But Google let most people who asked to go remote, go remote. And said several times that if you haven’t asked to go remote yet, they’ll give you a 30 day notifications before you need to go back

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.

>like allowing almost any SWE to go remote that asks

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).

A little birdie told me that most denials were for specific roles (eg some entire departments were not going to let employees go remote, mostly not engineering). In engineering the bird told me most denials were due to being very junior, working on something that needed physical access, or poor performance

Seems odd to have the juniors and poor performers sit around in an office together while everyone else is at home

There are other people who prefer to be an office that the juniors and poor performers can learn from...

The large majority of SWEs didn't apply for remote work.

Imo SWEs aren't on top of things like applying for remote work, and most who will, will do it on the last day they can

I find it very hard to believe that in the next month like half of the company is going to apply for remote positions. We didn't see this happen the last time we were within 30 days of a planned return (on Jan 3).

I wouldn't accuse Google of having an effective management culture.

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.

What about being a new hire? Do they get generally approved or denied?

Anecdatum: a coworker who joined mid-pandemic was approved for remote work.

Thanks! But mid pandemic would be a year ago right? Not quite what I was thinking of as new hire, though cool to know regardless.

Yeah, but he applied for remote work when he was still pretty new. I don't remember exactly when, but only a few months in.

If you haven't been hired yet, I recommend checking the box for "remote-eligible jobs" and telling the recruiter that's what you want.

Full disclosure I work at Google.

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

I am a google manager of a hybrid remote team. It generally depends on your manager and your VP; both have to sign off. I’ve heard rumors that it’s harder for Junior members to get transferred, but I had two successful transfers, a junior engineer with a transfer request outstanding, and hired a remote worker today.

Orgs vary. There are absolutely people who had applications denied. All I can say is that in my org (hundreds of people), every single application was accepted.

OP's article says 15% of requests were denied, i.e. 85% of requests were approved.

At least until Q4 2021, Google also told large groups of employees not to bother applying for remote, as their request will automatically be denied due to a combination of role / team / organisation / tenure / office location / remote work location.

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."

>Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.

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

The most common reason is being a junior employee, who could still benefit from in-person mentorship.

There's still more nuance here - you can switch to remote, but will you get the same compensation?

No, you won't, just like you wouldn't if you switched offices. Google is and always has been very clear about this. They pay market rates based on location.

You do keep your compensation if you don't move your address, otherwise you get paid a market rate adjustment for that area, which from what I've seen is quite fair.

Yeah, market rates, but those studies end up in bad offers outside tech-hubs as top 80% of the market is still targeting way less skilled people than the one they "want" to retain. It's almost seems like the policy is designed in this way so it sounds fair and at the same time keeps new locations from popping up

Because where your computer, desk, and chair matters of the quality of work you do?

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.

If companies had to settle on exactly 1 pay rate everywhere around the world, the last thing I’d be willing to bet on is that they choose the salary of their most expensive COL location.

It has nothing to do with cost of living; it’s market rates which are set by supply and demand. London is super expensive but the pay is much lower than even the rural American pay scale since UK engineers don’t get paid well anywhere and will work for Google even if they’re getting half of what they’d get in the US. They could move to the US—Google would support the transfer—but they don’t, so there remains a supply of people who are willing to work for that rate in London.

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.

They throw around "market rates" like there's a local market. Grouping employees into buckets by postal code makes sense for work-from-the-office arrangements.

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.

You’re right. Let’s align everyone worldwide on the salary of Google Hyderabad

You sound very angry.

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.

> Your compensation is not absolute dollars

Well, actually it is.

There is not a whole lot of nuance to the word "mandate". If Google was truly this amenable to requests to go remote, why "mandate" employees back to the office rather than make it optional? Sure, welcome people back who want to be in the office, but don't require people to be there.

Because the article reporting on it is shitty. Why not let the tens of thousands of Google employees who actually know what’s happening clear things up?

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

>Only the people with an assigned desk in the offices that are re-opening are mandated to go back.

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.

It's team and role dependent, so it pretty much is "both" at the company level.

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.

It can be, and is, both.

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

The fact that the policy is company wide certainly lends more pressure towards returning to the office. That being said something can be mandated but poorly enforced. In the Google case, it appears that the enforcement is tuned down by an (apparently) usable exception mechanism. One can infer based on this, that in the language of the article, the new policy is somewhere between “mandated” and “optional”. With all due respect, I think you are being overly pedantic.

Notably, the word "mandate" is not in the actual communication sent to Googlers. That word was chosen by the author of this headline.

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.

>It is mostly orgs like Sales that have hard rules against remote work

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.

There is already a huge google engineer hemorrhage. A number of principal engineers and other folks I thought would be google lifers moved to snowflake. I don't expect this to affect Google's ability to continue to grow at 15-20%, though. There will be armies of younger people who still want to jumpstart their career there.

Google has always lost top people to the next hip large-but-not-too-large tech company as they try something fresh / try to win the tech stock lottery. It was Facebook over 10 years ago, for example. You could get counter-offers to not leave for FB in that era. Is the current attrition any different?

Google needs long tenure more than other companies due to its large reliance on in-house software. This is yet another move to shoot themselves in the foot. Luckily, network effects will keep them in business for another few decades.

Totally anecdotally, lagging comp and bureaucracy are much bigger sources of attrition than remote work. For the most part, anyone who wants to go remote can.

Replacing senior engineers with juniors isn't sustainable though and their software quality is going to get a lot worse. Probably sooner than they think.

I mean... sustainably replacing senior people with junior people is the predominant arc of life throughout all human history. People retire or die.

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.

It's not just about experience as an individual though, Google has hordes of arcane institutional knowledge about it's own platforms to maintain, like any large organization. Even if they were replacing everyone with senior devs and not juniors, you'd still be losing little bits of that each time someone left.

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.

This makes perfect sense, some people will be suited to some days on-site, and some off-site, but there will be others like myself where the commute is now a deal breaker.

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.

Of course they'll lose some people but an office is enough of a competitive advantage to justify it.