I think that the c suite makes these decisions on a much more emotional basis than they let on.

Honestly, I think they’re sad seeing their big, expensive office spaces not being fully utilized, and want to be able around and physically see workers working.

Current management practices are very inefficient. When not actively engaging with subordinates, most of the rest of their time is finger fiddling (meetings and what-not with other managers and such take up the remainder of their time, but those meetings themselves are usually not as productive as they would let on). They need subs in seats or they'll have to admit how inefficient their job is.

Are you sure it's that simple?

Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing".

It wasn't about extracting productivity, it was about imposing culture.

> Google was previously known in the wider world for imposing longer than average work days under the guise of "you love it here at the office we have pingpong and rock climbing".

Honesty, in my experience this impression is just desperate cope from people with worse work environments. My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my career by far. Hell, that's why I left.

But whenever people would ask me about all the flashy perks and I'd confirm we had them, 100% of the time they'd follow up by _telling_ me (not asking): "they work you like a dog though". It was an early and dramatic lesson in how powerfully people are chained to the just-world fallacy: their emotional incontinence was severe enough that it literally prevented them from conceiving of a work environment that was simply more pleasant than theirs.

Google's perk-filled environment doesn't need to be explained by anything but golden handcuffs + productivity boosts from having recreation/convenience onsite.

Hey hey—I didn't say one way or the other whether it was a good thing or a bad thing.

But I've been in and out of Google (Waterloo). They were there long, long hours often. Just the same, people seemed happy and fulfilled.

I don't think I would be—I covet my time. But I recognize that it wasn't designed around me, so whatever.

It's a fact of the process though: Google wanted people in the office longer, so they installed resources to keep people in the office longer. In that way, it's not overly surprising to me that they're trying to get people back into the office. Similarly with Apple: they didn't build that big fancy ring for nothing.

> Hey hey—I didn't say one way or the other whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. But I've been in and out of Google (Waterloo). They were there long, long hours often. Just the same, people seemed happy and fulfilled.

"Imposing" in your original comment is doing a lot of work here. Creating an environment that benefits your employees and allows them to be happier, more fulfilled, _and_ more productive doesn't quite fit the framing of being "imposed" upon.

You could just as well say that companies who allow remote work are "imposing" longer hours/more productivity on those for whom a flexible schedule is a better fit. But that renders the point meaningless.

But they do impose it. The 40-hour workweek was a hard fought-for standard. I would call anything above that standard as imposing. It's not a rare concept. It's why billing for overtime at an increased rate is common practice—because the extra time spent is an imposition.

Depending which team you're on, just work west coast hours from Waterloo. No one will notice.

> My time at Google was the easiest/most relaxing of my career by far. Hell, that's why I left.

Would you mind if I reach out to you? I'd be curious to learn more about your life/career path, if you're willing to share.

Sure, how can I reach you

definitelynotmmmmmbop [at] gmail [dot] com

Imposing culture and keeping people around at all hours was in the service of company productivity. At least that is their philosophy. It really is that simple.

I can confirm that we happily worked nitty days for a very long time and the perks helped keep us happy and sane. After some number of years though, your personal well of energy starts to dry up and no amount of weird crap in a fridge is going to solve it. We were very productive until that point though.

> in the service of company productivity

This is the only thing I question, given the mix of data suggesting the opposite is true. Stanford ran a project about it some time ago: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/crunc...

That may boil down to execution, though. That project emerged out of pretty scathing posts from the boiler room programming environments of EA. I'm pretty confident Google operates very differently, and probably learned from those calamities.

I doubt it.

We know that over work reduces creativity and productivity. Hell, as an outsider you can practically see this in what Google offers; they’ve totally lost their way and keep rehashing the same products in repeatedly inferior ways.

Rather, I think that they feel that it’s more productive or that it gives them more control. Neither of which is a rational argument

Given what we know about longer hours and productivity, plus Google’s low retention figures, I’m going to go with the latter.

What do we know about Google's retention figures?

Can’t speak post Covid, but last time I checked they weren’t terribly impressive. IIRC the median was 1.1 years. Facebook usually tops the FAANG charts for retention, but the numbers still aren’t great.

Would love to see some actual numbers, even pre-COVID.

(The claim is at odds with my observational data... assuming, of course, that we exclude interns and similar.)

I'd like to know that too. Anecdotally, in the past 6 months 7 people I've previously worked with on projects at Google left after having been there about 10 years.

I don't know how good the data out there is but the meme seems to be that people are moving around a lot right now. Certainly I've seen a disproportionate number of long term employees I know deciding to either retire or switch jobs.

I think people overestimate the short term impact of C-levels in these giant organizations. Google isn't run like a startup anymore. There is an existing compensation structure at place that pays employees differently based on the location they are working in. The HR and legal department has probably a pretty firm stance on assuring these structures are applied fairly and unequivocally. And if the C-suit is presented the options of cutting pay of some or raising pay of many others, we all know what a business would go for.

Really ironic given how Google isn't innovating anymore (relative to their market cap).

I'd argue the company itself isn't very productive and is just treading water with its ridiculously profitable cash cow and moat.

That's a C-suite bug.

Given the fact that they can't even put together a decent chat application it's pretty embarrassing. Hangouts was bereft of features, and the new Chat replacement adds a few more features only to be incredibly slow. Progress? Nope.

Most people I know at G are working on something related to the cash cow of "spying on people to sell them more stuff better". The number of folks working on actual hard problems seems to be very slim, though highly publicized.

One might wonder whether google employees are even creating value at this point or if they are just burning cash. What was the last product launched by Google that was a success? Which Google product hasn't gotten worse in the last 10 years? Gmail, google search, the 50 flavors of google chat, youtube, all were better 10 years ago. Maps stayed the same which is an achievement compared to any other Google products.

The C-level have had months to prepare and show data about productivity dropping and have, so far, refused to do so. At this point, they can put up or shut up. I refuse to just believe them because they say so.

The empty platitudes of “we work better together” is a giveaway that they don’t have that data.

maybe it's OK in the short term - they can keep the lights on keep current initiatives going - but it might have an impact on the process for developing new strategic initiatives. people can be 'productive' in one sense, but it might still be in the interest of the company to have some class of workers 'on site' vs WFH as a default.

I'm not saying this is definitely the case in google's situation, just... "effect on productivity" is hard to measure, and may have more than one measurement.

You're wasting your breath. It took me many years to reach this conclusion, but HN threads about Google are the official meeting place of people bitter about their failed interviews.

Just look around this thread to see how wild-eyed and frothing the conspiracy theories can get

For the record, I passed my Google interview, and they demanded that I move to NYC which I was unwilling to do. I ended up taking other work, and haven’t bothered with them since.

So perhaps don’t jump to conclusions, especially when you’re doing it to impugn other people. It’s a bad look.

> So perhaps don’t jump to conclusions, especially when you’re doing it to impugn other people. It’s a bad look.

I 100% don't doubt that there are individual people here that have irrational feelings about Google for reasons other than the one I mentioned, or that have rational-but-uncharitable feelings about them. I'm not even particularly bothered by the target: Google in 2021 has a mountain of things to answer for that I think it deserves very harsh criticism for.

But the collective IQ of HN drops about 30 points whenever they come up, far beyond the level of the general anti-big-tech attitude you generally see here. The amount of circular reasoning and comments that don't stand up to a second's scrutiny is palpably higher than in the average HN thread, and over the last almost-decade of observing this fascinating dynamic, the one constant I've noticed has been a deep and abiding bitterness. Contrast this with, say, Facebook: while they get plenty of HN hate, it's of the same type that you find anywhere, and lacks a lot of the pitiful contortions you find HNers squeezing themselves into on the topic of Google.