241–250 of 355 posts
It's hard to quantify the potential loss of productivity or collaboration caused by working from home, though. No way to find out either, unfortunately.
Yes. But arguing around $1B saved won't be easy.
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> because of Prop 13 those people wouldn't be paying property tax in 10 years I'm not sure what you mean. Prop 13 just caps the annual increase at 2%. I've lived in California and owned property here for 30 years. I pay property taxes.
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.
Asymptotically at infinity, you're not wrong.
I'm probably not living that long though. Meanwhile taxes do go up every year in real money.
It's hard to quantify the potential loss of productivity or collaboration caused by working from home, though. No way to find out either, unfortunately.
Can we not judge output?
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Yea commute + kid is the key motivation for WFH for me. My Bay Area commute is 4+ hours per day, depending on traffic. This means in order to guarantee I can be at work for my first 8AM meeting, I need to wake up around 5AM and leave the house at 5:30. My day is over at around 5PM (thankfully I don't work for a workaholic culture start-up), but this still means I'm home by 7:30-8PM most days. I'm basically driving 50…
Why do you live 2 hours away?
I can bet that $1B won't get distributed through salaries, but rather some managers get hefty bonuses and the rest will be reinvested into perfecting manipulation techniques to make us buy products we don't need or want.
They already have $100B+ in cash on their hands. SV tech companies seem to be left, but not when it comes to distributing money.
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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.
I agree. I'm working about 5 productive hours a week now. Nobody is supervising me, nobody is tasking me with any work. But I'm still getting paid so not making waves.
While WFH you could also seek out things to work on and go at it.
Both are true working from the office as well.
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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…
Yep, it's groundhog day. Wake up, make coffee, sit down at the computer. Everything having anything to do with work happens on that screen. Every day is the same.
Wake up, make coffee, drive an hour to work, sit down at the computer. Everything having anything to do with work happens on that screen. Every day is the same.
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Sounds about right. The OP sounds like "Why does coke advertise their product so much when they are the most well known product in existence" Because that status will decline without advertising.
I wonder if this is not a good argument to actually make all kind of advertising illegal. There is no way that ensuring huge entities with enormous capital are able sustain their dominant position thanks to flushing cash at ads is healthy. I've yet to see a situation where advertising was better than word of mouth, personal experience or expert feedback. It seems it's all gain for them, no gain for us.
Always remember: numbers without context are meaningless. Google had 180bn revenue in 2020. In normal circumstances , even with much more WFH, they'd still pay for regular company get togethers. They'd pay for more satellite offices. They'd pay for conferences because making cross industry connections and promotion is important. These savings don't mean much. Even more so if they lead to a potential dip in efficiency…
two. billion. dollars. per. day. or $23,000 USD per second. Mostly from advertising, some 87%. Funny to think in their initial whitepaper, Brin and Page were heavily arguing against paid (sponsored) ads in search result of a search engine, as it would skew the results to the point where people would stop using it.
Walmart by comparison makes $17,730 per second.
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This is exactly the way I feel. After working at home for ~13 months now, it will be very hard for me to go back to the office. I have young kids at home and getting to spend extra time with them every day is a huge gift, on top of having no commute. There are some negatives, but I feel just as productive and more engaged.
Great for you! I feel exactly the opposite, I feel trapped in my house, super-ecstatic that the kids are finally in school now and can't wait for the office to open.