
Are Google employees more productive because of company perks? - Reedx
https://www.quora.com/Are-Google-employees-more-productive-because-of-company-perks?share=1
======
ridiculous_fish
Xoogler here; this information is circa 2015.

The infamous perks are low-order bits for personal productivity. For example,
on-site food is nice, but making it free actually hurts productivity: larger
crowds so you spend more time waiting, you are more likely to travel between
different cafes just to sample things, etc.

However company-wide these are much more valuable because they improve
recruiting and especially retention. Nothing hurts productivity like employee
turnover! This is why they are a smart investment for the company.

As for personal productivity, these were the biggest perks:

1\. The shuttle. This gave me effectively two additional hours working instead
of driving.

2\. Fast hardware. I had a 64 GB Mac Pro, plus laptops and dev servers. Sweet!

But there were also "anti-perks" that hurt my productivity:

1\. Cramped and ghastly loud open office (building 40). It was difficult to
focus.

2\. Insufficient physical space. My job required wiring up a lot of PCBs and
prototype hardware, but I had the same desk as someone just writing code. I
had to "swap" my physical setups.

3\. Highly distributed team. Having key team members in Asia meant ~16 hour
cycle time for questions, code review, etc. (Plus expect to spend a portion of
each meeting fighting with VC.)

However if we take productivity as literally "producing valuable things" and
not false metrics like LOC or bug fix count, then IMO these were the highest
company-wide productivity killers:

1\. Leadership churn, leading to project churn and cancellation. Not the
healthy reevaluation of underperforming projects, but rather arbitrary "make a
mark" changes associated with new directors/VPs.

2\. Performance review over-weighting "creating something new" leading to
unnecessary duplication. A Googler who creates a (say) new build system excels
the one who adapts an existing build system. This is visible all the way to
the product level, e.g. their many chat apps.

~~~
candiodari
I've had offsite food before and onsite food. Yes onsite food comes with
queues, but meet up while working + queue + eat still beats the hell out of
travel + meet up while waiting + travel + queue + eat + travel.

In my experience, onsite food (free or cheap) is often 30 to 45 minutes.
Offsite food starts at 45 minutes and can be occasionally up to two hours and
this is mostly out of your control.

I imagine this is pretty dependent on the exact area you work in though.

------
lmilcin
I don't work at Google, but I think their productivity comes from not wasting
time. I had some interactions over the years so here is what I have noticed
(might not be true, might not be all, might depend on the teams I interacted
with).

There seems to be a lot of effort to remove day to day time wasters in small
things.

Then, if you think about it, having subpar teammates is also a waste of time.
They are not only wasting their own time but also everybody elses. So making
sure you don't let people with IQ less than certain threshold is also
important for everybodys productivity.

Solving a problem once is extremely important. Instead of reinventing
infrastructure for each and every project at the company as many companies do
(mine, one of the largest banks in the world, in my team there are still
people who are devoted to maintaining a handful of servers running Windows --
including completely custom everything from project structure, to build, to
configuration mechanisms, everything reinvented for the project). Solving a
problem once also means you can focus on a single problem because you are
solving this problem for an entire company.

If you do Agile right you get to the part at the core of the process where you
mercilessly optimize your process. I think most companies talk about Agile
where Google is one of the very few that actually do it.

~~~
muzz
I was surprised at how much time _is_ wasted. Lunch is free of cost, but
because there are long lines at times it can take easily 15 minutes of wait
time, and that doesn't even count time spent going to a cafe in a farther
building, rounding up coworkers to go with, etc.

~~~
lmilcin
Time is wasted when a team works for years on something that ultimately is not
bringing value to the company because the vision was not clear or execution
was pitiful. Time is wasted when everybody repeats same thing without enough
benefit. Time is wasted when you are working on a project while you could do
something else with better return for the company.

That 15 minutes in line? Well, you probably had to stand up and socialize
anyway...

------
shafte
Some of the comments here suggest that the Google's perks are bad because they
corrode work/life balance and encourage employees to stay longer.

Having worked at some of the FANGs, I can say that this effect of these perks
on work/life decisions is very very small. Most people enjoy the perks and do
what they were going to do anyway. Most of my teammates won't stay for free
dinner because they'd rather spend time with their friends and families. Most
people work from home all the ~once/week.

When work/life balance is bad, it's because of a desire to perform or
managerial pressure; not because you get free food and an on-site dentist.
Generally the perks are conveniences and genuinely nice to have, and if they
are part of a sinister plot to exploit workers, they are pretty bad at it.

------
shanxS
Does anyone else thinks this question is not well defined? Because, 1\. How do
you define employee productivity? 2\. How do you know that Google employees
have more productivity as opposed to other companies?

The analysis becomes even more convoluted when "employees" encompasses
everyone from engineer to janitor to executive.

~~~
dakial1
Also, one possible answer is that the perks don't make the employees more
productive, but they attract more productive employees.

------
writepub
What evidence points towards higher productivity at Google? In my opinion,
this is largely a myth.

When Google acquired Motorola, snotty Googlers paraded around claiming to be
at least 2X smarter than the average Motorola employee. They publicly
proclaimed to turn around a sinking ship and produce iPhone killers, emphasis
on plural, within a few quarters.

But none of that famed productivity or genius amounted to measurable results.

An objective analysis will reveal that Google's main business - online
advertising- has been so damn profitable for them that they've absorbed
hundreds, if not thousands of failed projects burning billions. One might
argue that any other company with the ability to subsidize this this kind of
failure will churn out scores of projects with little chance of success,
projecting an image of productivity.

Ponder on this for a moment, if everyone outside core advertising, AI, YouTube
and Android are fired from Google tomorrow, their revenue and profit will
barely budge. What % of Google do to think work on those products? So how
productive do you deem the average Googler is?

------
m104
I'm guessing that, even if it wasn't more productive, the perks help keep
Google employees at Google and not, say, at a competitor.

------
gniv
A lot of the answers say yes, but I would say no. One of the answers touches
on what I think might be the real cause for high productivity:

> The problems you work on are new and interesting

> The people you work with are smart and helpful

I would add the great infrastructure, which is probably the main reason.

But none of these are perks that folks usually think of when they think of
Google perks.

------
avgDev
I feel as I would hate to work there.

They are creating all these things to make it a 2nd home for people. They want
people to be there a LONG time.

I'm happy with 40hrs with some days remote and I don't think I could switch to
googles approach.

~~~
eitally
But you have no idea that you wouldn't be able to continue with your 40hrs and
some days remote if you had a job at Google. There are lots of people who have
a positive work/life balance at Google. Some take advantage of some perks,
some others, and some don't use very many at all, but the fact is that there
are many perks available catering to a huge spectrum of desires, whether that
means fitness, food, social, cultural, technology, or financial.

Just because Google offers onsite laundry and serves three meals a day doesn't
mean employees _have_ to participate. But having them makes it a more
appealing place to a broader range of potential candidates, and a friendlier
place for employees, too.

~~~
lainga
Do people who work 40 hours a week get promoted?

~~~
Daishiman
Working long hours has zero to do with getting promoted.

------
nailer
Not covered in first answer: you could leave at 6, but if you stay till 7
there's a roast dinner. I suspect people who still work at Google are
sometimes a little blind to their own behaviour.

~~~
some_account
Young, brilliant programmers but still totally dependent on the approval of
their peers - to the degree that they not only work very late to get food,
they stay even longer to avoid someone judging them.

I bet they even make excuses before leaving at 8 pm... Its really very sad
that smart human beings act like that due purely to social pressure.

~~~
lawlorino
So is this something you've experienced personally, or is it just speculation?

------
hsienmaneja
Quora sure does take in a lot of data.

~~~
devmunchies
What’s this comment getting at? I don’t follow.

~~~
hsienmaneja
Quora compels users to hand over sensitive personal data, combines that with
any other data it can, makes mental health diagnoses on its users, and
generally offers creepy content.

------
newswriter99
Journalism/editing tip: Never start a headline with a question. And definitely
never start a headline with a question that can be answered: "No" by a
reasonable guestimation.

~~~
choxi
How did that come to be a best practice? I like titles with questions because
they can frame the scope and objective of the article really well.

~~~
Spellman
In journalism, the argument is as follows: If the answer to the question is
"yes," it is a stronger/more authoritative headline to simply assert instead
of pose a question.

Therefore, any headline that poses a question will result in the answer being
"no."

It doesn't apply in this case because it's a Quora question and not an
editorialized piece of journalism.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

~~~
choxi
Interesting, thanks

