I'm a parent, who does WFH, and definitely disagree about the preferability of office work. Sure my kids will occasionally pop their heads in the door to say hello. I guess that's an occasional distraction, which has some small productivity cost.

You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting. If you work from 9-6, and commute an hour each way, that basically means you hardly see your kids at all five days out of the week. That level of depression and alienation is going to do far more to hurt output. By comparison, the productivity impact of taking five minutes to give my daughter a kiss before she takes a nap is a de minims by comparison.

The people I work with are all great and interesting people. But frankly, I'd infinitely prefer to spend my lunch hour and coffee breaks and happy hours with my wife and kids. This may just be my preference, but I don't see how anyone with kids could actually prefer being alienated in an office instead of at home with their loved ones.

Yea commute + kid is the key motivation for WFH for me. My Bay Area commute is 4+ hours per day, depending on traffic. This means in order to guarantee I can be at work for my first 8AM meeting, I need to wake up around 5AM and leave the house at 5:30. My day is over at around 5PM (thankfully I don't work for a workaholic culture start-up), but this still means I'm home by 7:30-8PM most days. I'm basically driving 50% of the time I spend at work, and don't get to see my kid at all besides weekends. It really sucks.

COVID-19 has been a huge quality of life boost for me.

My father traveled for work a few months at a time. It wasn't the best for any of us, especially my mother. Consider the cost of those lost years. Even if you can retire early it's a season you'll never be able to share with them.

Why do you live 2 hours away?

Expensive housing

Property prices, I assume?

Obviously! I would love to live closer to work, if I could afford it. I can maybe afford a tent in Fremont and a shoebox in Palo Alto. Nothing in the South Bay or Peninsula in my price range screams "quality of life".

This is exactly the way I feel.

After working at home for ~13 months now, it will be very hard for me to go back to the office. I have young kids at home and getting to spend extra time with them every day is a huge gift, on top of having no commute. There are some negatives, but I feel just as productive and more engaged.

Great for you! I feel exactly the opposite, I feel trapped in my house, super-ecstatic that the kids are finally in school now and can't wait for the office to open.

Do you think you'll enjoy the office as much if (for simplicity sake) 50% of the people enjoy working from home so much they do not want to return? From my discussions with colleagues much more than 50% hopes to work from home 3+ days a week once this all is over.

Not the O.P., but speaking from experience, yes, a thousand times yes.

Here in Sydney, Australia, both office and WFH are available at my work. I'll have anywhere between 0% and 90% of my team in the office depending on the day or week.

In my experience, even being the only one in the office is a thousand times better than WFH.

Whether teammates are WFH affects me less than whether I'm WFH.

As a parent my workday has shifted to be 8 am to 6:30 pm and lots of people complain about that kind of shift, but I see that as a plus.

I used to be out of the house from 7:30 am to ~6:30 pm depending on commute, so it wasn't like that my time anyway. Now I'm working a slightly longer day, because during it I'm taking an hour to make my kids lunch, an hour to interact with them in the afternoon, some random downtime here and there when they pop their heads in, etc.

As schools reopen my plan is to basically just to set my core working hours to the schoolday which is going to be at 8:15 am to 3:30 pm and then I'll log a bit more in the evening if needed. We normally have the kids do some reading before bed to start winding them down and I can easily sit there with my laptop while the kids read. so many of the other parents I've seen struggle are the ones that rigidly stick to 9 to 5 vs a concept of "I should do about ~8 hours of work today". Those are the ones that really seem the most vocal about wanting the office back. Which honestly if that is what they want, that's fine. They can be the office crew and have the commute, pay for childcare, etc. I'm not looking to get back on that grind though.

I do feel bad for parents were both parents are constantly on Zoom. We're lucky in that we were able to rig it so all my meetings at AM meetings and my spouse has PM meeting, so we can have an on call parent most of the time. For families were both parents work sales, this probably sucks. Although I've seen some people in sales do enterprising things like setup little pods of rotating babysitting so they can just not schedule calls during their day to watch all the kids in the pod (do their reports or whatever).

I think going forward two things I'll advocate for at work is flexibility during summer hours and for parents with kids too young to be handed a Redwall novel and told to read quietly for a bit. Both are forms of investing your employees as short term thing for long term benefit since after all eventually the children get older (or you at least end up with a more mature child that can do tier 0 support duties and escalate to mom or dad when needed).

> Sure my kids will occasionally pop their heads in the door to say hello. I guess that's an occasional distraction, which has some small productivity cost.

Surely not a bigger productivity cost than a coworker doing the same thing, though.

I would even say a less, my kids will often have a specific ask 'can I watch some TV' where I can reply 'yes/no/later/that's really good/bad' and then its done. A co-worker will sometimes not even have a specific ask, but are instead looking for some idle chat.

> commuting

Assuming you're driving yourself, this is universally a productivity killer. You risking a huge amount of frustrating and angering situations while your workers are commuting to a central location. I'd put good money on a lot of lost productivity to commute.

Then there's the people who have to commute, due to functionally in-person jobs (artisans, doctors, baristas, etc.). Optional commuters going to the office for their "social fix" are doing so at the expense of forced commuters. Work should be work and social should be social; if you want a social experience during work hours then have a social lunch in your neighborhood.

We could just let people do whatever they wanted.

It is unclear why, having complained about being forced to work from the office, the set of employees happy to work from now think imposing their preferences on everybody else is supposed to be better for everyone.

There is one good reason: if most of your team works at the office, and you're working from home, it's difficult to make sure that you're not left out of discussions.

Agreed. I can’t focus when my toddler is running around screaming. I love her; but I miss my office.

In fact I simply miss the ritual of leaving my home and returning every day. I’ve been doing this for a few years, though.

Long dog walks have helped.

That’s a point I agree on. But my understanding is that most of the companies that are re opening offices are insisting that employees eventually come back. Is Google/Apple/JP Morgan letting people stay full WFH?

it isn't the employees imposing their preferences, it's the managers.

Even when talking about the negative effects of commuting on you and your kids, you frame it in terms of the productivity impact on your employer. Man, talk about Stockholm syndrome.

Productivity is not the end all be all. It's ok to look out for yourself.

I have two very young children, one of whom was born during 2020. I can tell you that raising kids that young, with both parents trying to WFH, and the lack of any support of any kind at all thanks to Covid restrictions, was a soul-crushing experience that I do not ever want to repeat. I do appreciate that my experience is a little unique, though.

> You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting.

Yes!

And I'm renting a small office near the house for pandemic purposes to have a quiet space to work. But being two minutes away instead of an hour away is night and day. I can be home and back multiple times a day, in same time than it took to walk to the snack dispenser at the office.

The secret you learn is that many people that like work a lot, actually fundamentally don't like their home lives, whether that be their spouses or their children.

How old are your kids and what are they doing all day?

This. My daughter is a month old now and while that does require me to chop my day into pieces so that I can take care of her, I can't imagine being out for 10h a day.

I couldn't agree with you more!

> If you work from 9-6, and commute an hour each way, that basically means you hardly see your kids at all five days out of the week.

So live closer to work. Google pays enough for people to do that. The schools are usually better too.

A) There's only so much housing near campus buildings.

B) Prices can become extreme near campus buildings because landlords know they can charge exorbitant prices and still find a tenant.

C) Moving to a more expensive place impacts you _and_ the rest of your family via shared rent, utilities, etc..

D) Your significant other, if you have one, may not work at the same company. So you may end up shortchanging your spouse and taking time away from them and their lives?

> Prices can become extreme near campus buildings because landlords know they can charge exorbitant prices and still find a tenant.

I'm not advocating for living literally right next to campus. But to say you can't compete is disingenuous. The whole reason Mountain View is so expensive is because there are so many engineers from Google who can afford it.

> Google pays enough for people to do that.

No they don't.

Go look up house prices right around campus on Trulia. I would say it's shocking, but disgusting is a more apt feeling.

Senior eng makes $400k+ TC. You're rarely buying a house alone. Most eng at FAANG end up marrying others who are similar. Easy to see $600k+ TC.

You can buy a home nearby. Sunnyvale has homes for $2m or less and you can afford it at $600K household. Very reasonable commute.

If you want 3000+ sqft and 5-bath homes then yeah, you're out of luck. Hit executive level or startup riches for that one.

To act like Google doesn't pay enough to afford a home in Bay Area though is BS. The whole reason the area is so expensive is because FAANG pays so damn much to keep pulling in more talent. (It's a cycle)

Also - you could rent. Most eng I meet at FAANG have no interest in ownership out of principal. They just want investment potential. Renting is frequently very good. Only reason you'd buy is for leverage but you won't get good leverage here in SFBA because you have to do all cash offer. So, just invest in market instead.

You're living in a dream world if you think $600K household is the norm in Silicon valley, even for FAANG employees. We are talking about a small percentage of employees (1. those with FAANG spouses) out of a small percentage of employees (2. top leveled, say Google L6+) out of a small percentage of employees (3. engineers) out of a small percentage of companies (4. FAANG). The rest of us, who are not 1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4, schlep away at normal compensations and there's no way we're buying $2M homes.

> You're living in a dream world if you think $600K household is the norm in Silicon valley, even for FAANG employees.

For married couples above 30 with one high TC earner - it's extremely common. You're not marrying a barista in SF if you work at FAANG. I haven't met anyone who is married, above 30, who also works at FAANG, the spouse can legally work in the country, and the household income is below $500K. I know that seems like a lot of qualifiers but basically a married couple that both have working abilities - if one is at FAANG, the other is likely at FAANG or similar (or a doctor or a lawyer or an executive or whatever - very common).

I'd have to really stretch to find anyone who I've met with high TC that isn't also married to another with high TC (besides SAHM/SAHD - where the one earner is usually an exec, so homes are still not too expensive for them).

I'm not talking about non-FAANG employees btw. If you work somewhere that doesn't pay well - then ok. You have to suffer like every other American does. I'm saying that if you work at FAANG - it's a bullshit excuse to commute an hour each way. (I mean - FFS - a lot of them have shuttles where you can clock in on even if you do live further away) It's a choice at that point. They pay you a lot so you can be close to their campus. High earners typically marry high earners. It's financial suicide to do otherwise. (Bye-bye 1/3 of your income for 18 years when you inevitably get divorced)

> I haven't met anyone who is married, above 30, who also works at FAANG, the spouse can legally work in the country, and the household income is below $500K.

You may have a very limited circle of folks you talk to and are willing to share such details with you. Myself and a number of close friends do not have a $500k TC household as married couples. Not even close.

> It's financial suicide to do otherwise. (Bye-bye 1/3 of your income for 18 years when you inevitably get divorced)

Maybe I misunderstood you but you're saying you should marry someone who earns similarly to you because of the inevitable divorce? I'm not sure I follow, you're advocating to marry for the financial prospects first because marriages end in divorce?

And you’re at FAANG? If you have 10+ YOE, there is no reason you shouldn’t be ~70% of the way there as a single earner.

I’ve seen enough people have their marriages end and have insanely high and long term alimony payments even after the other partner has moved on and pseudo-married someone else. (But hasn’t legally married them because then they don’t get their alimony) Until marriage is treated like a business contract where consequences are agreed to before signing, it’s a terrible idea to marry someone in a lopsided financial situation unless you don’t care about any kind of risk. You’d never be able to get/afford insurance for such an incredibly risky venture.

Half of that TC goes to taxes, then there is childcare, rent, etc while saving. The home is doable but you’re not going to have a competitive offer unless you’ve been saving for a few years assuming you have no debt.

The point is.. going into work is a waste of time most of the time. That’s why a lot of companies are doing flex schedules now.

> Senior eng makes $400k+ TC.

This is not true. Maybe people are confusing principal with senior?

That or you're counting multi-year stock grants in the current year.

Senior engineers at Google/Facebook (L5) make at minimum $300K, and with stock appreciation / refreshers $500K+ is not uncommon. Netflix is also well known for paying essentially all of their engineers at least $400K.

Principal engineers (L8) at Google/Facebook make around $1M a year, and $1.5-2M is not unheard of.

I have a lot of difficulty believing any of these numbers.

Source: spouse is management level at G of FAANG. Those numbers don't match up with reality in general. For a few edge cases, sure. Not for most people.

As mentioned in several other places on this thread, you can check out levels.fyi (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...) to see... nearly 500 reported TCs for Senior SWEs at Google. Median is indeed ~350k/yr. 320-380k seems to be the standard "initial offer" range for HCOL areas. These numbers don't include stock growth, stacked refreshers, or the new front-loaded 40/28/20/12 vesting schedule.

I also have multiple friends that work at Google, and can confirm that their numbers fall squarely into the bands described on levels.fyi. (In fact, they're often taking home considerably more, due to the aforementioned stock growth and stacked refreshers.)

Several possibilities:

1) your spouse is not in the engineering management track and isn't familiar with the payscale

2) your spouse works in an office with a lower payscale due to regional considerations (though this wouldn't make the numbers look realistic even in "LCOL" US offices, so it'd need to be international)

3) there's some misunderstanding about levels or something else. That Principal Engineers (L8 - three levels above Senior) make 900k-1M out of the gate isn't really disputed; they tend to make a bit more at Facebook, even.

Also, Google has an internal spreadsheet where employees document their own compensation, which, according to the same friends, corresponds pretty well to the levels.fyi numbers.

Is levels.fyi inaccurate?

Those golden cages at the FAANG companies are getting brighter, last time I had looked at their engineers' compensation they were around the 200-300k mark, and that was seen as high (around 2015-2016, even though I could be mistaken by a year or two). I guess monopoly power does indeed pay.

Levels.FYI for L5 (senior SWE) shows median annual at 350. Levels.FYI lags behind because they keep around old data. Principal at G is at 992k median.

> Senior eng makes $400k+ TC.

Good thing Google only employs senior engineers... <image>eyerollsmiley-x1000.gif</image>

> The whole reason the area is so expensive is because FAANG pays so damn much to keep pulling in more talent.

No it isn't. That isn't the reason at all. The reason is a bunch of literal rent-seeking wealthy old people who fight new housing projects at every possible turn so they can sell their house for $2 million, or die and leave it to their kids, who will then sell it for $2 million.

> Most eng I meet at FAANG have no interest in ownership out of principal.

Press X to doubt.

Even without a commute, the point still stands. Young kids are usually in bed by around 7, that’s enough time to eat and take a bath, maybe read a story and that’s it.

So what? That's the standard work environment and the reality for most Americans. This has nothing to do with Google or SFBA then.

Maybe the standard work environment has been wrong and should be changed and WFH is the way to do it.

That's fine - but that's not what I was talking about. I'm specifically saying if you work for Google - you can afford to live closer than a 1 hour commute. (And you can even take the god damn free shuttle where you clock in for the trip even)

You could also afford to set fire to a stack of $100 bills. That does not mean you find it a sensible thing to do.

You could also afford a straw man. Does not mean you find it sensible thing to say.

Or you're just spoiled.

I'm blessed. But the idea of civilizational progress is to get everyone at that level, as a baseline.

Someone want to tell this commenter how expensive daycare is?

Nah, obviously everyone who works in IT makes 500k a year, has a spouse who earns the same, and can afford 1 mil houses 5 minutes from where they work. At least from what they say.

If you’re at FAANG, you can - that is the point. I’ve only spoken of FAANG so far. Check levels. A $1mil home is cheap for a FAANG employee.

I don't think he said he works at Google.

Parents being less effective would be due to kids being at home, not due to wfh. It's not much of a distinction when it's all due to covid, but long-term the distinction matters for people who go back to out-of-home childcare/education but continue to wfh.

I disagree. Also most projects are distributed across multiple sites and orgs. In person meetings were always team based and guess what they still are wfh. You lose serendipity and cross pollination but I don’t think companies actually optimize for that. I mean it’s not an OKR nor performance goal.

My company has OKRs directly focused around improving serendipity and cross pollination lost due to Covid WFH.

Your company is making up fairy tales to support a narrative.

I shudder to live in a world where no one tells fairy tales.

Fairy tales in good faith and with positive intent are always welcome.

What have teams been doing to hit those OKRs? How are they measured?

Our people team is in charge of organizing things. Some of it is intangibles like encouraging more communication on Slack, others are more concrete like setting up time to connect people who might not otherwise connect.

What's OKR?

Objectives and Key Results. The things you choose to optimize for during any given planning period.

Which is arguably stupid as it makes you focus on improving specific numbers instead of your product/service. Crude example:

OKR: Improve customer feedback ratings from 4.2 to 4.5+ stars

Result: Customer support personnel start handing out free upgrades/bonuses/merchandise to complaining customers, resulting in many 5 stars reviews and while not solving any problems customers are facing, still achieving the OKR.

Measuring performance by numbers instead of personal judgement (from managers/team leads) is problematic.

Edit: It certainly makes sense in some departments (like decreasing page load time from 2 seconds to 1[0] but forcing that across all verticals is retarded.

[0] then again you could achieve that for example by deleting all JS from the site

/rant

I hate, hate, hate, hate, this argument, it's correct but it distracts incredibly from the fact _numbers still do matter_. Software engineering, remarkably, is the only industry I know of that can wave away any metrics, at all, ever, being even mentioned, by pointing out it's possible to game a metric.

That isn't a criticism of OKRs. That is a criticism of literally any and all metrics.

There is nothing wrong with metrics, the issue is optimizing for them which is what OKRs are trying to do.

Yeah metrics are fine as long as they're not being manipulated. Then you can be aware of their inherent inaccuracy. Amazon reviews springs to mind. If the only inaccuracies is that people tend to be binary in their choices and either give 1 or 5 star reviews then you can for example adjust by giving more weight to the 4 star reviews. But with the current landscape of all of them being highly manipulated the numbers almost don't even matter anymore.

OKRs are the opposite.

In your example, the "O" would be something like "provide a good experience for app users" and a "KR" would be "improve star ratings from 4.2 to 4.5". The "O" helps keep you focused on what you actually care about, making the metric subservient to that goal.

Only in theory, in practice success is measured by the associated metric. And as constantly demonstrated, anytime you measure people’s performance by some metric that metric becomes gamed.

Relying on personal judgement of a small set of managers is the fastest way to kill any product. Plus, your example isn't really using the process correctly.

Improved feedback rating is a result, not an objective on its own. It could be filed under, say, "improve customer experience with the app". That objective would have many (3-5) results that you track, with improving feedback being just one of them. Others could be improving page load times (as you mentioned), adding critical missing functionality, or whatever else. These results can also be based on subjective opinions, but need to be somewhat measurable (otherwise how do you know whether you made things better?) Ultimately if you made good enough progress in each of these KRs, you can consider the objective achieved.

What I guess I'm saying is that it's insanely difficult to come up with good OKR's and so many good things aren't measurable, while the fans of OKR's don't seem to want to take this into account.

Whatever alternative methods (judgement of managers) is up for debate though, I didn't say I had a good one. Just that OKR's in my mind are a waste of time for the most part, especially when you make the whole organization do them.

And look at products like Facebook, they seem to be built solely on OKR's.

Those parents may be a lot more productive once their kids go back to in person school and after school activities that keep them away from 8-5.

Maybe for older kids that are involved in extracurricular activities, but for younger kids that won't be the case. With a 4 year old starting pre-k this fall, I'll be lucky to have a distraction free work environment from 9-2 daily.

Pre-pandemic I had a 2 and 4 year old. The 4 year old was gone all day between 9 and 2 MWF for preschool, and we had a nanny the rest of the time.

I suspect post-pandemic it will be similar. Someone who works at Google can probably afford a nanny. It's just because people aren't comfortable with others in their home right now that it's a problem.

There is a huge nanny crunch / there are much longer lead times for high-end nannies now..

That's just nonsense. Australia has had one of the harshest lockdown measures in the developed world and we're quite Corona free at the moment. We're living in our own little bubble. Everyone who could, had to work from home during the lockdown. Everyone else was supported by a salary equivalent payment from the govt. Now, people are back at work. But when it can be done from home, most people are still choosing to do it that way. And we're haven't lost any productivity. Rather gained more due to savings in commuting time. Also, as our lives get easier, we're more grateful because of it and the overall positivity definitely helps with productivity. I've been lucky to work for a company that promotes this more. Even after everything is normal, no one is being forced to come back to the office. Because it doesn't matter. We get the same thing done more effectively. You're right about one thing. I'm also itching to get back to work. I do that once or twice a week. Mostly to catch up with mates and grab some lunch together.

I think it will be interesting to see how some of the companies in Australia with head offices in the US go over the next year. There are signs from the FANG (well “GA” here, the rest effectively don’t exist) will push for people back in offices.

On the flip side Atlassian just came out and said the reverse. https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/four-times-a-...

Microsoft has also said that they're envisioning a permanent work from home setup. Some people I know just gave up their apartment in Washington and moved to our small city in the midwest because even after MS adjusted his salary down he's coming out way ahead.

I don't see why MS would adjust his salary. He is still doing the exact same work. If anything he is paying the rent, electricity and internet bills that MS otherwise would pay for him! Am I missing something? I understand that living costs could be lower in his small city. But how is that MS's concern. He get's paid for his work/talent! It's not an attack on your statement. I'm genuinely curious.

yeah, there is some push by the city's business lobby groups to get people to offices as businesses that supported these offices are losing a lot. But it's upto the private companies to decide. Most employees like me have quite good home setups like standing desks, coffee machines etc and can do most of the things from home. It'd be interesting to see what approach other companies will take. I've heard stories about some of the American and Indian/Asian companies starting to ask their employees to get to office. It all depends on the work culture . I work at Xero and they've been quite cool with flexibility even before Covid.

Going to argue against this as a theme. I work for an extremely huge consumer electronics company based in a zip code not far from Google; my org has been remote for over a year and in that time, we’ve had significant productivity. Most people are claiming to be far more productive since many people had 2 hour daily commutes. Also, our company is so secretive that “water color” innovation isn’t particularly a thing. Since we all have private offices in my org due to confidentiality needs, the only real face to face is in meetings. Meeting where we sit around a table and occasionally use a white board. Most people that work for this company aren’t joining because they need an adult kindergarten (and we don’t get free food either, aside from vending machines.) I don’t care about free food or massages; with the appreciation of RSUs, buying that myself is barely a rounding error. I also saved tens of thousands being remote outside of California since I don’t have to pay resident income tax anymore. My house payment is less than half of what I paid for rent and I have about 3000 more square feet of house. My productivity is much higher because my mental health is much better. And my kids are in schools that have been open full time since August. Being “in” Silicon Valley is fun for a minute, but it’s a gimmick for the most part. I’m not having chance encounters with Tim Draper at the Palo Alto Starbucks raising millions over a latte and if I were to start a company, raising SV VC money would be the result of having something worth funding rather than my kid being on the same little league team with some investor’s kid. As far as “Silicon Valley” talent — that’s a myth. Companies didn’t start in SV because of the talent. They started because of that’s where they happened to live. The incentives that made SV great in the 1960s were killed off by politicians choking the golden goose.

I do believe you got free dinner, but maybe not.

> The incentives that made SV great in the 1960s were killed off by politicians choking the golden goose.

Nah, it's still there. It will be there as long as California bans noncompete agreements. (California being expensive is not because of politicians, it's because the voters want it to be expensive so they can sell you their house.)

As someone else says in the thread, all these "assurances" are based on combinations personal preference and anecdote.

I am overall responsible for the team that produces and figures out developer productivity metrics for Google.

I can assure you there is lots and lots of real data on this, so there isn't a lot of need for random supposition based on people's desires (WFH vs not) and biases. There are too many comments in this thread to read every single one, but most suppositions i read seemed just to reflect biases and personal preferences rather than any real data.

It's IMHO a little odd to see people assume that any really successful tech company is not going to be able to figure out and succeed at maintaining whatever overall level of productivity they want (IE pre-covid, pre-covid-50%, pre-covid+50%). The ability to adapt and be productive/effective in changing conditions is often one of the things that makes companies successful in the first place.

The thing that is much harder to fix is stuff like personal well being.

Care to share some of that real data? You're right about the haze of wishful thinking around the issue and seem to be in a position to clear it up a bit. You can infer something about the value of face time from the universal FAANG commitment to centralized HQs, despite the huge costs of this policy.

Here's a longer answer:

I actually really wish i could (and other companies could), because I think it would make for some really interesting papers/studies/etc.

We normally publish a bunch of our productivity, inclusion, etc research in journals and conferences. For example, https://www.computer.org/csdl/journal/ts/5555/01/09361116/1r...

For this particular topic, I believe we have published some small amount of stuff, and there is some public info in articles like this: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/18/how-google-improved-employee...

But I know for both us, and others i've talked to, there is a bunch of good reasons folks don't want to publish the more raw data, some privacy, some competitive, some legal, etc.

In this case, not releasing the data often means we don't publish more formal papers or studies because of the inability to make the underlying data available with the paper (for example).

I will say while this situation is a bit sad to me from an academic perspective, pragmatically, even with all the data from us, MS, apple, etc, i don't think it would pragmatically answer the broader questions for a whole ton of reasons.

It's definitely useful for research and further exploration, and trying to distill overall considerations and insight. It's probably useful on the internet to spike someone who says "WFH is more productive" or "Office is more productive".

But it also won't tell you what the future of work should be for your company.

Looks like, from the CNBC article, that WFH basically worsened the performance of low-level/ middle managers, which feels about right.

It also feels that some way of improving this group of people in general is sorely needed -- how does the G2G program work exactly?

ninjaedit: found this https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/learning-development-em... . Will evangelize at my company… probably will be ignored though because I'm an IC.

Working from home has actually increased productivity for the two teams I manage. Far less waisted time with "drive by" coworkers. We're also more flexible with time off when needed.

Add to that my ability to help around the house. Before I was basically absent from the house for 9-10 hours a day M-F. Now I can make my kids lunch, go on a walk with them, or sign off a little early and go to a park.

> (especially parents!)

Riiiiight... Kids are often not as big a distraction as the immature coworker(s) who can't be bothered to, you know, shut up and actually work.

My desk was near the ping pong table for a while. shudders

I am personally itching to get back into the office, at least a couple days a week. But, my team has been super productive throughout the pandemic and as of the last time we all chatted about it, I was really the only one who was concerned about getting back to the office. I do not work for Google, btw. Just experience from another tech company.

I'm sure some employees are less effective from home and others are the opposite. Looking at their earnings reports from the last few quarters, though, it is pretty clear that the company itself is reaping massive benefits from the pandemic and WFH culture.

Google's product hasn't noticeably changed at all during the pandemic. They're making more money because people are spending more time on the internet and advertisers are switching funding from traditional forms to internet ads.

Pandemic, not WFH.

on the other hand i feel vastly more productive with not spending 2-3 hours every day commuting. i will miss wfh, even though being around my teammates is nice for other reasons.

WFH during a global health crisis != WFH

That's probably a case-by-case scenario but the last year has been a struggle for me. I much more prefer my usual 30m commute over working from our 45m2 apartment with my wife doing the same, my daughter attending online classes and few apartments in my building being renovated during work hours. Man, I miss my office and my desk.

> vastly less effective (especially parents!) ... A lot of my Googler friends are itching to get back into the office

Well... are they really itching to get back into the office, or just itching for day cares to open back up?

The majority of employees and google as a whole is more productive. Their stock is up 80% in the last 12 months. Do you have a better indicator of productivity correlated to p&l?

I can assure you that a much larger cohort of employees are vastly more effective. No commute alone is a MASSIVE gain.

I can assure you all these "assurances" are just based off personal preferences and anecdotal stories.

There are pros and cons with office work and WFH, and some people prefer one over the other. A full remote arrangement isn't for everyone, despite how the overwhelming number of introverts on HackerNews paint it as the objectively the best way going forward for all companies.

Please don't frame the community as being on one side of a divisive issue (invariably, the side the commenter disagrees with). It's a trope of lame discussion. You can make your case for the view you think is correct without that.

The community is divided on divisive issues. It's as simple as that.

Heck, I'm an introvert and I recognize that the increased friction in communication has a significant negative impact.

I'm also a bit put off by the "it's so great not having a commute" people. Commuting does suck, but they voluntarily signed up for it. Meanwhile those that chose tiny apartments near their offices didn't sign up for spending all day in cramped quarters trying to work from a couch.

> Meanwhile those that chose tiny apartments near their offices didn't sign up for spending all day in cramped quarters trying to work from a couch.

They literally did. I don't see any difference between choosing living an hour from work or choosing living in a cramped up flat near work.

No, the point was that the choice of where to live was made before the pandemic sent people to work from home.

> despite how the overwhelming number of introverts on HackerNews paint it as the objectively the best way going forward for all companies.

Hacker news is no more pro work from home then people IRL I see.

And division among people I know in person is not introvert/extrovert at all. It is more about living arrangement and family. Single people living alone want to go to work. Those who have family and expect their partners to do all childcare, prefer to go to work and socialize with colleagues after work. Those who have kids and want to be present fathers or have partners with equally important work want to work from home.

You can use anecdotal stories or, you can look at quarterly earnings. That’s how one can objectively measure how productive a company is. If the earnings are there, it’s hard to prove that remote is, a least, a hindrance to productivity.

Most employers don't give workers a choice when it comes to open floor plan. And yet everyone sucked it up and did it to pay the bills.

My point is this: If you have to be effective working remotely you will be effective working remotely.

It's not really binary though. I can be somewhat more or less effective depending on my work environment.

It's also possible that wfh was beneficial in the short term, with projects already mostly planned and the benefits of in-person collaboration continuing via inertia, but will be detrimental long term. Maybe. I don't know.

And that is the big kicker to me: too many unknowns to definitively say one way or the other.

>It's not really binary though.

Might be. Depends on the company too.

I have a hard time imagining a complete uprooting from your normal routine during a global pandemic would result in a short-term productivity gain that would then decrease as workers become more accustomed to remote work and are less stressed due to the lack of a pandemic moving forward.

That's not to say you don't make good points, I just can't imagine your points outweighing what I perceive as more heavily influencing factors.

Anecdotal as everyone else, but what the grandparent describes has been exactly my experience. When we went all-remote last year we were in the later stages of an existing project, and it wasn't much of a problem because everybody had a good understanding of what we had to do. Getting our next project off the ground was much harder due to communication challenges.

I agree. I find the claims about WfH being inefficient very amusing.

I work for an international American SW company in Czechia. We have a big office there, but for the first ~8 years there (since 2006), I was the only person working with a team of Americans, or only with a teammate, because they "outsourced" work to us. It was more annoying than WfH today, I remember all the really incomprehensible phone calls (no reliable video, only screensharing), making sure I get everything I need done in the morning so I could batch the questions for afternoon due to time zones, etc. And yet, my bosses were happy about my performance (more than they are today).

(It's interesting when I think about it now, IMHO constant communication can have downsides, too. There is something about having a half day where it's only you who has to solve a problem, and no one can help, you will learn a lot.)

OTOH, I was never a big fan of work from home, but I tried it now and I found it more pleasant with almost no downside. It's very similar to how I used to work in the era of "outsourcing", actually it's much easier.

To sum up, outsourcing was efficient but individual WfH isn't? Gimme a break, of course it's propaganda.

> No commute alone is a MASSIVE gain.

This is a huge one for me and anyone more productive in the morning, I'm no longer wasting an hour of my most productive time just getting to work. Then you've got the extra 2 hours a day to relax and get various things done that also make me more productive.

Eh, I'm not so sure. As the parent said, time will tell.

Live in an area with a better commute. Mine is 8 minutes.

I'll live where ever I want to thanks. I have ZERO desire to life close to anything and I can you do a great job at home. If you can't that's on you not me.

100% this. There are some loud people trying to say the opposite, but a lot of places have had productivity tank.

I was talking to someone at a large financial company (think 10s of thousands of employees). Their workplace productivity went through the floor when things went work from home. They were willing to allow work from home for now to keep people safe, but will not be continuing in the future due to the efficiency loss.

A lot of people don't want to hear this, but it's the truth.

Work from home where I work has been kind of awful from a communication and camaraderie standpoint, even though the company was already rather heavily invested in remote work, Google chat, etc.

No, I think the truth is that it varies. A counter anecdote is my own example: Our team of network, software and systems engineers has seen productivity increase over the past year of wfh - albeit with casual access to the office and labs.

This totally depends. My experience has been that my team is way more effective since work from home (we even work less hours) but that doesn’t mean other teams have the same experience.