Google recommends all North America employees work from home

[bitL]

One pandemics and FAANG learns about advantages of remote work. I can imagine FB's productivity goes way up as people wouldn't need to share the same huge open office. Maybe they'll even figure out some useful ideas in the end...

[HumanReadable]

I don't know I'd measure it, but if someone can provide a good measure, I'd be willing to bet against wfh increasing productivity.

I have a feeling a lot of value is created during casual lunch conversations.

[blahblah12]

Anecdote, at one of the affected companies and we’ve been wfh. I honestly think my productivity has tanked. That’s the general sentiment for other folks that I’ve talked to, too

[antiterra]

I was significantly more productive in that huge open office than at home, even when the rest of my team was in a different office. Open offices are significantly flawed, but productively working at home is tough for a lot of people.

[untog]

I actually think it could backfire. Remote work that is thoughtfully implemented can definitely be a productivity boost, but thrown together last minute stuff like this is going to make people more wary of remote, not less.

[natalyarostova]

Well... The counter is that I have trouble being productive when my city is slowly being shut down and I'm scared of a pandemic lol.

[tylerl]

Oh yes? A productivity bonanza you think? I'm in the Seattle area and my office has been shut down for at over a week now. It's not been as rosy as you think. Here's what it's actually like:

First, the company has always been extremely supportive. Many employees have been working from home exclusively for years and nearly all of us WFH from time to time at least. The processes and expectations are well established. Engineers have always been supplied with a laptop in addition to their workstation, so WFH has always been immediately possible for everyone. You get your pick of hardware, but all the systems and services and processes have been optimized to make it reasonable (not just possible) to get serious engineering work done with nothing but a Chromebook. I've seen many programmers working _at the office_ from a Chromebook because they liked the interface. But for most of us... it's not optimal.

Corp work has to be done on Corp-owned hardware. This is enforced by technical controls that can't readily be circumvented, so even if you have a great computer at home, you'll be working from your laptop. Many of us at the kitchen table. Unless, of course, you've gotten a corp-issued rig in your house... which can't have happened in the past couple of months because the computer hardware supply chain in China has been shut down for a long time. Think you'll just go buy a nice monitor from Best Buy and dock it with your laptop? You weren't the first to think that; computer monitors are sold out across the city (having 4 giant tech companies all go 100% WFH at the same time will do that).

At a team level, it's been a mess. Productivity is definitely not up. We still get a lot of stuff done and we haven't adjusted any of our forecasts, but coordination has become a whole lot harder. Sure the company has been generally ready for this for a long time, but as individuals we were a bit blind-sided by the suddenness of it. Oh, and the local school district has gone "remote-learning" as well for this month (think WFH, but for 9-year-olds), so local parents are doubling as home-school proctors. It's not a distraction-free environment.

Thing is, we wouldn't have offices if it we didn't work more efficiently there. It's not like working from home is something foreign to us; like I said, we all do it as often as we like. Each of us maybe a couple of days a month, as circumstances require. But sending everyone home at the same time, that hasn't been the utopia it might seem to the casual onlooker.

[frenchman99]

Productivity is only a compelling argument if employees keep working the same hours, which they shouldn't unless they get paid more: producing more without any more salary is just another way of working for free. And while remote work has its upsides, it has its downsides too: loneliness is one that I've experienced myself and heard other colleagues mention.

[sidibe]

If schools close it will really muddy the data and make it look like remote work is bad.

[Infinitesimus]

FAANG employees who's jobs benefit from face-time will probably not see a productivity boost tho. But let's see where this experiments takes society

[siruncledrew]

I don’t know... I pessimistically have doubts that employees “won’t return to the office again” - as some headlines or hot takes have alluded - as a result of WFH.

IMO, it’s a real estate thing more than a productivity thing.

If we’re talking about weeks-months of WFH, then going from Office->WFH->Office seems like the more likely plan. Like how experiencing a blizzard may mean not going to the office for 1-2 weeks, but at some point a return will happen.

Companies that own/rent nice, expensive buildings to contain hundreds/thousands of employees are not going to write it off and stop using them for full-remote all of a sudden. The physiological value of WFH is not as quantifiable to bean count as property asset value.

[Kiro]

Pretty sure productivity will go down. When I WFH I just slack off.

[decebalus1]

There's remote work and there's remote work.. I used to work remotely for a day or two a week but now after one straight week of working from home and not having any social interaction due to the coronavirus thing, I'm climbing up the walls a bit. There is barely any traffic on the street here in the Seattle area, everyone is anxious and I personally find it very hard to focus and be productive.

[ehsankia]

> FAANG learns about advantages of remote work

I'm not sure how you get to that conclusion. Or were you saying that as "they will now learn about the advantages after this experiment"?

I also don't think it's a clean experiment as many other factors are impacting people's productivity anyways, but the results will definitely be interesting to look at.

[teekert]

Cheers to that, I'm "forced" to work from home this week, I seriously hope some benefits for higher management will emerge. I predict so. I hope the will thoroughly evaluate this week.

[jariel]

So the most profitable companies of all time will zillions of intelligent workers have thus far been unable to grasp a simple and easy way to jump their profitability substantially? Hmm ...

[bryanrasmussen]

I think it depends on your home life. My productivity goes really down, however I assume most people have it better than I do.

[throwaway1777]

The only advantage is not getting sick with a deadly disease. Productivity is not the goal and will probably decrease.

[starpilot]

Or it'll go down as people get distracted by YouTube, video games, family, porn.

[animalnewbie]

MAGA not FANG, Netflix and facobook haven't recommended WFH yet.

All of MAGA have though- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22540831

[beamatronic]

Maybe they will learn that big fancy offices are a big waste of money. And so is flying people to big fancy conferences.

[realityking]

Being based in Europe, Germany specifically, it seems like the reaction to this situation is much more intense in the US than in Europe. I haven’t heard of any employers going full WFH or universities closing outside of Italy.

And theories why the reaction in the US is or seems to be more intense?

[miguelmota]

It's interesting that Google only recommends it but doesn't make it mandatory. I also wonder how many of those people that do want to work remote end up going to coffee shops and/or order food from postmates where the delivery guy is all around town and the employee still ends up getting contaminated with the virus and spreading it in their household.

[meditativeape]

Not just NA, all EMEA employees are recommended to WFH as well, with the exception of Italy, which is mandatory WFH. Anyone know how other companies in FAANG are handling EU offices? Situation there seems direr than the U.S...

[htrp]

Does anyone at google actually have food in their fridge?

[Xorlev]

I'm sure this is tongue in cheek, but Googlers are just people who also go grocery shopping and have families to feed.

[xen0]

I'm completely comfortable in extrapolating from a sample of size of one to say "No; Googlers do not have food in their fridges".

[CydeWeys]

Absolutely. I have to feed myself on weekends. And I'm not gonna be one of those people who eats out for every meal.

[cellar_door]

By the looks of the empty premade food section at the Mountain View Trader Joe's earlier today, no.

[Mountain_Skies]

In the US, if you catch the virus while at a mandatory work event, would that qualify you for workman's compensation during your recovery?

[scrumbledober]

Does anyone know the largest employer to have recommended all employees work from home?

[ineedasername]

My workplace had a ban on WFH. The virus is forcing them to reconsider that, at least temporarily.

[Jam-B]

According to The Atlantic, 4384 people have been tested in the U.S. for Coronavirus, as of 4 p.m. Monday. Source : https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

[cosmodisk]

It's interesting how suddenly remote work becomes so attractive.Just yesterday I sat in the management meeting, where calls for remote work were getting much louder from the side of the company that'd previously refuse to even entertain such an idea.

[colordrops]

If we are able to contain the coronavirus this way, can we take advantage of the quarantines around the world and eradicate the flu and cold at the same time?

[OscarTheGrinch]

Nice thought, but we would also have to quarantine all other mammals. Maybe birds and reptiles too just to be on the safe side.

[skybrian]

That's very unlikely, but it did end flu season early in Hong Kong.

https://www.ft.com/content/ad7ae6b4-5eab-11ea-b0ab-339c2307b...

[adreamingsoul]

My employer here in Norway is encouraging people to WFH.

[pico303]

I honestly don't understand why people think hiding out at home is the solution. How can we possibly hunker down and hide in our four walls for the 6-12 months it would take for this to maybe fade?

[JMTQp8lwXL]

If the disease is only communicable for a few weeks after a person gets the virus, and everyone hunkers down for a month, then it should seriously impede an exponential rise in infections.

[rsynnott]

The intent isn't to avoid the virus; it's to slow down the progress of the virus. If everyone gets it at the same time, it will be very, very bad.

[beamatronic]

Why any tech company is resisting this, I don’t know.

[vlovich123]

Which ones are? I believe last week they quarantined their Seattle offices & this week they've done Bay Area (& it sounds like Google is taking this even further). I'm sure the reason it's "slow" is that it's logistically challenging to figure out policies for this as its totally unprecedented (policies here include figuring out how to handle all the special/unique cases they didn't think through originally because it's so rushed).

[bobobob420]

Why are comments saying no more paywall links getting downvoted. Some of the top comments are always hating on sources not to post from and no one mentions paywall linked.

[justlexi93]

This is for the health safety of their workers, a lot of companies have implemented the same working set-up due to Covid-19.

[brianpgordon]

I'm excited to be starting in Mountain View soon but I'm pretty apprehensive about having an effective orientation and getting up to speed if everyone's working from home. I've read that orientation is supposed to be a big event where you meet tons of people from around the world and learn together about internal Google tech and culture. I would hate to miss out on that experience because of the coronavirus fears.

[jumpinalake]

Can people please stop posting paywall’d links? It’s annoying to only being able to read the headline. If this is just a thing because I’m in Canada then that’s different.

[kps]

I'm in Canada — and so is Raymond Hill, who is your friend. But in this case you're missing nothing; all the substance is in the title.

[pfdietz]

So, how many Google employees (especially on the west cost) will now move to low living cost places?