When Google cost cutting goes molecular: Staples, sticky tape, and PC sweating Google's beancounters are hunting down ways to satisfy corporate expense bill reductions, with many staff asked to sweat PC assets and some noting things like availability of staples and sticky tape becoming more limited. In an email to Googlers, Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer at the ad search and cloud biz, described …
I'mma just gonna leave this here...
To be honest, most of the reductions are understandable and much more reasonable than a lot of the shit that beancounters come up with in cost-cutting exercises that tend to cost more than they cut. By "reasonable", I mean: refresh rate and choice for notebooks and phones; catering and transport. The staples and sellotape thing sounds a bit odd as it will be peanuts in total. But I suspect this may be more about the provisioning of items that routinely go missing. Centralise distribution and you've reduced the need for someone to go round and replenish supplies. More important is probably a print-to-me system so that documents are only printed when you're at the printer. Better budgetting and fewer reams of stuff that go unclaimed.
Of course, most accountants will point out that anything that business expenses are nearly always offset against tax and so don't end up costing companies much. Of course, reducing office space and services will have a noticeable affect on the local economy.
But how often does your trash can need emptying? Back when I last had my own desk (20 years ago!) I could probably have emptied it once a year since I was putting paper and aluminum cans in the recycle containers down the hall.
Having a janitor go around and empty one tissue or one candy wrapper per can per night on average seems like a bigger waste of time than making an engineer bring his trash can along with him to the bathroom to empty on the way once in a while.
I don't see how your comment is applicable to my statement. At the worst, the investment in prestigious offices in London is a tax-deductible for Google, at best it returns a profit because property in London remains desirable. This is not necessarily the case in any out of town business park.
...are tricky.
Are you paying a contract or per trip?
Do you have to run a bus with no passengers from the City centre to the suburb early in the morning so people can get into the centre on the return journey?
If you cancel the bus because there is only one passenger how does that passenger get home?
(In Google's case a park and ride pre-order system would suggest itself. Nice little form filled in a week ahead. Vehicle sized appropriately).
"(In Google's case a park and ride pre-order system would suggest itself. Nice little form filled in a week ahead. Vehicle sized appropriately)."
So, what happened to Googles driverless vehicle program? The intercampus bus, with an app to book one as needed seems like the sort of "own dog food" Google ought to be eating. If a bus is due at 4pm and no one has booked it, is it really there?
Seems to me that the cost of multiple employees spending ten minutes trying to find staples for the important document they just printed, or half an hour re-collating the printout they dropped is far more than the cost of providing staples at every printer.
After all, there aren't many printers. It'd almost certainly save far more to remove one printer. Pick one where there's another printer nearby.
We've done a few deployments of "follow me" printer services. On install, the users are often surprised and impressed that the whizz-bang printers can even staple the print jobs for them. Initially, the "gimmick" is attractive, and many people choose the stapling option just to see it in action. Some months down the line, when the novelty has worn off, no one ever seems to take responsibility for ordering a new staple cartridge when the last one is empty.
Strangely, most of these whizz-bang multi-function printers, despite being clever enough to, and programmed to monitor usage rates and automatically order toner and other consumables direct from the warehouse and addressed to the specific site and printer, they CAN'T tell when the stapler is empty, DON'T count each usage of the stapler and NEVER order staple cartridges automatically. Any time someone gets called out to service one of these beasts, invariably the stapler cartridge is empty and often there is a manual stapler on the nearby desk.
Try running Linux GUI software, text won't copy/paste between Linux/Linux software and Linux/ChromeOS software if you use keyboard shortcuts. Or at least it didn't when I had the misfortune of using one for a while a few months back.
In my experience, when they start worrying about the cost of staples rather than making money the business is already circling the drain.
I mean, FFS, how out of touch with reality do you have to be to think that this bollocks is relevant to a business the size of Google?
You can get right to the top of a career in management without having a fucking clue.
... how out of touch with reality do you have to be to think that this bollocks is relevant to a business the size of Google?
Surprised?
Being out of touch with reality is one of the basic traits of the beancounter culture.
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But the scale is what makes the difference. Maybe the staples aren't the best example, but it gets most clicks from news sites like this. The comment about the $1000+ phone is more interesting. According to a quick search, they have 190k odd employees at the end of 2022. If they all have phones and you take a $600 device instead of $1000, that makes a huge difference.
And the other reductions? Less muffins - save on food waste and energy. Empty buses - save emissions. Unused yoga classes - move it to a time it will be utilised.
"Surely if they're all Google phones then they get them at cost not full retail price?"
Don't be silly! if you ever worked in a large company, you'd know that ever subsidiary, every division, every department, every office, charges other parts of the business at the going rate for ever service provided to prove they are a profit centre not a loss leader :-)
Once upon a time, long, long ago (well, the 1980's), when I worked for ICL in Reading, we had a company meeting arranged at Wembley Stadium conference centre. The day before I was at the canteen and casually asked the serving lady what they were doing the next day as no-one would be in the building. It was the first the catering stuff had heard of it. I think they were able to take some action to prevent substantial food wastage.
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