
Google CEO tells employees return to office won't happen until at least June 1 - dsavant
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/28/google-ceo-says-return-to-office-wont-happen-until-at-least-june-1.html
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owenwil
Genuine question: do people really expect to be back in the office at all this
year, given how high the risk is and that those jobs can almost certainly be
done from home? Why?

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m-ee
Not all jobs can be done from home, and it's not all or nothing. I work with
hardware, just having one person be able to work alone in our lab would be a
massive improvement as there's test equipment we couldn't move. I don't see
much risk there. Others might face similar challenges accessing materials
(physical or virtual) that need to be kept somewhere secure.

EDIT: Also need to remember the challenges for parents. It can be incredibly
hard to be productive at home with kids around, and ability to trade off the
responsibility of watching them and working would be huge.

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hkmurakami
Natural given bay area shelter in place extension to end of May

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JJMcJ
What was the reason GOOG didn't have work from home before March?

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slongfield
Because there were hardly any Covid-19 cases in Santa Clara County (where
Google is based) before March

[https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx](https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx)

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JJMcJ
I meant, why can Google run now with WFH, but they didn't allow it before.
That is, what was the motivation for forbidding WFH?

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acituan
Wild but fun speculation: WFH decreases housing prices because people can
disperse further. The higher the tenure & seniority within a company, the
higher the likelihood of real estate ownership (both primary and rental
properties). There is a conflict of interest in having more control on WFH
policies and seeing your house not appreciating as much in value or not
bringing as much rent. I wasn’t able to find data on this but it is hard to
imagine any Bay Area exec not having real estate positions in the area.

More realistic reason: Middle management struggles with perceived lack of
control and justifying their existence through wider WFH. Their business is
their reports, and there is simply less control surface exposed through WFH to
them. It is harder to carry out impression management from home. It is simply
a higher friction, higher anxiety scenario. Ultimately they influence WFH
adoption, whether at team-local levels or upward influence in company-wide
decision making.

