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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

> I think Google having a company-wide policy on this is nuts. Teams vary a lot. They should probably be left to make their own decisions.

This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.

First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility ("Employees not prepared to return April 4 also can seek a remote-work extension, Google said. Since last June, Google has approved nearly 14,000 employees globally to transfer to a new location or go fully remote, Casey said. About 15% of applications have been denied, he added.") But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

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> it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

Why would that be true? Trust your staff to behave like adults, and trust your team leadership. This feels like a cop out from leaders who don't understand how to manage uncertainty, as opposed to an actual requirement.

Remember those Yahoos! Whom Marissa had to fire because those adults could not be trusted to do what they were expected to do and be responsible?

Some had “multiple jobs” and both or more employers were getting the short shrift.

Small orgs are like small towns, everyone knows who’s up to what. Large orgs are like cities…

It's a wonder cities don't just fall apart and stop functioning completely without someone taking an attendance headcount everyday and peaking over their shoulders to make sure they are doing their job.

There’s a distributed system of loosely coupled organizations in charge of making cities work. They coordinate by a price system for many urgent voluntary transactions and by bureaucratic organizations with supervision for others. In neither case do they rely on people just doing their jobs because it is the god and honorable thing to do.

Cities don’t have a particular mission statement, so that kind of comparison isn’t apt.

My point was that in a city people are semi anonymous and others don’t keep tabs in you and know whether you’re a slacker, a thief, the town millionaire, the job producer or not. In a small town folks know to some degree who is vandalizing, doing the graffiti, stealing the cattle, helping farmer John with the fences, bringing food to the widow, etc.

What makes you say employees working in cities don't have managers making sure they are doing their jobs?

Yeah, if you don't earn your living you end up homeless and starving.

You can thank capitalism for that.

Was Yahoo! incredibly more productive and efficient after Marissa fired all these slackers ? That doesn't seem to be the story we've seen unfolding from there.

It's a fairness thing at scale. In a small org, when you trust people to behave as adults they will generally fall within some band of normal that everyone sees as "reasonable". In a large org, you get outliers that do things someone else would consider unacceptable, and then they set the tone for the organization ("if they can do it, why can't I?"), and soon it's a race to the bottom in behavior.

The "cities" metaphor is actually pretty apt. In small towns everybody polices each other, and you don't behave badly because your life will become pretty difficult if you do. In a big city, you either have lots of rules in the form of municipal codes, or people start behaving badly along some dimension, eg. crime in SF or zoning in Houston.

I would like to know if you posted that because you have actual experience managing a large team, or you are just taking out of your **.

Yes, there is a great deal of flexibility and patience. I worked from home a couple days a week.

In the old days, they drew the line at going full-remote. When the Atlanta office closed, everyone there had to either move somewhere else or, eventually, leave. I guess that's changed.

Why did that office originally close? And haven’t they opened a new, larger one since then?

Engineering offices need an exec to serve as site lead. Whoever was there left or moved, and I guess they couldn't find a replacement. There is now an engineering office there again, so someone must have wanted (or been willing) to move there.

That would be me. I'm the tech site lead for Atlanta. The first part was certainly true many years ago (Bruce left). However, that was actually a driver for change way back in 2010 because nobody thought that was a good result

2010. Google was very different then, and was honestly somewhat immature about location strategy. It is no longer like that, in large part as a response to Atlanta back then.

We are opening a new larger space (in the next few months), and have over a thousand people here now.

> This seems rational until you are actually responsible for managing a large organization.

This reads like an argument against single management for large organizations. If you need to fit thousands of square pegs into holes, perhaps it's not the best approach in the first place.

Central vs distributed government. Which do you think works better?

A mixture of both is the usual approach I think.

A central government delegating most of the day to day management of citizen's environment to local, highly autonomous entities is a common pattern.

Federalism!

Central allows the majority to rule the minority. Distributed allows the majority to rule the minority but also allows groups to move to a jurisdiction where they can be the majority, or at least have a more friendly government while central does not.

Central is certainly easier for the rulers though and they have much more power and resources.

Depends which tradeoffs you are comfortable with and which aspects affect one's individual definition of "better".

I wonder how much of this consistency is for the sake of feeling in control. (i.e. I hypothesise, that it is only about emotions of the boss)

> First off, the article itself states that Google is giving a lot of flexibility

> But it get's very difficult to manage a large company without at least some sort of consistent policy.

It isn't a contradiction but these two statements seem to at least be in a bit of tension, right?

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