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Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

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Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#71

Post by toolz »

compiler-guy wrote: post #45
ketamine__ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most employers don't give workers a choice when it comes to open floor plan. And yet everyone sucked it up and did it to pay the bills. My point is this: If you have to be effective working remotely you will be effective working remotely.

It's not really binary though. I can be somewhat more or less effective depending on my work environment. It's also possible that wfh was beneficial in the short term, with projects already mostly planned and the benefits of in-person collaboration continuing via inertia, but will be detrimental long term. Maybe. I don't know. And that is the big kicker to me: too many unknowns to definitively say one way or the othe…

I have a hard time imagining a complete uprooting from your normal routine during a global pandemic would result in a short-term productivity gain that would then decrease as workers become more accustomed to remote work and are less stressed due to the lack of a pandemic moving forward.

That's not to say you don't make good points, I just can't imagine your points outweighing what I perceive as more heavily influencing factors.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#72

Post by jeffbee »

baetylus wrote: post #46
jeffbee wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what I wonder about Dropbox. There wasn’t really any particular reason to work there except the food. The RSUs weren’t going anywhere, the technical culture wasn’t amazing, but the food was incredible. In a 100% remote Dropbox, did they bump everybody’s comp by 20%?

What constitutes an excellent tech culture in your view? Just curious

Eh, I could complain about it at length if you get me started but the root cause is they have a process where you have to take all your ideas before a committee of senior engineers and get permission to do anything, and the people who are on the committee are unfortunately not qualified for that purpose, they just happened to have been early employees who blundered into fancy job titles. Aside from that there's also a special clique who do whatever they want to do without regard to that process and the existence of the clique is incredibly corrosive to morale within engineering.

Coming from Google, where you definitely do not need to bow and scrape before Jeff and Sanjay, and even if you did they are both gods who are more than qualified to comment on your ideas, the Dropbox system was a big shock.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#73

Post by walterbell »

lukeschlather wrote: post #53
sjg007 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Also most projects are distributed across multiple sites and orgs. In person meetings were always team based and guess what they still are wfh. You lose serendipity and cross pollination but I don’t think companies actually optimize for that. I mean it’s not an OKR nor performance goal.

My company has OKRs directly focused around improving serendipity and cross pollination lost due to Covid WFH.

What have teams been doing to hit those OKRs? How are they measured?

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#74

Post by aerosmile »

A lot of people bring up the issue of commuting, which I think is a bit thorny. Here's a quote from one of the comments below:

> I feel vastly more productive with not spending 2-3 hours every day commuting

Your commute is not your company's business. They might try to make it easier by implementing shuttles and flexible work schedules, but at the end of the day you signed up for this commute. If you work for Google, you certainly had the option of working somewhere else closer to home. You chose Google because you liked what they had to offer. They chose you because you seemed really good. They could have chosen someone else who lived closer to their office. I doubt that they take the commutes into their hiring consideration, within reason. So in other words, you thought that the extra time it takes to earn the Google check was worth it. Why bring it up now? Please don't use the "I give my company more of my time now" argument, because nobody believes it. You just simply get up later in the morning and get to see your family earlier in the evening. A more honest statement would be along these lines:

> I have reclaimed 2-3 hours from my time that was previously allocated to earning my paycheck, and I now redirect it towards other activities. Those activities range anywhere from 0-100% on the scale of how relevant they are to me being a better employee.

(I was inclined to not start at 0% of the range due to the clear benefits of distancing yourself from your work regardless of what you're doing... but then I remembered a consultant I recently met who offered his services while being a full-time employee at Google. When I asked him if he'll be able to perform his service reliably due to his supposedly challenging day job, he grinned and said that WFH has been great for his consulting work. So 0% it is.)

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#75

Post by paxys »

beambot wrote: post #4

Google may save $1B this year on the P&L, but I can assure you that a large cohort of employees are vastly less effective (especially parents!). Time will tell how wfh pans out in terms of long-term enterprise value creation, after confounding variables (i.e. COVID) are removed. Source: A lot of my Googler friends are itching to get back into the office -- whether parents or people whose social lives centered around…

I'm sure some employees are less effective from home and others are the opposite. Looking at their earnings reports from the last few quarters, though, it is pretty clear that the company itself is reaping massive benefits from the pandemic and WFH culture.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#76

Post by spurgu »

adamesque wrote: post #59
pomian wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's OKR?

Objectives and Key Results. The things you choose to optimize for during any given planning period.

Which is arguably stupid as it makes you focus on improving specific numbers instead of your product/service. Crude example:

OKR: Improve customer feedback ratings from 4.2 to 4.5+ stars

Result: Customer support personnel start handing out free upgrades/bonuses/merchandise to complaining customers, resulting in many 5 stars reviews and while not solving any problems customers are facing, still achieving the OKR.

Measuring performance by numbers instead of personal judgement (from managers/team leads) is problematic.

Edit: It certainly makes sense in some departments (like decreasing page load time from 2 seconds to 1[0] but forcing that across all verticals is retarded.

[0] then again you could achieve that for example by deleting all JS from the site

/rant

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#77

Post by briandear »

Cookingboy wrote: post #22
jaegerpicker wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you that a much larger cohort of employees are vastly more effective. No commute alone is a MASSIVE gain.

I can assure you all these "assurances" are just based off personal preferences and anecdotal stories. There are pros and cons with office work and WFH, and some people prefer one over the other. A full remote arrangement isn't for everyone, despite how the overwhelming number of introverts on HackerNews paint it as the objectively the best way going forward for all companies.

You can use anecdotal stories or, you can look at quarterly earnings. That’s how one can objectively measure how productive a company is. If the earnings are there, it’s hard to prove that remote is, a least, a hindrance to productivity.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#78

Post by popinman322 »

bradlys wrote: post #67
dcolkitt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent, who does WFH, and definitely disagree about the preferability of office work. Sure my kids will occasionally pop their heads in the door to say hello. I guess that's an occasional distraction, which has some small productivity cost. You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting. I…

> If you work from 9-6, and commute an hour each way, that basically means you hardly see your kids at all five days out of the week. So live closer to work. Google pays enough for people to do that. The schools are usually better too.

A) There's only so much housing near campus buildings.

B) Prices can become extreme near campus buildings because landlords know they can charge exorbitant prices and still find a tenant.

C) Moving to a more expensive place impacts you _and_ the rest of your family via shared rent, utilities, etc..

D) Your significant other, if you have one, may not work at the same company. So you may end up shortchanging your spouse and taking time away from them and their lives?

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#79

Post by sodapopcan »

reportingsjr wrote: post #41
beambot wrote: post #4

Google may save $1B this year on the P&L, but I can assure you that a large cohort of employees are vastly less effective (especially parents!). Time will tell how wfh pans out in terms of long-term enterprise value creation, after confounding variables (i.e. COVID) are removed. Source: A lot of my Googler friends are itching to get back into the office -- whether parents or people whose social lives centered around…

100% this. There are some loud people trying to say the opposite, but a lot of places have had productivity tank. I was talking to someone at a large financial company (think 10s of thousands of employees). Their workplace productivity went through the floor when things went work from home. They were willing to allow work from home for now to keep people safe, but will not be continuing in the future due to the effic…

This totally depends. My experience has been that my team is way more effective since work from home (we even work less hours) but that doesn’t mean other teams have the same experience.

Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home

#80

Post by coding123 »

bradlys wrote: post #67
dcolkitt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent, who does WFH, and definitely disagree about the preferability of office work. Sure my kids will occasionally pop their heads in the door to say hello. I guess that's an occasional distraction, which has some small productivity cost. You know what hurts productivity more? The soul-crushing experience of missing out on watching your kids grow up because you're spending all day in an office or commuting. I…

> If you work from 9-6, and commute an hour each way, that basically means you hardly see your kids at all five days out of the week. So live closer to work. Google pays enough for people to do that. The schools are usually better too.

I don't think he said he works at Google.
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