Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.
Always felt kind of gross to me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+dublin&oq=google+dubl...
IMHO it limited Google's hiring ability in Ontario. And it made me (and others) have to sell my house in Toronto and move when my employer was acquired. I tried the van/bus commute for 6 months and it was too hard.
Then the Geoffrey Hinton folks moved in there I believe. And I think some AI R&D was happening there?
And then COVID happened, and everyone was WFH but when you did go into the office and book a desk, it became possible to go into the Toronto office instead.
I left after that so can't say how it is now. Google goes through waves of "defrags" where small groups and teams in peripheral offices are... purged and merged because there's a feeling that "strength in numbers" for a particular project pays off. I wouldn't be surprised to see what happen post-layoffs.
The Toronto office, when I visited it, was small. Food was good though.
It is in the heart of the Toronto downtown, near Richmond & Spadina, next to the old & new City Hall. Definitely disagree with GP, I'm not sure what better area you would pick (but I love downtown). Similarly in Taipei, the Google office is right in Taipei 101 (like having an office in CN Tower - very cool.)
To be fair, Amazon's office in Toronto is next to the CN Tower and has a great view of it - so maybe Amazon takes the cake here. You have to pay for the cake though.
Tell me more about this.
I feel big tech in general is looting its brands for profit, that while it's not 100% obvious yet, we're in the decline phase.
Both are amazing.
Hence the focus on RTO.
Before I quit you had to book a desk if you wanted to come into the office, hybrid. I pushed to get myself my own assigned desk because I despised the stock monitors, etc.
At that point (fall 2021) hardly anybody was coming in, so it was a ghost town. But they would not have been able to fit everyone in if they'd demanded people come back.
