Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is.
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.
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.
Always felt kind of gross to me.
https://www.google.com/search?q=google+dublin&oq=google+dubl...
Both are amazing.
