101–110 of 355 posts
"Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home AND losing $1.4B because advertising is less due to COVID" - there, I fixed the title for you. I am pretty sure Google would love to spend 1B to gain back 1.4B, they must be doing something right with those perks.
It would be interesting if Googlers were presented with this set of options: 1) work from the office with the included perks or 2) work remote and keep the resulting savings to the company as a bonus.
Google is saving $1 billion per year because of COVID-19, not because employees are working from home. This is literally mentioned in the article, but the headline is twisted (for clicks no doubt): > During the first quarter, Google parent Alphabet Inc. saved $268 million in expenses from company promotions, travel and entertainment, compared with the same period a year earlier, “primarily as a result of COVID-19,” a…
Google is saving $1 billion per year because of COVID-19, not because employees are working from home. This is literally mentioned in the article, but the headline is twisted (for clicks no doubt): > During the first quarter, Google parent Alphabet Inc. saved $268 million in expenses from company promotions, travel and entertainment, compared with the same period a year earlier, “primarily as a result of COVID-19,” a…
What about office perks, maintenance of space, renovation, staff, commuter credits, office events, snacks, lunches, dinner, equipment, secretaries, and security?
If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions.
Not to mention the cost all the employees have to endure for traveling to work, wear on vehicles, gas, repairs, collisions, insurance, medical payouts due to car accidents, etc. Plus just generally the externalities of higher carbon emissions.
Guessing Google leadership doesn't believe that, since: If employees want to work remotely after Sept. 1, for more than 14 additional days per year, they’ll have to formally apply for it, according to a separate note marked “Need to know.” They can apply for up to 12 months in “the most exceptional circumstances.” The company could, however, call employees back to their assigned office at any point, the note said. ht…
The 14 day policy cited in the article is wrong. It is more than 14 days of international remote work.
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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.
I'm also a bit put off by the "it's so great not having a commute" people. Commuting does suck, but they voluntarily signed up for it. Meanwhile those that chose tiny apartments near their offices didn't sign up for spending all day in cramped quarters trying to work from a couch.
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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.
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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 influenc…
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.
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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. Meas…
That isn't a criticism of OKRs. That is a criticism of literally any and all metrics.