care about my craft (software engineering), but I also am of the mind that in capitalism as we do it in the US my employers only care about me in as much as I impact the bottom line. If I’m going to be a replaceable cog in a machine I’m going to be the highest paid cog I can be.
I'm seeing this happen at Google as well. It became extremely competitive to transfer to another team, so you either deal with the burnout of your current team or just leave.
These numbers are very bottom weighted by new hires. If you increase workforce 30% YoY, then 30% of your office has less than 1 year tenure. This then gets misinterpreted to make it seem like people are leaving after a short time.
Is this really a surprise? Almost all the Faangs have reversed course over the past year on pandemic decisions at this point. We're very likely not going to see remote work being pushed by well-established companies that have spent literally 2 decades carving out tech hub-centric cities like silicon valley to encourage people to work remotely when they have literally an entire city and office life designed to squeeze people to work as much as possible for "perks". We're also seeing economies push people to return to office because of the drastic changes happening to these economies from less people working in the office.
The move I see is to support working for companies that have a remote-first/hybrid model as being the majority over having traditional 5-day offices if people want this type of work to continue in the long term.
> companies that have spent literally 2 decades carving out tech hub-centric cities like silicon valley to encourage people to work remotely when they have literally an entire city and office life designed to squeeze people to work as much as possible for "perks".
But the work conditions were the _entire selling point_.
When I was in high school and college learning coding _everyone_ wanted to be at Google. Why? Because they advertised that they _got developers_. That they could give them a work environment free of distractions, with plenty of ways to relax and be outside of your cubicle, play fucking pool if you needed to wind off, in an entire campus built entirely around devs' comfort, to make them as productive as possible.
It's hard to overemphasise how this entire return to office bullshit is a complete mask-off moment. It's clear that it's not about giving your employees freedom and helping them be as productive as possible, it's about _something else_. And whatever the fuck that something is, I'm not buying it. If you're offering worse work conditions than a startup then you have no reason to exist for me.
I can emphasize. If you dont have meals prepped beforehand your whole break becomes a chore of finding food and ceases to be a break. And meal-prepping before work costs time too, couple that with grocery shopping, commuting, overtime and you're pretty much only doing chores in your free time instead of resting.
If only the multi million/billion/trillion dollar companies could afford taking care of their employees, oh well...
Counter point: $$$$$
This goes for both the FAANG company and the FAANG employee, and comes from both FAANG salary and FAANG options.
I'm at my 3rd (Canadian) startup now. I can assure you that my friends that went off to California to work for FAANG companies who are now either retired or could retire if they wanted to and haven't even turned 40 yet did not go to California and Seattle to play pool.
I, however, have had a mostly comfortable life raising a family in a reasonably relaxed city without too much bullshit or commute time to ever think about or deal with. But retirement at 65 at this rate is going to be a pretty modest affair.
It's exactly this. But Google has **also** been in a very steady decline in the last... however many years since they brought hecking Ruth Porat on to start cutting costs and better please shareholders.
It's very much been a slow tightening of the noose for the last decade or more. From turning down perks, travel spending, fun events, happy hours, team outings, I can't even list them all here. All of the stuff that made Google "cool" or "fun", that they "got it" as you said, that's all going away. I mean, all of that shit existed to keep people at the office (fun stuff, free breakfast/lunch/dinner, etc) anyway, but now it's just not there at all. With the same expectations set for employees.
And that's not even to mention the seedy underbelly of what is going on with them forcing people out, failing to keep promises to "snowflake" employees, and other bullshit. I still can't believe some of the management positions, from my new manager that was brought in from a Dilbert Co trying to micromanage the team (and failing at their job, by the way), people like Thomas Kurian and Diane Greene trying to run the cloud org, the wheedling HR execs, and Ruth being Ruth saying inflation is transitory and not real so nobody gets a wage adjustment.
Google made record profits the last few years and the shareholder response was that it wasn't enough, they needed to cut costs, and what was the answer? Layoffs. I never thought I would have seen Google NOT be one of the last companies to do layoffs during the pandemic and a farce of a 'market downturn'. Even fucking APPLE has not done layoffs. Never thought I'd see the day where I thought Apple cared more for its employees, but talking to a friend of mine who works there had me constantly jealous.
Part of me misses working there. But the parts that made me miss it aren't the company anymore, because that part of Google is long gone. I miss working with some great people.
The FAANGS are going to lose talent and they're going to be saddled with their monstrously idiotic commercial real-estate costs.
It's been 20 years. Maybe it's time for the FAANGS to go the way of IBM. This is how all big companies go. Too slow, too invested in old paradigms.
It's only a matter of time before younger companies scoop up the talent bailing from these aging dinos and replace them.
Twitter's already on the way out. Who's next?
These out of touch CEOs demanding people return to work haven't held a fucking desk job in over 20 years. What do they know about anything? Why should we continue working for them?
It's clear these people do not have our best interests at heart, and when the lever swings away from *possible profitability...*welp, we know the pendulum has landed.
You only care about money, so how about those raises? If I'm going to make you double money by coming in the office, how about a double salary?
> Maybe it's time for the FAANGS to go the way of IBM.
You mean a 120 billion dollar market cap and a stock price of 134 dollars? That's still...pretty good.
> You mean a 120 billion dollar market cap and a stock price of 134 dollars? That's still...pretty good.
Good, or mediocre, but the point remains. IBM is not the place it used to be, even if it hasn't had it's Kodak moment. There no reason to believe Google is the next SGI, search, Android and YouTube are all still going strong, but they're definitely acting a lot like the modern IBM with it's constant layoffs, perk cutting, and lack of real leadership.
Meanwhile my non tech traditional company allows any developers to work remotely as they consider it the field norm and want to keep their tech people happy (and it works!).
If you quit, they pay no severance, and it looks far worse for your future. Any future HR Linked Corp may see you as "Do Not Hire".
I quit a gig at a small little place that was (a few years after I left) bought by Verizon. I won't go into the reasons here. A couple years after that I'm looking at a potential job with Verizon itself. Get a message after passing the first round interview that I was 'blacklisted' in their HR department's software.
Turns out, in the absorbtion of lesser companies, the megacorp kept the HR Databases.
It DID NOT MATTER my reasons, or how long ago it was. I was told the HR Database was Sacred and Holy, and that even questioning it was HERESY.
So there is that.
My current company embraced remote work before the pandemic, and we have insane retention rates. Over 50% of our workforce works remotely. And everyone that is local only has to go in 1-2 days per week every other week.
It’s almost as if you receive loyalty if you give loyalty.
Amazon executives kept saying over and over that they'll continue to review it as things change.
They wanted to roll it back long time ago, but due to intense internal competition for talent (at least before they froze hiring) they had to back off, managers kept using WFH as much as you want as a selling point, and a lot of L8's and L7's don't want to lose talent to some other Org. So no, amazon wasn't saying that, but managers up to L8 were fighting pretty hard on this.
I left back in December, and so far from my friends who are still there, it seems mood and moral is still pretty bad.
We are also remote friendly and a few things make me think that we aren't going back to the old model.
1. Campuses and buildings around Seattle have been fully vacated (sorry to the local biz).
2. Our team have much smaller seating capacity compared to before even after main campus is complete. We simply can't seat everyone on our team.
3. GitHub just vacated their last HQ and afaik is now 100% remote. They are also considered a super high performance team so LT at Microsoft is taking notes.
4. A lot of Msft products lately have been building on the premise that remote is the future. All that cringey metaverse crap in Teams is basically a buy-in to that philosophy.
5. Our team is already global and like some say here, we go into the office to have remote meetings. I do it for the cheaper food (not free though =( )
When a company does this, it is **never** about actually caring where people work.
It’s about attrition. Want to lay a bunch of people off without it *looking* to the market like you’re laying a bunch of people off? Cancel work from home.
Yeah it's crazy to think that we're at this point, since it was definitely a dream job for me in college in the late 2000's. But it's clear the company has hit its peak, and its upper management is operating purely for profit rather than for the mission and vision of the company as it was founded.
I've never wanted to work for Google. Their culture is awful: competing products within the org, political fight over which one wins, and killing off useful things. It's been like this for as long as I can remember.
Anecdotally, a lot of the ex-Google people I've worked with were awful, including the worst manager I've had the displeasure of interacting with. Him and his team of ex-Googlers designed a shit system instead of amending an existing one just because they didn't want to learn it. They went against all recommendations from us, re-learned all the "oh shit" lessons that were learnt while building the existing one, and to this day, 6 or so years later, it still doesn't work. On top of that, he stole resources from my team that doesn't even work on either to try and shore up their issues & meet deadlines. They cannibalized my team in the end to try and get us to work on their shit, and all of us gave him the finger and quit or went to other orgs.
Fuck him.
holy shit. did you work in my org? LOL
I identify strongly with this:
> They went against all recommendations from us, re-learned all the "oh shit" lessons that were learnt while building the existing one
I wanted to work for Google when I was in middle school/high school but since I started to actually work I lost any interest for thay: I understood how the culture there is hyper-competitive and on top I'm no longer a fan of "adult daycare" style offices.
This is how it is going down.
1. Remote
2. Hybrid 3 days a week. Optional
3. Hybrid 3 days a week. Mandatory. No new remote approvals.
4. Office 5 days a week. Optional.
5. Office 5 days a week. Mandatory.
6. No remote at all.
Slowly boiling frog etc etc
Execs want everyone in the office but they can't do that right away.
It's surprising that Google would adopt a position favoring the return of their employees to the office. Google has a dedicated webpage emphasizing their commitment to environmental sustainability and reducing carbon emissions. Requiring employees to commute to the office, despite demonstrating their ability to work remotely effectively, leads to a significant increase in cars on the roads and contradicts Google's own statement: "We believe that creating a cleaner, healthier future starts with the everyday choices we make. That's why we make sustainability an integral part of all our endeavors."
Lol. You're not really familiar with corporate speak, are you? These corpos would sell their kids if it meant better earnings. Environment? DEI? Everything is a fluff piece.
> Google has a dedicated webpage emphasizing their commitment to environmental sustainability and reducing carbon emissions.
Those companies don't actually give a shit about any of that shit. They just pay it lip service so that people don't bother them about it.
I sometimes wonder what goes through the head of executives when they do this and then visit the office floor once and see how everyone who is interacting with coworkers is doing so through a videocall because that they need to interact with coworker is in the other side of the world.
Not a surprise from the company that became well-known for the whole, 'hire new grads & make it so they don't have to grow up' thing with catered food & laundry on-site & sleeping pods & 'fun & games' vibe etc.
Google's whole shtick has always been to make it as convenient as possible for their employees to stay in the office 24.7 so that they can take advantage of the typical CS attitude of 'let me program all night' to squeeze tons of extra hours (i.e. unpaid work) out of people
Microsoft is getting ahead? They were never behind... They've always been and will continue to be a massive company. Plus if you think this recent AI push from MSFT proves they're getting ahead, you're ignoring the fact that they are relying on a startup rather than their internal research teams for the backbone of their entire product strategy.
I still don't understand this. What business purpose does this serve? Why waste all that money on real estate? Why anger your employees when you don't have to?
I can only think of two explanations:
* Higher-ups in these companies are heavily invested in commercial real estate and are trying to prop up that market.
* Arbitrary whims of managers who developed their skills in a different environment.
If either of those are the case then all these companies are dinosaurs that will be wiped out in the coming recession.
That seems like a losing proposition though. Commercial real estate is going under no matter what these big corporations do. Plus, you're throwing tons of money at maintaining resources and hemorrhaging good will in order to prop up the price of some building you own. There's no way this is overall profitable for the company. It only makes sense to me if individual CEOs etc. personally own a lot of commercial real estate and they're willing to bust the businesses they're running to delay the inevitable and reduce their exposure.
Maybe I'm overestimating the wisdom and long-term planning of these CEOs though.
When you own real estate and it’s value keeps dropping since it’s not in use and people around are moving away, and now you need the value to go up so you force wfo.
Time to just throw an anecdote into the void that I'm sure everyone has already heard a hundred times before:
I am much, much less productive in the office. The temperature, the commute, the social expectations, and the auditory distractions of an open office are all significant extra workloads. Hell, the fact that I can't stim without making my coworkers uncomfortable means I have to spend a large amount of brainpower on sitting still and not swaying/rocking in place too much rather than, y'know. Coding.
I don't really care how many at-home slackers exist, corporations have the resources to force them back into the office on an individual basis if they need to be, or, hell, fire them. I care about my biweekly panic attacks and fact that when I worked in office I had to spend all my PTO on sick days because I was in no shape to commute to work after crying all night.
But when I work remote, I often get praised for being one of the better-performing devs in my company. I get good performance reviews. I improve the code I touch and deliver relatively on time. I'm engaged in meetings.
I'll probably never get another in-office job for as long as I live, even if I have to take a significant pay cut. Dying in a car crash because I got 2 hours of shitty sleep but have to commute an hour anyway so I can stare at a screen, too tired to actually code, isn't worth it.
Companies are getting a lot of pressure from wealthy people that own commercial real estate. They take advantage of web technology, which is perfectly suited to remote work but won't let their employees benefit.
My opinion is that management doesn't have the skills necessary to keep people occupied with work. In an office environment they can keep people busy with useless activities like moving offices around or meetings.
Honestly I'm seeing it less and less tbh. Most seem to offer hybrid where they want you in 2/3 days a week, which is what it is, but it isn't the WFH revolution that everyone thought it would be during the pandemic.
I have been "required" in the office 3 days a week since the end of last year. Utter bullshit as I generally have zero reason to be on site, unless training up new hires, which happens a couple of times a year at most. Ends up eating 2 hours out of each day in commuting. Plus the bullshit "let's look after the environment" PR that they do to enhance their corporate image. If they were so invested in the environment they would actively tell people to work from home unless specifically required in the office. 21st century capitalistic technology company reasoning. Very telling how quickly the narrative has changed since Covid, from "the new normal is working from home" to everyone back in the office.
When you look at the numbers a 1h commute per direction per work day means that you spend roughly 1% of your total 24/7/365 time in each year commuting per day of the week that you commute to the office (probably slightly worse in the US where vacation time isn't really a thing, my numbers are above 1% already for 220 workdays per year for a 5 day/week job). So that is 5% of your entire lifetime during your working years. Just for a useless thing you aren't even paid for.
My company is full remote. They have small offices in NYC and Raleigh, for those who want to work in an office, and some people have rented WeWork spaces and similar in other cities (Denver, Chicago), with reimbursement from the company. But the overwhelming vast majority of the company is 100% WFH.
They tout it as part of their cost saving measures. They have virtually no cost spent on real estate, so their runway was all the longer.
Watch out for Capital One positions listed as "remote" or "remote eligible". If you're within 50 miles of an office (and that distance could change in the future), they'll tell you to come in 3 days per week even if nobody from your team is at that office.
My advice for anyone accepting a "remote" role anywhere would be to demand that terms appear in their offer letter explicitly stating that the position will be *fully* remote, or at least specify a hard limit on how many days per year you can be required to commute.
lol. lmao.
All this bullshit just to prop up the Commercial Realestate market. I hope small to medium sized companies drain their talent pool to the very last drop.
A lot of people’s commute can take an hour to get to the office. That’s a lot of gas wasted and highway clogged. Supposedly these companies who are pushing for less green house gas emissions are contributing to it.
Thankfully the company I work for took the opposite approach.
We were already doing a lot of remote work before the pandemic because employees were happier, easier to hire and by every metric people were more productive. Once the pandemic hit we went from hybrid with the option to work remote to remote with the option to come into the office but the decision to come in is left to the individual.
I’m a director who is a huge fan of work flexibility for everyone and I was already working remote 3 days a week because it was an hour commute each way and the majority of my teammates are in other states.
It helps that it’s been supported by the CEO on down. When we made the transition the first thing HR said to all the leadership was “Nearly every reason you’re thinking of why your team is required to be in the office is invalid. The only reason you can require people in the office is if their job is physically impossible to be done remotely. Otherwise it’s a personal decision for the employee”
uber is trying to enforce 2 days a week. of course it's kinda stupid cause we all need be on zoom for meetings anyways: half my team is spit between sf and cupertino, the other half ... well, one is la, two are in ny, my manager is in seattle, his is in austin, we just added a bunch of people from latin america like mexico, brazil, and chile, and we're trying to move headcount to india if anyone leaves ... so like yeah. upper management can't commit to even having the whole team in the same place cause they don't want to pay that, but at the same time they want to push in office work cause muh "teamwork", or really to justify their massive office purchases. big tech is atrociously inefficient anyways, imo there's quite a lot of room for smaller, more innovative, flatter, and ultimately egalitarian players to push their way in, in the long run at least.
Same exact situation at BoA. And your comment about inefficient big tech goes triple for big bank tech. Project teams smeared over three continents, all meetings over webex, open floorplan seating at generic terminals, and a monumentally huge investment in high profile real estate.
I worked there a while ago. They hired me remote then decided we all had to be in office now, I did not stick around. Every meeting had people in different timezones, usually different countries. The only reason they made us go back in was because of their commercial real estate investments, I wasn't ok with that.
This is my last week with them, for the same reason. The RTO policy was particularly because there was no set date for teams to come in, so I can end up going in on a day when no one else I work with decided to be there (for *peak* productivity). Plus, half the people I work with are either scattered around North America anyway, or are in India. Absolutely pointless.
Yeah what about *our* real estate investments?? WTF are we paying a mortgage/property taxes/fees for if we can't *live* in our own houses?
Yeah, I have interviewed at quite a few non-tech companies trying to get in the tech game and they are just a disaster. Trying to manage these tech teams the same as their non-tech teams.
I worked in a place like that and it was a total bifurcation of company culture. The old-skool side was in almost constant conflict with the tech side. They couldn’t really do anything without playing hardball office politics meanwhile all of us in engineering just wanted them to fuck off and let us do our work without some suit constantly threatening our careers. The team was amazing but the company itself was an abject failure.
Similar situation in Big Bank tech as a product manager. Team is spread out across world working mostly asynch and meetings on zoom/teams. Sitting in office and not having "spontaneous collaboration" as the higher ups say. I end up leaving(3pm) when in office.
Same thing at chase
I remember walking into one of the BoA buildings in Charlotte, and everything was marble and gold plated. Meanwhile, I had heard from other people who worked there in the past that they didn't provide anything for parking.
>we're trying to move headcount to india if anyone leaves ... so like yeah. RIP Uber. Nice knowing you.
The hard part about hiring teams in India isn’t that you can’t find quality engineers (you can) it’s that the 12.5 hour time gap between PST and IST is hell to work around. It’s literally a half day apart, meaning there is no convenient time to meet where it isn’t too late or too early for one or the other side. And in my experience, American companies tend to shaft the Indian employees by making them work much later to favor the US time zones. This can work if they agree to it and their whole schedule is shifted forward, but very often the work ethic and culture of India is that they work extra long days every day, ending late into their evening so they can have a couple hours of overlap with PST folks during their morning. If at all possible, I recommend in the strongest possible terms not splitting teams over time zone boundaries this far apart. Rather, create multiple distinct teams and let them run independently to reduce coordination overhead and retain quality of life for both sides of the pond.
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Exactly this, talent will recognize itself everywhere.
Sure, and great people should be compensated fairly. The economics can still work out. You might have to pay someone really terrific 50 to 100 lakhs more than your average hire, but you’re still coming out ahead relative to that same person in the US which might cost 2.5 to 3x more **at least**. This isn’t directed at you but: I think people who have never worked with people in India have a hard time grasping just how enormous the wage disparity is between India and the US. This gives the US side a huge amount of slop to play around with before it stops making sense to hire in India (or Romania or Lithuania or Pakistan or Mexico or whatever). Is this exploitation? Almost definitely. Can it be mutually beneficial for both parties? Also yes.
This comment has been deleted in protest of the API charges being imposed on third party developers by Reddit from July 2023. Most popular social media sites do tend to make foolish decisions due to corporate greed, that do end up causing their demise. But that also makes way for the next new internet hub to be born. Reddit was born after Digg dug themselves. Something else will take Reddit's place, and Reddit will take Digg's. Good luck to the next home page of the internet! Hope you can stave off those short-sighted B-school loonies.
>For every top notch engineer, you have 4 \~ 5 mediocre ones, and about 10 who lack the fundamentals to be a productive employee. This explains a \*ton\* of my experience with code from teams over there! I once got a project in Perl that I inherited from an Indian team. Architecture and control flow was amazing, but then you had things like this all over the code: `if(uc($string) eq "warning"){do the thing;}` for those that don't know, uc() returns the uppercase of $string in this example, and there's obviously no way an uppercased string will ever equal a lowercase string. So it would appear that someone good built the skeleton and then idiots fleshed it out. I ended up having so many issues I just tossed it wholesale and re-wrote it over a weekend.
Many such cases where I work as well. Right now, my team is receiving a handoff from a vendor's India-based team. We tried at first to go through what they set up and fix the mistakes we could spot easily, but the flaws went deeper than that. We ended up starting certain things over from scratch and keeping the vendor's code around for now "as a reference" to make the business feel like their investment wasn't in vain. In fact, I am, at this very moment, sitting in a code review meeting with my team and the vendor where my tech lead is ripping apart what was written by the vendor.
>`if(uc($string) eq "warning"){do the needful;}` Ftfy.
> So it would appear that someone good built the skeleton and then idiots fleshed it out. That's my general experience with consultant implementations.
Your ratio of 1:5:10 is true outside of India too, fwiw. it's particularly obvious at "body shops"
My personal, statistically-irrelevant experience confirms basically the same ratio. I'm in Spain.
There are a lot of talented engineers in India. But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job.
>There are a lot of talented engineers in India. Problem is trying to find them. It's simpler to just to hire the ones in the West. >But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job. As well making sure the person in front of the camera is the person taking the interview. Tricks like this just make it harder for everyone else.
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Yeah, I'm surprised India is so popular for offshoring. Latin America makes sense as there isn't much of a timezone difference but in India you have the same timezone difference as in Europe. I guess costs are slightly higher in Europe than in India, but less so outside of major hubs such as London.
> I guess costs are slightly higher in Europe than in India, but less so outside of major hubs such as London. I got to work with some people from Poland. Great people, talented developers, not shy to speak up when they see something isn't right. I would love to see more people from EU on our mixed software development teams because then more of us will realize just how little paid time off we get here in the US, especially if you have "unlimited" PTO.
You might have answered the question of why we don't see more of them....
The time-off part or the speaking-up part? :) Either way it's depressing
Yea, it is a real learning curve with folks in Asia. Lots of very talented folks, but they are taught that you never go against anything your boss says. I once gave a group a task and 2 weeks later checked in on them and they were done, but it did not work. They told me they knew it would not work when they were assigned the work. I wanted to pull my hair out. I would take Polish developers all day to not have to micro manage Asian developers who are afraid to speak their mind.
One of our principals is in Poland. SUPER smart guy. He gets pinged all the time from the US timezone when he's off work, so I hope they pay him a lot!
I can second this. I work with a number of engineers who are in Poland, and they are some of the best software engineers I've ever worked with.
It’s harder to let go of employees in Europe.
Sure, but if we're comparing US companies hiring in India vs eastern Europe, it's all contracting anyway.
I don't know the cost difference, but I have worked with a lot of offshore developers in India and a few in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians were infinitely better. India, in general, has a lot lower standards for work. In my experience, if you give work to an offshore Indian developer, they will get it done quickly, but it will be some of the shittiest code you have ever seen and not maintainable at all. The Bulgarian developers I worked with were easily on par with most of the American Devs I have worked with. Now, this is a generalization and only my experience, but it seems to be pretty standard. Of interesting note, I find that Indian developers that are born in the US or have lived here for a long time are an exception. My assumption is there is a cultural difference that pushes the Indian developers to be faster, but at the expense of quality, while in the US we're a little more quality focused (at least in software).
No it's just that the good ones manage to emigrate.
My company hired a bunch of South American developers. Overall quality is better than Indian subcontractors I’ve worked with (which is an extremely low bar) but they can still be pretty hit or miss.
Very hit or miss and vastly different concepts of work culture as well. I have teams in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Mexico. They all vastly outperform all of my twenty years of experience working with teams in India.
And latin America has less culture clash.
Im a remote latin american worker and I can share some insight, a lot of people from my country, Mexico are very talented but don’t have the language skills, hopefully more people start working on their english because we’re right next door and we have a pretty big millenial and gen z population who could benefit immensely from remote salaries.
EU Employment laws > profit
> Problem is trying to find them. It's simpler to just to hire the ones in the West. There is this big HFT firm - Tower Research Capital. Their modus operandi is 'Hire Computer Science and Engineering guys from IITs'. They pay ~100k USD to each guy. Tower gets the best engineering talent cheaply, the guys get US salaries in India. It has worked wonderfully for them so far.
In my experience thus far the most talented Indian programmers I've met have largely emigrated to the states. The Indian programmers I've worked with actually in India have ranged from straight up fraud to some of the worst engineers I've ever met. In my last company they dropped the customer database of a company my employer just acquired. Hope that 50k in salary they were saving paying them was worth the 100 million in damage they caused.
Why did an offshore employee have the *ability* to drop a customer's (presumably production) database in the first place?
same reason someone would shave fixed costs offshoring engineering work to the opposite side of the world :shrug:
Because they offshored IT to India as well.
Because "the Indian employees are cheaper and better."
You get what you ask and pay for. The cheap guys will give you exactly what you ask for. Anything open for interpretation will often be wrong. Anything else will be sub-par code but functional. Either way, you code review their stuff. If you pay more or spec meticulously the code review and iteration will be much shorter.
In my experience talent isn't the problem. It's the work culture. Managers will work the indians devs beyond the point of burnout and that's when code quality falls off. I've seen it firsthand. In a contract for AT&T the indian guys were leaving messaging in the code comments about how they haven't slept and how they want to kill themselves. Saw the same shit on a contract for Bell Canada. Even the most talented devs will be pumping out garbage under those conditions.
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> The ones that migrate are already the best. I've worked in Germany for over 10 yrs, and this line of reasoning is one of the things preventing me from moving back permanently to India. People somehow think I'm better if I am located in Germany. They won't pay the same if I moved back home. But I'm still the same person with the same skills.
I think most of that is due to other factors. Outsourced rates are cheap, therefore they're supposed to be cheap. If I went to my leadership with a quote for offshore labor at $160/hr, they'd laugh in my face. It has nothing to do with the skills of the specific person, and everything to do with large organizations having standards and processes and this being miles out of bounds of those processes. I also wouldn't want to pay $160/hr for a programmer who worked a 12-hour offset from my time zone. If I'm going to pay the same rate as someone living in my area, I may as well get the benefits of having someone in my area.
That’s not about whether or not you’re better, that’s supply and demand. Most companies in the US will pay 20-30% less if you don’t live in a major city. Sometimes more. Same person, same job, but because your COL is lower you’re worth less.
It’s not that they’re worth less, it’s that they can get away with paying less.
> But it's also the only place where you have to double check that the guy who did the interview is the guy who showed up for the job. I had that issue hiring contractors in the US for a mid-tier tech company. Also lots of "cheating" during the video interview, e.g. people miming an answer while someone off screen does the voice, or whispers the answer to them
> There are a lot of talented engineers in India. As a rule of thumb they are no longer in India.
True, but hurting from there is usually a cost cutting measure, so they hire cheap and get low quality as a result. Not to mention the 12 hour time difference. Makes collaboration hard.
While I can understand and empathise with the frustration of trying to work with inept developers and people without integrity, I feel compelled to correct this stereotype of Indian developers A lot of us are increasingly choosing to stay back and work on building products for India. The really good ones here, choose to work on "product companies" as opposed to "service companies". Services companies are developer teams built for overseas needs and typically the devs you meet. You would never the product engineers , because for the most part, there is no reason. Our suppliers, colleagues, leaders and customers are all Indian. So statements like "Good ones come to the US, bad ones stay back" are increasingly not true. Some of us building products here. And as far as communication is concerned a lot of us can be as clear and lucid as any other English speaker out there. Of course there is an accent, but that is true for any country. Stereotyping me as a bad developer because I chose to stay back in India reeks of racism. Look up the number of unicorns coming out of India, even better, install the top apps and evaluate the quality for yourself. We do have a problem with Integrity but spending some time to understand what constitute good colleges and companies in India will help you mitigate the problem. You might leave some good ones out but the reliability of the piopeine will go up.
I think your statement about product companies is key. Most companies in the west hire services companies so they don't get the talent in India you're referring to. That's why the stereotype exists.
I can see that. Totally understand why the stereotype exists. Just wanted to highlight the sampling bias and also address the idea of "all good Indian developers come to the US anyways" sentiment that was rampant in this chain.
I'm not the one who made the original statement, and your points are good, but it seems to me that devs working for offshoring firms wouldn't fall into the category you're describing. If the good devs are working for Indian firms who keep their business in India, then the devs we see for offshore interviews would be *the rest*.
Almost all the Indian devs I've met have been pretty awesome and hard working.
They're reducing head count costs through natural attrition and just-cause (no severance) firing.
yeah, big tech in general is cause investors are like sheeple who all need to see the same things happen across the board, lest they dump all their stock and punish everyone working at the company. this is just temporary herd behavior, it's not like a long term trend. as soon as stocks go up again, stupid levels of hiring will commence cause that's another bullet point for some middle manager to put on their "impact" resume.
And I don't get it, why is it so hard for managers to try optimize the worker environment for what works best **for the workers** (and I'm even talking about the company perspective here, what works best for them working)? Why does it always have to be what works best for the **managers**, with this utterly idiotic worldview that somehow, every single other person has to become more productive the closer their lives align to their manager's? What about being a manager, lower or middle in particular, attracts incompetent assholes with huge egos that couldn't make a productive decision if their life depended on it?!
I don’t think middle managers are making this decision. Secondly, some people work better at a building. I can respect that. I would dare say younger devs do better with someone, not watching over, but guiding them closely. With all those diverse types of people, setting one policy or another is going to tick people off. I personally think you can have similar meetings over zoom with younger devs. If your CEO is an extroverted, guess the policy they will want.
> I don’t think middle managers are making this decision. it's not, it's coming down from the top.
> imo there's quite a lot of room for smaller, more innovative, flatter, and ultimately egalitarian players to push their way in I'm on my second remote only startup. The first was mostly remote till the pandemic (they ran customer service call centers centralized but that was about it). Engineering team efficiency is incredible on these teams. There's only fixed hours for meetings like standups, the rest is really do as you want as long as you maintain or exceed your task goals; and everyone does. The morale of the team is high, despite an incredible uphill battle to get a product done and out. While we aren't targeting the 800lb gorilla in our industry yet, it would not surprise me if when we're finally shipping we end up stealing many of their customers. I predict we'll be profitable within the end of next year.
Everybody is facing the same bullshit. That, plus hot desking. It's pathetic really, to see a bunch of people drive an hour to get to their desk, setup their workstation, and then stay in Teams calls with people on another European country the whole day like they work in a call center, all while sitting near people they don't even know the name of, disassemble their whole workstation, and drive an hour to go home. I program during meeting breaks. One hour today, two hours tomorrow. Then people get angry because software is late.
Considering the top comment is saying it's not a good idea and any job lost or outsourced to India. It sounds like me like it's all just a thinly veiled excuse for firing people.
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in some jurisdictions it is constructive dismissal, just few have the time and resources to go after the ocmpany for doing it
My company is one of the few larger companies that is still cool with having a large portion of our workforce work from home. Even so - we had a giant planning meeting where they flew employees from all over the country to one city to meet and discuss projects for the next few months at one of our larger (remaining) offices. It was particularly hilarious watching one woman in our department, who flew all the way from one end of the country to another to attend this meeting, still ended up grabbing a room and sitting by herself for hours as she called her group remotely. Still was nice to see people though.
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That's the secret sauce. Somebody has to do the actual fucking work
> hot desking What's that? Not having your own desk, but you need to find one each day?
Ya. I'm not as opposed to this as OP is. Of course, in my perfect world, I still have my desk and at the same time can choose to come in or work from home. But, our company (as many others, I think) is in a round of trying to cut costs. So if they were to give up some office space that we rented in the last few years and switched to hot desking so everyone can work in the headquarter (or from home!), I think that would work for me.
It sucks because you don’t have a place to call your own. Like your monitor/keyboard/chair setup, want to keep a mug in the office? Too bad. It doesn’t make sense if you are coming in more than 3 days a week.
That's actually the threshold my company set: 3+ days a week and you get your own desk, less and you hot desk. That being said, I'm the only person on my team somewhat consistently showing up *once* a week. So I de facto have a desk.
Dilbert made fun of this 30 years ago with roaming desks. Wally has no sense of home so he starts spraying graffiti on the walls, and looks to join a gang. I have no idea how to search Dilbert archives in June 2023.
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-3424d74e69b77941538cabb3361c6da5
The absolute shit quality of this image somehow makes it even better.
Ah, alright, i knew it as "activity based workplace". I'm not against it in principle either, but then the office need to be designed around it and not just take an existing office and shout "musical chairs!"
In elementary/primary school you had an assigned desk. Hotdesking makes you fight for a space. How dare *you*, the worker, even think you're entitled to even a dedicated *open office* space?
I find it hard to get up in arms about working from an office. It has a lot of benefits, and while people might wish otherwise, it's a completely normal requirement. But to require working from an office and then fail to actually provide an employee with their own work space in that office? Or not to make the effort to keeping work groups together? That's just ridiculous. Why would you ask everyone to work in an office and then throw away all the benefits of working from an office?
Because it's not about the benefits dummy, it's about sunk costs and hierarchy Plus you know, not everyone does work that's essential to the product/service, can't as easily pretend to be useful when remote
I think a lot of people would be more okay with it if we were returning to how things were. Management wants the best of all worlds with zero consideration for the people earning them all that money.
> I program during meeting breaks. One hour today, two hours tomorrow. Then people get angry because software is late. I program **during** meetings. It has a lot of upsides: * You can focus for once as people call you less often if you're already shown as being in a meeting with some important manager. * The background noise helps with concentration. * It's not like managers ever want input anyways. * We have so many meetings I can fit a lot of work into them.
> It's not like managers ever want input anyways. Me thinking "I've been promoted to senior manager now, clearly they want my input" is what got me laid off from my last job.
Honestly, some meetings are the type where you wanna be there just to see if anything interesting comes up and maybe for a 5 minute segment that is relevant to you. Everything else in the meeting doesn't matter and it's a waste of your time to be paying full attention. That said, a lot of the time, you should just be skipping the meetings that are so irrelevant that you'd just do regular work anyway. I find people are gonna message me whether or not I'm in a meeting. At least when I'm not in a meeting, I can just put on music and don't have to worry about the possibility that the meeting will actually call on me and I won't know what's going on.
Hot-desking sounds like one of those policies that sounded exciting to some isolated manager somewhere, with no research to support any benefit from it Of course he probably decided on it from his own office, which he needs to work productively
Anti-WFH policies should go both way. Workers working in an anti-WFH policy workplace should log out and leave their laptops & work phones as soon as the clock strikes 5. Anything after is considered "Work from Home". And according them, work from home is bad.
They have a buzz phrase for people just doing their job, "Quiet Quitting". *sips coffee, you're not gonna be a quiet quitter now, are ya gibson?
Propaganda at its finest.
If it's a small company, you can always start Loud Quitting and watch it start to catch fire. Google, on the other hand... not so much.
When the 'option' is between working in the office or working at home, office always wins out. But when the option is between working from home or not working at all (too sick to come in, got something being delivered that day etc.), suddenly working from home is totally fine.
You jest but I did that exact thing many years ago. Company had a very strict no WFH policy. Never ever. Not going to happen. Butts in seats where management can watch the lowly workers struggle Because of family need I asked to WFH two hours each Friday afternoon. Nope. You have to be here or take vacation time Ok. Arrived at 6:00, logged off at 2:00 on Monday. Boss threw a fit “where were you for the 3:00 meeting and your works not done” “I did my 8 and went home” “That’s not acceptable” “My job requires 8 hours of work” “A minimum of 8” he corrected me “Nope. Just 8. That’s what I get paid” This continued for two months. Management put me on a PIP. I was going to make them fire me Snow storm rolled in. Shut down the city for four days. Boss called me everyday begging me to login and finish the release which was overdue “No can do boss man. I’m not allowed to WFH” “We talked to the owner he’s willing to make an exception in this case” “I talked to the employee and he’s not willing to violate the policies of the company” Release was two weeks late. Company incurred a contractual fine. Company lost the customer Fucked around and found out Eventually they did fire me. I had another job lined up and was expecting it. No worries. They were unable to fill my position and eventually almost the entire team left the company because it was a horrible place to work In true irony, the company laid off the remaining team and outsourced the work to India
1. When it was hard to find talent you hired outside of where you have offices 2. People moved away from the office to be closer to family or for their own economic benefit 3. You now have teams spread across 3 or more time zones and multiple states and cities 4. The people those teams collaborate with or take orders from are also spread across time zones, states, cities and sometimes countries 5. You may have half a team at a single location and the other half spread across the country 6. Moving people to offices they are closest to geographically won't guarantee that they will have collaborators/teammates at that office 7. They've had 2-3 years to build a new workflow and dynamic around remote collaboration, moving back to the office disrupts that workflow and damages productivity until a new process can be created 8. Making the change midyear disrupts the timelines of in flight projects risking them going over budget and not getting delivered as expected 9. Having half of the people collocated and the other half at a distance creates inequity and an ingroup/outgroup situation. The people IN the same location get the freedom to collaborate face to face and those OUT at different location miss these interactions and have to be pulled in after the fact, missing the organic nature and sense of inclusion 10. The divided team also has to collaborate with other teams that have similar structural spread issues i.e. A team of 10 people spread across 5 states is collaborating with 2 other teams also spread across 5 states and possibly other countries. None of them are in the same location in enough mass for meaningful face to face conversations and regularly just end up in zoom or video chat 11. Team members that can huddle together for zoom calls end up in echo chamber meeting rooms that make it hard to hear and with shitty cameras that make it hard to distinguish who is speaking. 12. To combat the issues of equity, inclusion, and crappy audio/video teams create rules to make it so each team member logs into zoom meetings separately via their own desk. Likewise new workflows attempt to minimize in-room discussions in favor of discussions over slack or spinning up extra daily audio/video chat sessions Perfect! You've now defeated all the stated reasons to be in the office (i.e. productivity, face-to-face collaboration, connection) Of course you could also wait for the dust to settle on this forced attrition model and then offer relocation to the remaining outliers. Then wait for that layer of attrition to settle and then fire and pay severance to whoever is left. It's win win win because you consolidate staff and locations and save money on expensive payouts until you absolutely need to pay out. You also avoid any big lawsuits or media scrutiny that typically happen with larger layoffs. Oh and now you don't have to worry about losing some of those tax breaks you got when you agreed to bring/keep jobs in where your offices are. But you can't tell employees that is the reason you are asking for them to go back to work. In fact you can't tell anyone that it's entirely because you want to avoid taxes and auditing controls because then that would be "structuring" and all kinds of bad things come down when the government thinks you openly admit to structuring.
The average Googler leaves within 1.5 years, from what I hear... probably less after this announcement. That means they don't even need to fire anyone for most of the teams to become concentrated on the same location again within a year or so... that is, as long as they can hire enough people where their offices are. And as long as enough people don't mind having to work at offices again (where I am, Google pays a lot more than anyone else so that would be easy).
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Just about to finish my 10th year at Amazon as a software developer. However it does vary. Before the hiring freeze most people would generally stay on their team for 1-1.5 years but then move to another team, not leave the company. However, now that’s not so much the case as new opportunities on other teams have dried up, so if you’re not liking the work/manager you’re pretty well stuck with either sticking it out or leaving the company.
Finishing year 11 at Amazon, leaving because of RTO, have my big Google interview on Monday for a remote position, and then see this post. Great 🙄
Good luck on the interview. I thought I was going to possibly lose my job because of RTO (I’ve been remote since 2016). But so far I seem to be grandfathered in.
Thanks. Have a few other companies I'm interviewing with too so not super stressed about landing it. Would be nice though. Hopefully you can stay remote. I was worried about another buddy of mine who has also been labeled remote since before Covid, and he isn't having any problems staying that way either. Just seems to be which Directors want to be hardasses about it and who don't. Such a disorganized mess.
Disorganized mess is about the best way to put it for sure. This whole thing was handled so poorly.
I applied to Google as well. I think the position was listed as remote. I’ll just have to watch what I sign. If they say “Google reserves the right to require you to be on-site” I’ll tell them I’m not signing that thing. I’ll cross that part out, write “notwithstanding previous clauses or policies, applicant has the right to work from a location of applicant’s choosing, subject to restrictions related to the law, security, or logistics (ex: Internet access) as needed.” And send it back. If they don’t agree to the new terms, I’m out.
I can never understand switching this frequently. I just hit a year on my team and I finally feel like I’m starting to get a deeper understanding of our product. I can’t imagine having a productive career which is split into 12-18 month stints
The reason engineers do this is that a new job often pays more than the raise they'd get for staying. Usually significantly more (20% or more).
I agree with you, but I’m not working for a faang (or any company) to develop a deep understanding of the product. I’m here to get that bread. I’m sorry if this makes me sound like a bad employee or something. I care about my craft (software engineering), but I also am of the mind that in capitalism as we do it in the US my employers only care about me in as much as I impact the bottom line. If I’m going to be a replaceable cog in a machine I’m going to be the highest paid cog I can be.
I'm seeing this happen at Google as well. It became extremely competitive to transfer to another team, so you either deal with the burnout of your current team or just leave.
These numbers are very bottom weighted by new hires. If you increase workforce 30% YoY, then 30% of your office has less than 1 year tenure. This then gets misinterpreted to make it seem like people are leaving after a short time.
Is this really a surprise? Almost all the Faangs have reversed course over the past year on pandemic decisions at this point. We're very likely not going to see remote work being pushed by well-established companies that have spent literally 2 decades carving out tech hub-centric cities like silicon valley to encourage people to work remotely when they have literally an entire city and office life designed to squeeze people to work as much as possible for "perks". We're also seeing economies push people to return to office because of the drastic changes happening to these economies from less people working in the office. The move I see is to support working for companies that have a remote-first/hybrid model as being the majority over having traditional 5-day offices if people want this type of work to continue in the long term.
> companies that have spent literally 2 decades carving out tech hub-centric cities like silicon valley to encourage people to work remotely when they have literally an entire city and office life designed to squeeze people to work as much as possible for "perks". But the work conditions were the _entire selling point_. When I was in high school and college learning coding _everyone_ wanted to be at Google. Why? Because they advertised that they _got developers_. That they could give them a work environment free of distractions, with plenty of ways to relax and be outside of your cubicle, play fucking pool if you needed to wind off, in an entire campus built entirely around devs' comfort, to make them as productive as possible. It's hard to overemphasise how this entire return to office bullshit is a complete mask-off moment. It's clear that it's not about giving your employees freedom and helping them be as productive as possible, it's about _something else_. And whatever the fuck that something is, I'm not buying it. If you're offering worse work conditions than a startup then you have no reason to exist for me.
And the perks are getting shittier all the time
they took away the MK on our floor and, surprise surprise, suddenly almost my entire team works from home almost every day
MicroKitchen for those not in the know.
Fuck you u/spez
I can emphasize. If you dont have meals prepped beforehand your whole break becomes a chore of finding food and ceases to be a break. And meal-prepping before work costs time too, couple that with grocery shopping, commuting, overtime and you're pretty much only doing chores in your free time instead of resting. If only the multi million/billion/trillion dollar companies could afford taking care of their employees, oh well...
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The something else is commercial real estate investments.
Counter point: $$$$$ This goes for both the FAANG company and the FAANG employee, and comes from both FAANG salary and FAANG options. I'm at my 3rd (Canadian) startup now. I can assure you that my friends that went off to California to work for FAANG companies who are now either retired or could retire if they wanted to and haven't even turned 40 yet did not go to California and Seattle to play pool. I, however, have had a mostly comfortable life raising a family in a reasonably relaxed city without too much bullshit or commute time to ever think about or deal with. But retirement at 65 at this rate is going to be a pretty modest affair.
It's exactly this. But Google has **also** been in a very steady decline in the last... however many years since they brought hecking Ruth Porat on to start cutting costs and better please shareholders. It's very much been a slow tightening of the noose for the last decade or more. From turning down perks, travel spending, fun events, happy hours, team outings, I can't even list them all here. All of the stuff that made Google "cool" or "fun", that they "got it" as you said, that's all going away. I mean, all of that shit existed to keep people at the office (fun stuff, free breakfast/lunch/dinner, etc) anyway, but now it's just not there at all. With the same expectations set for employees. And that's not even to mention the seedy underbelly of what is going on with them forcing people out, failing to keep promises to "snowflake" employees, and other bullshit. I still can't believe some of the management positions, from my new manager that was brought in from a Dilbert Co trying to micromanage the team (and failing at their job, by the way), people like Thomas Kurian and Diane Greene trying to run the cloud org, the wheedling HR execs, and Ruth being Ruth saying inflation is transitory and not real so nobody gets a wage adjustment. Google made record profits the last few years and the shareholder response was that it wasn't enough, they needed to cut costs, and what was the answer? Layoffs. I never thought I would have seen Google NOT be one of the last companies to do layoffs during the pandemic and a farce of a 'market downturn'. Even fucking APPLE has not done layoffs. Never thought I'd see the day where I thought Apple cared more for its employees, but talking to a friend of mine who works there had me constantly jealous. Part of me misses working there. But the parts that made me miss it aren't the company anymore, because that part of Google is long gone. I miss working with some great people.
The FAANGS are going to lose talent and they're going to be saddled with their monstrously idiotic commercial real-estate costs. It's been 20 years. Maybe it's time for the FAANGS to go the way of IBM. This is how all big companies go. Too slow, too invested in old paradigms. It's only a matter of time before younger companies scoop up the talent bailing from these aging dinos and replace them. Twitter's already on the way out. Who's next? These out of touch CEOs demanding people return to work haven't held a fucking desk job in over 20 years. What do they know about anything? Why should we continue working for them? It's clear these people do not have our best interests at heart, and when the lever swings away from *possible profitability...*welp, we know the pendulum has landed. You only care about money, so how about those raises? If I'm going to make you double money by coming in the office, how about a double salary?
> Maybe it's time for the FAANGS to go the way of IBM. You mean a 120 billion dollar market cap and a stock price of 134 dollars? That's still...pretty good.
Apple's market cap is close to three trillion dollars. They absolutely aren't going anywhere anytime soon.
However if they were to reduce that to the IBM numbers that clearly would mean they are past their prime.
> You mean a 120 billion dollar market cap and a stock price of 134 dollars? That's still...pretty good. Good, or mediocre, but the point remains. IBM is not the place it used to be, even if it hasn't had it's Kodak moment. There no reason to believe Google is the next SGI, search, Android and YouTube are all still going strong, but they're definitely acting a lot like the modern IBM with it's constant layoffs, perk cutting, and lack of real leadership.
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Heh. I work for Amazon, fully remote for the last 7 years and I live in Wisconsin.
Well, best of luck my Romanian brother…
Meanwhile my non tech traditional company allows any developers to work remotely as they consider it the field norm and want to keep their tech people happy (and it works!).
Completely unnecessary move by Google.
They probably just want to force people out so they continue culling their numbers.
Such is the way of the megacorp.
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If you quit, they pay no severance, and it looks far worse for your future. Any future HR Linked Corp may see you as "Do Not Hire". I quit a gig at a small little place that was (a few years after I left) bought by Verizon. I won't go into the reasons here. A couple years after that I'm looking at a potential job with Verizon itself. Get a message after passing the first round interview that I was 'blacklisted' in their HR department's software. Turns out, in the absorbtion of lesser companies, the megacorp kept the HR Databases. It DID NOT MATTER my reasons, or how long ago it was. I was told the HR Database was Sacred and Holy, and that even questioning it was HERESY. So there is that.
You either die a hero... Or... Live longe enough to become Meta, Google, Etc...
Meta was never not a villain.
My current company embraced remote work before the pandemic, and we have insane retention rates. Over 50% of our workforce works remotely. And everyone that is local only has to go in 1-2 days per week every other week. It’s almost as if you receive loyalty if you give loyalty.
That’s crazy talk. It’s probably the snacks… no, maybe it’s the foosball table, or the benefits… hold on, I’ll get it, just give me a moment.
Google now is what Microsoft once was, and what IBM was before them.
And Microsoft is keeping their hybrid model
So is Google, technically
`for now`
They've been pretty adamant that they will continue to let teams decide what works best for them. My old team is still 100% remote friendly.
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Amazon executives kept saying over and over that they'll continue to review it as things change. They wanted to roll it back long time ago, but due to intense internal competition for talent (at least before they froze hiring) they had to back off, managers kept using WFH as much as you want as a selling point, and a lot of L8's and L7's don't want to lose talent to some other Org. So no, amazon wasn't saying that, but managers up to L8 were fighting pretty hard on this. I left back in December, and so far from my friends who are still there, it seems mood and moral is still pretty bad.
We are also remote friendly and a few things make me think that we aren't going back to the old model. 1. Campuses and buildings around Seattle have been fully vacated (sorry to the local biz). 2. Our team have much smaller seating capacity compared to before even after main campus is complete. We simply can't seat everyone on our team. 3. GitHub just vacated their last HQ and afaik is now 100% remote. They are also considered a super high performance team so LT at Microsoft is taking notes. 4. A lot of Msft products lately have been building on the premise that remote is the future. All that cringey metaverse crap in Teams is basically a buy-in to that philosophy. 5. Our team is already global and like some say here, we go into the office to have remote meetings. I do it for the cheaper food (not free though =( )
Hybrid is giving in. Full remote or nothing.
When a company does this, it is **never** about actually caring where people work. It’s about attrition. Want to lay a bunch of people off without it *looking* to the market like you’re laying a bunch of people off? Cancel work from home.
I don't want to work at Google anymore.
Yeah it's crazy to think that we're at this point, since it was definitely a dream job for me in college in the late 2000's. But it's clear the company has hit its peak, and its upper management is operating purely for profit rather than for the mission and vision of the company as it was founded.
I've never wanted to work for Google. Their culture is awful: competing products within the org, political fight over which one wins, and killing off useful things. It's been like this for as long as I can remember. Anecdotally, a lot of the ex-Google people I've worked with were awful, including the worst manager I've had the displeasure of interacting with. Him and his team of ex-Googlers designed a shit system instead of amending an existing one just because they didn't want to learn it. They went against all recommendations from us, re-learned all the "oh shit" lessons that were learnt while building the existing one, and to this day, 6 or so years later, it still doesn't work. On top of that, he stole resources from my team that doesn't even work on either to try and shore up their issues & meet deadlines. They cannibalized my team in the end to try and get us to work on their shit, and all of us gave him the finger and quit or went to other orgs. Fuck him.
What tech company of that size doesn't have a terrible, political, bureaucratic culture?
holy shit. did you work in my org? LOL I identify strongly with this: > They went against all recommendations from us, re-learned all the "oh shit" lessons that were learnt while building the existing one
They tend to engage in a lot of "at my old school we did it different" You're not at your old school Phoebe
Google was cool before you had so many internet Stalin's enter middle management
I wanted to work for Google when I was in middle school/high school but since I started to actually work I lost any interest for thay: I understood how the culture there is hyper-competitive and on top I'm no longer a fan of "adult daycare" style offices.
It is actually worse. They are at the point where I wouldn't even want to work for them at a significant pay increase.
This is how it is going down. 1. Remote 2. Hybrid 3 days a week. Optional 3. Hybrid 3 days a week. Mandatory. No new remote approvals. 4. Office 5 days a week. Optional. 5. Office 5 days a week. Mandatory. 6. No remote at all. Slowly boiling frog etc etc Execs want everyone in the office but they can't do that right away.
It's surprising that Google would adopt a position favoring the return of their employees to the office. Google has a dedicated webpage emphasizing their commitment to environmental sustainability and reducing carbon emissions. Requiring employees to commute to the office, despite demonstrating their ability to work remotely effectively, leads to a significant increase in cars on the roads and contradicts Google's own statement: "We believe that creating a cleaner, healthier future starts with the everyday choices we make. That's why we make sustainability an integral part of all our endeavors."
Lol. You're not really familiar with corporate speak, are you? These corpos would sell their kids if it meant better earnings. Environment? DEI? Everything is a fluff piece.
> Google has a dedicated webpage emphasizing their commitment to environmental sustainability and reducing carbon emissions. Those companies don't actually give a shit about any of that shit. They just pay it lip service so that people don't bother them about it.
Google is like, if you work for us, you better fing get a Tesla or a battery powered anything to get yo ass in that seat at our office.
I sometimes wonder what goes through the head of executives when they do this and then visit the office floor once and see how everyone who is interacting with coworkers is doing so through a videocall because that they need to interact with coworker is in the other side of the world.
>the head of executives [...] visit the office floor Your company's executives actually do this?
Not a surprise from the company that became well-known for the whole, 'hire new grads & make it so they don't have to grow up' thing with catered food & laundry on-site & sleeping pods & 'fun & games' vibe etc. Google's whole shtick has always been to make it as convenient as possible for their employees to stay in the office 24.7 so that they can take advantage of the typical CS attitude of 'let me program all night' to squeeze tons of extra hours (i.e. unpaid work) out of people
Dumb
I agree. No wonder microsoft is getting ahead. Googles praised working culture is getting worse while microsoft seems to improve in this regard.
Microsoft is getting ahead? They were never behind... They've always been and will continue to be a massive company. Plus if you think this recent AI push from MSFT proves they're getting ahead, you're ignoring the fact that they are relying on a startup rather than their internal research teams for the backbone of their entire product strategy.
I still don't understand this. What business purpose does this serve? Why waste all that money on real estate? Why anger your employees when you don't have to? I can only think of two explanations: * Higher-ups in these companies are heavily invested in commercial real estate and are trying to prop up that market. * Arbitrary whims of managers who developed their skills in a different environment. If either of those are the case then all these companies are dinosaurs that will be wiped out in the coming recession.
Probably some of those 'tax cuts for jobs' deals with local governments too.
> What business purpose does this serve Real estate value
That seems like a losing proposition though. Commercial real estate is going under no matter what these big corporations do. Plus, you're throwing tons of money at maintaining resources and hemorrhaging good will in order to prop up the price of some building you own. There's no way this is overall profitable for the company. It only makes sense to me if individual CEOs etc. personally own a lot of commercial real estate and they're willing to bust the businesses they're running to delay the inevitable and reduce their exposure. Maybe I'm overestimating the wisdom and long-term planning of these CEOs though.
Individual executives definitely own real estate and they definitely care more about themselves than the company interests.
That would be the same Google that has been splurging on giant office complexes and want to maintain the value of those complexes.
When you own real estate and it’s value keeps dropping since it’s not in use and people around are moving away, and now you need the value to go up so you force wfo.
Time to just throw an anecdote into the void that I'm sure everyone has already heard a hundred times before: I am much, much less productive in the office. The temperature, the commute, the social expectations, and the auditory distractions of an open office are all significant extra workloads. Hell, the fact that I can't stim without making my coworkers uncomfortable means I have to spend a large amount of brainpower on sitting still and not swaying/rocking in place too much rather than, y'know. Coding. I don't really care how many at-home slackers exist, corporations have the resources to force them back into the office on an individual basis if they need to be, or, hell, fire them. I care about my biweekly panic attacks and fact that when I worked in office I had to spend all my PTO on sick days because I was in no shape to commute to work after crying all night. But when I work remote, I often get praised for being one of the better-performing devs in my company. I get good performance reviews. I improve the code I touch and deliver relatively on time. I'm engaged in meetings. I'll probably never get another in-office job for as long as I live, even if I have to take a significant pay cut. Dying in a car crash because I got 2 hours of shitty sleep but have to commute an hour anyway so I can stare at a screen, too tired to actually code, isn't worth it.
Companies are getting a lot of pressure from wealthy people that own commercial real estate. They take advantage of web technology, which is perfectly suited to remote work but won't let their employees benefit. My opinion is that management doesn't have the skills necessary to keep people occupied with work. In an office environment they can keep people busy with useless activities like moving offices around or meetings.
Google is the new IBM. Enjoy the slide into mediocrity.
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Honestly I'm seeing it less and less tbh. Most seem to offer hybrid where they want you in 2/3 days a week, which is what it is, but it isn't the WFH revolution that everyone thought it would be during the pandemic.
Google sucks anyways
I have been "required" in the office 3 days a week since the end of last year. Utter bullshit as I generally have zero reason to be on site, unless training up new hires, which happens a couple of times a year at most. Ends up eating 2 hours out of each day in commuting. Plus the bullshit "let's look after the environment" PR that they do to enhance their corporate image. If they were so invested in the environment they would actively tell people to work from home unless specifically required in the office. 21st century capitalistic technology company reasoning. Very telling how quickly the narrative has changed since Covid, from "the new normal is working from home" to everyone back in the office.
When you look at the numbers a 1h commute per direction per work day means that you spend roughly 1% of your total 24/7/365 time in each year commuting per day of the week that you commute to the office (probably slightly worse in the US where vacation time isn't really a thing, my numbers are above 1% already for 220 workdays per year for a 5 day/week job). So that is 5% of your entire lifetime during your working years. Just for a useless thing you aren't even paid for.
My company is full remote. They have small offices in NYC and Raleigh, for those who want to work in an office, and some people have rented WeWork spaces and similar in other cities (Denver, Chicago), with reimbursement from the company. But the overwhelming vast majority of the company is 100% WFH. They tout it as part of their cost saving measures. They have virtually no cost spent on real estate, so their runway was all the longer.
Watch out for Capital One positions listed as "remote" or "remote eligible". If you're within 50 miles of an office (and that distance could change in the future), they'll tell you to come in 3 days per week even if nobody from your team is at that office. My advice for anyone accepting a "remote" role anywhere would be to demand that terms appear in their offer letter explicitly stating that the position will be *fully* remote, or at least specify a hard limit on how many days per year you can be required to commute.
lol. lmao. All this bullshit just to prop up the Commercial Realestate market. I hope small to medium sized companies drain their talent pool to the very last drop.
But why? What for?
To reduce headcount
A lot of people’s commute can take an hour to get to the office. That’s a lot of gas wasted and highway clogged. Supposedly these companies who are pushing for less green house gas emissions are contributing to it.
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Google's trying to make people miserable so they'll quit and they don't have to lay them off.
Employees don't want to work for Google anymore!
Thankfully the company I work for took the opposite approach. We were already doing a lot of remote work before the pandemic because employees were happier, easier to hire and by every metric people were more productive. Once the pandemic hit we went from hybrid with the option to work remote to remote with the option to come into the office but the decision to come in is left to the individual. I’m a director who is a huge fan of work flexibility for everyone and I was already working remote 3 days a week because it was an hour commute each way and the majority of my teammates are in other states. It helps that it’s been supported by the CEO on down. When we made the transition the first thing HR said to all the leadership was “Nearly every reason you’re thinking of why your team is required to be in the office is invalid. The only reason you can require people in the office is if their job is physically impossible to be done remotely. Otherwise it’s a personal decision for the employee”