That's interesting, since my assumption is that Google would be fairly data driven. I'd be curious if Googlers feel like this is because they are really seeing reduced productivity, or if there's a different motivation.
managing a small product engineering team. I have to say WFH has a considerable impact on productivity. Coding is actually fine, but the problems are:
1. Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
2. Personal relationships are difficult to grow, especially for newbies. Usually those things got grown via coffee chats, launch meets, ad-hoc talks, but those are all gone. You know, a lot of cases, whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot. I don't have a word to describe it precisely, maybe "lower team coherency".
3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Those are things may not be easily tracked from data, but really harmful in the long run. I cannot imagine how to manage effectively after another year of WFH.
This depends. The problems we've been working on as a team are really too big to work out on a whiteboard. I think for my team, WFH is just fine. I'm nearing the end of one of the most complicated software projects I've ever worked on and don't feel like any of our issues were related to WFH.
Over the last year I've actually started to connect with my team. We have weekly video chats and spend hours socializing. As an older engineer with bad hearing, video chats are far better than crowding around a big table in a cavernous, modern office.
My only complaint is the environment I have to work in. Silicon Valley real estate is sub-par and high priced. I've been looking for a new apartment with a spare bedroom for months but the only units available are far away or run-down. If I knew I could WFH forever, I'd have left already. Here I am, waiting, because I have no idea when I'll be required to go back to work.
Heh.. I can sympathize. I find voice chat with a decent head set makes it SOO much easier to hear/understand people. And it basically eliminates multiple people speaking at once - the 'muddle' that turned into used to drive me crazy.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
Everyone in my team does literally just that on Slack. If I can say something, I can type something. If I can close my laptop in the office, I can close my laptop at home just the same. Or close Slack. Or just sign out of the company's workspace.
Working remote is a skill. Like other work-related skills, it takes effort and attention to develop it. It's likely most people haven't made that effort in the last year, since the situation was seen to be temporary.
I've worked full remote for almost a decade now. It was hard at first, until I realized there were solutions to the problems I encountered and it would take conscious effort on my part to get it done.
It's definitely possible for remote developers to achieve at least as much productivity as in person devs. But it's also understandable if people/companies don't want to make that effort.
I think this is very subjective. When I carpooled to an office my personal life lost commute time and arriving early or leaving late to coordinate with rides or buses. Gained an extra 8h a week when I went remote.
I've found that 3-4 people doing the initial design for something is usually too many. One person on their own or two people so they can bounce ideas off each other seems to be ideal. After the first rough sketch of the design is ready (it shouldn't have too many details), it should be presented to a larger audience so they can take feedback and course-correct if needed.
The personal relationship stuff is tricky, and I think junior folks, and especially fresh grads, got hit pretty hard here. On the flip side, I joined a new team around the time we all went remote last year (with several people I'd never met or heard of before), and it turned out just fine. I wouldn't say I'm buddies with all the new people, but I think we all feel comfortable with and respect each other. I joined in more of a technical leadership role, though, so I can totally get that someone who has to also deal with receiving mentorship could feel a bit overwhelmed and lost.
The work-life balance thing I find very puzzling. Many people (especially in the bay area) have gotten 1-2 hours per day of commute time back from utter waste (though I guess you folks at Google have the buses). Sure, things get blurred when you work at a desk in your bedroom, or at your kitchen table. But this is something that you as a manager need to be on top of by setting an example for the team. Keep reasonable hours, and disconnect outside those hours. Don't hold your team members to deadlines that require them to work excessive hours. When you sign off at 5 or 6pm with your "gotta go, chat tomorrow", make it clear that you expect the rest of the team to sign off pretty soon as well.
Having said that, I do know people in my org that work too much. But they're the kind of people who weren't great at balance back when we were in offices, either.
> 3. Really bad work-life balance in general. When busy and everyone's WFH, boundary between work and life really got blurred. There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
You can only blame yourself for that. When I'm done working for the day, I log out, lock my screen and walk out of the room. And if the time to go happens in the middle of a chat, then so be it. My boss can tell me he's gotta go, and I can tell him I've gotta go, and that's exactly what we do. There is no blurring of work and life because I don't blur them.
1. All you need to do a remote whiteboard is a microphone and a mouse. This is a great opportunity to create new softwares that actually help collaboration and improve the design process rather than being stuck forever with a pen and a paper.
2. What you call "personal relationship" is, at the end of the day, employee relationship and politic to be promoted. You are in a long term position of power on your employee, which allows you to impose your point of view. Stop pretending to be benevolent. Most new hires do what you tell them to do, it doesn't change with work from home.
3. I think that's just because you are not a good manager (sorry), or your own managers are bad. If you actually cared, you would respect people time and have clear rules that show it. You can send a "have a good afternoon" at 6PM, no one would find that awkward
For (1), I’ve found the opposite. The ICs end up having smaller meetings, and producing more coherent designs.
Then, they’re forced to write their designs down, people read them, and there is a larger meeting to discuss (which usually is only needed for big course corrections).
1. This is your strongest point. I've missed the whiteboard a bit. But you just need to find other ways to sketch out your ideas. Even a google doc, which is pretty primitive as these kinds of things go, it pretty easy to use instead.
2. Personal relationships require investment and deliberate choice. Schedule some open mic time. Keep a zoom room open where teammates can interact but with the expectation that they needn't be 100% engaged. This is a substitute for talking over the cube walls or the random break room interactions. Also spend time in non-work conversations via slack or talk a bit about non-work stuff before or after normal meetings. You'd do this in the office as you walked to or from a meeting room. It isn't as easy to just accidentally build these social relationships. Working remote you need to build the habits that support them.
3. Keep your work space and your personal space separate. Set some time boundaries. Encourage your team to put a cap on their daily work. Remind them. You have to learn set and stick to healthy boundaries. Too much time on the job leads to productivity drop in the long run. Keep your team productive and happy by helping them be aware of the issue. As a manager, watch out for perverse incentives driving overwork.
There are zillion little moments of ad hoc communication that happen face to face. Now that their absence has helped you discover that they are valuable, ask yourself when they occurred and how they worked to your advantage. Once you have some idea what you're missing, then you can start to engineer a replacement. As a leader, it's important that you model these behaviors for your team.
>...whether you know someone in the other team matters a lot...
I was kind of hoping the remote work experience would help folks make that sort of inside baseball less important. There are real equity concerns to consider, but practically speaking, you end up with narrower and less open decision-making processes in general.
It's definitely a complicated subject, but maybe some folks are partly missing some privilege that they need to learn to let go.
It goes both ways though. Up until now the nice chat zone was limited to people on the same floor. With WFH we got people in other countries joigning the chats on equal footing.
The info density difference also seem to be compensated by everyone being more open and comfortable (not packed in noisy office for the day)
There's definitely less random chats, it's more formal and less intense, but also broader and the hurdle is lower.
I think for companies above some size it's not better or worse, just different.
The problem is that the person in the office in another city, or perhaps even on another floor of your building, probably doesn't get to have that nice chat, ever, due to the lower likelihood of running into each other.
Why should my requests get better prioritization just because I happen to work on the same floor as a person in a key position?
This was an area that improved hugely at my workplace, because we're spread across multiple buildings in multiple cities anyway; the pre-COVID dynamic was that people were in the habit of including only those in physical proximity. COVID has made cross-city collab instinctive for people.
The comment you're responding to sounds like a team resenting the inability to have the (bad) habit of only talking to people in physical proximity.
When we were in the office it was rare to speak with anyone who wasn't on your floor, whereas now it's no harder to work with someone in Stockholm or Berlin than it is in London.
Doing Zoom calls before was always a massive pain as we have an open office (like almost everyone nowadays) and there weren't enough private spaces.
I genuinely wish more people held this attitude. Is it really worth 10% (or even 20%) productivity gains if the price is that your employees have to waste 1-2 hours a day sitting behind the wheel of a car?
To the executives and bean counters, yes, it obviously is. But from the overall perspective of society and mental health, hell no, it is absolutely horrifying to put people through that.
>Disclaimer: Googler
>... Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
It just seems honest and pragmatic to me. There are nice collaboration tools, but there will always be a gap vs face-to-face. I think you just have to make other areas of remote work offset the lost value of that unfixable gap.
> Designing over VC is very difficult, especially for something entirely new. 3~4 people working on a single whiteboard is far more efficient.
What's stopping someone from just... grabbing a whiteboard? They ain't expensive. Yeah, maybe not everyone can write to it, but everyone should be able to read from it. Designate someone as the writer and you're good to go.
> There's nothing like "gotta go, chat tomorrow" stuff.
What about "Sorry, just broke for $MEAL, let's put it on the calendar for tomorrow"?
Xoogler here, left pre-pandemic. Google has always been very data-driven. It just seeks data that support management's ideas of how they want to run the company. Despite ample evidence showing that cramped, loud working spaces both decrease productivity and increase sick days for coworkers (because flu and the common cold, and other reasons), management went for densification to meet growth targets and cut real estate outlays. Google workspaces would have been the absolute perfect super spreader spaces for COVID. TBH I feel a bit of schadenfreude for their deliberate choice to create that environment, and this article saddens me to see that Google hasn't learned much.
I, for one, hated the densification and tight working environments, but I didn't have the "data" to make a hill of beans difference.
(Googler, opinions are my own) I don't think Google has really justified why the return to the office is necessary for all employees, beyond saying that it's a key part of the culture.
Obviously the office is a part of the culture, and most employees want to be in the office at least some of the time. But to me, that doesn't explain why you can't offer a remote option for the employees who want it.
A charitable explanation might be what we've heard from execs: we don't want to rush to go remote, we'd like to dip our toes in and slowly explore broader options. Thus the hybrid 3/2 model. A less charitable explanation might be that Google has spent a lot of money on real estate. Or simply that leadership is out of touch and can't relate to the reasons why employees might want to be remote. I imagine it's a mix of both types of explanations.
Or even simpler: execs own super expensive real estate in the tech hubs and the only thing that supports the prices is the hoards of employees that have to live in the area.
This is the true answer. A lot of people have moved into far away (cheaper) bedroom communities to save money.
Also Google themselves would have a huge issue justifying their own real estate if people aren't in it "post covid". They are a publicly traded company so they would be forced to sell it off to appease investors.
All in all I think Google has shown it's true colors here. They don't have a damn about their employees. This reeks of boomer micromanaging 101.
I think that to fight this stockholders should push Alphabet to sell of their properties now. Should do the same with Amazon as well.
Google has some of the best offices in the world. They’ve built up these offices as a clear differentiator from their talent competitors. It’s lead to many companies offering free lunch and other perks tied to their physical space.
Giving it up would mean changing the culture and the value prop of working there. I can’t say I’m surprised they don’t want to do that.
Yeah, I do agree. It's odd that FB are doing so differently from them, though. When I worked in a FAANG, they had lots of issues with senior level engineer retention. Generally loads of people left when they wanted to start a family.
I guess FB must have seen the same thing, hence full remote for senior engineers. It's odd that Google haven't experienced this issue.
Sadly that culture changed long ago. Even prior to covid a lot of companies were downscaling their perks as they offshored jobs to Asia, thanks to our previous administration.
Can you give specific instances of this happening? I feel like offshoring tech jobs has been the bogeyman that has never delivered in our industry for a really long time.
Yeah, it's very easy to pick and gain metrics to support whatever view point you want to espouse. We see this in politics all the time, sometimes even multiple politicians using the same data set to push wildly different proposals. Why would Google be any different?
Kinda seems odd too because the only metric that you would think matters (stock price) would have heavy consideration (~90% growth since March 2020).
Yep, and then employees have a harder time challenging it - because how is an employee without the power of HR, facilities etc. going to gather the almighty data?
As someone who has done it for over a decade, in software, it's totally doable providing your org has all the infrastructure and has a culture that successful business requires treating their employees like humans who need to socialize, communicate, and slack off a bit like they would in a physical office. Usually online work turns into a push to maximizing efficiency and minimizing time you'd normally be "wasting" at an office. People then hate it, informal socialization doesn't happen, and hidden business processes that live in those informal social interactions that keep things moving don't happen.
They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.
I think you'll be looking for a while if your standards for an employer is that you have arbitrary access to the data they use to make decisions. There are a handful of radically transparent employers out there but it is the vanishing exception, not the rule.
Well the trouble is if you tell everyone that you are data-driven, and do so in most cases, then people are definitely going to ask about what data you used to make a decision.
If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.
Googler, but opinions are my own. A lot of employees like me would like to go back to the office, but would also like to have a few days at home for personal reasons (exercise time, kids school events, etc), fewer hours of exhausting commuting, and even just to have lunch at the restaurants in my own neighborhood. This would reduce the exhaustion one can feel at the end of a 5 day office week and leave you feeling fresher next time you come in to the office.
The 3-in-office/2-at-home week referenced would work well in this regard.
I don’t think it’s possible to be completely data driven about a company-wide cultural change that you can’t a/b test. A year or so after they make the decision, though, I’m sure they’ll have data on whether they have a spike in losing employees to competitors like Facebook that are more remote-friendly.
