I didn't really get the point of the article, so I'm just going to comment on work-life balance at Google in general.
Basically, you are freed from any unnecessary constraints in choosing your own work life balance. You are judged by the work you do, regardless of how long it took you to do that work, or which hours of the day you did that work.
The company goes to reasonable lengths to allow remote working, but they can't make up for the inherent disadvantage of not being in the office/campus when other people are.
In my opinion, that is the best that a company can do in terms of promoting work life balance. A company could also actively try and stop people from working more than X hours, but I don't see why that is a good thing, if a person really wants to do it.
Many posts on HN suggest that when a person chooses to work long hours, this is (A) an irrational choice on their part and (B) imposes externalities on other people, and therefore should be culturally discouraged. On (A), it's hard to judge all cases, but some people really want/need the money. On (B) that is really just wanting to avoid competition. If another person is willing to work longer hours or accept less pay, that is going to harm me, but it is also how the free market works. I'm happy to accept market wages because that's how capitalist societies work, and both in theory and practice, they work* pretty well.
* And by "work" I mean that they provided the overall best outcome, including for the worst off. I added this disclaimer because there is always one comment that says something like "yes capitalism works... for the rich".
Except for B) having nothing to do with free market. 1)The problem with a long-hours work culture is that long hours don't translate to productivity, and it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting. It's an emotional/managerial phenomenon.2)It's not avoiding competition either. If the optimal work hours for a programmer are 4-6 hours, then 10 hours surely will lower his/her productivity and just project "more work". As a result, we get a badly competitive micro climate based on "projections" of more work.
I suggest you look at how Finland approaches non-competitive study in elementary and high schools, which propelled them to the top of the world in terms of quality.
I'm not describing encouraging people to work long hours for the sake of it, but rather people working longer hours in order to get more done. It seems like you don't believe it is possible for a company to reward people based on their actual results, ("it's rather hard to quantify productivity in a programming setting") but that is what Google does. No one really notices how much time you spend in the office.
So I would accept your points (1) and (2) to the extent that they apply in a particular setting. But these arguments don't apply to Google. If a person at Google chose to work longer hours, and ended up being less productive, that would really only harm themselves.
1) No such thing as long hours for the sake of it. It's always to get more "done". And like I mentioned in my parent post, there's no such thing after a certain number of hours.
2)I don't believe it's possible for a company to do that, or at least not to the extent that you're saying.
3)Based on some of the interviews people have had here with Google, it seems that Google could use some more "reward based on performance" in their culture.(or a lot)
p.s. Keep in mind that my competition point still stands. Longer and longer hours are of no good. It's a slippery slope. And yes, I think such competition is poisonous and detrimental, even if some more work gets done. Working more hours just pulls everyone down,* in regards to your free market comment. It's price competition.
*even if it's not projection, but actual performance. Soon enough, everyone is working more and more to catch up to you, and everyone's miserable. That's not sustainable practice.
Soon enough, everyone is working more and more to catch up to you, and everyone's miserable.
That's an argument against high performance regardless of hours. But I doubt many Googlers are miserable because they have to "compete" with Jeff Dean.
I guess it is. It sounds wrong to me as well, but there's only so much performance you can fit into certain hours. Thus, more hours are bound to become the norm, in my opinion.
>>>The problem with a long-hours work culture is that long hours don't translate to productivity,
I have no idea how you can make such statements for everyone. Feel free to talk about yourself. It is ridiculous to claim that working "extra" does not result in anything "extra" for everyone. That may be true for you. It is in fact not true for me. Now you can call me deluded. But I think I am smart enough to measure my results and decide accordingly.
he problem with a long-hours work culture is that long hours don't translate to productivity,
[Citation needed]. Note that citing a source that vaguely asserts data exists is insufficient. So is citing a source showing that mean hourly productivity in construction/manufacturing goes down.
Make sure to differentiate between lowering productivity (=production/hours) and lowering product in your answer.
I think it would be disingenuous to consider two years worth of studies "insights"; I think the truly interesting stuff will likely come out of clustering machine-learning algorithms applied to the data ten, maybe twenty years down the line (when some Googlers' children have grown up and we can see the effect or lack thereof on them as well as on the Googlers themselves).
I get the impression that Google errs on the side of "provide more information"; for example, food in the micro-kitchens has been labelled with traffic-light colours for many years now. Many of the interns I met at my last internship there went out of their way to eat more of the food that was labelled "red" because "that clearly means it tastes better". Whether that made the life of the interns in question "better" or depends entirely on the metric you choose to measure with.
No idea as like others have said the survey is only 2 years old.
What I can say is Google is the first company I've personally worked at where it was easy to always work. At all my previous jobs (video games) the dev kits could not be taken home and even if there happened to be a PC version there's no way I could have taken home the terabytes of source data needed to work on the game. Nor would any company have let me if I could.
The short of that meant once I left work I couldn't keep working.
At Google on the other hand my work email went up 10-100 fold over previous companies. I could read that anytime day or night and even if I didn't intend to read it at home I'd open up my laptop and given that I left gmail running I'd see new messages, open a few without thinking and get stucked in and 20-60 mins would go by at ~12:00am.
I saw several other employees responding to email between 11pm and 1am all from home.
I'm not saying that's bad for work/life balance. I have no idea. I certainly felt good to respond to people as soon as I noticed but maybe it would have been better to disconnect?
Similarly I could ssh/vnc in if I wanted to. And, working on Chrome which is open source meant I could work anywhere on any machine I chose. Something I wasn't used to from previous jobs. My understanding is some of those things are far more common for other programming jobs. My financial friends all have ways to log into work from home when they need to.
Yet another is being involved in a web browser meant it was easy to get sucked into tons of mailing lists. The WebGL list, the Web Audio list, the W3 lists, the Web Apps List. All the places where browser standards are discussed and that discussion goes on 24/7. It's very tempting to keep checking how people are responding to your comments or where some other part of the standards discussion is going. So that's also hard to turn off.
Again I don't know if that's good or bad for work/life balance. It certainly feels good to participate. Is that work? Or is it more like going to a PTA meeting or city council meeting?
No where was I encouraged to work after hours by Google. It was completely up to me to decide if I checked email at home or if I worked on stuff at home and if I stayed late or went home early. All I'm saying is it was easy to do these things, something I wasn't used to from previous jobs.
PS: You don't have to work at Google to participate in those mailing lists. If you want to influence web standards just get involved.
Basically, you are freed from any unnecessary constraints in choosing your own work life balance. You are judged by the work you do, regardless of how long it took you to do that work, or which hours of the day you did that work.
The company goes to reasonable lengths to allow remote working, but they can't make up for the inherent disadvantage of not being in the office/campus when other people are.
In my opinion, that is the best that a company can do in terms of promoting work life balance. A company could also actively try and stop people from working more than X hours, but I don't see why that is a good thing, if a person really wants to do it.
Many posts on HN suggest that when a person chooses to work long hours, this is (A) an irrational choice on their part and (B) imposes externalities on other people, and therefore should be culturally discouraged. On (A), it's hard to judge all cases, but some people really want/need the money. On (B) that is really just wanting to avoid competition. If another person is willing to work longer hours or accept less pay, that is going to harm me, but it is also how the free market works. I'm happy to accept market wages because that's how capitalist societies work, and both in theory and practice, they work* pretty well.
* And by "work" I mean that they provided the overall best outcome, including for the worst off. I added this disclaimer because there is always one comment that says something like "yes capitalism works... for the rich".