221–230 of 355 posts
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 thought so myself. But after having spent > 1 year at home I don’t think it’s sustainable. Separating work and home becomes increasingly difficult.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been paying rent on their offices the whole time. 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.
> If they went permanent WFH they could sell/lease those spaces and probably save billions. To whom? Everybody is moving to work from home.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about office perks, maintenance of space, renovation, staff, commuter credits, office events, snacks, lunches, dinner, equipment, secretaries, and security?
They've been paying rent on their offices the whole time. 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.
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…
If Google saved that much money and the business didn't see a considerable negative impact (34% increase? Quite the opposite in fact.), then that news should be telling not just for Google, but for every company that previously catered to spoiled employees who jump on an airplane just to have lunch with the customer. Two lies COVID has forcibly flushed out and helped dispel: Lie #1: Remote work, cannot work. Lie #2:…
However in a world where one company travels for conferences, lunches, in-person events, then that company will clearly have an advantage over the company that did none of those things.
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 t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh, it is causing pain already. Recently I pitched to a friend fixing a component as a great project for a very junior engineer. Only to find out that neither his nor my team has any sufficiently junior engineers on hand. So the oceans will keep getting ever so slightly boiled until we hire some, or one of the too senior engineers runs out of more important things to do. Sure it won't bring Google down right away, bu…
But the culture there is still douchey, as reported by people who DID tolerate the interview process and worked there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the annual increase is capped at 2% and inflation is >2% then the value reaped by property tax will eventually go to 0. Similar to how if you rent the same place for long enough and it's rent controlled your rent effectively gets cheaper even though it's going up.
Can't they game their way around that though by just increasing the assessed the value of the property? That's how my town effectively raises property taxes beyond the statutory limits. Sure you can appeal the assessed valuation but most people don't. It is expensive and time-consuming.
There was an attempt to fix this for businesses just last year, but it failed because homeowners were convinced it was a plot to get them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So what? That's the standard work environment and the reality for most Americans. This has nothing to do with Google or SFBA then.
Maybe the standard work environment has been wrong and should be changed and WFH is the way to do it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's fine - but that's not what I was talking about. I'm specifically saying if you work for Google - you can afford to live closer than a 1 hour commute. (And you can even take the god damn free shuttle where you clock in for the trip even)
You could also afford to set fire to a stack of $100 bills. That does not mean you find it a sensible thing to do.
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.