A bit more detail: long ago, before the time of the Great Brace War, people wrote code using all sorts of styles: tabs/spaces, short or long variable/function names, Hungarian notation or not, comments or not, long blocks or short, and so on. You could often tell which of your teammates wrote a block of code simply by newline usage. This made it hard to read and contribute code in a less familiar part of the codebase.
Google mitigated this problem at scale by introducing the concept of "readability" for each language (C++, Java, and Python, simpler times). If you had readability, you could approve another person's change for that language. If you didn't, you could still review the code, but the reviewee also had to go find someone else with readability.
After you'd accumulated a certain number of commits in a language, you could try to get your own readability by bundling up your CLs (changelists) and submitting them to the readability queue, where a certain group of senior people with readability would evaluate whether your code was sufficiently idiomatic. This process could take months, or even years if you didn't write much in a particular language. In any event, it felt like a real achievement to get readability.
The upshot of all this was that most code at Google felt authorless in a good way: if you knew and expected Google style, all the codebase felt the same, and you could concentrate on the logic flow rather than the regional dialect. And needless to say all the energy wasted on whose style was best was squelched in the readability queue.
This is all past tense because I last wrote code for Google more than 10 years ago, and I'm sure the process has changed since then. Code formatters, shared editor defaults, and presubmit checks have surely automated away a lot of the toil, and there's much less of a monorepo culture these days, so there are probably more style dialects (in addition to many, many more permitted languages).
1) go kinda eliminates a lot of the reasons for style guides to exist w/ `go fmt` and separately, I think the Go readability team made a conscious decision to approach readability differently anyway,
2) ... once you had a couple people on your local team w/ readability, if your team wanted to do things a certain way, well, style guides and formal readability wasn't really an issue anymore.
I was wondering if someone was going to ask. It's the most bizzare aspect of code reviews at Google.
And "Readability" doesn't mean you are good at a language, it means you are good at it in the way Google uses it. C++ readability is the poster child of this. Borgcron, not so much.
For anyone interested in learning Godot or building an arcade beat'em up similar to Double Dragon or Streets of Rage, I put together a 10h course on Youtube. It's broken down in episodes of 30 mins and is quite accessible to beginner / intermediate developers with little experience in Godot.
After winning the lowrezjam last year for an open-source beat'em up game I created in a week, I received quite a few requests to create a tutorial to help others build similar games. What started off as a small tutorial in November became a two-months intensive labor to stitch together a full cohesive 10-hour course spread over 20 episodes of 30 mins each. I released the entire series on youtube this weekend, hoping it would be helpful to any beginner / intermediate wanting to learn Godot or better understand how these games were made in the past.
Just to clarify, they are only banning the usage of the free offerings of Office and Workspace which do not provide the data governance / compliance features. The higher tiers of Workspace/Office provide this functionality.
It's an important point, but doesn't remove weight from the decision.
First, Google Docs is out of window either way. Then a specific budget needs to be approved to use Office, which will reduce its use to only people actually needing it (just reading docs produced elsewhere won't be enough)
Don't worry about the budget, education is the second most funded government feature in France after healthcare/social security, and before Defence [1] (in French)
(103 billions EUR for education in 2020 by the central government only, 67 for Defence, and surprisingly little resources about how much social security actually costs, on an extensive scale)
(local governments allocate more resources, mostly for the maintenance or buildings and supplies)
Teachers have had free licenses for MS Office since forever, even for personal computers)
Computers can be pretty new in most schools.
But network and host administration is more than patchy in most schools, due to a lack of qualified and dedicated employees, so they're ok with purchasing SW that works out of the box.
(We used to maintain the school computers with a small group of students when we were in HS)
Actually, free software advocates have been complaining by the price of MS products, compared to the subventions to make free software.
And anyway, MS Office is the only software consistently used in ANY branch of government. It's a staple.
Some Defence ppl have even been complaining that you might not want to run NSA-approved American SW for everything, especially as it often came on Chinese Lenovo HW.
(While top government officials reminded that the USA is friendly, and that you can't go to the extent of making chips out of the sand from Brittany, a region with cold beaches in the west of France)
So the budget and the usage for Office already exist, for everyone
> education is the second most funded government feature in France after healthcare/social security
Both of which are under heavy pressure to reduce costs, which also leads to the waves of strikes (I know, France, strikes, name a more iconic duo. But their conditions are actually super shitty). They don't have enough money to cover salary raises among the inflation, that money going to US monopolies doesn't look go under any light you put it.
> Teachers have had free licenses for MS Office since forever
Local licenses might stay, 365 ones are going away (here the free tier is targeted, and Education minister targeted Microsoft in particular to freeze new licenses)
> Actually, free software advocates have been complaining by the price of MS products, compared to the subventions to make free software.
These decisions are actually not bound to bring fully free software in the mix. Proprietary solutions seem to be eyed at (those could be based on free software of course, but money will be exchanged at the end of the day)
My general take is that up until now "nobody is fired for choosing MS" was the basic principle, but that doesn't mean it stays that way forever. Switch to linux was a step in that direction already, and they committed to it up to a point. Stopping Office 365 propagation goes in that same direction.
See, this kind of misunderstanding (that doesn't happen in French, BTW) is why calling it «free software» instead of «libre software» is IMHO a bad idea...
> It's an important point, but doesn't remove weight from the decision.
Which FOSS alternatives provide similar functionality to Offices 365/Docs, and don't cost somewhere around ~$10/seat in IT time to set up and administer?
A git repository and an installation of LibreOffice don't meet that bar. Collaborative editing, good-enough default access control and security, and document sharing that doesn't consist of emailing "March Report_Version_6 (Copy 2)--actually final--.doc" around.
1. Students aren't the only people who use productivity software in schools.
2. You don't need computers at all until uni, and yet...
And generally speaking, the alternative to this stuff in schools isn't FOSS, it's proprietary shit that costs $XY(Z)/seat and steals student data for use in its anti-plagiarism feature.
The court's ruling is fine and reasonable, but the conclusions people are drawing from it are not.
The point is that the free version is currently wide spread, and forcing payment means lots of districts will have to justify additional costs in their budget. With Europeans increasingly disgruntled at US companies at least some of these districts will find or make due with alternatives. This has macrolevel effects.
... if only Microsoft was a private company that can adapt itself (and even put sales teams on this) in less time than a government minister needs to request permission to enter their office.
I've heard of Microsoft education deals that involved paying 500 to 5000. With your choice of a macbook for every 500, or a lenovo laptop for every 200 paid.
> Then a specific budget needs to be approved to use Office, which will reduce its use to only people actually needing it
You have great faith in bureaucracy. The reality is anybody who was using a free version before will probably be given a paid version afterwards, and if not then the cost of administration and the creation of new fiefdoms around this process would be a net burden on efficiency anyway.
Additional note: there are directives to also stop paid Office 365 [0], especially from the education branch with clear orders coming from the top to stop any new deployment[1]
To the unavoidable question of “what to use then?”, I think the answers are “tough luck” and “the gov has a new service for that”. It’s set a case where GDPR has priority over costs and efficiency.
> S'agissant de l'emploi de la solution Microsoft Office 365, le ministère de l'éducation nationale et de la jeunesse a informé en octobre 2021 les recteurs de région académique et d'académie de la doctrine « cloud au centre » (circulaire du Premier ministre précitée), de la position de la Dinum (note du 15 septembre 2021 précitée) et de l'avis de la CNIL sur ce sujet. Le ministère a ainsi demandé d'arrêter tout déploiement ou extension de cette solution ainsi que celle de Google, qui seraient contraires au RGPD.
I find it really fascinating to see the amount of similar posts theses past few months. Professional artists, fearing for their jobs due to AI-generated art, who find solace in the fact that the resulting artifacts are still missing on production quality by a tiny margin. This is somewhat similar to the fear that self-driving cars will one day replace the most common job in America.
In the short term, I think there's a real opportunity for artists to leverage those tools to create things they didn't think were possible before. In the long term, it seems inevitable to me that all jobs today will one day be performed better by computers. I do like to think that we will adapt to those changes over time, like we have in the past technology breakthroughs. While the nature of our jobs will most likely change, ideally we all end up having more time to spend with the ones we love.
perhaps read the article before commenting, especially if you aim at criticizing what is written? the word "laptop" isn't even mentioned in the article, this talks about desktops only and how Google runs its own linux distri on those...
this is only for those who have opted to not be fully remote.
those folks have a reserved physical desk / office space at which they will be required to go 3 days per week starting apr 4th. They may switch to fully remote but cannot keep a dedicated physical spot if they do so.
Microsoft is doing something similar where you can choose hybrid work or fully remote. Personally, I think, with hybrid work, fully remote workers will go back to being second class citizens at those companies if most people choose to go back to the office (even part time).
This is totally unproven. We have no idea how the market as a whole is going to react. Most companies are going to follow the leaders on this one, and Microsoft and Google taking a clear stance will heavily influence the rest of the market.
That's one way to evaluate things. Another way is to consider diversity in working methods a goal in and of itself, even if it doesn't further capitalist positive outcomes.
I'm curious, though, why that would make you think that racial discrimination is happening? It could just as easily mean that racial discrimination is not happening and that Asian candidates are equally over-represented in the underlying qualifications (e.g. university degrees, prior experience -- both of which are indeed the case).
Also, at a level removed from tech, what criteria do you use to determine whether some system which does not equally represent the general population is discriminatory or not? It seems like the numbers alone here aren't sufficient, but I reckon you've probably given this a lot of thought, so I'd love to hear your mental model there.
The mental model is simple. Tech has grown. It's no longer a niche domain. It employs a large percentage of the overall population.
The fact that it is not representative of the general population (and I'm not even talking about men vs women, that's another huge can of worms), means that something is wrong somewhere along the pipeline.
Either at university level, or at high school level, or before. Or at company level.
Plus diversity gets worse and worse as the pay grade goes up.
In any case, I think affirmative action works, long term, for the affected minorities. As much as people outside those minorities hate it.
Indeed. Be warned, remote devs. Ideally only be remote on a fully remote team. You don't want to be the one person excluded from the meeting in the hall.
Perhaps even less than half. At my last job, only three of the ten people on my team were going into the office, and yet the rest of us were still perennially out of the loop.
That said, I don't think it has to be that way. Companies and teams do have the ability to choose their cultures and communication styles in an intentional way. It's just that very few actually do. And this is a situation where you absolutely do not want to accept the default configuration.
That's interesting because an outsourced recruiter contacted me recently about a Google role and very clearly needed to confirm that I would be able to return to an office one day a week.
I was confused why 1/5 was so much more powerful than 0/5. I sorta get 3/5 if you have a commitment to in-person culture. Anyway, the 1 per week doesn't at all line up with your more credible 3 per week.
Can you go remote within commute distance of the office and keep your salary? What's the limit?
Living in Pleasanton is cheaper than living in Mountain View, but still commutable. Living in Tracy is cheaper still and people still commute to the Bay Area from there. Living in Fresno or Sacramento is even cheaper and farther but still some people will do that commute daily.
The limit is based on what the Census bureau dictates the metropolitan statistical area to be. Certain MSAs with Google offices correspond to a special rate; otherwise it's based on the state you're in.
If you're in Sacramento, you're definitely not in the same MSA as either San Jose or SF. Pleasanton on the other hand is part of Alameda County, which is part of SF's MSA.
Meanwhile, if you opted to be in Santa Cruz, "just" 32 miles south of San Jose, you'd be SOL.
Interesting. I live in a big MSA (Atlanta, which includes a lot of mostly rural counties). I've considered a role at Google, but currently work in a suburb and live further out from there. 1 hour to Atlanta proper without traffic, but still in the MSA according to the census. And I could move further out and still be in the MSA (like Heard County or Jasper County if you want to look at some examples).
Atlanta is still going to be a significantly lower pay band than premium plus (Bay Area/NYC), though. Tech salaries there aren't as high. The ideal play is to be far out in the boonies of a premium plus MSA, e.g. something like Dutchess County in upstate New York. The cost of living there is quite low but you'll still make the highest salary possible.
Interestingly, Seattle is only in the premium price tier, not the premium price tier. This is because there's no state income tax in Washington, so a lower salary goes a longer way. So it ends up being a wash even factoring in NY/CA state taxes. Because CA taxes are higher than NY (but not NYC taxes), your best bet is living in upstate NY (Long Island is outside of NYC too but it's eliminated because CoL is higher there).
There was an internal tool that simulated your pay change when you move. For example, if your office is in Santa Clara county but you move to Santa Cruz county the pay will drop by a lot. But if you move from Santa Clara county to San Mateo county there's no change at all.
Getting paid less for doing the exact same job, just a few miles away. :) Isn't that wonderful? But at least the corporate real estate market is happy.
Oh no, I would bet some money that the C level execs at these companies own a lot of residential property near their campuses. Likely purchased before they announced building said campus! It's just good business sense.
If the employees move away rent goes down, so does demand for their properties.. so yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah
... if they are charging from being in the office from 5 days a week (before times) to 0 days a week (now) rather than 3 days a week in office and 2 from home.
5 -> 0 is a pay cut based on where you live.
5 -> 3 is not a pay cut as you're still working out of the same office.
Ah, OK I thought anybody who lived in Santa Cruz and reported to the office 5 days a week would take a pay cut. This is just if you're fully remote, I guess. Still seems like a slap, Santa Cruz ain't cheap even if it's slightly better than San Mateo or Mountain View.
So I'm a "super commuter"; I can take the Metro North from the end of the line to NYC, although I usually go for Amtrak for several reasons.
If I were to go fully remote, I would take a pay cut ... but it would be almost identical to my commuting costs, once you account for rail fair, parking, vehicle mileage, taxes, snacks, etc.
I don't know how representative my case is, but the pay cut ends up being a non-factor in my decision whether or not to apply for full remote.
The above seems to put the lie to the argument I've often heard that the justification for these cost-of-living adjustments is that in-person employees deliver more value than remote employees.
If this were indeed the reason for the salary adjustment, it wouldn't matter whether an employee was moving to Santa Cruz, San Mateo, or San Salvador. Either way they're remote, and unless one city has markedly different internet bandwidth, the value that a given employee delivers from any remote location should be the same.
Next time I hear someone making this argument, I'm calling BS. It's a bald-faced attempt for the company to capture value which rightfully belongs to the employee.
> The above seems to put the lie to the argument I've often heard that the justification for these cost-of-living adjustments is that in-person employees deliver more value than remote employees.
Only the horribly uninformed would ever make such a bad faith argument. You've never been paid based on your "value" but rather what it takes to keep you as an employee. The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
> The company only wants to pay you enough to keep you and if you move some place cheap well they don't need to offer as much.
I think that depends what your other options are. It might work if everyone in the industry offers you less based on where you live, which is almost collusion in my opinion.
Not true. If it were based on cost of living, then Google would pay more for you to work from Hawaii than from Alabama. (Spoilers: it doesn't, they're both in the same salary band.)
It's slightly more true that it's based on the local cost of labor, but even more so that it's just based on the state, with carveouts for MSAs (which are defined based on county) surrounding certain offices commanding higher salaries.
You'd make just as much working remotely in Matamoras, PA as you would working out of the NYC office in Manhattan.
You would think that Mountain View based Google, being registered as a Delaware Corp, would understand the benefits of legal residence being different than practical residence.
And it's not fraud for an employer to arbitrarily control pay based on someones location? Is their revenue similarly confined by that employees contributions because of location?
If company can pick arbitrary locations around the world to be their HQ, or Trump can use Mar-a-Lago as his residence, then so too can every other citizen following the law and paying their taxes.
One is legal the other isn't.... This isn't hard you would be committing fraud no questions. Also depending on how you've lied you'd also be on the hook for tax issues to the government rather then just and issue with your company.
For criminal fraud to happen, there has to be a defrauded party. If I follow my local tax laws and negotiate a better salary with a corporation based on Location A, while potentially living elsewhere at Location B/C/D for prolong periods of time with lower costs of living, that is not fraud.
Getting the company to enter into a contract under false pretenses is fraud. "intent to deceive" is alone enough. This isn't some kind of gotcha where your technically ok if you do X and Y. Intent matters!
Two parties entered a contract with the understand you would live in location A if you don't that's fraud objectively.
No, it's not tax fraud. Tax is between you and the government, not you and your employer. The U.S. even allows you to ask your employer not to deduct tax so you can deal with it personally.
If you follow whatever local and state laws apply to your situation, you're perfectly in your right.
I didn't bring up taxes, I'm just responding to it.
The topic is whether a global corporation with access to a global workforce should be allowed arbitrary salary negation privileges because of the circumstances of a candidates geographical circumstances, while robbing the candidate of the same privilege.
Just sounds like another way to exploit labor at a time of record profit windfalls for corporations.
A dev in Mountain View has many more high-paying opportunities than the same guy in Weed, CA (pop. 2,862). Google pays him more because that’s what it takes to retain him.
Someday if most employers switch to remote-first, this won’t matter and salaries will be equal everywhere (a lot lower than we’ve seen in tight labor markets, and probably the first world in general).
People do that with car insurance and jobs with residency requirements.
I used to drink with a bunch of fireman who lived about 300 miles away - they had to live in the city or adjacent county. They’d have a flophouse in the hood shared by like 20 guys and crash there once in awhile when they pulled overtime as well as get mail.
Travel scams are similar too. If a company will reimburse travel if you’re 50 miles from home, people will “move” so they can bill the mileage tolls.
It works great until it doesn’t. If you want to give up your cushy Google gig for a few thousand bucks, good luck.
Well for starters you're gonna have all applicable state and local taxes withheld from wherever you're fraudulently claiming to be living, as that is going to be where you are ACTUALLY living as far as all relevant taxation authorities are concerned.
I think a more non-fraud tactic would be to find the cheapest area in a high cost of living area and minmax on that dimension. Especially if it’s by county, then there are likely unfavorable areas within that county.
But if there is anywhere in the county that has escaped full IT gentrification because of poor commuter access, those prices are going to explode if they haven't already. Since median house price is a huge fraction of CoL calculations (and a frequent complaint among some economists), staying in county gets you a raise, if your friends do it too.
Yeah, last time I looked at rents in my hometown, the cheapest options there were comparable to the cheapest options in San Francisco. They're probably a bit ahead of the curve; most the empty land around is either federal or LADWP, so there's limited room for new development, but it's a major shot up from pre-pandemic prices where renting a full house was cheaper than an SF bedroom.
Not at Google. When you go remote you're paid based the same as if you were onsite at the nearest office to your residence, limits are roughly CSA (combined statistical area) in the US—not cost of living.
I don't know the boundary of the SF Bay Area region. It is based on some US designation. Once you leave the region around an office you become a part of some general state-wide designation.
This has some failure cases, with some weird places being included in regions like NYC while some other places where people really do commute to NYC (though it is extremely far) are excluded. I don't actually know anybody who has been impacted by this, but clever Googlers made a pretty compete map of all of counties in the US and their pay region once the tool for getting salary information for proposed moves was available.
It is a bit ridiculous to base these things off location when the location would reduce the taxes the company pays for you.
I'd like to understand how these market values are calculated. It can't be supply and demand, because if you move to a place with 0 supply you do not maximize your value.
I should be able to say to them "hey, I create $x for you now and I cost $y, but if I move I will make the same $x for you for $(y-z), and it will make no impact on means or ends since I'm entirely remote."
You are not paid the value you create. The value you create has nothing to do with your salary(other than whether you get fired if value < salary). Your salary is the least your employer thinks they can pay to get an acceptable candidate. As they expand the pool of applicants they figure they can find people willing to work for less.
From what I’ve been told it’s been pretty easy for some to negotiate no salary adjustment when going remote. It’s against HR “policy” but I know deals happened when someone was deemed a crucial contributor.
im planning on moving out of state in a few months from high cost area. what i've been told is that my salary wont change but I will be at "top of band" in the new area.
Complete manipulative nonsense if they ever use "top of the band" as reason to change their relationship with you imo. A Ferrari doesn't stop being Ferrari just because it's parked amongst Priuses.
If you're worth paying $x for $y, you're worth paying $x for $y minus the reduction in taxes they'll pay; your moving to an area with less taxes is them getting you on sale.
I have YouTube TV - which is great by the way - but the fact it doesn't include YouTube Premium for free or the ability to add YouTube Premium for something like $5/month just sticks in my craw. So being the stubborn mule that I am I refuse to pay the $12/month for YouTube Premium and now I'm watching less and less of YouTube as a result.
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