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Comment by yegle | Hacker News Reader

My ex-manager who left Google to another well established company once said the most missed thing from Google was the ability to work remotely right away on corp laptop with BeyondCorp.

Disclaimer I work for Google not related to BeyondCorp.

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Is logging into a VPN in 3 seconds and starting to work not "right away" enough?

Maintaining a stateful VPN connection is much harder than making a stateless HTTP request.

Modern VPN solutions allow for full IP roaming. Nothing to maintain really.

I see what these guys are trying to get at - its essentially how I run distributed services for my small business, but having a VPN in front of those is still a more secure option. VPN should not mean the keys to the kingdom and should indeed be restricted to a subset of explicitly exposed services.

I thought Google doesn't allow remote work?

This is incorrect! I began as a full-time remote employee and stayed so for 16 months until it made more sense for me to move to HQ.

There are hundreds of remote workers, but being local has definitely allowed me to not need to rely on email and video chats so heavily.

(Disclosure: Google employee)

I concur: I'm typing this from my home office in Palm Springs, and I'm a Director at Google.

Directors might get to work remotely. Good for you. I hope you enjoy Palm Springs while your reports are trapped on 101.

Mere Developers are essentially never permitted to work remotely long-term. Google would rather lose someone valuable like Tim Bray to a major competitor than allow him to do so.

If you're a global subject expert like Professor Hinton, maybe you'll be accommodated, but you dare don't mislead people into believing it's remotely common. That would be a lie.

Probably more dependent on one's immediate manager and/or chain than on company wide policy.

Personally, I would not want to report to someone who spends the majority of time remote. But maybe this person is a really great boss.

> I would not want to report to someone who spends the majority of time remote

Why? There is really little to no difference if person is in next cubicle or video chat away.

I work on a team with another remote team, and I assure you this is not always the case.

For me it is the glance over to the next cubicle or next aisle to see if the person is on phone, heads down working, or is easily interruptable. I don't have remote technology to do that. The best I have is an IM which is a cognitive load for me and an interruption for them.

Same here - not a the same level though :-) Undisclosed location from the European Alps - I've always worked remotely, even when my company HQs were in Sunnyvale and I was living a few blocks from the office.

how long did it take for you to obtain clearance on that?

i tried to create a plan to go remote within a year of starting, and i was told that people WAY more senior than me have tried and failed to go remote

How does one request full-time work in the interview? Is it normal to do it during the onboarding process?

Full-time remote work? If you're going to reach an agreement on where you will live and work it's better to do it as early in the process as possible. I'd say WELL before onboarding and interview. Like conversation #1 with the recruiter/internal contact. It's about mutual understanding and respect, and making sure your physical position would provide value.

The smaller the team, the better, but it's 100% on you to explain when there are 70,000 counter-examples in play. Same would go for discussing why a certain regional office (like Seattle) would maybe work vs. Mountain View. You have to be where you will give your best work to your self and team. I got really tired of flying back and forth and holding meetings being the one remote person out of ~12-20 got really ridiculous, so a move was inevitable for me.

When I'm applying for jobs I'll open with an email to their recruiter saying that I'm interested and intend to apply, but only if they can confirm they're open to me working remotely the majority of the time, I also mention my expected salary range. Doing it that way saves us both time and hassle in going through the motions only to find down the line that it would never have worked out because of either work arrangements or salary.

For a big company, Google is surprisingly willing to make the right thing happen in individual cases. My sense is that Google's ban on working from home is a strong default, a rebuttable presumption that working from home would be a bad idea in a given situation. Rebuttable presumptions can be rebutted.

On my team (and most other teams) it is cool to work from home or a different office occasionally.

Maybe you're confused with Yahoo?

https://www.fastcompany.com/3020930/yahoo-says-that-killing-...

They're very, very different companies/work culture :)

One is in the technology industry.

The other is managing its shares in Alibaba.

Very different needs.

Remote work can be intended also as in "you are at a customer facility and need to access the corporate intranet to get a document or access the SW repository".

It's quite rare to have a full time WFH situation. But WFH once or twice a week is quite common. At least in my office.

Well, even if you don't work remotely, you routinely need to access corp resources from outside office.

This is for an SRE role who would need to work during on call, or for whatever reason decide to WFH.

I think pure remote role is still allowed but that's not what I mean.

Working remotely part of the time is common. Full time seems rare, and I've known people who had to find another job when their office closed.

I think the only restriction is working on Google approved hardware so no BYOD there.

(Disclosure: not a Google employee).

Bring Your Own Device is fine for ChromeOS and Mobile. You might not get the full amount of trust as a Google-issued device (for mobile/tablet).

To achieve the highest levels of access in the BeyondCorp model you need a machine with Google's management agents, so we can evaluate device state accurately and pull information from our inventory management system.

But if you don't provision the device yourself how can you be sure it hasn't been tampered with in a way that just displays "bootloader OK, everything good" but in the mean time it was rooted? Or is that a risk calculated in the "no full amount of trust"?

https://www.chromium.org/chromium-os/chromiumos-design-docs/...

That protects against newbies, but we’re talking here about Google employees – modifying and cloning the ICs on the board to fake a verified boot status should be a triviality for people who design their own chips and boards for Google’s own servers, right?

That would be covered by policy controls, not technical ones—it's the same issue as someone taking pictures of the screen with their personal phone. You'd need to address the actual issue that's causing people to do that (ill-thought-out policies, employee actually working for $INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY, employee enjoys espionage,…).

A recent example would have been the data that was stolen from Google and given to Uber – the employees who were qualified enough to design their own LIDAR chips and boards would equally be qualified to circumvent any such protections.

And that's how / why the legal system is involved and it's cost them their job. Security isn't just preventing something from ever being possible.

On a Google-approved device, you can still use that device, and copy content to another, non-Google-approved device. Nothing is perfect, but at some point you trust your employees.

you can't clone code from a non-Google-approved device so if you write code you might as well have a google issued machine

they do; many teams discourage it though

Remote meaning on the Google Bus on the way to the office.

Or working on the boat, as we at Google Zürich do: http://goo.gl/P9CA69

Or working on the train: http://goo.gl/mPZKcc

I don't know why people are negatively marking your post, because this is a thing a lot of people do and it does feel like there is a bit of a stigma to do so.

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