[rwiggins]

Not exactly. For engineers, at least (not sure about other roles), the Google Cloud desk options are:

1. "Commit" to being in the office 4+ days a week. You get a dedicated desk as normal.

2. Accept a shared desk - assigned to you 2 days of the week and another person from another team 2 days of the week. Each team has its 2 office days selected by local site leadership. In this setup, your desk assignment and partner are static, so you'd coordinate e.g. what kind of monitor setup you want.

3. Give up your desk entirely and use drop-in hot desks. There's still an expectation you're in the office 2 days a week. So far, this mostly seems to have been chosen by folks with so many meetings that they're rarely at their desk anyway.

4. Get an accommodation if you have specific desk needs that can't reasonably be met with a desk partner.

5. Go remote and free yourself of the office. (As of today, apparently this requires a special exception...)

To be honest, as much as I find it distasteful, I can absolutely see why they did it - walk around any office lately and you'd find >50% of desks totally unoccupied, practically every day. Real estate is expensive. It seems like pretty clear wastage. And this system is way better than blanket hot desking.

And, of course, theoretically 2 days each week you get all of the supposedly-proven benefits of in-person collaboration ... modulo the dozens of exceptions.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

[AtlasBarfed]

Are these actual desks, cubes, half cubes, or even smaller?

You know your engineering forefathers used to have actual offices? I remember when cubes were a compromise. Then half cubes. Then just a long table with a seat.

But yeah, they care about productivity.

Also, real estate is an investment vehicle and depreciation/tax break primarily, adult day care center secondarily.

[grogenaut]

I worked at a Microsoft derrived game studio in 2010... the offices were glorious... but the devs literally only talked to each other once a week or at lunch. But they were doing things like implementing entire siggraph, which are 'near real time' aka 1-5 seconds per frame, papers into actual real time (sub .1 millis per frame) implemetations. theyd spend a week wiring bindings between c and glsl, and 3 months getting it down to 20ms so we could see the effect. it was really odd since I needed to interact a LOT with otheres comparatively. I got bored as fuck coming from an agile pair programming company. It was good for that deep level of coding. it was not for the type of stuff I do at my current job.

[pseudalopex]

Pair programming with all pairs trying to ignore or talk louder than all others is miserable. Open offices decrease face to face interactions empirically.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices

[grogenaut]

wow great writeup... thanks for that.

I wonder how 2 will work. it'll be interesting. I have too much shit at the office for that, but I also have a lot of unoffical work stuff at my desk, like the tools to fix the monitors (hex wrenches screwdrivers), and the whiskey stash.

3 - I do see a ton of non-eng doing this. I see a lot more eng also just chilling in 'flex spaces' like phone boths, lounges, etc... the stuff that never got used when everyone had desks and now is even tho my office isn't over full. our little mini-single desk rooms I call our intern offices as they seem to just work in there.

is the 2 days a week just the RTO minimum?

4 - this is me but also 1 is kinda me.. I'm in a lot but I travel a lot, and I have very specialized setup that I do use.

5 - I can get this, my whole management chain is remote... I'm senior enough. I'm actually well above average on in office attendance, and just below the rto requirements esp if you account for me working from office for a month in the last 2 months while bein in other cities. or last 3 weeks because there were "synergies" for folks for me to meet.

The true answer for me is I get to pick and choose between days when I need to get stuff done coding, by clearing my calendar, and slamming out code at home... or at the office. Or by forcing a lot of in person meetings and getting 8 months of design convs done in 4 hours. I got a solid 1.5 hour convo done while waiting for traffic to die down on thursday that I had been trying for 2 years to do on remote.

but I had this flexibility in the before times and I'm pretty senior.

The thing I do think sucks is that I suspect everyone is single car riding into the office so traffic in seattle is actually WORSE than pre-pandemic. Traffic sucks till 9:30 am now.

The only true benefit of the march of time is that there's so many "enhanced" cars now that I can just HOV way to the front of the line then cut off a tesla or obviously expensive mercedes in the exit lane at the last second and know they'll stop :)

basically I'm a bad one to ask and I'm making it work well for me.

[zeroonetwothree]

Average cost of a desk is like 10k/yr. That’s very little compared to an employee’s compensation, it only has to make them like 5% more productive to be worth it.