Sad to hear the savings are so trivial.
Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
261–270 of 355 posts
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#262You 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.
That's not a universal opinion. All of the people on my team would prefer to be in the office 2 or 3 days a week. Some people find it's positive for their mental health to see and interact with other people, in person, regularly.
It is possible they are not telling you the truth.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#263Google 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…
That's just nonsense. Australia has had one of the harshest lockdown measures in the developed world and we're quite Corona free at the moment. We're living in our own little bubble. Everyone who could, had to work from home during the lockdown. Everyone else was supported by a salary equivalent payment from the govt. Now, people are back at work. But when it can be done from home, most people are still choosing to d…
I think it will be interesting to see how some of the companies in Australia with head offices in the US go over the next year. There are signs from the FANG (well “GA” here, the rest effectively don’t exist) will push for people back in offices.
On the flip side Atlassian just came out and said the reverse. https://www.smh.com.au/business/small-business/four-times-a-...
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#264You 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…
So in other words, you would rather take the blue pill?
Sounds like removing the distractions gave you time to think and allowed you to see things more clearly. That sounds great! Now you can face the things that came up head on rather than distract yourself from them. Why would you want to 'sleepwalk' through life instead via constant distractions? Maybe there is more to life, and getting rid of distractions is the first step to realizing it.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#265Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once an employee has built a report with their team, knows their roll, is fully trained, properly equipped, and demonstrates proficiency at their job..... then I'm cool letting staff work from home. I suspect Google has the leadership, supervision, and infrastructure to do all those things at a large scale. Unfortunately for my crew I find brining everyone in is waaaaay more efficient....carbon emissions aside.
Of course, who cares about carbon emissions when profits are at stake.
If you completely ignore profits you go out of business and then the only companies left are the ones who ignore carbon. Better to get this changed at a legislative level to keep the playing field equal.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#266Earlier 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…
Google cuts epsilon’s in engineering cost that operate on efficiencies of 10s of thousands engineers or engineering components that underpin multiple high-value products. They have entire teams of very senior engineers dedicated to this problem. Conversely, a smaller project wouldn’t demand this kind of attention because solutions don’t scale well and so are managed as local costs at the most local level possible.
What kind of scale project are you and your friend working for and which component is the problem in?
Note that I’m not disagreeing with the consequences being that there are ever growing tech debt that will live on forever and you just try to manage that and fit that into “fixit week” or “20% time”. That’s kind of the discount for why they still pay the crazy salaries for all work, not just in the teams closest to the revenue generation.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 always thought about this, but not about Coca-Cola, since people actually need to want to buy it to acquire it, but Visa and Mastercard have huge advertising budgets, notably for events like the World Cup and the Olympics, and I never met someone who actively pursued a specific card flag when getting a new card and instead just get whichever their bank has to offer.
But then someone at the bank has to decide between Visa and Mastercard.
And this persons surely thinks "ok, the conditions are roughly the same, what is going to make sure none of my clients even bother to ask why we chose this".
So the bank picks something they know that for sure their clients won't question, and here you are. Even if a newer provider emerged with better conditions, they probably wouldn't pick it because they don't want to deal with the inevitable questions.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#268You 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.
That's not a universal opinion. All of the people on my team would prefer to be in the office 2 or 3 days a week. Some people find it's positive for their mental health to see and interact with other people, in person, regularly.
With non-pandemic WFH you can see and interact with other people, in person, regularly, outside of work. Hobbies, cafés, bars, etc.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Someone want to tell this commenter how expensive daycare is?
Nah, obviously everyone who works in IT makes 500k a year, has a spouse who earns the same, and can afford 1 mil houses 5 minutes from where they work. At least from what they say.
Re: Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
#270Google 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.
Why exactly would Google need to do any of that? They're Google, people will come to them for as long as they are Google (and as long as they hand out very generous six-figure salaries).