What a miserable work culture it must be for them to even have the nerve to declare this.

Downvote away, I’ll be hiring some of them! ;-)

I hate threads like these because people will circle around generic talking points while missing all the nuance and context behind this actual decision, like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks, giving a heads up, having a well-defined policy.

Do you have the policy document or data to back that up? Asking because I am friends with a Google engineer who asked to go remote and was denied (even though nothing about their role requires them to be in-person).

They tend to promote from within and along the engineering track, which results in engineers reasoning from "What would I (a high-performing engineer) do?" and not necessarily what's best for the team.

Full disclosure I work at Google.

https://careers.google.com/jobs/results/?distance=50&has_rem...

They may have reversed stance after I left, but I'm pretty sure the "15%" number cited is "15% of people that were considered eligible and had their manager support were declined."

15% is still something I consider significant. Why were they denied? Are there people getting preference based on manager or their own personal reputation?

No. These are shitty capitalist ploys trying to tell you the above is true when it's blatantly false. And well, they'd work you for no money, but they wouldn't have workers.

If anything, I'd claim to live in a high CoL area while being in the Midwest. They get their quality work, I get my commensurate compensation. Fuck them for thinking otherwise.

As others mentioned, if Google ignored supply and demand and paid for quality of work only, why would they pay everyone the high rates that were originally set by supply and demand in Silicon Valley? They’d pay a normal living wage for someone in India.

On the other hand, in theory the bottom markets will see their rates rise quickly (because they merged into one wider remote market) if remote is as popular as it apparently is.

Your compensation is not absolute dollars but what you can get for those dollars.

Ideally the same dollar would get you the same everywhere in the world. That is not the case atm.

Instead, people at your new location will provide the same quality of work for fewer dollars, because they see what they can get for those dollars. That is your capitalist competition.

Well, actually it is.

The people who applied and were accepted for fully remote aren’t the ones that need to go back. Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.

You’re getting tripped on the wording of an article that was hastily written after a reporter got wind of an email

But you are still using the same word that I was getting tripped up on. Either the return to the office is optional or it is mandated. It can't be both.

This seems win-win to me. Teams and orgs that consider remote-friendliness important can operate that way, while teams and orgs that don't think that can keep the team colocated. Ultimately, it means the vast majority of people's preferences are accommodated. Worst case, changing teams at Google is very smooth.

If it were truly "optional" for everyone even without manager approval, that's effectively "remote" because some people not being present means the team works in a largely remote fashion, and it also means space planning for expensive offices is very hard and result in office layouts that are not as productive.

For a big company with 100k+ employees, this seems like a good call IMO because it allows all working models to co-exist, and it can easily be tweaked after seeing how RTO goes.

The decision to work as remote-first or office-first is, as I understand it, much more broadly available than it was. You are given the option to go remote-first and not return to the office at all. Returning to the office is optional.

If you choose to go office-first, then you will be expected to actually be at the office. In that sense, return to the office is mandatory.

The only thing that's really happening is them saying "you need to commit to one approach or the other, and act accordingly". This is understandable, you need to plan office capacity and other such practical considerations

Googlers with assigned desk will be expected to show up to the office. Applications for remote transfers have been available for like six months and in the cases where engineers are unable to work remotely due to their role or their management disapproving, transfers within Google to other teams that are remote-friendly are nearly trivial.

It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work where the word "mandate" with its connotation of a hard and unpleasant rule makes sense.

That seems weird for outside sales (i.e. large accounts) given you're often near your customers and (in normal times) should be in customer meetings rather than sitting in an office.

Worked for many tier 1 investment banks in the techiest corners of each org and some cases felt like startups with all the shiny new toys everyone else was using vs the dark ages of customized software straight from the nineties or some other entirely-in-house-built abomination in other places.

You need to make sure you aren't replacing them so fast that the median experience level is dropping, but it's certainly the case that the average experience level of the incoming cohort is expected to be lower than the outgoing one.

You see it at institutions, hundreds of individual "low bus factor" risks spread throughout the organization. The company would survive, but it would be a tough time, and a terrible place to work, during a large knowledge exodus.

If you get some talented engineers to join you because of the shortsightedness of Google then kudos to you, and more the loss for Google.

I'm not going back to the office ever there's no need to.. the company I work for has experienced explosive growth since we went remote ..brought on and maintained 100 new hires.

If they try to force me I'll find something else!!

Cities are dying some cause of remote work but aren't we tired of the govt controlling our lives (Biden's remark of all remote workers must go back..ha lmao). Umm the solution is to innovate cities and offer programs for remote workers to come live there for three to six to 12 months ..have a startup that owns buildings in all cities for remote workers to live in and congregate as well let's them jump from town to town every many months. City living Innovation not more govt control/lame ideas is what is needed to spur the economies of cities and their future prosperity.

Remote work in a lot of roles, especially knowledge working, is just the way forward and will be how these things function in 50 years. Companies that are able to scout talent globally will simply out compete those that insist on a local labor pool. It makes no sense to perpetuate commuting, just in terms of the environmental damage it causes, when we've shown that this work can still be done without having to load a single ~200lb occupant and spend energy moving them + 3000lbs of metal around for two hours a day five days a week. If you are finding your juniors are falling behind, then step up instead of giving up and work hard to come up with a viable pipeline that isn't "well hopefully in two months we are back in the office." Plenty of companies and organizations and research groups have functioned entirely distributed for years now even before covid. It's not rocket science.

We don't need to imagine it. Those of us who lead teams have tried, and we know it's harder to onboard people, and to socialize as a company, when you're working remotely.

I think the advantages of remote working greatly outweigh the disadvantages, and I will continue to work remotely if I can, but there's no need to pretend everything is better. It obviously isn't.

I think it's worth separating the two parties in this (the employer and employee). IMO too many comments focus just on the employee view and then wonder why the employer behaves differently.

Most employees seem to love it, although some certainly don't (I fit in the second category) - but most seem to find it preferable.

However my experience leading a remote team is that IMO it is worse for our particular company from a corporate perspective. On-boarding and knowledge sharing is worse, relationships degrade and it's hard to distinguish someone who is just struggling/slow and needs help with absenteeism.

I wouldn't say it's worse, but different. It requires thinking through the onboarding process in a deliberate manner. I think a lot of companies used to get away with onboarding by having the new person spend a bit of time with HR and then throwing them in with their team and hope it works out.

My onboarding process now is scheduled out and takes 1-2 weeks depending on the position. I make sure the new person has their computer a couple days before they start. I ask the new person during and after the process what's working/not working and refine the process from their feedback. I keep an open block of time every day for the person as long as they need it, etc...

I should add that we were already remote pre-covid, but still had to deal with all the same issues when we went remote. One of the biggest challenges we had and I see is that remote magnifies already existing issues around communication and management. I remember one of my managers asking 'how will I know if someone is working if they are not in the office?' and my response was 'how do you know if they are working now?'.

I'm also not going to argue in absolute terms that in-person or remote is better/worse than the other. They are just different.

Like, when an existing team goes WFH (e.g. when lockdown first kicked in), everyone already knows each other. You have your banter channels, you know who knows what about what, and for those conversations you'd prefer not to have on Slack you have non-company backchannels (e.g. WhatsApp).

But in the long term, after new people join the company and others leave, this degrades. It takes far longer for newbies to get to know people, social ties weaken, and trust falters. Doubly so for early-career joiners, who likely haven't worked an office job before.

That's all true if you let it happen. You don't have to though. If you recognize the problem you can put resources into addressing it.

We applaud ourselves for self-studying, being fairly educated on average with backgrounds in being taught to self-study effectively and finding information online. Yet somehow the idea of juniors doing those exact same things, with or without digital aid of seniors, is unthinkable to many.

Surely somewhere this story feels off.

For many, the exact forced socialization through work, commutes and office culture that's going on is what drains them to the point of isolating themselves afterwards. I expect most people no longer working under that system to find a way out of their social isolation, given the friction for those venues isn't too high.

Maybe if we stop pushing people into a catch-all environment and give them time, money and means to solve their problems, they will.. solve their problems. All of those three have been dwindling over the past few years.

I don't get this idea that you need to be friends with your colleagues. Hpw does that improve productivity?

Professional yes, friendly even sure but friends? That's for leisure time and it shouldn't matter if their your colleagues or not.

Of course this is at a company that was remote before the pandemic.

When a person signs in the first day, they already have a bunch of meetings scheduled (meet and greets, explainers, etc...), some work assigned (I like to have a bit of a goal when exploring a new code base, but this work isn't expected to get done right away), etc...

It can be done well, but takes some thinking through.

People they want to keep will be able to continue WFH if they want. People who are on the margins or destined for the Performance Improvement Camps will have to come in and warm seats if they want to eke out a year or two more of existence.

(1) people who make their bosses look bad are first to go.

(2) next are people who are perceived to cost their bosses time, regardless of whether it's their fault.

(3) after that, it's usually the infanticide cases: i.e., the people who did nothing wrong but haven't been there long enough to establish themselves.

The infanticide is especially ugly, because (a) it means the company is firing people basically at random, and (b) it rapes the shit out of the resumes of the people affected, because they now have <1 year jobs to explain. The reason it happens is that, empirically, most of the people cut in mass stack-rank purges are new members of underperforming teams... who, by inspection, have had the least to do with the team's underperformance.

Underperformance does get people fired, but rarely. It's at least as likely to get someone promoted, because underperformers usually have a career's worth of experience of being shitty, and therefore have developed such political skills they can easily fail up every time.

Not at Google, you can't. Firing someone who's performing abysmally still takes up to 6 months, between all the process and PIPs and paperwork and shit.

At my work at very anti-remote employer, there are so many people who have obtained permanent remote. So I wouldn't be surprised people who Google thinks valuable would get individual arrangements and other who just themselves think they are valuable are in for rude surprise.

That's how tech companies usually do layoffs. Rather than admit they overexpanded and have to cut people (or that they are cannibalizing their own people to boost executive compensation) they blame it on departing workers by increasing the PIP-rape cutoff.

Basically a company's last effort to cover their butts before firing you. If you contest the termination, they can claim they gave you fair warning and a chance to improve.

If you're ever on one, the sensible course of action is to look for another job. You're next on the chopping block.

This sentence amuses me a bit. Does that also mean that American Democracy has only been proven to work for up to 245 years? :-)

OP's point is that 2 years of remote work isn't a test that a company can successfully go through a lifecycle of a team of employees. You know, onboard a grad, get them up to speed, get useful productivity, maintain whatever system/documentation, have them leave AND repeat this until the original members of the team are all gone AND then check that things are still ticking along well.

It may be that said companies are "going well" because there is 1 person left holding the fort while a bunch of new starters fumble around with their remote work, not getting up to speed properly.

Unlikely maybe? But the point is that 2 years isn't a proper test of such working conditions.

EDIT: remove political rub.

And when I say I am now working 11 years remote and was always more productive compared to be before (9 years in offices) you'll immediately say "anecdotal evidence", right?

Maybe look into your bias. It does look like you're trying to find scientific reasoning to support your subjective preference. That's not OK. Let's at least have an objective discussion.

Demeaning the positive results of remote work by pettily narrowing down their results to super specific borders, while at the same time implying that office work is the go-to thing to do is not being objective.

I think a key question here is how long and how often do you need to see someone to establish and maintain those relationships.

There were exporters/importers and othe long distance businesses relationships for a long time, so I don't think its every day for years.

  > It works well when you already have a bunch of personal relationships between teammates that were established while the company was in-person.

Two years is nothing. You just got warm in your cloths and started to perform.

Edit: There most be impossible to have a stable engineering "culture" in such companies.