Google’s offices were once famous to outsiders as a whimsical, magical place filled with giant playground slides, 24/7 staff massages, a wide selection of free meals, and free laundry services. bottom. Today, in Google’s new cost-cutting era, some employees can’t have their own desks.
CNBC’s Jennifer Elias has obtained an internal document from Google’s “cloud” division declaring that “most Googlers will share a desk with one other Googler.” The move is apparently part of a cost-cutting move that will allow Google to “continue to invest in cloud growth,” leaving some buildings empty. According to CNBC, the new policy applies to Google Cloud’s largest U.S. location in Kirkland, Washington. New York City; San Francisco; Seattle; and Sunnyvale, California.
Instead of the humorous image of Google employees sitting shoulder-to-shoulder and fighting over desk space, employees are expected to alternate between desks during the day. After the pandemic and work-from-home trend, Google wants employees to visit her office twice a week with a “hybrid work” policy. As such, you are expected to work with your desk mates to set rules for how you share. According to Google’s documentation, if you don’t stick to your schedule, you could run out of desks. In that case, you have to work with “overflow drop-in-space”.
The team leader “sets a norm with the team regarding shared desks so that paired Googlers can discuss how to decorate the space, store personal belongings, or discuss tidiness expectations.” It is expected that Google has also increased usage limits for meeting rooms.
It will probably take some getting used to how desk sharing works with important desk items like computers. A strange line in the CNBC report reads:[Google’s] According to the FAQ, employees using computer workstations will no longer keep their workstations directly under their desks and should instead look up their location in a database or file a ticket for troubleshooting. there is. “Google wants to move away from dedicated workstations and wants employees to move to an internal-only virtual desktop tool for thin clients called ‘CloudTop’.
Inside Google, the report said, employees criticized the company for shutting down the company’s “corpspeak” announcements. Google calls this shared desk plan a “cloud office evolution,” and says it combines “best pre-pandemic collaboration and flexibility,” and “ultimately leads to more efficient use of space.” The team is organized into “districts” of 200-300 employees, and each district’s “vice president or director” is responsible for ensuring that everyone shares office resources fairly. , “Not every cost-cutting measure needs to be mangled in words to sound good to employees. , making leadership more credible. ”
Earlier this month, a Google spokesperson told SFGate that it was “ending leases on a number of vacant spaces and working to consolidate underutilized spaces in the future.” We are working to reduce costs. Last month, the company laid off her 12,000 employees. This is the largest outflow from a company previously unaffected by Big Tech layoffs. In the past seven months or so, Google killed Google Stadia, the Pixel Laptop division, Project Loon, and most recently, a robot division called Everyday Robots. He split Area 120 in half, integrated Waze into Google Maps, and cut his 15% of staff at Alphabet health company Verily and nearly 20% at Alphabet robotics company Intrinsic in another layoff.
The cloud division is a large user of real estate, as it accounts for a quarter of Google’s full-time employees. The group is the third-largest cloud provider market behind Amazon and Microsoft, but has never turned a profit, most recently losing $480 million last quarter. According to his 2019 report in The Information, Google Cloud said he faces a deadline to become No. 2 by 2023 or “risk losing money.” . That was a while ago, but now he’s in 2023. Google Cloud is still in third place, which is specifically for Google Cloud, and not all of Google sounds like budget cuts.
