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There's a lot of employee travel at big companies. Many times of the year you can hardly book a hotel room around Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto. I think the

There's a lot of employee travel at big companies. Many times of the year you can hardly book a hotel room around Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto. I think the pandemic has shown how non-essential a lot of that really was.

bredren 5y ago
It will be interesting to see how much previously considered necessary patterns are restored. On site employment, car loans and car payments, expensive rent in poorly managed or unsustainable counties—the potential for behavioral change is enormous.
bpodgursky 5y ago
I think a big question is not how essential it is in a vacuum, but how important sales travel is in a competitive landscape. ie, sales would work equally well if everyone did it via Zoom calls. But if one competitor is willing to send reps in-house for in-person meetings, and the rest are just scheduling Zooms... I can see the industry quickly collapsing back into constant sales travel, if there's even a small marginal gain from face-to-face meetings (or dinners, or drinks, or whatever else sales reps do to close a deal)
- guyzero 5y ago
  I'm sure there's a lot of sales travel at places like G but I feel like G in particular doesn't have a lot of sales travel. A lot of the travel is just employees working together for whatever internal tasks.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Maybe, but we had GCP reps in-house for days when we were figuring out our cloud strategy. So I do think there's some even at G.
    - f6v 5y ago
      If AWS is coming to my office to do a "free architecture evaluation" and GCP doesn't, guess which one I'll choose.
- mmcconnell1618 5y ago
  Ive worked cloud sales for Azure and GCP. Zoom/Teams/Meet is not a replacement for in-person sales. In large Enterprises, you would be surprised by how much of the outcome is determined by relationship rather than technology decisions. There is no substitute for shared experiences with customers or randomly bumping into a friend as you’re walking the hallways of your customer. Sometimes it just comes down to who they like better and building rapport over video chat is hard.
amscanne 5y ago
What does “essential” mean? I don’t think anyone viewed travel as essential — they just viewed it as “worth it” to facilitate collaboration/communication, build relationships, etc. This is still easier in person.
- kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  “Essential” means your boss expects you to.
  - amscanne 5y ago
    Interesting. I work at Google and never saw such an expectation (though it’s just my experience). I suspect most travel at large companies is dominated by individuals making decisions about what allows them to be most effective in accomplishing their goals (as long as it’s aligned with company travel policies).
    - smueller1234 5y ago
      It really depends on your job and location. I think the "your boss expects/forces you to" interpretation from the grand parent isn't generally what happens (at Google). I haven't seen that at all. It's rather more common that you realize on your own that a certain amount of travel is highly effective for building and maintaining the relationships you need to do your job. This is extremely strongly correlated with your distance from HQ and with the seniority of your position in the company. For what it's worth, I hold a reasonably senior role (at Google) in EMEA and I'm living off of the relationships I built in the two years prior to the pandemic. I traveled nearly 25% of the time then. Ask your nearest director+ in EMEA engineering and they'll recognize this at least in principle. This is likely to be very similar in other companies that are globally distributed but with a strong epicenter somewhere. I don't think it's particularly Google specific except in that Google engineering isn't very top down/command-and-control, so relationships in a complex org are an even more important tool for getting things done than they would be in a more hierarchical environment.
      - 5y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
Back of the envelope calculation: 100k employees, each spending 10k/year on business travel... $1B. The company could choose not to spend this money even without COVID, but it normally chooses to spend it, presumably because it considers the benefits worth it. Personally, the difference in working atmosphere before and after I visited coworkers from a different country was massive, and likely well worth the travel expenses for the company.
- spurgu 5y ago
  That, combined with the change in overall productivity. I don't know what the net is, for me personally it's a neutral since I was working remotely before COVID, but my hunch is that it's an overall negative due to how many people seem to crave the social aspect.
paxys 5y ago
If you define essential as "the project will fail if I don't make this trip" then yes, very little business travel is essential. That does not automatically mean it isn't beneficial at all. Employees gain skills by attending conferences and expand their network. Getting distributed teams from different offices together once in a while improves working relationships. Free travel to other countries is sometimes just a perk which helps with employee retention.
mavelikara 5y ago
That logic is flawed, I think. It is fairly easy to see why. Gyms have been closed for many months, but that doesn't seem to imply that exercising is not important.
majani 5y ago
Google isn't exactly a penny pinching small business, and for now, while the getting is good, they don't need to act like one.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
Don't follow this at all. FAANG companies putting on their big conferences may ostensibly seem unnecessary, but they also helped keep event companies, hotels, tourist stuff all going in the economy.

bredren 5y ago

It will be interesting to see how much previously considered necessary patterns are restored. On site employment, car loans and car payments, expensive rent in poorly managed or unsustainable counties—the potential for behavioral change is enormous.

bpodgursky 5y ago

I think a big question is not how essential it is in a vacuum, but how important sales travel is in a competitive landscape. ie, sales would work equally well if everyone did it via Zoom calls. But if one competitor is willing to send reps in-house for in-person meetings, and the rest are just scheduling Zooms... I can see the industry quickly collapsing back into constant sales travel, if there's even a small marginal gain from face-to-face meetings (or dinners, or drinks, or whatever else sales reps do to close a deal)

guyzero 5y ago
I'm sure there's a lot of sales travel at places like G but I feel like G in particular doesn't have a lot of sales travel. A lot of the travel is just employees working together for whatever internal tasks.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Maybe, but we had GCP reps in-house for days when we were figuring out our cloud strategy. So I do think there's some even at G.
  - f6v 5y ago
    If AWS is coming to my office to do a "free architecture evaluation" and GCP doesn't, guess which one I'll choose.
mmcconnell1618 5y ago
Ive worked cloud sales for Azure and GCP. Zoom/Teams/Meet is not a replacement for in-person sales. In large Enterprises, you would be surprised by how much of the outcome is determined by relationship rather than technology decisions. There is no substitute for shared experiences with customers or randomly bumping into a friend as you’re walking the hallways of your customer. Sometimes it just comes down to who they like better and building rapport over video chat is hard.

amscanne 5y ago

What does “essential” mean? I don’t think anyone viewed travel as essential — they just viewed it as “worth it” to facilitate collaboration/communication, build relationships, etc. This is still easier in person.

kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
“Essential” means your boss expects you to.
- amscanne 5y ago
  Interesting. I work at Google and never saw such an expectation (though it’s just my experience). I suspect most travel at large companies is dominated by individuals making decisions about what allows them to be most effective in accomplishing their goals (as long as it’s aligned with company travel policies).
  - smueller1234 5y ago
    It really depends on your job and location. I think the "your boss expects/forces you to" interpretation from the grand parent isn't generally what happens (at Google). I haven't seen that at all. It's rather more common that you realize on your own that a certain amount of travel is highly effective for building and maintaining the relationships you need to do your job. This is extremely strongly correlated with your distance from HQ and with the seniority of your position in the company. For what it's worth, I hold a reasonably senior role (at Google) in EMEA and I'm living off of the relationships I built in the two years prior to the pandemic. I traveled nearly 25% of the time then. Ask your nearest director+ in EMEA engineering and they'll recognize this at least in principle. This is likely to be very similar in other companies that are globally distributed but with a strong epicenter somewhere. I don't think it's particularly Google specific except in that Google engineering isn't very top down/command-and-control, so relationships in a complex org are an even more important tool for getting things done than they would be in a more hierarchical environment.
    - 5y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

Back of the envelope calculation: 100k employees, each spending 10k/year on business travel... $1B. The company could choose not to spend this money even without COVID, but it normally chooses to spend it, presumably because it considers the benefits worth it. Personally, the difference in working atmosphere before and after I visited coworkers from a different country was massive, and likely well worth the travel expenses for the company.

spurgu 5y ago
That, combined with the change in overall productivity. I don't know what the net is, for me personally it's a neutral since I was working remotely before COVID, but my hunch is that it's an overall negative due to how many people seem to crave the social aspect.

paxys 5y ago

If you define essential as "the project will fail if I don't make this trip" then yes, very little business travel is essential. That does not automatically mean it isn't beneficial at all. Employees gain skills by attending conferences and expand their network. Getting distributed teams from different offices together once in a while improves working relationships. Free travel to other countries is sometimes just a perk which helps with employee retention.

mavelikara 5y ago

That logic is flawed, I think. It is fairly easy to see why. Gyms have been closed for many months, but that doesn't seem to imply that exercising is not important.

majani 5y ago

Google isn't exactly a penny pinching small business, and for now, while the getting is good, they don't need to act like one.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

Don't follow this at all. FAANG companies putting on their big conferences may ostensibly seem unnecessary, but they also helped keep event companies, hotels, tourist stuff all going in the economy.