[serial_dev]

I also don't understand the "swag obsession" (well, maybe except for the Rust Ferris, Go Gopher and Dart Dash plushies) but neutering conferences and travelling would make me frustrated.

Travelling to conferences is a huge learning opportunity: you can upskill by having fun with people all over the world for two-three days.

If I worked for a FAANG company where I am supposed to be or become an expert of a technology, and they don't want to pay me for one or two conferences per year, I'd also feel frustrated.

[captainbland]

Yeah, I'm not with a FAANG but I'm having an experience where we seem to have replaced all learning opportunities with horrible online presentation style courses. It's like they've taken as many bad practices about providing a learning experience and automated them.

Monotonous speaker? Check. Visuals that don't relate well to the content? Check. Wall of text slides? Check. Lack of opportunity to ask questions? Check. Asocial learning environment? Check. Bad pacing? Check. Prescriptive teaching style which doesn't give learners an opportunity to broaden their understanding? Check. Uncompelling or just nonexistent narrative? Check. Badly targeted subject matter? In spades.

[htrp]

What happens when you start hiring execs from the rest of the F500 companies to do your "Learning and Development"

[Victerius]

Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so. Pichai is right to tighten the purse strings.

[yndoendo]

Traveling to conferences allows a person to get OUT of the same old day-in-day , while also allowing to network. This can help fight burn out. Changing up your environment, even temporary, can lead to better problem solving, often during vacation, because you remove the tunnel vision.

Would like to see number of psychology and socially studies around it.

My opinion of why Meta-verse will fail is because you are using their technology in the same environment. A bad environment is a bad environment no mater how expensive the VR/AR tech your using. And also lacks body language communication.

[ultrasaurus]

For a small company, networking can be the first time people hear of the company. For a company like Google, I wonder how often networking translates instead into chances for other companies to hire away their people (without really helping much vice-versa, everyone knows about Google's hiring process)

No matter how much that actually happens, I wouldn't be shocked if it gets echoed and magnified internally as a problem.

[aetch]

The benefits you described are the same as a vacation.

[zinclozenge]

Except the employee is paid for travel, transportation, food, and lodging.

A while back when I was working at a company that had significant spending in GCP, we'd get free tickets to Next. My director basically said that there wasn't any expectation for the employees he was sending to learn or network, it was basically a semi-vacation. Kind of makes sense honestly.

[piva00]

Those employees are making order of magnitudes of their salary in revenue. Google is having record profits. Why exactly should Pichai tighten the purse strings? For the shareholders? What, exactly, have those shareholders done to create this revenue (except for the ones that are employees and get golden handcuffs shares)?

[s1artibartfast]

Let's be real again, most employees don't touch anything that contributes to revenue.

[piva00]

Then why are they employed? If they perform any function that helps to materialise that revenue they are indirectly responsible for it.

Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution. As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine, this machine uses you as a part of it and the machine as a whole generates revenue. You might not be the main piston firing and generating power but you are still part of the mechanism. If someone hired you even though you won't be creating any value it's not your problem that the machine is dysfunctional.

[s1artibartfast]

I just think it is a funny juxtaposition when workers shout about the "Value or revenue they created" on one hand and then claim and then claim individual value creation doesn't matter on the other hand.

The whole question of where the value comes from and "who deserves it" is central to the argument, and there are a lot of positions with different axioms. I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.

The same could be said of shareholders:

Why are employees so focused on direct attribution? As a shareholder you are part of the machine, ect. If you aren't creating any value, its not your problem the machine is dysfunctional...

[piva00]

> I hadn't heard that it is deserved simply for being a warm body in a chair independent of any productivity, so that's a new one.

A worker was hired by a system, that system decided they needed that worker and as a contract promised said worker a salary. Why is the fault of the worker that the work they perform doesn't add value?

I really can't comprehend why a systemic failure such as hiring people that you think don't add value is supposedly an individual's fault. If the system failed, why is that you point to the worker and not to the system that failed and hired said zero/negative value worker?

> As a shareholder you are part of the machine

That's a new one. What part exactly does a shareholder perform in this machine, given we are discussing a public company? No bullshit about "pricing" and other financial shenanigans, please.

[unity1001]

> Unsure why the HN crowd is so hyper-focused on direct attribution.

Not only the HN crowd, but increasingly everyone, everywhere are so hyper-focused on direct attribution because...

> As a worker in a corporation you are part of a machine

...our work life, less, our actual society should not be made into a soulless machine for the profit of absentee shareholders.

[colinmhayes]

People aren't paid the revenue they create. In fact the revenue you create is nothing but an upper limit to how much you can be paid. You get paid what your company believes your replacement cost is. Google believes the market is cooling and therefore replacement cost is decreasing, so pay goes down.

[SoftTalker]

The shareholders own the company, bottom line.

[piva00]

Yeah, and that answers nothing about my question: what work have they done to create revenue?

I don't care that they own the company, that's meaningless for my question...

[vintermann]

The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise.

[unity1001]

> Let's be real. Most of the traveling to conferences that Google employees do is just an excuse to get out of work and be paid to do so

Absolutely ok. In the world of work, that has been the case for a century or so. That's why those are considered perks. Because that's what they are. Everyone knows it. You just call it 'conference travel'.