Like one expense they saved on is sending out recruiters and engineers to likely thousands of career fairs, recruiting sessions, etc. Nobody would reasonably argue that skipping all of them is a sustainable strategy long term even if it hasn't hurt them much so far.

Oh, it is causing pain already. Recently I pitched to a friend fixing a component as a great project for a very junior engineer. Only to find out that neither his nor my team has any sufficiently junior engineers on hand. So the oceans will keep getting ever so slightly boiled until we hire some, or one of the too senior engineers runs out of more important things to do. Sure it won't bring Google down right away, but having cruft like that accumulate kills efficiency in the long run. And Google thrives in cutting those epsilons.

Google cuts epsilon’s in engineering cost that operate on efficiencies of 10s of thousands engineers or engineering components that underpin multiple high-value products. They have entire teams of very senior engineers dedicated to this problem. Conversely, a smaller project wouldn’t demand this kind of attention because solutions don’t scale well and so are managed as local costs at the most local level possible.

What kind of scale project are you and your friend working for and which component is the problem in?

Note that I’m not disagreeing with the consequences being that there are ever growing tech debt that will live on forever and you just try to manage that and fit that into “fixit week” or “20% time”. That’s kind of the discount for why they still pay the crazy salaries for all work, not just in the teams closest to the revenue generation.

We're SREs working on the rollout system used for vast majority of internal software. The component in quesiton collected enough tech debt to start showing "unfixable" defects, but still not enough to justify anything more than "make it retry harder". Any year now it will become worthwile to quantify the actual impact.

Sounds like a Sisyphyian effort to have the software retry harder (harder meaning in a different, more effortful way, rather than increment the retry loop counter).

With the amount of resumes they get, I'd question how important it is for tier 1 companies. I have gone to career fairs and learned a great deal about companies I had never heard of, but it seems as though Google would just receive thousands of applications per opening and approach it algorithmically anyways. Although I've had contacts get poached via LinkedIn or given challenges from Googling certain tech topics.

Google is one of the most sought after companies, but this is due to them actively advertising Google as a great place to work. Actually talking to someone who works at Google makes it more real and attainable in candidates minds and reinforces Google as a desirable place to work

If Google were to stop attending, they risk newer generations of engineers shifting their perspective on Google, especially these days when most portrayals of Google in the media are negative.

The point of Google attending these events isn't for recruiting. It's to advertise their brand to job seekers. Seeing a bunch of candidates flocking to the Google recruiters triggers FOMO is candidates who might not have been as enthusiastic

Sounds about right. The OP sounds like "Why does coke advertise their product so much when they are the most well known product in existence"

Because that status will decline without advertising.

I always thought about this, but not about Coca-Cola, since people actually need to want to buy it to acquire it, but Visa and Mastercard have huge advertising budgets, notably for events like the World Cup and the Olympics, and I never met someone who actively pursued a specific card flag when getting a new card and instead just get whichever their bank has to offer.

But then someone at the bank has to decide between Visa and Mastercard.

And this persons surely thinks "ok, the conditions are roughly the same, what is going to make sure none of my clients even bother to ask why we chose this".

So the bank picks something they know that for sure their clients won't question, and here you are. Even if a newer provider emerged with better conditions, they probably wouldn't pick it because they don't want to deal with the inevitable questions.

But they're not getting Amex or Discover.

Plus, thanks to all the ads they might be pulling out that Visa or Mastercard when they pay for something, rather than using cash. Or they might use the Visa or Mastercard online rather than Paypal. etc etc...

I wonder if this is not a good argument to actually make all kind of advertising illegal.

There is no way that ensuring huge entities with enormous capital are able sustain their dominant position thanks to flushing cash at ads is healthy.

I've yet to see a situation where advertising was better than word of mouth, personal experience or expert feedback.

It seems it's all gain for them, no gain for us.

I recall Google coming to our career fair (maybe 10 years ago now...) and they weren't taking resumes or doing interviews, it was just them talking for a minute and telling you to go online to apply. Still had a queue of people probably 30-50 deep waiting all day.

I think that’s a fair take although my expanded position was more along the lines of whether spending 9 figures on this particular channel was the most effective use of resources given the extent of industry domination, when perhaps other channels could promote the brand for marketing and recruitment purposes.

Unsolicited resumes are the most noisy channel of all. TBF I'm somewhat surprised it is even cost effective to keep reading them. But, send an engineer to spend an hour talking at a university and you get a bunch of very promising leads every time.

Source: I've been an interviewer in Google for a number of years and talked at a university at some point.

How do you determine promising leads among hundreds?

Let’s say for example you send someone to UMinnesota or UMD.

What’s the process here to get leads for internships or new grad roles?

The folk hanging around to ask follow-up questions are my bet. Some of the questions really show the person is sharp enough to suggest you can put them into the system.

Obviously this misses the good leads that simply don't care about your today's topic. That's in line with Google's approach being fine with a lot of false negatives.

It helps because they can also do the initial screening round with basically the entire graduating CS class in-person at the university.

That is practical. Wouldn’t have thought of that.

Companies compete with each other for the best talent, and often lose. They could always stop spending on recruiting and hire anyone from the pile of resumes, but they aren’t looking for just anyone.

One could argue that the money spent sending people to career fairs would be better spent on bigger signing bonuses. I assume Google uses data to make these decisions, but it could just be keeping up with the Joneses.

Why exactly would Google need to do any of that? They're Google, people will come to them for as long as they are Google (and as long as they hand out very generous six-figure salaries).

Better signal to noise ratio.

If Google saved that much money and the business didn't see a considerable negative impact (34% increase? Quite the opposite in fact.), then that news should be telling not just for Google, but for every company that previously catered to spoiled employees who jump on an airplane just to have lunch with the customer.

Two lies COVID has forcibly flushed out and helped dispel:

Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work.

Lie #2: Business travel, is a necessity.

It will be interesting to see how the corporate travel whores, spin this post-COVID in order to keep their Triple Diamond Medallion Platinum status.

Cigarette companies spent a lot of money on advertising [in Europe]. When cigarette ads were banned, they continued to sell cigarettes, but saved on the marketing budget. Still, it would not have been wise not to advertise beforehand: The level playing field is all that matters. For some reasons, e-cigarettes are allowed to advertise, and the shift to these products is substantial.

So for sales/consulting, it might be fine not to travel to your customer when nobody can. Afterwards, you might want to reevaluate.

(And I am speaking as an ex-consultant that hated corporate travel).

This is only true in an environment where nobody from any company travels.

However in a world where one company travels for conferences, lunches, in-person events, then that company will clearly have an advantage over the company that did none of those things.

True, but visits to far away intra-company campuses I suspect to be highly curtailed across the board when remote communications has been shown to work well.

They work when everybody is on the same page. Once things return to normal, it causes a prisoners dilemma. If a company is too cheap to send somebody to speak to you face to face, what else are they going to cheap out on?

I've been working through VC across the atlantic during the pandemic. It's been horrible. There have been multiple projects that took months - and I know, from past experience, that if I could hop over the atlantic for a week they'd be solved in that timeframe.

Why? Because of face-to-face experience and trust building and the ability to sit beside one another and grab someone quickly. It's 100% worth the ridiculously high costs of air travel and expenses.

Seconded. I did consulting for monitoring systems, and doing remote stuff (via email or weird late night calls) was just less effective and shitty.

We got on a plane to Spain, brought some Spanish speaking folks, and crushed the issue in 3 days. Left us with 3 days to chill, and our Spanish counterparts were keen to show us around Madrid; several were locals and actually took us to see their old neighborhoods and families.

Point is, fixed the issue quick AND had added benefits of travel. As an accountant I'd not be keen on it, but as someone who has to live and work, these things are the spice of life.

Do you do much work in this space internationally, for Spanish speaking countries? I'm in something related, and bilingual. I'm also interested in post-covid work travel.

> Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work.

I can see tech bros claiming, noshing on company catered meals, sweating in office gyms and finishing off with a massage is how world is made better place.

> It will be interesting to see how the corporate travel whores, spin this post-COVID in order to keep their Triple Diamond Medallion Platinum status.

Beautiful sentiment. I think there is "military-industrial-complex" like thing between corporate travel, hotels and airlines. So there will be enough "requirements" from clients to have face-to-face meetings, dinners and sports events to attend to. Besides off-sites and retreats are required for executives to keep the morale high of employees who do not get to travel.

Collocated teams and physical meetings work far better than trying to do 100% remote.

Some of #2 holds for academia as well

'Travel whores', lol

You are conflating problems. Digital companies gained a lot of revenue when brick and mortar stores were closed, isnt that kinda obvious?

Your "lies" are missing the "outside of a pandemic" qualifier.

What are your reasons for assuming business travel is a necessity outside a pandemic?

Why do you think remote work is only feasible during a pandemic?

> Why do you think remote work is only feasible during a pandemic?

Remote work was feasible in part during a pandemic because it had to be. When everyone is 100% remote, things aren’t bad. If companies don’t do anything to preserve that culture from during pandemic times, when folks start returning to the office again, remote work will very likely go back to sucking. Being remote you’ll very likely be the odd person out on meetings desperately trying to hear what was said and/or struggle to get a word in with everyone else jammed in a conference room.

A number of teams in my group have long had a rule that if anyone on a call is remote, everyone needs to do the call from their own computer.

I agree that the odd person out being remote is often a problem but distributed teams generally can adopt effective practices. If your company doesn't? Well, there are other companies that are going to be more effective.

I used to work in event tech and can confirm the annual event marketing budgets just for one product at Google is in the $XX millions. Multiply that by all their departments and it could easily be 100s of millions that google spends on conferences every year.

What about office perks, maintenance of space, renovation, staff, commuter credits, office events, snacks, lunches, dinner, equipment, secretaries, and security?

They've been paying rent on their offices the whole time.

If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions.

Not to mention the cost all the employees have to endure for traveling to work, wear on vehicles, gas, repairs, collisions, insurance, medical payouts due to car accidents, etc. Plus just generally the externalities of higher carbon emissions.

This assumes the presence of enough office demand to replace a Google sized company in the markets they lease in. It’s not clear that this is true.

US vacancies are projected to be 19.4% nationally. On top of that, there isn’t exactly another Google-sized employer waiting in the wings over in Mountain View.

With re-zoning this won't be a problem. Just rezone it to residential. or residential/commercial.

There's nothing Mountain View wants to do less than let anyone live there.

Also, because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years, much like how everyone living there now isn't paying any, so Google is paying for everyone's schools and sewer systems as is.

> because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years

I'm not sure what you mean. Prop 13 just caps the annual increase at 2%. I've lived in California and owned property here for 30 years. I pay property taxes.

If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0.

Similar to how if you rent the same place for long enough and it's rent controlled your rent effectively gets cheaper even though it's going up.

> If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0.

Asymptotically at infinity, you're not wrong.

I'm probably not living that long though. Meanwhile taxes do go up every year in real money.

Taxes go up in nominal money :)

Can't they game their way around that though by just increasing the assessed the value of the property? That's how my town effectively raises property taxes beyond the statutory limits. Sure you can appeal the assessed valuation but most people don't. It is expensive and time-consuming.

It’s fixed at the original assessment the last time it was sold, I think. It also applies to businesses, with the result that the car dealership next to me pays less taxes than a new condo. Inheritance does not reset it, meaning the state is effectively living under feudalism.

There was an attempt to fix this for businesses just last year, but it failed because homeowners were convinced it was a plot to get them.

No, it's fixed at when the house was built. You'll see "renovations" where the entire house minus one wall is demolished, and the new structure built around it. This allows the owners to avoid reassessment.

and if inflation is under 2% and the city always increases by the maximum of 2%, then eventually the value of the property tax paid will be infinite, right? How is that analysis useful?

If you make property tax a fixed percentage of the value of the property, it automatically adjusts with inflation.

Imagine how much nicer the cities of the world would become with many of the offices turned into residential. There would be a rebirth of local community.

With many of those offices gone, many people simply won't live in those cities. There seems to be an assumption here that people want to live in cities, but that's certainly not true across the board.

How much cost they will endure when their employees start getting insane from all the zoom meetings and working with a monitor instead of a real person?

> working with a monitor instead of a real person

Pre and post pandemic I'm still communicating with coworkers via email and slack, on the monitor. No difference at all.

Well, one difference is I used be able to hear them munch on their snacks a couple cubicles over, but I can do without that part.

Also, erasing the two hour commute, total win.

We both win with WFH.

I have a co-worker (generally a lovely person) who is about ready to explode when she hears someone crunching on an apple.

WFH, I can now eat an apple without self-consciously slow-crunching.

Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll, is fully trained, properly equipped, and demonstrates proficiency at their job..... then I'm cool letting staff work from home. I suspect Google has the leadership, supervision, and infrastructure to do all those things at a large scale. Unfortunately for my crew I find brining everyone in is waaaaay more efficient....carbon emissions aside.

> Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll

Did you mean "rapport" and "role"? Because that sentence was a bit confusing.

Also, "brining everyone in"? They are all going to be very salty after that... :)

That's a model I'd be interested in working under. It's different for everyone, but I find onboarding most efficient in person, and long-term work most enjoyable fully remote.

If the fully onboarded employees are all WFH, what good will bringing in new hires do?

If you completely ignore profits you go out of business and then the only companies left are the ones who ignore carbon. Better to get this changed at a legislative level to keep the playing field equal.

Amen.

> If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions.

To whom? Everybody is moving to work from home.

Does it matter? Even if they have to sell or sublease at a loss, it's better than paying rent on empty buildings.

If you read his comments closely, he was specifically talking about investment bankers. He talked about how it was hard to train junior bankers on deal making if not face-to-face. I think he used the term "apprenticeship". Even in the era of unlimited voice calls, emails, and video calls, as I understand, most M&A and IPO deals are still done face-to-face.

For the investment bank, many of the employees work in New York City and use a train (or bus) to commute. That is pretty low carbon intensity.

The same "apprenticeship" also applies to tech companies.

The claim is usually that people are more productive in the office. Assuming that's true, then what's actually more expensive: having existing employees commute, or employing, say, 10% more people? Even if you only care about carbon costs, what are the carbon costs of raising, educating, training, and giving healthcare and everything else to 10% more people?

Yeah.

It’s totally fine to ask everyone to stop eating meat, but millions of Americans running their cars to/from the office everyday? Not a peep.

Our politicians and business class are wholly unserious about this as they were about COVID-19.

It's also not counting any repercussions, short or long term. I don't know Google but several other friends have told me productivity is down at their companies significantly with WFH.

Also, if it's just about the perks mentioned, those perks might be part of what retains employees.

Interesting, what position are the people in that told you this? I‘ve only heard this from middle management at my company.

Software project‘s actually have less delay than usual. Don‘t get me started on why every project is ‚late‘. We‘re not even allowed to work overtime while we‘re at home.

We do see problem‘s with new hires though. They have a harder time integrating into their team.

I guess it will go up a little, but I am willing to bet that a bunch of the cases you mentioned where they had to send people around are now done online. I will be really shocked if the google IO is not an online conference going forward.

>I will be really shocked if the google IO is not an online conference going forward.

I would be very surprised. I'm connected to the tech events space and the widespread assumption is that events will go back to physical while maintaining a strong online component going forward to continue to reach more people.

It means all the consulting companies are also going to report better than expected results; no travels, food etc expenses. Clients don’t always reimburse that.

In general, the pandemic has not been great for services businesses.

Also, people might work differently, as there will be different distractions in a post covid world.