Google employees will work from home until summer 2021, Jeff Bezos will face off against Congress this week, and the downsides to working from home are discussed online.
It’s all the tech news that’s popular right now. Welcome to Hashtag Trending! It’s Tuesday, July 27, and I’m your host, Baneet Braich.
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Google says its employees will work from home until summer 2021. The company’s initial policy was going to bring workers back to its offices beginning in January next year. However, now roughly 200,000 full-time and contract workers who work for Google and Alphabet will be able to work from home. Google is certainly not the only tech giant to expand its work from home policies. Twitter, Facebook, and Canada’s own OpenText have all made various extensions to their remote working plans over the past several months.
Jeff Bezos is getting ready to face congress, and so is the rest of the world. The Amazon CEO will appear before a committee of US Congress members for an antitrust hearing. The hearing will highlight Bezos’s response to a damaging report alleging that Amazon uses data it collects from its own merchants to compete against them. He will be joining Apple CEO Tim Cook, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai. This hearing is one way for Congress to create better competition laws especially now that the internet has set a new groundwork for a few players to have so much power. Until now, Jeff Bezos has been the only one of the 4 Big Tech CEOs never to sit for Congressional questioning.
Working from home definitely has its ups, but some of it is not so great after all. The Wall Street Journal recently spoke with executives in IT, tech, and other industries who agree that projects take longer due to logistical challenges, hiring and onboarding new hires is tougher and workers seem less connected. Employers also fear that by not being face to face innovation will suffer without the spontaneous charm of the workplace.
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