I think the author is correct that some big tech companies create a culture where going to 11am yoga is more important that crunching out a few more lines of code. He's correct that if your focus is on building and scaling product, this culture reduces the velocity of change. However, I see a couple of things the author is missing:
1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire.
2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase.
3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.
Another glaring omission - he’s now sitting on 7 years of savings from his Google manager salary & equity. If you have a few million dollars in the bank it’s much easier to take the pay cut to work at a smaller startup and chase a more high risk/high reward outcome.
It’s completely out of touch to judge anyone for wanting a stable and in the scheme of things ridiculously high paying job with good work life balance, like working at Google.
This is also part of the argument for basic income. Having a stable source of income allows people to take risks like starting their own business or joining a small startup.
It makes more sense in a country that already has a social safety net; I've read somewhere (citation needed, I know, I'm not very deep in the subject) that the cost and overhead of assessing and paying the individual cases of unemployment, long term sickness, disability, homelessness etc is more expensive than just giving everyone a basic income.
But yeah, #2 is what I'm afraid of too. Paraphrasing a cartoon villain, if everyone is wealthy, nobody is.
Besides, in the past decade, cost of living / housing / rent has gone up so much that even a $1000 / month basic income can't give you anywhere decent to live anywhere. In addition to basic income, we need basic housing - which is dangerous, because it invokes the USSR's rows of depressing and substandard apartment buildings. But everybody should be able to live comfortably at a standard of living. Everybody should be able to have access to and afford a two bedroom house or apartment on a single income, or the social safety net if they are not employed.
1) So you're saying that giving people $1000/month would open up zero new possibilities for people?
2) It's not that simple because different goods will respond differently. Certain goods will get cheaper because the increased sales will allow for more economies of scale.
Housing is the big one mentioned, and it does not allow for any further economies of scale than already exist. Rent rises based on the prevailing salary of the area -- house prices as well, since they represent the years of rental income. It's not even necessarily a supply issue, since Seattle has more empty houses than it has homeless people! Prices simply rise to whatever the market can bear. So under the current system, any absolute increase in money will likely simply be swallowed by landlords.
Housing is a normal economic market that is responsive to changes on both the demand and supply side. The major problem with housing in this country is that restrictive policies have put a damper on housing supply so that it is not able to keep up with demand. Seattle has a normal amount of vacancies in it. It could have 2X the housing (and thus have a lot more people living in Seattle paying lower rents) and still have the same percentage vacancy. It's not a real or valid argument to say "look there's more vacancies than homeless people, so supply must be fine".
A "normal number" of housing vacancies would only make sense if everyone was housed. Housing isn't a voluntary good, where you'll expect some unsold stock and you'll expect not everyone to buy one -- everyone needs a place to live, and will spend as much as they have to in order to get housing of minimal quality. The entire concept of a "normal" number of vacancies doesn't make sense here.
There absolutely is a "normal" amount of vacancies because it takes time for a house to sell, for someone to move out and then someone else to move in, for a new lease to be signed, etc. It's exactly the same dynamic with employment; there is a "normal" amount of a unemployment (a low single digit number) that is impossible to improve past, simply because it takes time to find a job. Housing is no different.
Also, most of the homeless are unhoused because they either can't afford a home or they have mental illness/drug addiction issues that makes them incapable of earning money in order to be able to afford a house. It doesn't matter if housing is vacant if you don't have the means to pay the rent, or if they won't even consider you for a lease anyway because you don't have a reliable source of income.
It seems pretty complex to design a version of a lax unemployment policy that eliminates steep cliffs that might disincentivize working, is fair, and also doesn't let anybody slip through the cracks. How do you handle someone quitting voluntarily, or retiring early, or starting their own business which doesn't pay them yet, or only paying themselves a small amount, or working a part-time job on the side while focusing on something else, etc.
The income tax code already exists and has to solve some of these problems, so it seems easier to give everyone the money and then tax it back from the highest earners later (or implement it as a negative income tax, but that has its own hurdles as well, i.e. imagine a homeless person needing to wait until tax season and then getting paid for the whole year, it would be a big hurdle and they'd still need other assistance programs the rest of the year if they didn't budget the money well enough).
I agree it is complex, I have no answers. Certainly though if the requirement for unemployment is that you have to be actively looking for employment ... sort of nixes it for the want-to-be entrepreneurs.
> 2) rent goes up $1000/month nationwide so it is an even emptier gesture
Do you also expect food, transportation, entertainment, and technology costs to go up $1000/month nationwide?
Rent goes up due to a lack of available apartments or houses in the area. If public policy is geared toward allowing development of sufficient housing for the people wanting to live in a place, that will have a far bigger impact on rents than UBI.
Not an economist. I liken it to the cost of tuition having gone up, perhaps because of the availability of student loans and the willingness (need?) of students to borrow to get a higher education.
Rent is the one you are sort of locked into. Food, etc, you have choices ... moving, much harder to shop around.
I remember visiting the valley for the first time for a big company I worked for at another location. The scale of work life balance was unbalanced so many strange ways...
The tech support team I worked with was in 'building 3'. Nobody ever left that building through out the day. I went to the big cafeteria and the options were amazing. I managed to get some of my peers to go with me, several of my peers from building 3 were equally amazed as ... they never went there, they just worked all day, ate something at their desk, and kept working...
Meanwhile I'd go to the cafeteria each day and sit outside and watch as some folks would play basketball for an hour, then a while later show up and chat it up with coworkers (not talking about work) over lunch for what seemed like forever...
The game room was always full of the same guys, the other amenities, yoga, etc, and it often included people who I simply never could get a hold of. HR couldn't be bothered to get security to take my photo for my badge for weeks ... because the gym schedule changed.
I noticed this when I worked at my first "employee satisfaction" focused company. Half the employees took every perk they could get, seemingly doing as little work as they could under the mantra of "work-life balance". The other half never left their desks. It created a strange dynamic of resentment between the two parties, where one thought the other stupid, and the other thought them lazy. It was hard to know where to stand.
I once worked for a team was historically over worked, that had changed recently for the better, but the team culture was still pretty stressed and nose to the grind stone. We were working to bring that down, but it takes time.
The offices were being renovated and our team was moved next to HR.
HR formally complained (apparently there was a process... where HR sent some sort of complaint to ... HR) that the team sitting next to them was not very friendly.
Before what I can only imagine would have been a horrific joint team meeting / culture clash could occur, someone very smart put the kibosh on the complaint / meeting ....
The culture / work experience differences were extreme.
I agree, I think this situation fits in nicely with the discussion of how stock compensation doesn’t directly result from the results of your work. Employees who aren’t passionate about or motivated by their jobs seek out compensation in return for retention. And even then, they scale their efforts at work based on their interest. I like the independence of Amazon teams, but the independence is limited when the teams don’t control their own finances.
First, there's always a self selecting thing there. For some reason folks from building 3 never bothered to go explore, and it sounds like they didn't keep going to the caf even once you showed them. Nothing was holding them at their desk, they just didn't care/bother.
Second, some jobs are different than others. Some jobs you have to "be there" for. Tech support may be like that - you have to pick up the call/email when it comes in. Other jobs may be more like strategy or research where having a few key insights a year generates millions of dollars for the company and if hanging in the cafeteria helps you do that, everyone wins.
Third, at the end of the day you kinda have to trust the system. What I mean is - if the company is successful it's because it's overall people strategy is working. So in the great net of things, having the caf setup be the way it was may be what was needed, even if some individuals abused it (which you then would hope be detected in their overall output)
I think it is self selecting ... by every individual. Each makes their choices.
The real challenge is when you value work life balance and ... it starts to hit other people's work.
Like in my case, getting hassled by security every day, multiple times a day ... IMO that should supersede someone's gym class if it was their job to schedule getting me a photo and a proper badge, but it is super easy for those kinda "well we value work life balance" kinda decisions to push important work aside.
A strange work ethic I must have been born with (weird, I know) kept me mashing keys the full 8 hours while some of my co-workers might see fit to stay home one day because a package was due to arrive.
Or maybe I have always felt like I'm an imposter: if the ax fell on the team I didn't want to be the low hanging fruit they culled. Who knows.
But I confess to having had a difficult time across my career accepting the perks, relaxing. It's been a slow awareness that this industry really truly is on fire, they really make boatloads of cash, they really need me more than they compensate me for.
What a strange time to live in for a blue-collar programmer like me.
He's giving a few examples for work-life balance and I have completely different feelings about - from the 11 AM Yoga class (pretty ridiculous IMO) to taking a personal day (reasonable, people need their day off, maybe the personal day is for an urgent medical check-up?) to working during the weekend (unless the entire service is down and I'm the oncall, it can wait).
Why are several people denigrating the 11am mindfulness session?
We're not going to talk about people showing up to work on acid to perform but make fun of people out of college taking advantage of the mental health and exercise course offered on site for an hour, and then excuse an entiiiiire personal day just because its ... more familiar?
oooookay.
just a perspective.
this manager didn't know how to schedule his workers, and couldn't calibrate it and chose to go with "entitled young people are the problem" just like people probably said about him and millennials, there's nothing more to read into this article.
Isn't that an indication that he sees these things as equivalent? 11am yoga is just as ridiculous as refusing to work weekends. This is precisely the sort of toxic attitude that keeps a lot of people away from startups.
The 11 AM Yoga class does not sound ridiculous to me precisely because of the nature of tech work: we don't need to all be working together at the exact same time, as opposed to most other jobs.
Want to trade an hour in the middle of the day on a Tuesday with showing up an hour early Wednesday? Do it. What's the problem?
I was watching Jurassic Park (1993) the other day, and I got a kick out of the software engineer rambling about a compile taking a long time as an excuse for going on a break
Also software engineer singular, I guess an expense was spared after all
It's almost like different people value different things. I knew a guy that got a massage every day at 2pm but he also was at work until 10pm. This is also why - even with a flexible work schedule - it's useful to have some set of "core hours" everyone should be available.
In a company I work for, some people take time to exercise at lunchtime - 11yoga seem to fit right there. Basically, lunch then takes longer then if you eat during that time, but not by horribly lot.
I does not seem to me so horrible honestly, assuming that you then stay longer to make up for time spend by exercising. I dont do that, because I need to take kids out of school basically, but when I had time to exercise a bit in the middle of the day I was more productive.
A small startup has a finite amount of time to either become a big company in their own right or do something so noteworthy that a big company sees the need to acquire them. Nothing else matters. There are minimal incentives to invest in the long-term welfare of your employees because in the long term, the company doesn't exist. You can't even guarantee that an acquisition will keep the employees you have invested in.
Large corporations like Google are incentivized to give their employees reasons to stick around. They can expect the company will be there in 30 years, and they can expect a good employee to put in a career's worth of work for them (and eventually have peer and mentorship contacts that encourage other good potential employees to join the company).
This is painting with a broad brush of how the incentives are structured... Not all big companies see it this way and not all small companies see it this way. But it's the behavior the marketplace appears to reward.
As someone who did track in high school, the whole agile nomenclature around "sprint" continues to rub me the wrong way. If you aren't a startup facing a launch-or-fail moment, the approach should be much more that of a marathon.
I was joking with my wife that "sprint" to me implies that you go all out and then take a long break before you go again. We should be treating the longterm plan like a marathon and the intermediate steps like "splits".
If you are working on a product that's been around for years , the idea that you are an all-star for delivering your 5 points the day before your 2 weeks sprint ends and a lazy jerk if you deliver it the day after sprint ends just incentivizes a lot of shorterm-ism and corner cutting.
The model of working "all out" and your "break" for planning is a 2 hour meeting in between sprints where you get praised or scorned for a 10% difference in delivery speed is..
Splits works, but I tend to use iteration. There are benefits to breaking work into chunks and checking in how it's going every 2-4 weeks, but there's no reason to be in perpetual crunch time. There should also be free time at the end of every iteration to do some problem/design/idea exploration.
The same people that go for an 11 AM yoga class will stay working until 11 PM because they can and are encouraged to.
Second, and another commenter points this out, the desirability of anyone that lands a job at a FAANG means they get away with it. They have Made It, they are the 1% in their field, and they can go anywhere else outside of SF (internationally if need be) and instantly be hired as CTO of any company. Generally speaking. And of course switch to the other FAANG, possibly getting even better compensation and perks and a better 11am yoga teacher.
"When I was growing up in Tech in the ‘90’s - there was no such thing as work life balance."
BS. I worked for a large computer systems company throughout the 1990s. I mostly headed home by 5-6 and I would take month long vacations. (Of course, there crunch times as well.)
I also found his pissiness at apparently not being able to curse or whatever in presentations sort of offputting. Yes, general standards for language and behavior in the tech industry has shifted over time. This isn't anything specific to Google. And whining about it comes off as being tone deaf.
1) Work life balance is about employee long term retention and places like Google spend a lot of energy in hiring, so they optimize for keeping the people they hire.
2) Sometimes an 11am yoga class frees your mind enough to foster creativity. Raw working hours may be reduced but novel solutions might increase.
3) Some tech workers have figured out the odds of hitting it big in a startup or having the next billion dollar idea are not that likely. Instead, they've optimized for a far above average salary with work life balance. There is nothing wrong with choosing that path and this is where the author is missing empathy for people who didn't choose his path.