The Googleplex Critique
The concept of “the future of work” has long proved fertile ground for a certain giddy prediction discourse. In the last couple of years especially, the volume has been turned up to 11 as we contemplate what pandemic-induced remote work means for corporate America’s shifting mores. Amidst the din of chatter about relocation, Zooms, and converted home offices it can be hard to recall that just a few years ago our perceived work future was very, very different.
The tech industry and its notorious office perks served as fodder for journalists and other writers for about a decade. The ping pong tables, cruiser bikes, and yoga classes associated with tech campuses became a mainstream cultural cliché. When COVID hit, the office discussion turned sharply existential; we became more fixated on the tenuous future of office buildings than the quirks of their interiors.
Last week, a Jamelle Bouie TikTok video went viral in which he characterizes office perks as “exploitative.” He got pushback on this, then doubled down. In the video, Bouie quotes Das Kapital and asserts that office snacks exist to tempt workers into producing “surplus labor,” thereby generating value for the company beyond what’s contractually stipulated.
This idea that tech company office perks contain a sinister ulterior motive has persisted as long as the perks themselves. It might be true that at some companies — I’m picturing bro-ey early-stage startups headquartered in SoMa circa 2013 — perks were part of a larger culture of coercion and exploitation. But in my experience, this lukewarm take doesn’t hold water and contains a fallacy common in tech industry analysis. By accusing the companies of explicit nefarious intent, these critics miss the bigger issue: the passive, creeping influence we’ve all come to accept, but which nonetheless distorts the world around us. It’s a subtle revolution — disruption on autopilot.
When I worked at Google people would often ask me if there were beds at the office, and if people slept there so they could work into the night. They would crib the popular idea that, “You know, the food is there so that people will stay longer and never leave.” I think they were fishing for material to confirm their priors that tech life was cultish. In fact, each day at the end of work, I would get on the Google bus (here is a legitimate object of ire) at 4:30 p.m. to get back to San Francisco by 6 p.m. One year I worked on a team whose design lead left at 3:30 p.m. every day. I knew people who would ghost on half the day to pick up their kids from school. There was not a widespread compulsory pull to work late hours. Even by today’s “new normal” standards of workplace liberalism, it was a very forgiving environment. Some people did stay for dinner or do their laundry, but it was mostly 22-year-olds who lived five minutes away and didn’t know how to cook.
In Mountain View, where Google’s headquarters is, the lines between work and home have blurred in a more physical way. Walking around Castro Street downtown after hours, it’s not uncommon to pass people with Google badges still clipped to their belts dipping in and out of restaurants. Mountain View really does feel like one of the company towns of the 18th and early 19th centuries. The restaurants are just like the ones on campus, the only difference is that here you pay for the food and for the luxury of feeling like you’re off the clock.
The truth is that tech companies never needed to compel workers to stay at the office. As a result of Silicon Valley’s widespread products, the virtual office and other digital environs have seeped into the rest of our lives. Work has come to us, and we play ping pong in our basement. Research has shown that workers are actually generating more output from home. In a world where people are feeling overworked without leaving their apartment, perks are not the problem.
The legacy of tech is much more likely to be about negative externalities than explicit malice. The tired critique about snacks misses the point. The issue isn’t what’s happening inside the Googleplex, but outside of it.