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

latimes.com

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

#141

Post by feteru »

catern wrote: post #68
kwertyoowiyop wrote: post #47

Scale does crazy things. If Google switched to a slightly cheaper salt packet they’d probably save $100M/year.

Scale isn't everything. If each of 200000 employees used 10 salt packets a week, at a cost of $0.003 per salt packet (from https://www.warehouse115.com/single-serv-flat-salt-packets-p... ), then if they cut their salt expenditures in half they'd save: >>> (200000*10*52*0.003)/2 156000.0 $156,000

Still a lot of money on salt packets, I love these rough approximations compared to our expectations

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

#142

Post by tjr225 »

bobthepanda wrote: post #114
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…

We could just let people do whatever they wanted. It is unclear why, having complained about being forced to work from the office, the set of employees happy to work from now think imposing their preferences on everybody else is supposed to be better for everyone.

Agreed. I can’t focus when my toddler is running around screaming. I love her; but I miss my office.

In fact I simply miss the ritual of leaving my home and returning every day. I’ve been doing this for a few years, though.

Long dog walks have helped.

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

#143

Post by astrange »

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #132
bobthepanda wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes the presence of enough office demand to replace a Google sized company in the markets they lease in. It’s not clear that this is true. US vacancies are projected to be 19.4% nationally. On top of that, there isn’t exactly another Google-sized employer waiting in the wings over in Mountain View.

With re-zoning this won't be a problem. Just rezone it to residential. or residential/commercial.

There's nothing Mountain View wants to do less than let anyone live there.

Also, because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years, much like how everyone living there now isn't paying any, so Google is paying for everyone's schools and sewer systems as is.

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

#144

Post by newusr429 »

katbyte wrote: post #128

You know what WFH is way WAY more for efficient and good for? A employees health, wellbeing and happiness! which imho is more important than profits or the company.

I was the biggest advocate for WFH in the last year but recently I feel pretty down. Life feels so repetitive. Part of it is possibly lockdown, but a bigger part I think is that I have way more free time to think about things. All the shitty things about open office and commuting seemed to serve as a distraction that kept me more occupied. It's weird. I'm not saying WFH is bad, but there are definitely some effects that I hadn't anticipated.

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

#145

Post by ryandrake »

bradlys wrote: post #126
cbozeman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google pays enough for people to do that. No they don't. Go look up house prices right around campus on Trulia. I would say it's shocking, but disgusting is a more apt feeling.

Senior eng makes $400k+ TC. You're rarely buying a house alone. Most eng at FAANG end up marrying others who are similar. Easy to see $600k+ TC. You can buy a home nearby. Sunnyvale has homes for $2m or less and you can afford it at $600K household. Very reasonable commute. If you want 3000+ sqft and 5-bath homes then yeah, you're out of luck. Hit executive level or startup riches for that one. To act like Google doe…

You're living in a dream world if you think $600K household is the norm in Silicon valley, even for FAANG employees. We are talking about a small percentage of employees (1. those with FAANG spouses) out of a small percentage of employees (2. top leveled, say Google L6+) out of a small percentage of employees (3. engineers) out of a small percentage of companies (4. FAANG). The rest of us, who are not 1 AND 2 AND 3 AND 4, schlep away at normal compensations and there's no way we're buying $2M homes.

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

#146

Post by kingsuper20 »

I can't say that I'm surprised.

It seems to me that the attraction isn't just winnowing out travel or office expenses but just imagine the chance to instrument employees if 100% of their work runs through your pipe. There's opportunities for fine tuning, detection of dead wood, identification of jobs that could be automated. The surveillance workplace might suck but it's good for profits.

On a related note, I have to wonder how many companies might realize the lack of value of tradeshows.

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

#147

Post by astrange »

bradlys wrote: post #126
cbozeman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google pays enough for people to do that. No they don't. Go look up house prices right around campus on Trulia. I would say it's shocking, but disgusting is a more apt feeling.

Senior eng makes $400k+ TC. You're rarely buying a house alone. Most eng at FAANG end up marrying others who are similar. Easy to see $600k+ TC. You can buy a home nearby. Sunnyvale has homes for $2m or less and you can afford it at $600K household. Very reasonable commute. If you want 3000+ sqft and 5-bath homes then yeah, you're out of luck. Hit executive level or startup riches for that one. To act like Google doe…

> Senior eng makes $400k+ TC.

This is not true. Maybe people are confusing principal with senior?

That or you're counting multi-year stock grants in the current year.

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

#148

Post by astrange »

briandear wrote: post #70
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…

Going to argue against this as a theme. I work for an extremely huge consumer electronics company based in a zip code not far from Google; my org has been remote for over a year and in that time, we’ve had significant productivity. Most people are claiming to be far more productive since many people had 2 hour daily commutes. Also, our company is so secretive that “water color” innovation isn’t particularly a thing.…

I do believe you got free dinner, but maybe not.

> The incentives that made SV great in the 1960s were killed off by politicians choking the golden goose.

Nah, it's still there. It will be there as long as California bans noncompete agreements. (California being expensive is not because of politicians, it's because the voters want it to be expensive so they can sell you their house.)

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

#149

Post by colinmhayes »

paxys wrote: post #75
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.

Google's product hasn't noticeably changed at all during the pandemic. They're making more money because people are spending more time on the internet and advertisers are switching funding from traditional forms to internet ads.

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

#150

Post by Guest42 »

seoaeu wrote: post #118
paxys wrote: post #81

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…

Like one expense they saved on is sending out recruiters and engineers to likely thousands of career fairs, recruiting sessions, etc. Nobody would reasonably argue that skipping all of them is a sustainable strategy long term even if it hasn't hurt them much so far.

With the amount of resumes they get, I'd question how important it is for tier 1 companies. I have gone to career fairs and learned a great deal about companies I had never heard of, but it seems as though Google would just receive thousands of applications per opening and approach it algorithmically anyways. Although I've had contacts get poached via LinkedIn or given challenges from Googling certain tech topics.
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