Google is known for its fantastic amenities including from free gourmet meals, massages, elaborate workout facilities and recreational centers. Paying for these amenities provides Google with plenty of benefits, including increased productivity (from happier employers who stay at work longer), improved retention of their employees and a great recruiting tactic.
While they are at the far end of the spectrum, many companies have spent time and money on employee friendly workplaces. Available amenities range from free sodas and ping pong tables to on-site gyms and hosted conferences. And for their efforts they get also get the benefits, in proportion, for productivity, retention and recruiting.
Even with that whole coolness factor, Google and other companies are still scrambling to find top talent. There is enough talent in the world, but there just aren’t that many people who are already located nearby or who are willing to relocate there.
Progressive companies are moving towards distributed development teams.
Distributes teams are teams where the developers work together … from home. There may or may not be an office, but most of the developers’ collective working time is spent not there.
Probably the most well-known example of this is is 37signals. It is based in Chicago with office space and half the team there and half the team distributed, and anyone can work from home. They not only practice this but encourage it on their blog and recent bestseller Rework
A few other high profile examples include DailyBurn, Gravit, Automattic and DotSpots and there are plenty of lesser known examples as well.
Elephants can dance, too
It’s not just restricted to small, very agile companies. I’ve even seen larger companies embrace distributed teams on a team-by-team basis. As outsourcing and global collaboration becomes more mainstream, distributed teams are much less scary.
It’s just smart business for companies to move towards distributed teams. You can reach the best talent, including people who would never ever move to where you are geographically located.
Plus, they take the place of those fancy Googleplex amenities:
- Instead of enticing people to stay at work longer, you can move work to them. Passionate workers will naturally work more when it’s so convenient and built-in.
- Instead of having your employees go through hour-long commutes, get more working time, go green and reduce stress (also reduces need for those free massages).
- Instead of manicured lawns, give employees some breathing room by allowing employees to work in natural setting with easy access to comfortable outdoor settings.
- Instead of installing ping-pong tables and video games, avoid burnout by letting employees enjoy fun in their own homes
- Instead of hosting a childcare center so that employees can be near their children, let employees select great childcare options near their homes, see their children at home anytime if their spouse or nanny watches them there, and greet their children when they get home from school.
- Instead of filling up employees with unhealthy sodas or expensive gyms, save money while improving the health of your employees with access to their kitchens for easy homemade foods instead of fast food.
And for those companies that just want to spoil their employees rotten, you can still provide great services like paying their gym memberships or team vacations.
… why can’t everyone lavish these sort of perks, and this sort of environment, on their employees? Well, because we’re at a weird time in the history of the growth of the Internet. At this (perhaps anomalous) point, the business leverage resulting from the focused application of human intelligence is so high that all these benefits and all this freedom, considered through a pure cold profit-and-loss lens, are cheap at the price.
Tim Bray in Life at Google
Look for more smart companies hiring for their distributed team at a location not-so-near you.
Your comparison of “distributed” versus “Googleplex” is ill-informed. At least based on your description above, Google is no less distributed than the contrasted companies. While the reasoning is valid (and precisely why Google has adopted this approach), it is not an either-or proposition. Those employed by Google in distributed offices enjoy (most of) the Googleplex amenities without the need to live and work anywhere near Mountain View.
I don’t think that it does have to be either-or. My primary examples, 37signals and Stack Overflow, actually have both. So even if Google supports distributed teams, it doesn’t dispute the fact that distributed is the new “super duper benefits on-site”.
As far as I know, though, Google does not. I’ve heard of them having people work for them “in the interim” before they could move, but I do not think Google hires and manages developers working remotely, as a policy. In fact, I’ve heard a great deal about an expectation to spend a lot of time in the office, from those working on-site.
If Google does fully support distributed, working-from-home developers. I don’t think you could necessarily say that they would enjoy the same benefits as those in Mountain View, though…
Canonical/Ubuntu is mostly distributed workers with ‘all hands’ global meets a few times/year — something you might want to look into if you update the article.
Not mentioned in the article is the huge company savings in not have to purchase space for their human resources.
[...] Distributed Companies are the new Googleplex It seems so obvious but there is *a lot* of pushback against remote work. I think this is one of those things where attitudes are slowly changing over time. [...]
Not to spam, but my company has been 100% distributed since 1991. We do have an office, but that’s just where the bills get paid; all development is done from our developers’ homes across the US and Canada. Being able to hire really talented developers who’d rather live on the coast of Maine, or near family out in the middle of noplace is a real advantage for us.
We’ve seen this fail at other companies who try to graft a few distributed developers onto the side of an existing office-based company, but when you build a company from the ground up like this, it works well.
Actually, it would be nice if you kept this idea quieter. I’d rather that my competitors were pouring their profits into renting big, beautiful office space and were limiting themselves to hiring the best talent they can find who happen to already live in commuting distance of those offices.
I’m going to start working from home next month at a new contract. It involves custom hardware so it will be helpful that I’ll be somewhere near the main site. I live in a nice building that has all the stuff (or what is not there is probably a walk shorter than in the googleplex).
It requires discipline, but if the project is interesting, that can involve not working an all-nighter just to fix that last bug but leaving it for the next day. As well as insuring the paperwork is in place.
Yes, big beautiful office buildings. Then you can’t get the temperature right (my current office is usually around 80 unless another one turns into a refrigerator). The furniture police (Peopleware, DeMarco and Lister) will insure no one gets a window cube, and they will have lighting designed for the days when drafting was done on paper.
All those “green” companies that insist every employee has to burn fuel to get to and from the office.
I recently had three serious offers for work:
Place A had a great OSS policy and a strong team that I could learn from
Place B offered telecommuting and a really interesting problem set (1000+ req/sec in rails)
Place C offered a boatload of money and required 10+ hours a day
I originally was a bit fearful of the telecommuting (I’d be lazy, I like being around people), but after thinking about it I took the telecommuting job. I can work near whomever I want, I can make my own hours (within reason — shift an hour here and there), I get great mobile equipment for free, and I’ll learn how to work efficiently alone, which will be invaluable for my side projects and/if I move on to client work.
Also, the feeling of trust is a really nice thing to have as a new hire.