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Comment by thoweryo2i344 | Hacker News Reader

> By now, many of us have gotten a good setup at home and are pretty productive.

It might be okay for people who've been at Google for a while, but it's really not a very good experience for a Noogler.

Google's infrastructure, while amazing, is also one-of-a-kind, which means that you need a lot of internal resources to get up to speed on things, which would go much faster from a face to face interaction. It's nightmare dealing with all this when the only folk with the required know how are some rather unfriendly folk in MTV (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India).

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> (who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India)

It probably doesn't make you feel any better, but I ran into this attitude frequently when working from a satellite office in the US.

Teams worked in constant fear of a defrag (read: their jobs got impactful enough to pull the work into MTV), and we regularly referred to ourselves as a "vassal" office. Teams in the vassal would get assigned sustaining engineering work on systems that the MTV folks didn't want to maintain any more, or product development support work for low-end gear. I was told by a PM once, "how can your team contribute if you aren't in MTV?". There were too many examples to count, and enumerating them all would just turn into a grouch-fest. It also certainly isn't everyone on the campus, but incidents happened often enough to be a sore point.

So, yeah. They don't look down on you for being from India. They look down on you because you aren't in MTV.

Do you know whether people based out of the Cambridge/Boston site would be considered second-class citizens today?

And if there is a second-class dynamic, would it be in a way that adversely affected the work, directly, or the impact was more about individual treatment?

(For example of affecting the work... when collaboration across sites is needed, for the benefit of the org, would there be difficulty getting it to happen, because some were second-class... such as not being taken as seriously, or working with second-class didn't fit well with promotion strategies, etc.)

I have never particularly felt second class in the Cambridge office. Nor heard anyone complain of being such.

There have been a few defrags, but there is a wide array of impactful projects.

> who I find are always rather disinterested with us plebs in "shit-hole" India

I can empathize with the problems of remote work across national and cultural divides, but please don't toss flamebait like this into HN threads. It leads to flamewars, which we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough, I can see why it would be beneficial for a noogler, but everyone struggles initially, no matter how much face to face interaction you have. It took me 6+ months before I felt comfortable enough with the internal tools and I'm still learning lots of new things today, despite being 6+ years at the company.

The other thing is, even if we went to the office, we won't necessarily be able to have the same face-to-face experience until the mask and social distancing mandates are done with imo.

I also felt people disinterested on collaborations, everyone has their own goals, I wouldn't attribute it to your country per say.

I think every company struggles with collaboration in general. People have their "day jobs" so asking them to do something they don't really get "credit" for can be tough.

It's easier in-person because you're harder to ignore than an email is. But it can be hard to get support especially from other groups.

I joined Google in February and I love working remote. Definitely not excited about the prospect of sitting in traffic for 2 hours a day just to wear a mask at work.

I don't work from India, but haven't had much issue with onboarding or access to things.

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