What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before. They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.
Anyone remember Google Allo? I think it had video? If they made it a discord kind of thing it might have worked but instead they chose to compete with their own products.
Allo didn't have video, that was Duo's job. Hangouts Chat is their Slack/Discord competitor, and Hangouts Classic is the version that everyone has in Gmail. Hangouts Meet is their Zoom competitor. Both Hangouts Classic and Meet can video call, I believe. Chat piggybacks off of Meet. Hangouts Chat and Classic are named the same but are two different products.
Right but it's also astonishing that was allowed before. If it's not needed for work why would it be installed? Why would any non-work software be allowed on corp laptops?
Because unlike most large workplaces that inhibit innovation and productivity and infantilize staff with an “anything not specifically permitted is prohibited” rule which also creates continuous work for a review and approval bureaucracy and guarantees that toolsets are outdated and improvements difficult to discover, Google apparently has an “everything not specifically prohibited is allowed” policy.
There's a third "use at your own risk" option between the two extremes. Sure, install your favorite terminal emulator, but if it steals your production credentials you may get fired...
Because then you don't impede people who might need a new widget installed because everyone and their mother in IT needs to try it and test it before you can use it.
Especially at Google scale, where the BeyondCorp system described in their papers could automatically see when an endpoint was doing something naughty, block the user from accessing corporate resources, and give the user information on how to fix it, instead of blocking them from installing anything (even if what they want is perfectly harmless).
Google allows personal software to be installed in a corp laptop, subject to restrictions and limitations like this. It's not encouraged, though, and if something happens because you installed a third party software then it's your responsibility.
Google has always had the company culture of not infantilizing their employees and broadly trusting them to do the right thing. This reflects in many many policies and general 'culture'. You can install software on the laptop as long as you have the right license for it, and there are centralized tools to check for potentially dangerous binaries and things like that.
With videoconferencing you aren't always in control of it, especially if you interface with other companies. I have webex, zoom, bluejeans, teams, and skype4business on my laptop because I am a consultant and have to use whatever my client is using.
There's also that zoom free tier creating a 'Shadow IT' situation. Slack used this to great effect and everybody on HN was very impressed. It should be no surprise that Zoom is finding its way onto random employee laptops, that is something tech firms are trying to do on purpose now.
Generally you can install anything, but the responsibility is on you though. It's not uncommon to see people with Steam, Spotify or other personal software too.
Because sometimes there are contractors, or consultants, or vendors, or partners you work with that for one reason or another can't use internal options.
Really? I've started using it more and more recently and it seems pretty good. Dependent on good Internet connectivity like anything else but otherwise it seems straightforward and streamlined--which IMO describes Gsuite in general.
The screensharing is truly atrocious. Any window over, say, 1280x720 looks like total garbage on the other end. Aliased to hell, unreadable text, "ghosts" when you scroll.
Some employees had it installed on corp devices, maybe to connect with their friends and families. Google has banned even installing that app on corp devices. Nobody used it for corp work.
It's surprisingly common for people not to own a non-work computer other than a phone/tablet, especially now that prevalence of desktop computers is declining. Some people do still have a home desktop, or a separate personal laptop, but a lot of people I know don't. Or they might have one but it's a shared family computer that's mostly used by the kids, while parents use their work laptops.
This is correct.When all this Corona thing started,we put the entire office on remote. Before we did it,we had to assess who's got what at home. In my department it was about 20% without a laptop/pc. In others was similar.We simply gave company's PC to take home and called it a day. It's a small company, so obviously things are simpler here.
It's something I would strongly recommend against, since it gives your employer easy access to monitor you, and if for some reason your employer winds up in court, everything you used the machine for could end up read into the record.
Eh. Depends on how much control the company has over devices being used for work. I have a number of different computers--including a company-issued laptop that I use as a Linux system. But I mostly use a personal MacBook for both personal and work use. I travel a lot (normally) and really wouldn't want to have to travel with a laptop that was strictly for work use.
It's frustrating because Google Hangouts used to be great, and then Google purposefully started cannibalizing their own platform.
I really want to know what goes on within Product Management at Google, because looking from the outside in I cannot imagine anything other than sheer incompetence.
The rumors from inside Google is that there's no way to get credit/be rewarded as an employee simply for maintaining an existing solution, or even for fixing obvious breakage. Every incentive is tilted towards starting new projects, often multiple projects in the same domain directly competing with one another. There are some positives to this of course, but clearly it's being overdone.
But still...As a prod manager,you aren't coming up with new projects every week, your entire job is to ensure the roadmap is decent and not taking the product into the graveyard. The company has so many people and yet can't produce a single product with a decent UX.
I worked at Google 2006-2010, and from where I sat, Google's biggest problems were (1) rapid erosion of corporate culture over that time frame and (2) weak project management.
A friend was managing a project on a shoestring budget. Upper management (C-suite) had reviewed the idea and green-lit it. He had been told Larry and Sergei in particular had voiced support. He got it done ahead of schedule and under budget by managing a stream of off-cycle interns. The week it was scheduled to go live, someone in middle management killed it. My friend and his team got zero credit for a job very well done, a big setback for him. He and I were working on an internal tool for datacenter management as a 20% project when I left. I asked him about it later, and our 20% project met a similar fate: enthusiastic support from management, including giving us some resources, all the way through completion, followed by cancellation shortly after completion. My friend left less than a year later.
Another friend started a modest improvement to chat as a 20% project, which later got expanded to a full-time project for several engineers. I forget the external name, but the internal code name was "Taco Town" after the SnL skit. Walkabout / Wave was a skunkworks project that used its separate repository, which was very rare at Google. People knew something mysterious was going on down in Australia, but we really had no idea what it was, other than the Google Maps guys were running it and it was named "Walkabout". When Walkabout / Wave came out of skunkworks mode shortly before external launch, the Taco Town team realized they needed to launch very soon or their project would never launch because its functionality was subsumed by Walkabout / Wave. Taco Town rushed its launch, was a bit buggy and had some scalability issues that they knew about, but expected to be able to improve shortly after launch. I think Taco Town's botched launch a few weeks before Walkabout/Wave contributed to initial confusion around Wave and some of Taco Town's problems colored perceptions of Wave's launch.
Shortly after I left, Google publicly announced they'd be putting "more wood behind fewer arrows", which was a step in the right direction.
I get it that management doesn't want to discourage engineers or stifle innovation, and they know they don't have a good handle on what will be successful and what won't, but keeping around zombie projects gives engineers false hope. The "throw mud at the wall and see what sticks" style of project management can be soul-crushing for talented junior people managing small projects, unless they're properly supported and really get proper credit for doing a very good job engineering something that fails for non-engineering reasons.
They've probably run in to a similar issue to Apple whereby they've found their consumer-grade "phone auntie susan once a week" offerings don't stand up to the needs of everyone working remotely needing screen sharing, hot seating in and out all day long chats.
We're using MS Teams and it seems to be pretty great for us (team of about 15), we use Skype to contact the remaining 20ish more junior staff who don't need Teams licenses just to be able to keep in touch with their work and keep the face to face communication going.
> What's surprising to me is that it was allowed before.
> They have had their own videochat solution for years, so I would expect the usual "eat your own dogfood" approach.
If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working? Just both dig their feet in and never talk to each other? Seems silly to me.
One or both are going to have to install a video application that isn't their own aren't they?
> If an engineer from Microsoft has to speak to an engineer from Google, and you think they should both be dog-fooding their own video application... how do you see that working?
They could use a telephone. (Yes, they still exist.)
Edit for response:
Neither Google nor Microsoft forbid their employees from using telephones, and neither would even consider it. The assumption that they'd dogfood their own video chat platforms is obviously not a supposition that they'd ban telephones. Your comment frames the matter as though a third party video chat service is the only pragmatic option. Video chat was a fringe concept not very long ago, considered mostly to be in the realm of science fiction. Even today, inter-company telephone meetings are still common. Tech-fetishists working in this industry often seem to lose sight of the obvious time-tested solutions that still work today. I think a lot of people are earnestly forgetting that telephones still exist.
Standard practice for Google SREs in any serious outage is to communicate via internally-hosted IRC, since it has a minimum amount of dependencies outside of itself
I was once invited to the Google campus in Mountain View. The employee showing me around laughed in disbelief when I pulled out my Android phone to show her something. She said that she and all of her coworkers use iPhones.
