(Googler, opinions are my own).

I'm also a WSJ subscriber, and saw this notification from WSJ before I checked my email this morning. I think there are 2 important things to take from this for those that didn't/can't read this.

1) From the article: "Mr. Pichai was swayed in part by sympathy for employees with families to plan for uncertain school years that may involve at-home instruction, depending on geography. It also frees staff to sign full-year leases elsewhere if they choose to move."

2) This does not mean offices will remained closed. If Google is able, they will open offices and allow people to return, if employees chose to. This is more about giving people more options.

Everybody seems to be celebrating the opportunity spend more time at home, but I have the opposite view.

I live alone(it seemed like a good idea at the time[pre-corona]). My family lives hundreds of miles away on a different land mass. At the weekends I can meet up with people and do activities, but everything I used to do midweek(e.g. swim training) is now shutdown indefinitely due to Coronavirus.

I am utterly miserable in Home Office. It means from weekend to weekend I have no human contact with anyone except my reflection in the mirror.

I have no idea what to do. If I demand to work from the office just so they I get the chance to occasionally chat to someone, it takes away valuable capacity from people that actually need it.

Google employee, but opinions are my own.

As a parent I'm grateful for the flexibility to choose where I work until next summer, however it has become very clear to me that a large number of lower-income essential workers who are parents are currently facing a major childcare crisis because they have to return to work despite schools being closed.

This is really revealing underlying disparities in childcare access and the inequities in our education system. Given the immediacy and severity of this crisis, people in my community are trying to figure out if they can repurpose existing social service foundations, like school PTAs, to raise funds from more well off community members to support others who are in this sort of childcare bind.

But it's very hard going, not at the least because everyone is in their own personal logistical crisis and it's hard to think about others' childcare needs when you are trying to figure out your own.

There's a lot of celebrating about working from home and the convenience that brings, but there is no free lunch. A social trade off: now it is (the people who WFH) your responsibility to separate your work/family/life boundaries. I cant speak from experience (introvert, no family), but I think I understand people enough that many will be lulled by the convenience/comfort and not put enough effort into keeping those boundaries up. Expanding: your routine before the shutdown (gym, night classes, public talks, etc). Each of those now require two trips to participate (to and from), instead of hitting them up after (or during) work -> more effort to keep boundaries up.

Additionally, staying in the same place all day cuts out hundreds/thousands of opportunities (over a year) to meet people.

I disagree with people pushing for WFH to become the norm. As convenient as it is, I think it is a net negative to society/our social fabric. IMO, life is already too convenient. That being said, it may be possible for local (neighborhood/town) culture to bloom. It will be challenging in our hyper-political, 'can find people who agree with me anywhere in the world' environment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place

There was an HN post with great discussion that I cannot find about the wiki article. Third place's were already in decline in the USA.

Lastly: This has been posted many times, but many of the employers costs could be transferred to the employee in a WFH environment.

EDIT: I should add, I've been working from home for > 5 years and live in a big city. I've watched my self discipline decline over the years (or maybe that's due to getting older, or being too comfortable). It's been very difficult to build a social network of friends.

As someone at a non-silicon valley non-FAANG company, how are those guys treating their hardware teams?

As an embedded hardware engineer, I've been coming in to the office on an "as necessary" basis. Reading between the lines, I'm rolling my eyes. 99% of what I do can be done at home with the equipment I have, yet our business unit has been the one R&D group expected to have butts-in-seats the whole "shutdown" due to being an "essential" (i.e. medical devices) business.

Hearing all of these tech companies taking the pandemic seriously is giving me some serious grass-is-always-greener feelings.

Think this is a smart move - a LOT of other companies spending energy trying to figure out when and how to phase people coming back to the office, this approach shifts it down the road and says lets just focus on executing here and now.

Reality is if people did start coming back to office that could easily get reversed in a few months.

So again I like the idea of kicking the problem down the road given what we know today.

I'm ready for high-tech, work-from-home workers to build a trailer park in some remote location (as long as it has great internet), where you have to quarantine for two weeks on the way in, but once you're in your kid gets to go to school with other kids the same age, your infant gets to go to daycare.

I mean, really, a lot of Bay Area people would probably end up with MORE living space in a mobile home.

Either that, or maybe I should just be trying to move to New Zealand.

While this was probably a necessary move due to ongoing covid19 impact on families as well as pressure from other companies (e.g. FB and Twitter having announced broader WFH policies), it's fascinating to see Google do this and how it'll impact their workforce in the longer term.

Google arguably pioneered the model of "office will have everything you need" to incentive current employees to come to the office as well as lure new recruits. It's been a win-win for the company and the employees: Google gets focus/dedication and the synergies of colocation, whereas employees can enjoy the many onsite perks.

One major irony is that for a company that sells products that facilitate and enable WFH, such as the GSuite, it's actually not very open to allowing its employees to WFH. Covid19 has seemingly forced the company to change, or at least adapt in the short term.

But what happens in 2-3 years? As tech employees everywhere are used to WFH, Google probably needs to de-emphasize the onsite requirement aspect and consequently change their culture/workplace model.

In some ways it’s actually kind of annoying to get a medium-term commitment. My partner’s job at Google can be (and of course recently has been) done remotely. We would rather move somewhere cheaper and closer to family, rather than being chained to a particular office location.

Now we have confirmation that remote work is basically all fine, except we can’t take real advantage of it because there‘s no reason to think it will continue to be possible in the future.

I appreciate that companies are offering flexibility, but it would definitely be better if there was more thinking being done about the long-term restructuring of work.

If I was able to receive a definite answer from my employer about a real remote date, I would have purchased a house for under 100k in Montana months ago by now.

If everyone's moving to remote working. Do you believe this will push for dumping wages as well? I don't mean moving jobs to India, but rather recruit remote workers in relative low-income areas of the US?

Not discrediting the amount of skills available on the US East coast but why wouldn't FAANG try to source new remote employees elsewhere in the US?

What really hasn't gotten the same level of attention is the fact that Googlers will be able to work from anywhere in the country their main office is located in. I predict there will be some exodus of Googlers from places like NYC, SF/Bay, LA and Seattle for places like Austin, Colorado and Florida.

Edit. I have two small kids and child care has been the bane of my existence since March. This (and flex time) has definitely helped my families situation. I'm grateful for the luxury and I'm deeply concerned for everyone who is in this situation without this flexibility (friends and family included).

/Googler living in a middle state, thoughts my own.

My how things change. Last year my manager and director at Google wouldn’t let me be away from the office to work from another location for 2 weeks without forcing me to take a family leave. To quote “remote doesn’t work, if you can’t be in the office you need to take a leave or vacation”. Apparently those two L7 geniuses weren’t consulted before this decision :)

I worked from a company that was acquired and about 1/4the people in the building were left working in a building for about 4x the number of people there.

All the layoff horror aside, it was glorious working there for a while before they started renting the unused space.

The executive bathrooms were real treat. it was always quiet, every common space was sort of a private lounge.

I wonder if folks in the office are having the same experience.

I find it interesting how this situation is beginning to feel normal to me. I'm only 20, so I've never really consciously lived through a world event of anything even approaching this magnitude before. I'm finding that my whole outlook on life is being majorly altered by all this. As utterly horrible and tragic as everything is right now, I'm hopeful this will ultimately turn out to result in some positive lifestyle changes for me at a personal level, as long as I don't die.

Good thing. I think that other major companies too will follow the same step Google has taken now(WFH).

PS: Typing this wondering when the corona phases out.

The cynic in me sees the cost savings. Suddenly you're at work 24/7; no office space or workplace overhead, no office perks or food.

And this marks peak tech salary.

Anyone know what the US tax implications are of long-term working from home, specifically for deducting "home costs" for the employee?

As other comments mention protracted WFH reveals and expands many inequities;

- A good chunk of the FAANG workers are young immigrants, which means they cannot move back to their parents’. Whereas most of their American counterparts can do this if they choose to and enjoy multiple benefits from rent savings to moral support of having a community.

- A good majority of the workers are single young adults. Multiyear shutdowns including the office space will make couplings suffer. It is already harder for immigrants to find partners (e.g. large intercultural gaps) but this not only amplifies the current isolation but also delays people’s life goals significantly.

- A good portion of the workforce don’t have enough savings for a downpayment and usually live in HCOL locations, which means they are renting smallish apartments. When the primary locale is home, it makes a huge difference what that home is like. Be it sufficient noise isolation from neighbors, to having space for exercise / hobbies (even more important where gyms and other entertainment venues are closed), a dedicated office, a yard to get some sunshine and fresh air.

I forsee mental health of these demographics taking an extra hit that will ripple for the next several years, even decades.

Absent from most coverage:

This and the related issue of school closure,

are necessitated only because in this country we were incapable of embracing, or even in any meaningful way, articulating, the necessary and obvious solution to this pandemic: • support individuals and businesses 100%, while • developing effective test, trace, treat, and control

There is no mystery here. The examples of successful variants are everywhere: literally, everywhere else in the first and some of the second world.

The arguments for UBI, single payer, and not least, the eradication of right-wing indoctrination networks which cultivate a meaningful subset of the populace to be uninformed, uninformable tribal victimhood-rage-junkies divorced from consensus reality and hostile to science, have never been more stark.

Yet nowhere are these self-evident truths being articulated, debated, trumpeted, defended, forced.

Every vehicle which the right habitually paints as "left" liberal or biases that I follow,

is so laughably mealy-mouthed, equivocating, both-siding, and self-constrained in its framing, let alone advocacy, as to provoke nihlistic despair.

The question is not why Google is resigning itself to WFH.

The question is not why employees must now form micro-schooling pods out of pocket.

The question is why there are not pitchforks and torches forcing the obvious basic systemic change in this country necessary to bring us in-line with every other functional variant of 21st c. intelligent capitalism.

We have been committed by short-sighted billionaires who backed social tribalism as a tactic to wealth consolidation,

to a path of total cultural and political self-destruction.

So f--king tiresome and so, so, so unnecessary.

So a mischievous question : if everyone can work from home, which means they can work from anywhere and not really needed in USA, will Google reduce H-1B applications for the next year?

I'm pleased to see that WFH is becoming more normal.

The government wouldn't let Google create housing at the site of its office, so it created Google offices at the sites of its employees :)

Feel bad for people in the US, which seems to effectively to be back to March/April.

Why not work from home forever? If it works now it’ll work in a year.

This is the first person/company that actually has a realistic (still optimistic) Coronavirus timeline.

Prior to this, everyone had unrealistic "fall 2020", then pushed to "January 2021".

This still assumes a vaccine and production of the vaccine will be finished in under a year.

A more realistic estimate seems to be 2022.

I don't understand why this is so hard, you can look at pandemic physics to know that Coronavirus is not going anywhere. And you can look at previous vaccine and medical production to understand how long it takes to make hundreds of millions or billions of vaccines.

Are most people willfully ignorant?

Extend and pretend!

So many non-government institutions can see what's obvious!