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Google employees who work from home could lose money

reuters.com

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Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#111

Post by minikites »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #79
jensensbutton wrote: post #43

Companies 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.

Finding cheaper labor elsewhere further concentrates wealth. The only way to spread out the wealth would be to mandate the same salary across regions.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#112

Post by biztos »

chrisseaton wrote: post #60
dsr_ wrote: post #44

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?

That’s not what the threat is supposed to be. The threat is supposed to be that all the engineers will step away from their keyboards and the ginormous money machine will grind to a halt.

But since Google pays so much it’d be both really hard to convince people to take the risk, and really easy for the company to replace them. Having employees partake of the money machine via stock is also a factor.

I don’t think Google would unionize unless the vast majority of coders worldwide were already active members of the International Brotherhood of Logicians and had already won some big concessions from other FAANGs.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#113

Post by smnrchrds »

zrail wrote: post #32
Sacho wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitlab implements this compensation model openly(to the point where there is a calculator for it!) - I don't remember how well it was received when it was first announced, but looks like Google is applying a similar idea.

The calculator is no longer public.

That's a shame. When did they make it non-public?

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#114

Post by minikites »

rexreed wrote: post #71

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.

>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.

Welcome to the last 40+ years of corporate economics. The only power that employees can have against employers is through collective action. It's unfortunate that most people in tech see themselves as too good for labor unions.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#115

Post by gravypod »

azornathogron wrote: post #107
gravypod wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anacdata: My personal comp is on the lower half of the spectrum for my level. Took a small pay cut from the startup I came from. Left for Google because I was tired of proposing changes, having someone else in the org disagree, and then having someone high up say "I talked to my friend at Google and he likes my way better so it's better than yours". Now I'm going to be the Googler and never have to worry about that a…

You think you'll join a giant company and that there will be less need to get organisational buy-in for your proposals than there was in a startup? That's a take I haven't heard before...

No, I thought that people would have the experience to evaluate my proposals on their merits, not on if they contain buzz words. So far that's been pretty true. :)

On the way to launching my first large internal service in the next few weeks.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#116

Post by alphabetting »

rjzzleep wrote: post #34
underseacables wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or massages, child care, game rooms, or any of the other ridiculous perks. The company could start rolling those back if enough people wfh.

The reason why they have it all there is specifically to abuse your work hours. Hungry, don't have any food? Go back to the office real quick to grab a snack on a Sunday. And well you might have just figured out something so you might end up back at your desk. There are enough studies on why those campuses are designed that way. The convenience is designed at making sure you spend more time at work.

The actual reason they have the perks is talent attraction and retention

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#117

Post by 2muchcoffeeman »

pc86 wrote: post #85
kristopolous wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The planet is always on fire in a couple dozen places. This is about as useful as saying "The planet is actually underwater, right now, as you read this." Of course it is. That's sort of how it works. Whether or not someone rides the train isn't going to change anything.

But it’ll change if you get significant portions of the behave differently. During the beginning of the pandemic there were loads of stories of wildlife coming back to certain areas, pollution disappearing. So everyone WFH will in fact have an impact.

I took a bit of a pay cut during the pandemic too. All this staring at my screen for longer hours was really taking a toll. Maybe this is a good time to think about what kind of lifestyle you want and how to get it. If Googlers really believe in the work they are doing and they are treated well, maybe stay. If you only want the money quit and don’t look back.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#118

Post by inglor_cz »

So, just a tip for anyone who is really hit by this...

Czech railway workers used to strike against Nazis by rigorously and pedantically following all the valid regulations. Even Nazis could not really do anything against that; the Reich was very process-oriented, after all.

Do the same to your employer. Follow every idiotic rule to a letter. After all, it is your duty and their rules.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#119

Post by jsjohnst »

vitus wrote: post #89

If anyone's curious about the underlying details: 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 Bethle…

> 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

The majority of Tahoe is in California.

Re: Google employees who work from home could lose money

#120

Post by swader999 »

ctvo wrote: post #105
boplicity wrote: post #99

The cost of commuting on the environment is extremely high. We should be offering incentives to companies to switch to remote work. If 20% of jobs permanently switched to remote, the impact on carbon emissions would be immediate, and extremely positive.

Sources please. Edit: The OP makes an extraordinary claim about remote work and reduction in CO2. I would assume members of HN would be intellectually curious enough to want to dig deeper.

You really need sources to decide that reducing commuting is a good idea for the environment?
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