It’s going to be hard to tell what’s related to the Covid shutdown and what’s related to remote working.
Annual two digit increases in ad impressions and clickthroughs and CPMs etc are not necessarily going to happen for Google.
Access to cheap Chinese hardware manufacturing may diminish as more things near-shore, supply chains continue to be messed with by wars (trade and physical) and economic disruption generally.
Tech employee preferences are shifting in terms of what they are willing or able to work on, and where they want to work.
VCs have cut back a huge amount in general, but their emphasis is also shifting.
So, yes, it will be really hard looking back to see what's WFH/RTO related and what's just a result of a rather massive restructuring generally.
But also in addition to demanding RTO, their actual office situation sucks now. In the years before I quit Google (after 10 years of being there) they just made the actual office experience worse and worse. Cramming people in like sardines. Open concept noisy auditorium workspaces. Messing up the parking situation and requiring people to park and walk 10 minutes away while they ripped up the parking lot to build new castles to cram people into. Overhiring and overstaffing into dubious projects. Lowering quality of food and other perks. And during WFH if you actually wanted to come in there was a whole song and dance about reserving desks, and not getting any kind of permanent comfortable workstation.
I don't like working remotely. But I also despised the commuting situation; I was willing to tolerate it while the office was a pleasant environment. COVID ruined that.
Google started on the path to not being a "cool" company to work at when Ruth Porat came on as CFO. She did great things for the stock price, but long term bad things for the culture of the company.
Gonna assume it’s a “who you know” and “right place, right time.” But I’ve been holding out in AngelsList for some time.
Google is, by far, the worst place I’ve ever worked with the most useless work and uninspiring management and coworkers. I haven’t learned a damn thing in my time there. FB had its problems but I was at least learning there.
Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.
But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.
This banning of remote work is so backwards, and will only contribute to their demise from their former peak. Next thing you know Google will no longer be seen as a "cool" place to work, and face the same fate as many former behemoths like IBM and Yahoo.
At this point I wonder who even desires to work at companies like Google except for entry level hires, prestige whores, and old people with families wanting stability.