81–90 of 699 posts
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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.
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.
Not that I agree with any of this, nor am I sure that any of this is even written, but that's probably what it is. All of these gigs being at will employment certainly doesn't help the employee here.
Class 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?
Class 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?
Source: https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Google,Facebook,Microsoft&tr...
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Because employees in the office are more productive.
The planet is actually on fire, right now, as you read this. So fuck productivity. We can manage. We must sacrifice the inconvenience of wasting our time commuting because of some arbitrary productivity definition to stop the surface of the planet from being engulfed in flames. There's also a pandemic that's killed 4.3 million people because productivity is apparently more important than containing the outbreak of a…
I 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.
"Cost of living" is personal and largely not the company's business. If my spend is $X per month, it's $X, it doesn't matter what portion of that goes to rent or mortgage. When circumstances change that shifts the portion of housing, most people don't pocket the savings, but instead just shift it to other things. Sometimes even for better housing. It's a rare individual who will save instead, and even rarer to unnecessarily subject oneself to lower quality something for savings, like the SF Google employee living in his car, driving his cost of living as far as rent was concerned to $0, cheaper even than the corn fields of Iowa.
But companies will keep trying to do these "adjustments" so long as they keep getting away with it. Consider fighting it, and finding out how valuable you really are in the process. Similarly with WFH "adjustments" -- given intent for a coming pay reduction, you should instead counter with a demand for a pay increase, because you're no longer contributing to the costs of having an office space.
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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 v…
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"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.
Each state has an associated salary band. For certain metropolitan statistical areas (defined by the OMB to encompass certain counties), as noted in the article, there is an overriding (typically higher) salary band.
This leads to quirks like someone in Milford, PA (~70 miles northwest of NYC) being paid top dollar, as part of the NYC metro area, but someone in Bethlehem (80 miles west of NYC) being paid 15% less. Or, if you live in Santa Cruz, you'd be paid about 10% less than if you continued working out of the Mountain View office (just 30-40 miles to the north).
(The 15% paycut for moving to Tahoe is most likely cherrypicked as crossing the state border into Nevada, which is in a lower band than California.)
Don't forget, to the CEO and their cronies you are all just peons. If they could pay you nothing at all they would absolutely do so.
If you could have your company pay you all the money they have (but still magically continue to function), wouldn't you?
The point is, compensation is inequitable. Upper management at most tech companies is paid 20-50x what a worker is paid. Do you think that is reasonable?