[andrew_]

It's dubious that folks at that skill level would lack the capacity to make WFH work for them. I've been remote for 10 years, I couldn't get in at the Googs. Working from home is not hard and there are a litany of resources for those who struggle.

[RussianCow]

Working from home is not hard for you. That doesn't mean it isn't hard for everyone else. A few reasons WFH may be difficult for some people:

* You have kids at home

* You live in a tiny apartment and don't have room to set up a proper home office

* Your work is very collaborative and Zoom meetings are just not the same

* You live by yourself and the loneliness is brutal

* You find it hard to stay motivated without the daily camaraderie you had in the office

* You're in a pandemic that adds a ton of stress to your life

And that's just off the top of my head. It's great that you can successfully work from home, but please realize that your life experiences are not the same as everyone else's, and what is a positive experience for you may be dreadful for others. And also remember that we're in a pandemic and the current WFH conditions are far from optimal for most people who were forced into it.

[tidepod12]

>at that skill level

What skill level is that? For the most part we are talking about a bunch of people ages 22-30 that function by responding to specific feature requests or JIRA tickets from their team leads. There are of course exceptions, but by and large this population of engineers do not do well with unstructured environments, such as the type created by a sudden shift to WFH. I am wholly unsurprised that productivity at Goog has dropped. At my large tech company (where we work with consultants from FAANG) there's also a similar drop in productivity due to aforementioned lack of structure.

>10 years remote and I couldn't get in at Googs.

FAANG interviewing has very little to do with skill level and a lot more to do with mastering the very specific interview process of that particular FAANG. It's a lot like taking the LSAT. You could be a genius but still not ace the LSAT because you don't know the very specific strategies needed for the test. On the flip side, just because you ace the LSAT doesn't mean you are a savant, it just means you studied the specific things necessary to ace the test.

[andrew_]

I know quite a few brilliant folks there, and I just can't buy the assertion that the majority are drones/codemonkeys that drown without instruction and structure.

[still_grokking]

> the majority are drones/codemonkeys that drown without instruction

You can't expect anything else alone for statistical reasons:

Companies as large as G need a lot of employees, but there are by definition only a few percent of top people around (as one has to stand out significantly form the mass to be considered part of the top people). As a result a big company can't hire only the best of the best, as there are simply to few available! (Smaller companies can be much more picky in this regard as they don't have to fill as much positions). As a result you will have in a large workforce a large amount of at best average employees, meaning "the majority are drones/codemonkeys".

Additional there is cost. You can usually choose to hire one top dude, or respectively a small team of codemonkeys… For a lot of (most?) tasks a team of drones will do just fine when given the right instructions. So having only a few top people (giving instructions to the less experienced / talented) will work out mostly just fine.

G is especially know for building their process around that reality. They put some effort into handling the fact that most of their hires will be young inexperienced people. They even created a dedicated programming language in which their large amounts greenhorn hires could be potentially productive. That this language is "dubbed down to the max" is a hard business requirement for exactly that reason.

I think dealing with the fact that the majority of people in software are (and will indefinitely stay) just codemonkeys is actually a huge part of a software business' success story as it develops into a larger enterprise. An important factor to successfully grow is the ability to make good use of the "average majority" your workforce consists of I think.

[username90]

Being able to do good work remote and being as productive when working remote as when in office is different.

[andrew_]

Agreed. People who work remotely tend to be a lot more productive.