Does this mean employee agreements are up for renegotiating? Salary / compensation for work is the key element to an employee agreement. If employers can change compensation at will without employee consent then the employee agreement is truly meaningless and simply a tool for the employer to wield against the employee. I'd imagine a few employee lawsuits on breach of contract that will test that.
Google employees who work from home could lose money
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Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the article makes it pretty clear that it’s a cost of living adjustment
but my cost of living is now higher when Im using more electricity and water at home, and i had to refurbish my room for home office.
Is it really that significantly higher? I can’t imagine you’ve increased usage of those to the tune of thousands of dollars a year.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#73beancounter MBAs
You make it sound derogatory, but counting the figurative beans is part of their job description, and someone has to do it. I've had the misfortune of working in places where no one is willing and able to count the beans, and I promise you that didn't go too well.
As with most everything, the difficulty in making an org run well seems to be in finding (and keeping) that fleeting balance between vision and bean counting.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where is the data that shows this? I've worked remotely since 2015 and I don't buy this.
Also if they’re suddenly paying more for productivity: how do you explain the rise of the open office- proven over and over to decrease productivity?
I don’t have any data either way, but it could technically be the case that the productivity gains from working in an open plan office offset the costs compared to allowing people to work from home, but that the same is not true when comparing an open office to a traditional one. I guess it depends on if you believe these companies work off good data or not.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#75Yeah I think we've been through this. Your salary isn't purely a function of how much value you bring to the company. It also depends on how much other people are willing to work for. That's how markets work.
The value you bring to the company is almost irrelevant. It's all supply and demand. Of course if you bring a lot of value that might increase demand for you, especially if few are able to provide that amount of value. Also, no market is perfect. There are (well-paid) employees that bring zero or even negative value without anyone noticing.
Theoretically the value you bring should always be higher than what you're paid, since it would be uneconomical to employ you otherwise. That said your second paragraph is absolutely right, there are plenty of failures. In a modern bigcorp I'd be willing to wager that value is created on a bell curve relative to a given salary level (so for example if you take a bunch of people making $60,000 in the same company, some produce no value or negative value, some produce moderate value, some produce extreme value). If I had to guess complexity actually allows the information asymmetries to flourish, so the market is probably extremely distorted and that's why you see the effect.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
At that point, it's better to let the employee go.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#77i like how the us military makes cost of living adjustments. you have your base pay determined my your rank which is not adjusted by where you live. in addition to that you get a housing stipend (BAH and BAS) that is adjusted by where you live. if i remember correctly the housing stipend is before tax.
google is essentially forcing a pay cut to your base salary in addition to the portion of your salary you use for housing.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#78Companies never lose an opportunity to cut costs. They sense that many employees prefer to work from home, so that they may be willing to essentially pay for the privilege.
But wouldn't companies also save money by using smaller offices (and maybe by cutting the micro managers who control employees in an office environment)? What you are saying is that companies are capitalizing on the preference rather than any real cost of working from home?
Why not both?
Cut office costs and salary costs.
I don't see this as a signal that these companies necessarily want employees back into offices: If employees do prefer WFH then, as I mentioned, companies may be betting that they will accept a level of cut.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#79Companies were never paying based on value provided. They pay market rate which, until recently, was artificially limited to a few expensive markets. With remote, these companies are now able to do what every other large labor driven industry has done and lower their costs by finding labor in cheaper markets.
This is a good thing, it's not healthy to have all your wealth in one small region of a country.
Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money
#80> 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.
What if they need the money?