Am surprise by the census data for Lake Tahoe and the 25% drop in salary that goes with it. Isn’t this a super wealthy area? This is going to hurt the Googlers who where going to trade their primary home for their secondary one.
Google employees who work from home could lose money
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Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#62It's weird how directly the incentive is to increase your carbon footprint. They'll essentially pay you more for contributing to congestion and pollution.
Because employees in the office are more productive.
Of course its different for everybody, but for a recent study of "IT professionals", productivity goes down but the amount of work goes up:
https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2021-56/
This was early on in the COVID lockdown, presumably better remote centered management/tools would increase productivity.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#63Class A office space in Manhattan is about $70/sqft, and the average office employee gets 150 sqft allocated (desk, hallway, conference room, supply closets...) Google is probably 170. That's $11900 annually that they save by not having an employee take up office space. No, it's not fungible on a small scale, but it's certainly fungible on a large scale: reduce your office needs by 100 people and you can rearrange de…
> If Googlers had any collective bargaining power, they wouldn't be getting salary reductions: they would be getting extra expense money for desks, chairs, and ISP upgrades. Since Google already pays the most, where do you threaten to leave to while bargaining?
"I'll leave to do a startup, and you'll have to hire some new grad and train them for years till they're as good as me" is a common threat.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#64> One Google employee ..would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time > The employee was considering remote work but decided to keep going to the office - despite the two-hour commute. 10% paycut in place of 10 hours of commute seems a good deal to me.
Unless you need that 10% of your salary.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#65Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#66I think this is making a whole lot of out nothing, or at least not much. Google would determine your pay based on your work location, regardless of whether that's your home or the office. As a result people that lived far from the office in a typically less expensive area could see their pay drop.
Exactly. When I left California I fully expected my pay to get reduced, I’m not going to blind myself and think that it wouldn’t happen because of my move to a lower cost of living area. I’m lucky that that wasn’t the case but it was a pleasant surprise more than something I expected and demanded.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats quite the leap of judgement, and I'd say its almost certainly not true (and quite possibly the opposite, I know thats been the case for me).
Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.
Why would it be more productive to work in the office and have the children at day care than working from home and have the children at day care?
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats quite the leap of judgement, and I'd say its almost certainly not true (and quite possibly the opposite, I know thats been the case for me).
Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.
I can see why you'd think that, but again having worked with many people who do, I don't see a difference.
Of course personal experience is far from hard data, but with a lack of decent data to go off on the subject (partially to do with the fact that productivity is a very vague term, with many disagreeing on how it should be measured, especially with the constant number of external factors affecting it), I can only go by what I experience. I also notice those with children think they're being less productive, whereas the rest of the team doesn't actually notice, so that could be a factor.
Thats not saying that WFH is beneficial to all, of course not. I think theres a massive range of factors, children of course being one of them, but I think it comes down to the individual, rather than any broad strokes we can attempt to make.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#69> One Google employee ..would likely see their pay cut by about 10% by working from home full-time > The employee was considering remote work but decided to keep going to the office - despite the two-hour commute. 10% paycut in place of 10 hours of commute seems a good deal to me.
It's not a trade. The worker just loses.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats quite the leap of judgement, and I'd say its almost certainly not true (and quite possibly the opposite, I know thats been the case for me).
Not universally true, indeed. However if you got little children, it is most certainly true.
This is arguably false.
Anecdotally, I have small children at home and worked from home even before the pandemic when my company had an office. I have climbed the corporate leader every evaluation period because of my performance, while coworkers who were exclusively in the office weren't so fortunate.
It just goes to show that people are very different and it's impossible to generalize statements based on a single variable (has_children=True)