Directors might get to work remotely. Good for you. I hope you enjoy Palm Springs while your reports are trapped on 101.
Mere Developers are essentially never permitted to work remotely long-term. Google would rather lose someone valuable like Tim Bray to a major competitor than allow him to do so.
If you're a global subject expert like Professor Hinton, maybe you'll be accommodated, but you dare don't mislead people into believing it's remotely common. That would be a lie.
For me it is the glance over to the next cubicle or next aisle to see if the person is on phone, heads down working, or is easily interruptable. I don't have remote technology to do that. The best I have is an IM which is a cognitive load for me and an interruption for them.
Same here - not a the same level though :-) Undisclosed location from the European Alps - I've always worked remotely, even when my company HQs were in Sunnyvale and I was living a few blocks from the office.
Full-time remote work? If you're going to reach an agreement on where you will live and work it's better to do it as early in the process as possible. I'd say WELL before onboarding and interview. Like conversation #1 with the recruiter/internal contact. It's about mutual understanding and respect, and making sure your physical position would provide value.
The smaller the team, the better, but it's 100% on you to explain when there are 70,000 counter-examples in play. Same would go for discussing why a certain regional office (like Seattle) would maybe work vs. Mountain View. You have to be where you will give your best work to your self and team. I got really tired of flying back and forth and holding meetings being the one remote person out of ~12-20 got really ridiculous, so a move was inevitable for me.
When I'm applying for jobs I'll open with an email to their recruiter saying that I'm interested and intend to apply, but only if they can confirm they're open to me working remotely the majority of the time, I also mention my expected salary range. Doing it that way saves us both time and hassle in going through the motions only to find down the line that it would never have worked out because of either work arrangements or salary.
For a big company, Google is surprisingly willing to make the right thing happen in individual cases. My sense is that Google's ban on working from home is a strong default, a rebuttable presumption that working from home would be a bad idea in a given situation. Rebuttable presumptions can be rebutted.
Remote work can be intended also as in "you are at a customer facility and need to access the corporate intranet to get a document or access the SW repository".
Bring Your Own Device is fine for ChromeOS and Mobile. You might not get the full amount of trust as a Google-issued device (for mobile/tablet).
To achieve the highest levels of access in the BeyondCorp model you need a machine with Google's management agents, so we can evaluate device state accurately and pull information from our inventory management system.
But if you don't provision the device yourself how can you be sure it hasn't been tampered with in a way that just displays "bootloader OK, everything good" but in the mean time it was rooted? Or is that a risk calculated in the "no full amount of trust"?
That protects against newbies, but we’re talking here about Google employees – modifying and cloning the ICs on the board to fake a verified boot status should be a triviality for people who design their own chips and boards for Google’s own servers, right?
That would be covered by policy controls, not technical ones—it's the same issue as someone taking pictures of the screen with their personal phone. You'd need to address the actual issue that's causing people to do that (ill-thought-out policies, employee actually working for $INTELLIGENCE_AGENCY, employee enjoys espionage,…).
A recent example would have been the data that was stolen from Google and given to Uber – the employees who were qualified enough to design their own LIDAR chips and boards would equally be qualified to circumvent any such protections.
On a Google-approved device, you can still use that device, and copy content to another, non-Google-approved device. Nothing is perfect, but at some point you trust your employees.
I don't know why people are negatively marking your post, because this is a thing a lot of people do and it does feel like there is a bit of a stigma to do so.
