I think the real problem is that SV doesn't really have any advanced, well developed urban infrastructure and commercial areas within a walk-able distance. The closest to Google's HQ is MTV downtown which doesn't even have capacity to feed thousands of employees. You cannot spend 2 hours in a car to buy some hamburger somewhere in Sunnyvale and get back to the office while being productive. Those free perks are not that cheap for Google but it has no alternatives.
It's just a complete failure of urban development thanks to NIMBY. Cities want to keep Google in their area for obvious financial reasons, but don't want to touch any of their precious SFH zoning. So they let Google to do everything they want, even housing. Google's recently trying to develop urban area around their campus (San Jose has the most buzz but it seems MTV and Sunnyvale also has a similar masterplan? You'll be surprised to see how aggressive Google is on purchasing real estates around their campus) and I guess their primary motivation is to outsource as many office functionality as possible to third parties. We'll see how many "free perks" will remain after that.
> I think the real problem is that SV doesn't really have any advanced, well developed urban infrastructure and commercial areas within a walk-able distance.
I agree that this is the main reason. Facebook in Menlo Park is similar. There's not much within walking distance and certainly nothing that could handle the scale of thousands of workers showing up.
Salesforce is a company that generally has taken a different approach. There are no cafeterias, but many of the main offices are in urban areas with plenty of nearby infrastructure.
> Salesforce is a company that generally has taken a different approach. There are no cafeterias, but many of the main offices are in urban areas with plenty of nearby infrastructure.
Sorry, I wasn't clear. I was referring to a cafeteria where the company provides meals for you to eat vs. a place for you to eat your own food or company provided snack. I also haven't been to Salesforce tower, so it may be different from the other 5 or 6 offices I've been to.
It goes both ways. Because Google has a free cafeteria, it disincentives building restaurants close to the Google offices, due to the low number of potential customers.
In this case, the free lunch at Google doesn't really compete with the other restaurants since there are a lot of other offices without a free cafeteria around.
If you look at the GooglePlex, there are no other offices around. It's just Google. Neighbors are a park and nature preserve, NASA AMES research center and a Highway.
I mean, el Camino real, really from Palo alto to San Jose is thick with restaurants that are pretty good places to get lunch, and these are supported by workers in the area, including other tech companies that don’t have the same “never leave the office complex” culture as google. But yeah, you are not walking there.
(And 2 hours to get a hamburger in Sunnyvale? Must be St. John’s)
In this context I’m assuming MTV isn’t music television that for some reason has decided to become a valley startup instead of playing music on television (would fit the whole SV pivot mentality)
> In this context I’m assuming MTV isn’t music television that for some reason has decided to become a valley startup instead of playing music on television (would fit the whole SV pivot mentality)
> What does the post-pandemic workplace resemble? Wilkinson envisions big, open spaces with couches and cozy nooks as work stations that are not assigned to any single employee. An environment where it's easy to hang out and chat.
But not an environment where it's easy to get work done.
I like moving into a shared space for a group conversation, yes.
But mainly, I want an office with a door that closes. I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own mouse, again, selected for its ergonomic properties. I want my own chair, which I have selected and adjusted for its ergonomic properties. I want to put pictures of my kids on the walls. I want to leave physical notes to myself. And have reference books nearby. I want a plant.
I do not want a soul-less hotel-style "business workstation." And I especially don't want one in an open floor plan with everyone talking over everyone else.
"It was a gigantic shift in the way we worked, because we went from being in cubes to, all of a sudden, literally every person had an office." -Greg "Joz" Jozwiak
Anecdotally I heard that Infinite Loop also made every point on the one central hallway into an accidental parabolic microphone -- you could hear basically every conversation in the hallway from any point in the building.
My impression is that Microsoft has done offices very well, but at the cost of locality with team members (since shuffling offices is a great deal more burdensome than shuffling an open floor plan).
> I want my own keyboard, which I have selected for its ergonomic properties.
^This. I enjoy using a nice electromechanical keyboard, but the noise from typing (even on a model with quieter/damped key switches) is incompatible with a shared/open plan office space.
But the greatest reasons are privacy, a sense of spatial ownership, and freedom from distraction and interruptions.
I can zone other people and their keyboards out just fine but yes.
Though my colleagues have noted previously that they find the level of volume coming from my keyboard to be less a distraction and more a useful indicator of how interruptable I am that I don't need to deliberately update.
This may be off-topic but over the years of working in a shared office with 3 others, I learned to distinguish whether they were coding, writing on their thesis, or just browsing.
Indeed. My employer had hot desking for a while during lockdown for people who chose to voluntarily come into the office so they could space people out. I tried it solo, I tried it booking a pod as a small team of 4-8, and I hated it. If they tried to make it permanent (they're not, they've moved back to assigned desks), I would quit in a heartbeat.
Working in a random area from a laptop is an ergonomic nightmare. I want a specific keyboard, specific mouse, and specific monitors. I don't want a tiny laptop screen plugged into a dock with the same generic Dell equipment that comes with every machine, and I don't want to have to lug in my own equipment every single time I come to the office.
It's also nice to have a spot that's "mine" for the most minimal of personal touches - I can leave my headphones there, I can have post it notes on the monitor reminding me of things, I could even have a picture if I wanted.
Also, a set of drawers with sufficient ramen and wasabi peanuts in it that if I'm mid hack and need carbs that can be fixed on autopilot while continuing to focus on the actual problem.
You get the sense that this architect has not talked to very many of the people who would be spending a third of their life in the space he envisions. I'd take a grey cube farm over this any day of the week.
I mean, they don't need to. Their job isn't to make work more comfortable for the employees and/or make them more productive. It's slashing costs while still maintianing a facade of a desirable workplace.
That's why you see offices with giant empty slides in the lobby, treadmills with a laptop stand that are never used, hangout spaces your boss doesn't allow you to be in, et cetra. They're there to fool candidates and post posed pictures on the company website, nothing more.
Wow what a sad image of the corporation. I'm not about pretending massive businesses care about you (they don't) but not everything has to be a big facade to trick people.
I've worked in offices where people actually go to hang out spaces, and other useful places. Not everyone has a controlling boss like that, and most places that build these spaces likely don't have that sort of management.
Ug, managers love how these spaces look but they terrible to work in. I want my own setup in my own office that I can close the door and leave out books and papers and have sticky notes and the kind of keyboard and mouse I like and everything set to the right heights, and a computer I can leave all my programs up and just lock so its all ready for me the next day and so on and so on. Wilkinson can go suck it.
I'm always fascinated by this obsession with having right-brained people design environments for left brain people.
Don't get me wrong. It has plenty of upsides to it, but yes you get this other impractical aspect. I'm pretty sure this guy is the main reason open offices got so huge in my God, do we all hate them.
Also tired of these people who cash huge checks and then have regrets.
How do cozy nooks and unassigned workstations implement EH&S? We know sofas and couches lead to poor posture which results in muscle and skeletal discomfort among other things... But nooks and even unassigned workstations may not be ideal in terms of ergonomics...
> The office is the fermenting ground for people growing into successful adults.
This makes me scream in my head. Do we really believe this? Should we really believe this? Have there been no successful adults who were not fermented in an office?
Very much like time manager sessions, collaboration sessions and other assigned trainings. the majority of that imparted is fluff. Occasionally you get a nugget, but by and large, it's not for these nuggets that these people become "experts" in a particular domain but rather they are perpetuating their parasitic relationship with companies.
I wouldn't read too much into it. He talks about the next step of people freshly out of college being offices where they grow to be adults with careers.
I don't think that he is trying to make a sociological statement but to emphasise the impact of the offices on peoples development.
IMHO open plan offices are a fermenting ground for burned out adults asking themselves at what point they will have a personal space like a grown up.
From the point of the corporate hierarchy, by definition you are not successful if you do not have an executive rank. Therefore only those who have been fermented in the vat, can be considered successful.
I worked at a bit campus with lots of perks. It felt more like college than work. Especially with how people stayed for dinner and the campus was busy from 7AM to 10PM. I can see how this could be dangerous.
I really felt like the campus made people feel like it was more like college which led to some bad behaviors, IME.
Amazon is slowly creating their own nation state, where you can grow up in their ecosystem, live in their housing, attend their schools, train through their job training programs, and work your entire career for them.
The SV “campus culture” is a contributing factor to the area’s overall social dullness. The downsides of this are not immediately apparent but there is an opportunity cost to eating all your dinners with the same group of (mostly) guys and salad bar take-home scavengers.
One thing I liked at Apple is that at 4pm, almost everyone went home (many commuted via the company bus). A coworker of mine who had moved from Apple to Google and back to Apple preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home.
> preferred Apple because people there have more “fire in their belly” and a bias toward getting things done rather than availing themselves of benefits and treating work as a retirement home.
I would guess this has more to do with Apple’s cohesive product line creating a laminar flow of ideas through the environment versus Googles emergent order out of turbulence. I worked at the MV campus for a spell and all of the campus ‘bennies’ cognitively evaporated within a month or two. The only thing of durable appreciation for me was the shuttle service.
That’s how it looks from the outside but internally, Apple is also turbulent and decentralized. Products are incubated by engineering teams and only much later in the process do HI and ID get involved.
PMs analogous to Google’s don’t seem to exist either (as far as I know it is purely a marketing function with little direct influence). Admittedly I’m not too sure how it works once a product gets released and matures into a flagship like the iPhone but bottom-up incubation work definitely continues even on those.
Isn't keeping employees working longer by design? Or is it only "dangerous" now because they are somehow finding out that the knock-on effects of these perks are now giving negative returns on productivity?
> "Work-life balance cannot be achieved by spending all your life on a work campus. It's not real. It's not really engaging with the world in the way most people do," he said. "It also drains the immediate neighborhoods of being able to have a commercial reality."
Do Mountain View and Sunnyvale and Cupertino want, or would they even allow, more and busier strip malls?
I see these perks as fundamentally trying to make the suburban office park experience tolerable to younger workers, who would otherwise get this stuff from the city. I work for a more urban company and we don’t do any of this crap except lunch. We don’t need to; it’s down the street.
It's a little worse than that, because a cult only destroys your life. These Silicon Valley corporations are destroying Earth as we know it (climate change, etc).
(if you doubt it, think about it: how many resources does surveillance capitalism need to build datacenters just to hoard your personal that's unrelated to the service provided? p2p is far greener than any cloud service you can think of)
Eh. Eating out is a huge money sink. I rarely go to restaurants or cafes. The city certainly isn’t entitled to my money for shit I can make at home for vastly cheaper.
It's just a complete failure of urban development thanks to NIMBY. Cities want to keep Google in their area for obvious financial reasons, but don't want to touch any of their precious SFH zoning. So they let Google to do everything they want, even housing. Google's recently trying to develop urban area around their campus (San Jose has the most buzz but it seems MTV and Sunnyvale also has a similar masterplan? You'll be surprised to see how aggressive Google is on purchasing real estates around their campus) and I guess their primary motivation is to outsource as many office functionality as possible to third parties. We'll see how many "free perks" will remain after that.